How to set up your team for success in 2018

6 easy steps to create a high performance team that delivers extraordinary results

By Graham Wilson, Leadership Expert, author of The New Leadership Manifesto, Leadership Laid Bare! and founder of the award winning Successfactory

In today’s world the role of a leader is to create a high performance environment where success is inevitable.

Effective teamworking 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.

In this article I want to share a tried, tested and proven approach to set up your team for success, and gain the results you are looking for.

Having spent 25 years building elite teams in many environments from areas such as the military, sport and business we get asked all the time to run ‘away days’ for teams. Usually the team has been operating for a while and for some reason performance is dropping. They always make me smile when we get the phone call. Especially when the team leader says, “Do you do paint balling?” So the team isn’t working very well and they now want to come together to shoot each other!!

The challenge for most leaders, and the mistake many make, is that they get into deliverables and the doing too soon and leave all the relationship stuff to happen by chance. They try and sort out for one day a year at the ‘away day.’ Not a great strategy!! ‘What gets measured gets done’ drives the wrong behaviour here. How many leaders have KPIs around team relationships, feelings, trust, confidence, or accountability?

The secret of building a high performance team is to ensure six key elements are in place and agreed on what I call a Team Canvas. 

When teams get together they go through an unconscious process of needing to know:

1. Why am I here?
2. Who's who?
3. What do we need to do?
4. How are we going to do it?
5. How do we keep it going?
6. How do we know we are successful?

The Team Canvas process enables you to have dialogue to satisfy their needs, gain clarity and move to high performance really quickly. After all the key in today's world is to deliver at pace.

Quick question for you... Before you read these you have to promise me that you won’t leave your business and become a team building consultant! :) Agreed… fab! (Only joking!)

Here are the six elements to guarantee your team performance will transform:

1.    Purpose: Ensure your team knows ‘why’ it exists. What is the purpose of the team? Get it down to one sentence and make sure the first word is an active verb. This is so important for decision making, motivation and clarity.

2.    People: Make sure people are playing to position and using their strengths. Spend time getting to know personalities, build trust, understand what motivates/demotivates each team member. Ensure people know their roles, responsibilities and boundaries.

3.    Performance: Ensure you know what success looks like and how it will be measured. Make sure the performance criteria is a mixture of hard and soft goals. Keep it top level and a mixture of input/output measures.

4.    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 and certainly no more than five – your team will forget them otherwise.

5.    Process: Agree your team ways of working. How are you going to communicate, what meetings do you have, what are the planning cycles, reviews, continuous improvement process and decision making process?

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. Here the template I use to create the team canvas.

Make 2018 a fantastic year by setting your team up for success... and then keeping the canvas alive by regular reviews. You can find out more about how to do this and get a free team report at grahamwilson.com

Every Success

Graham

If you would like to receive regular leadership inspiration direct to your inbox you can join our global tribe here... Yes please, I want inspiration! (Scroll to the bottom of the page and join the Leadership Revolution)

Graham Wilson is the UK’s #1 Leadership Trainer, author of Leadership Laid Bare! and The NEW Leadership Manifesto and founder of the award winning Successfactory?

The NEW Leadership Manifesto is available from amazon

Leadership Laid Bare! is available from amazon too