How Do You Lead Your Team To Performance ?

Great Leader - Great Team ?

Have you ever felt that you are a great leader (let’s say it, you have a compelling challenge, a vision and clear strategies you want to implement, strong soft skills and ability to communicate and motivate) and still there is something missing for your team to really engage and deliver ?

This is why sometimes leadership coaching is not enough when applied to team leaders, and team coaching is the way to reveal the team to itself and allow the team to transform their way of interacting and communicating for increased performance.

“Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers -— a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.” writes Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, author of ‘‘The Power of Habit’’ and the forthcoming book ‘‘Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Productivity in Life and Business,’’.

Leader and Team Member

As a leader, you are also part of a team. As part of the team you play as per the rules you created together. The spoken and the unspoken. And this in itself has an impact on how all of you as a team perform whether you want it or not.

The free “Team Leader View” or TLV assessment (how to get it for free - see my post How do you measure your team performance) gave you a snapshot of how you view your team and the world they live in. As the team leader you are part of the team, but only one voice of the team. What are the other voices saying ?

The “Team Diagnostic Assessment” or TDA is given to any teams (from the Board to the Operational field, functional, cross-functional or project teams) of any size from 4 to 25+ members. The TDA will give you and your team a snapshot of your performance as a team and how you score on the 14 Team Performance Indicators (TPIs).

It reveals to the team their strengths and areas of improvement through a comprehensive report and multi-layerd analytical results.

Less than 10% of teams in the Team Coaching International (TCI) database rate themselves as “high-performing” out of 1000+ teams. In your organization if 90% of any other asset were underperforming, wouldn’t it get some focus ?

The Making of Great Teams - Coaching !

The success of Team Coaching resides in the ability for the team to take action and learn from it, then take actions from their learning. But not just that.

Charles Duhigg summarized well in his NYT article, what Google learnt from its “Quest to build the perfect team”, through a research conducted by their People Analytics Division during 3 years on 180+ Google teams to find out why some stumbled and why some soared : they weren’t able to come to a pattern or a rational explanation despite having involved the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers in the study.

They noticed however 2 behaviours that all the good teams generally shared :

1. Everyone has spoken roughly the same amount,
2. High sensitivity to others people thinking and feeling,

Those behaviours are aspects of “psychological safety”, described by “a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” (Amy Edmonson – HBS 1999).

Trust and Respect are 2 of the 14 Team Performance Indicators (TPIs) measured by the Team Diagnostic Assessment by TCI. See the other 12 in my post How do you measure your team performance.

High-performing teams score 40% better than average teams on most of these indicators as a result of 10 years data collection based on TDAs deployed in over 1000 teams.

Positivity is as important as Productivity to reach Peak Performance and guarantee sustainable results both in financial and behavorial terms. This means team members know how to achieve business results by working with each other and working with other teams.

The initial TDA or how the team sees itself, provides a snapshot of how the team performs and the starting point for defining and designing where the team wants to be both in terms of productivity and positivity - leading to business targets when asking "how will we know that we reached our goals".

Coaching is the process that will take the team from good to great - with tangible results.

Results driven : The Team Coaching International (TCI) approach

The Team Coach is supporting the team as a partner towards their set goals which are both based on :

• Team dynamics through 14 TPIs : how does the team want to interact, behave, speak, create solutions, value diversity, manage conflict,
• Business metrics through relevant KPIs : what business KPIs does the team/stakeholder/company want to measure, follow-up, how and how often

This combined approach shows both improvement in the Team dynamics and Business metrics as a direct result of the team coaching. Ask for our case study here.

Before / After Team Coaching

The good thing about measuring how the team performs before the Team Coaching is that it provides a Benchmark to :

• Compare how the team performs after the Team Coaching
• Compare how the stakeholders view the team performance through the Team 360 View, usually after the TDA to get the feedback from people whose opinions matter.

In average data show +20% improvement in Team Performance (TPIs) before/after the coaching process.

Leader ready for Team Coaching ?

The Team Coaching Process

In this process, what gets measured gets improved through the coaching process– thus the combination of KPIs and TPIs, Productivity and Positivity to :

1. Create initial awareness of opportunities to improve,
2. Design the steps for ongoing team development,
3. Provide coaching on team accountabilities and progress (TPIs and KPIs)
4. Create a second benchmark (assessment) to show progress and assess further team development.

The coach is a facilitator, supporter, guide to the team's transformation and helps to see opportunities in challenges, strengths in diversity and learnings in failures. Ultimately, the coach supports the team to reach their goals.

More to come on ROI of Team Coaching !

Special Offer

• Free TLV ('Team Leader View") – be curious about how you score your team performance.
• One Free TDA ("Team Diagnostic Assessment") – get you and your team to score your performance as a team. Offered to team up to 8 team members till the 31st of May 2016 – 1st come 1st served basis.