Recipe for a high-performance team

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Ahoy,

What does high performance mean to you?

I imagine it looks a little different to what high performance means to Olympic athletes.

A high-performing team looked different to me on board a submarine compared to when I worked in an office.

It will always look different based on your environment and your goals.

What makes a great Olympic team, doesn’t make a great business.

But if you think about it, you could probably list off a whole bunch of things that make an Olympic athlete a high performer:

• A strict diet

• Consistency

• Training hard

But have you thought about what high performance looks like in your organisation or team?

Or have you thought about how you can drive your team to be high-performers?

There are a few core principles that carry across all businesses.

If you’re running a start up, these are exceptionally important to get right early!

1. Encourage collaboration and innovation

2. Set and maintain high standards

3. Ensure you build team engagement

Lets get into the weeds of this.

Innovation can be such a horrible corporate buzzword.

“Excelling through innovation…”

Yeah okay… What?

Real simply what we mean here is not shutting down team opinions and ideas.

In fact, encourage it!

And a good way to encourage new ideas? Encourage collaboration.

Get people working together in teams. Provide loose guidelines and see what they come up with.

I’m sure if you think right now, you could come up with small problem your facing, that you could assign a couple of people to with as little guidance as you can get away with and see what ideas come out.

This obviously isn’t all I mean by innovation, but it’ll prove the point:

Encouraging innovation doesn’t have to be a big deal.

Next up we have setting and maintaining a high standard.

Coming from a military background, this is something that gets talked about a lot.

“The standard you walk by is the standard your willing to accept.”

A phrase that is thrown around quite a lot. Probably too much to be honest!

But the concept is accurate.

You’re in charge, set the example.

Be aware, even if you don’t think you’re setting the standard right now, you are.

Your team will be looking at you and absorbing the way you act and the way you behave.

Set a high standard by operating at that standard.

Then one of the hardest parts of leadership comes in. Be consistent with it.

People aren’t operating at the standard?

• Coach them

• Mentor them

Don’t just accept that they aren’t at the right level. Bring them up, and support them with their own development.

Praise the high standards and communicate your expectations clearly.

Finally we have building and maintaining team engagement.

A lack of engagement in teams is a huge problem.

In fact, only about 70% of employees are actually engaged at work. With 13% being actively disengaged.

What does that mean?

• 50% of employees will actively look for new employment withing a year.

• The culture will fail to grow into a positive motivated way

• Productivity and profitability will decrease

Not good!

Luckily we can improve engagement! There are three steps to this:

1. Promote empowerment/ownership

2. Improve communication

3. Build the culture

We want people to feel responsible and part of the teams success. We do that by empowering them and giving them ownership.

We keep them informed of what’s going on and ensure they understand the strategic direction of the team.

We build a winning culture that people want to be a part of.

That’s what makes a high performing team.

It doesn’t matter what industry you are in. Employing these steps will make your team deliver better results and get them on the path to being high performers.

Think about how you could start to integrate these steps today.

I hope you got a lot out of today’s newsletter.

If you did, why not share it with a friend?

And if you are that friend, you can subscribe here:

And if you’re not already, you should check out my X (Twitter) account. There I’m posting stories and short leadership tips and tricks each day to keep you focused on building a high-performing team!

You can follow me here!

As always, have a great day.

Reece

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