4 Real World Ways to Lift Team Performance
A high-performing team is one that consistently achieves its goals. An essential and powerful strategy for achieving high team performance is building high team functionality. A team that is high-functioning it is setting itself up for success.
There are almost endless tools, research, and techniques on building the performance of teams. Partly because of this vast amount of sometimes conflicting advice it can be hard to know what to actually do to lift your team’s performance.
Here are four proven, real world behaviours that will lift your team’s functionality and performance.
Foster Camaraderie
It’s one of the paradoxes of leadership that the best way to lift performance is to not always focus on performance. Camaraderie - a friendly feeling toward people with whom you share an experience - is a proven driver of team culture, which is vital to sustained team performance.
Just as you can’t make people be friends, you can’t just make camaraderie exist. But you can foster it. To do this, allow and participate in moments where your team can simply be friendly, relax, and have a little fun. Even if only for a minute at the start or end of a meeting.
Beyond that, look for opportunities to facilitate camaraderie. After work drinks are no longer a common thing but an occasional morning tea, even if it’s a remote format, goes a long way.
Work on Clarity
Clarity is a simple idea and challenging reality. Complexity, differing interpretations, and reality itself, have a way of quickly compromising clarity. It only takes a little uncertainty to take away a lot of clarity.
When goals, decisions, and actions in a team are clear the team has direction and focus. Members know what’s supposed to be done and achieved. As a result, performance lifts.
Another benefit of clarity that can get overlooked is that it builds psychological safety. People feel more secure when they have clarity and are more likely to contribute more actively.
Building clarity is a constant task. From the heights of strategy to corridor conversations, savvy leaders work on clarity. They make sure strategy is short and simple, ie. clear (and realise that a plan is not a strategy). And they pursue clarity right down to brief conversations.
Listen Before, and More, Than You Talk
It’s easy to unconsciously think that effective leadership is solving problems, making decisions and talking about both. And sometimes it is. But less than you might think.
When a leader listens to their team, individually or collectively, they are empowering them or it. Listening doesn’t hinder decisive leadership, if that’s what’s needed. In fact, it enhances it in two ways; decisions are better informed, and team-members have been given voice, which increases their buy-in to the decision, whether it comes from the leader or the team.
A real world guide to this for leaders is to listen before, and more than, than you speak.
Coach
“Have you got a minute?”, is heard by leaders everywhere, every day. For a range of reasons, from genuine need to reducing their accountability, people ask their leaders questions.
Many leaders answer those questions. It was unexpected, they likely don’t really have the time, and answering aligns with their default ideas of what leading is.
Sometimes a short, clear answer is the perfect piece of leadership. Often it is not.
When, no matter how nicely, a person is told the answer or what to do they think less, learn less effectively, take on less accountability, and over time grow to reply more on the leader. These are not good outcomes and do not reflect well on the leader.
Instead, after the person has asked their question a leader can ask, “What do you think?” … and then listen before responding. Often, no answer or direction other than an endoresment and encouragement, will be necessary.
This is coaching. Do this enough and you will build thinking, learning, and accountability in your team … core components of high functioning and high performing teams.
Each of these four behaviours will build team functionality and performance. If you can improve both in your team you are doing some great leading.