How to Build A High-Performing Team
Everywhere I travel around the world, people always ask me the same question: How do you build a high-performing team?
They want to know the secret sauce to create teams that get great results, work well together, and innovate and improve the company. A lot of it comes down to the leader setting the tone for a successful team.
From my experience working with top companies around the world, here are three essential ways to create a high-performing team:
Know the strengths and weaknesses of yourself and your team members.
High-performing teams work well because everyone is in the right position. Leaders need to be self-aware about their strengths and weaknesses and aware of where their team members excel and struggle so they can put people in the areas where they will shine. Optimizing performance starts by knowing where people will do the best work and then putting them in that position, and to do that, you truly have to know your employees.
Set clear goals and focus on transparency.
Without clear goals, it’s hard to move the ship forward. Setting goals puts everyone on the same page and aligns the entire team about where they are going and how to know they are moving in the right direction. Be transparent about how the goals came to be and set up feedback systems to provide honest updates.
Give and receive regular feedback.
More and more companies are moving away from the traditional annual performance review model to an ongoing dialogue with regular check-ins, and it plays a huge role in creating high-performing teams. Instead of waiting to give feedback until months after a project has passed, regular feedback patterns allow for people to grow continually and apply feedback in real-time. Check your ego to receive feedback from team members so you can stay on the same page and grow together.
These three high-level characteristics of high-performing teams can make all the difference in your team’s performance. As you implement these steps, you’ll see a dramatic increase in your team’s performance.
Now more than ever we need to take a step back to define what it means to be a leader and what great leadership looks like. But this isn’t easy to do. In fact, many business leaders struggle with this. You cannot become and build what you don’t define. In the PDF you will get a framework you can follow and also see how some of the world’s top CEOs define leadership. Click here to get the PDF.
