Let’s just set the scene. You’ve started a business. That business is doing rather well. You continue to grow your sales and revenue. You are continuing to grow your staff numbers. One concern though, is that you haven’t really managed teams before, let alone in a fast-paced scale up business that you are now running.
In our experience the most common issue that leaders face is building efficient and effective teams; placing the wrong people in the wrong teams, holding teams and team members to account and giving direct feedback to individuals and teams.
Great team members will leave your organisation for better places to work if you cannot get your teams performing well as a result the rest of the team will disengage and become demotivated. From their perspective, if the best team members are leaving, the situation must be bad. In fact 70% of employees have left previous employment because of poor leadership and teamwork.
From experience there are 4 fundamental areas which are vital to creating high performing teams:
- Meetings
It has been said that meetings take minutes but waste hours! Good operational meetings whether face to face or virtual are the engine of good organisational and project performance. However, more often than not their success is left to chance.
- Alignment and accountability
These areas address the critical team challenge of getting and keeping everyone aligned with the objectives and values of the team AND the organisation. Imagine your team are all in a boat, however they are all paddling in different directions. How quickly would the boat get towards the finish line? The second element is accountability, making sure that everyone knows what they are being counted on for and what they can count on their colleagues for.
- Communications
Effective team communications are the lifeblood of effective teams. This includes areas of conflict resolution, decision making and information sharing. To what degree does your team effectively share accountabilities, priorities, updates and information.
- Support and systems
The last but by no means the least pillar for high performing teams is having the right relationships and support processes in place between team members to foster experience sharing, learning and the prevention of potential problems BEFORE they happen.
The next in this series will go into more detail into the aspect of meetings and offering some tips and tactics to ensuring that your operational, problem solving, team and virtual meetings are as effective and efficient as possible.
For more information on Creating High Performing Teams please attend our FREE webinar on the 24th Feb.