The Keys To Success
By: Michael DeVenney
- Supervisor … “A lot of the team members are not happy and morale is down”
- Leader … “Yes, but we’re still getting results right?”
Getting results at any cost ends up costing a lot – to the organization, to the team, to the leader, and to the customer. Building and leading an effective team is the answer to achieving the highest level of results and building sustainable success.
The critical element of teamwork is leverage. When you leverage the strengths of other people, you achieve much more than you ever could alone. More importantly, when you leverage the strengths and provide meaning you achieve maximum performance. You gain the benefits of more money, more time, and less stress.
Why is it so difficult to get your team to work together and get things done effectively?
The directive approach has often been the method leaders fall back to in order to just get things done. Giving orders and telling people what to do and when to do it can cut the chase and get to the bottom line. The problem is that people don’t always do as told and if they do it is without ownership and engagement. Results are fine in the short team but suffer going forward and no synergy is created to achieve more.
Using authority may sound like a mistake just the new leader makes but it plays out at all levels of organizations and regardless of how long someone has been in a leadership position (note they have a leadership position but are not actually acting as a leader).
So, we need to think differently to get maximum performance and results.
Real success is the result of building and leading an effective team.
Getting the right people in the right places doing the right things at the right time is the goal.
Think about how your team works now. Are you getting the performance you want? Is the team working to provide maximum results? Are people engaged and showing initiative?
Most team leaders answer no to these three questions. A Gallup Organization survey showed that more than 80% of teams do not achieve optimal performance and only 17% of team members feel that decisions are made effectively to move the team forward.
More than four of five teams are not performing effectively.
What happens is that we lose money, we waste time, we waste energy, and we lose customers.
- Team Leader … “If I don’t come up with the ideas, nothing happens – they just do what is in front of them and wait for me to tell them what’s next.”
Team leaders are frustrated with trying to understand the dynamics of how to get people to work together effectively. From one of our private team performance studies, we found five core challenges leaders experience with their teams:
- Team members are not focused on the customer – they lose sight of what needs to be done to keep the customer happy
- Team members don’t work from the same page – there is a lot of duplication of efforts and no one really seems to know what the other does
- Team members do second things first – people just do what is in front of them and don’t look at the big picture of what is most important in their work
- Team members are not accountable for results – people don’t take responsibility or ownership and pass the buck
- Team members don’t communicate clearly with each other – rather than talking to each other, people just stay in silos
We need to resolve these issues to get to the real success – leveraging the strengths and motivation of others to achieve maximum performance.
Leaders want to see engaged team members stepping up and taking initiative, working from the same page proactively and collectively, doing first things first, and staying focused on the customer to do what is right and provide an excellent experience.
Where do you start?
The first step is with the leader to make sure the environment is right to support a high-performing team. Getting there requires attention to seven elements.
Have a vision and strategy. Without a vision outlining a bigger future, people will not invest themselves. We want something to believe in and commit our energy and strengths to helping to make happen. Leaders need to clarify their vision on a regular basis. One of the top three factors supporting a highly engaged team is seeing the big picture. Leaders rarely do this. Our recommendation is to commit to a quarterly session with the team simply to confirm the vision.
With the vision is clarity of the values that are most important to the team. To realize the vision, values explain the behaviors and beliefs that are needed by the team. Clear values determine how people will work together.
A clear strategy is also needed to understand how to make the vision happen. Teams need to see the five actions that will achieve results. Once teams see the vision and the strategy, they understand what is most important and how they can contribute. Innovation happens more when teams see the strategy and what will help success. A big point here is that teams want leaders to update the strategy and stick to the plan – not bouncing from idea to idea. With clarity comes focus and greater results.
Focus on the drivers of success. Strategies fail because of people. Teams need to clarify what is most important to move the vision forward and their part of the plan. Clarity of roles and accountabilities is often the greatest complaint from teams. People need to know the four or five key responsibilities and actions they need to focus their time on to support the vision and strategy. When team members know how they contribute and see how their work relates to the bottom-line of the vision and strategy, initiative results.
Leaders need to take time to outline the strategy, confirm the key drivers for each team member’s work, and connect the dots to the desired results. Leaders often people will just get it. We can’t get it without clear expectations. From there, teams will welcome accountability and take ownership for performance improvements.
Understand and apply strengths. The dynamics of maximum team performance is based on the ability to put people in positions that use their natural strengths. Each of us has skills and experience, personality preferences, and instinctive strengths that support our performance and achievement. As well, those dimensions affect the overall team performance as well as individual work to achieve synergy. Leaders need to take time to make sure the right people are in the right positions to leverage the energy of the team.
Assessments are available today that provide highly accurate and reliable means to assess team strengths and structuring people and positions for success. We all want to succeed and provide meaningful contribution – putting someone in a position and hoping they work out is not the answer. Leaders need to invest in proven team analysis to set people and the team together up for success.
Measure for effective execution. Athletes measure all dimensions of their performance to maximize their ability to win. Businesses talk about it but don’t do a great job of measuring for success. We generally just measure financial performance and general results. Although important, such measures do nothing to indicate where people contribute to success, what is working and not working, and what needs to be done next to take the right actions to achieve the desired results.
We believe scorecards based on actions (rather than just results) are the single best management tool to separate teams that try from teams that win. Scorecards connect the vision and strategy with the driving actions that create the results. Measuring actions provides real time analysis to make the best decisions and take the right direction to achieve success. Leaders need to take their strategic plans and build action-based scorecards to connect the end game to the actual play – and each team member should have an individual scorecard that connects their contribution to the overall team results. Connected scorecards create clarity, focus, and the sense of urgency needed for a team to win.
Communicate to connect. For teams to perform effectively and work well together, they need regular and consistent communication. Regular team meetings that focus on tactics (who does what by when) keep everyone on track and in touch with what other people are doing to keep the action moving, reduce duplication, and support collective teamwork. Additional meetings for strategic progress updates and visioning should support the big picture view for everyone. Most important, team members need individual time from their leaders to gain feedback on their performance – how they are doing, what they are doing well, and where they need to improve. The second greatest factor supporting employee engagement is access to regular, honest, and direct feedback – hearing both the good and the bad.
When leaders are asked what is their top drivers of success providing team member feedback always makes the top five. What driver is most often deferred or not provided? Again, feedback is always the winner. Leaders know what is needed and need to invest the time to make it happen. For team members to reach optimal performance they need input to get there. Annual performance reviews are not the answer. Feedback is needed monthly and structured correctly.
Communication needs to be open, consistent, and regular. Amazingly, leaders need to invest only about four hours each week to cover the communication investment.
The client foundation. Underlying team success is the need to stay focused on the client. In the end, work only happens as long as we satisfy the needs of the client. Every team has clients – they may be external or they may be internal but all teams serve an end client. Leaders need to clarify with the team who the client is (oddly enough, teams don’t always have the same client in mind) and how the team creates value for them.
Creating competitive advantage is about understanding the defining elements of the team’s work that provide differentiated value for the client. Leaders should work with the team to show how their work creates the end product or service experience for the client. Exercises, such as “staple yourself to an order”, that walk teams through the various workflow steps and what it is like for the client are exceptional to increasing team performance.
The number one factor that teams selected as most important for team success is client experience. Getting teams to work effectively together needs to be founded on what is most valued by the client.
Enjoy the journey. This aspect of teamwork sounds like it doesn’t fit. Are we really saying that social activities are important for team success? Yes – over and over again, we are saying just that. Teams that socialize together get along better together and achieve higher performance. We are not saying that everyone needs to be best friends and that the leader should become a social director. What we are saying is that when we know each other outside of work, we form a community and work more effectively together.
One of the key elements that team members are looking for in an organization is a feeling of community and friendship at work. Leaders need to support that type of environment. It does not need to be expensive – you just need to commit the time for people to come together and build a community at work.
Before leaders complain about the challenges in their teams and the trouble getting people to work together to generate results, they need to first look in the mirror. Are they doing what needs to be done to create the right environment for high performance?
The seven aspects of the high-performing team can be achieved by all leaders and teams. We are all under pressure to create more for less and in a shorter period of time. Telling people what to do may seem like the shortest route to the results. In the end, being directive gets you behind. You spend more and more time putting out fires and reacting to situations.
If you want to be a leader of a high-performing team, step back and assess your team for the seven aspects and do what you need to do to provide the environment that is needed for team success. You will win.
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The High Performing Team
