From principles to communication: Six ways to transform your team’s performance
In today’s world the role of a leader is to create a high performance environment where success is inevitable.
Effective team working doesn’t happen by chance or by using a strategy of hope. As a leader you have to create your team and then sustain high performance.
The secret of building a high performance team is to ensure six key elements are in place to guarantee that your team performance will transform
1. Purpose
Ensure your team knows its “why". What is the purpose of the team? Get it down to one sentence and make sure the first word is an active verb.
2. Principles
What are the guiding values that the team must remember to align to? These drive individual and team behaviour so make sure they are right. Three is a good number.
3. People
Make sure people are playing to position and using their strengths. Ensure people know their roles, responsibilities and boundaries.
4. Process
Agree your team ways of working. How are you going to communicate? What meetings do you have, planning cycles, reviews, continuous improvement process and decision-making process?
5. Performance
Ensure you know how your team know it is successful. Make sure it is a mixture of hard and soft goals. Keep it top level and a mixture of input/output measures.
6. Pride
What does your team want to be famous for? How would you want others to describe the team? What is your team brand? Again one sentence works well here.
The best way to create this is by running a team workshop early on to co-build and ensure the why, how and what is in place. Once in place you have to agree how to keep it alive.