Team Performance: 7 key things to do as a leader when your Team doesn’t pull together!
It’s almost new year (again!) and time to look at how your team performs. Sometimes, yes? Mostly, no? And you realise the team didn’t perform well as well as it could have last year either. And the year before that was average too.
At times, you feel you’ve got them sorted, and then something happens and you take a huge backwards step.
We know all about the importance of highly performing teams in Organisations but when your team does not excel, what do you do?
Statistics
- 79% of great performers in teams will leave for better horizons and those left behind will disengage (more than 70% of employees do) if you don’t get the team rockin.’
- About 2 in 10 employees are disengaged in their work and undermine the effort and contribution made by others, according to researcher group Gallup
How can you turn this around?
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- Lead them! If you are unsure what that means, take these immediate actions:
- Have a Vision for your team. Design it with them and talk it through with them regularly
- Ensure each person knows what specific goals they have to achieve. Provide ongoing feedback
- Be upbeat and optimistic and approachable
- Communicate all the time with them. The more you communicate respectfully and in a way, that involves your team, the better they will respect you
- Show integrity. Do what you say you will do
- Never accept mediocre or non-performance. Manage your people well and that includes their performance
- Celebrate success with them time and time again
Questions to ask yourself
- Out of these 7, how many do you do?
- Out of these 7, how many don’t you do?
- Out of these 7, how many do you sometimes do?
- If you scored yourself ‘seldom’ or ‘never’ for any, perhaps it’s time to look at your leadership style and do something about moving your troops forward in a positive way.
- Ask your team to score you if you’re courageous
5 Steps to Creating a Dream Team
Firstly, to create a dream team you have to have the right people with the right attitudes, doing the right things properly. Positive attitudes are critical – and often are role-modelled (or not) by the leader. So, if you are a leader, what’s your attitude like?
Creating and sustaining high team performance is not that hard and when there are problems in the team camp, it’s always time to look at the leadership. A leader sets the team’s culture, work and goals, code of conduct and monitors outcomes.
Get the leadership right and generally you’ll get the teams right