For today, I want to set aside management strategies and focus on people.
Your team performing at their absolute best is critical for so many areas of your business. It affects your payroll. 3 people performing at their best will out produce 5 mediocre team members. And in today’s economy business owners want tight, efficient teams. We want to cut out any dead weight that is dragging our ability to create, innovate, and serve our clients.
A lot of money goes into training and managing team members. And all of that is good. But can I share the biggest problem I see with team performance?
People are more disconnected now than ever before. We keep our conversations on the surface, until we get on Facebook, and then we spew all of our opinions and argue with each other. Or we just stay quiet and hold our opinions and beliefs even tighter inside. And for years we have had the “Don’t bring your personal life to the office” mentality. So we’ve created this corporate culture where we don’t focus on the individual. We focus on how to move the masses.
As someone who has led many teams, I understand this completely. It would be chaos to run a large team if we felt like we had to create a separate leadership plan for every individual. What I’m suggesting lies somewhere in the middle.
If you want to pull the best performance out of your team. Here are 5 critical concepts to understand.
Every competent team member can hit their best performance given the right context. There’s a zone for every human being where we thrive, feel safe, feel valued, and free to innovate and create. Think about it in your own life. There are times you feel at your best, and other times when you don’t. This also explains why an individual can be highly successful on one team, and struggle at another company. I’m not suggesting you could hire a babysitter to be a brain surgeon. They wouldn’t have the level of competence required. But when you take a population of people with similar levels of competence, it’s the context you create for them that will determine who does better in the position.
Every person has a unique set of needs. This is the tricky part. What team member A needs to hit optimal performance is not what team member B needs. And Team member C will have a completely different set of needs. The bigger your team, the more challenging it gets to meet all of the needs of all of the team members. Instead of attempting that chaotic and impossible challenge, create a success culture that stems from your corporate values. If you value integrity, creativity, and loyalty, weave those into your culture. And hire people who will thrive in that culture.
Ask about their needs in the interviewing and training process. I like to ask questions during the interview process that assess what type of culture the team member is likely to excel in. I’ll ask questions like, “What management style do you respond best to?” “When you are underperforming, how do you want to be supported as you are working to improve?” “How do you like to receive feedback.” I listen closely for any indicators that we cannot create the right context for an individual to perform at their absolute best. And then when a new team member comes in for training, I watch for indicators that they are, or are not, going to succeed within our culture.
Determine what you can and can’t give as an organization. Every organization has its ideals. And around the ideals we have a zone of flexibility. Defining that zone of flexibility is as important as defining the ideals. This is where you will bring the gap between team members who are performing well, and team members that are performing at their absolute BEST! This is the area that allows your company to accommodate individuals rather than just getting a group of individuals to adhere to a plan. You cannot accommodate everyone. But when you have the right people on the team, it’s simple and easy to make small adjustments that can have a big impact on an individuals performance. Here’s a few examples of adjustments I have made for the right individuals to be successful on our team.
- Letting 2 individuals team up, who worked better together than alone.
- Allowing someone to work from home and video conference in to meetings.
- Getting a part-time assistant for someone who is great with closing deals, but struggles to keep up with their paperwork.
- Discussing concerns privately instead of in a group meeting with an extra private and sensitive individual.
Train your leaders on Emotional Intelligence. Emotional Intelligence was defined in 1990 as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action”. It is the most important piece of the success puzzle! An individual with higher Emotional Intelligence will outperform an equally capable and intelligent team member. They will accomplish more because they will be able to enroll others into working together. They will bring in more clients. They will be more successful at processing the stress of life and not letting their personal challenges interfere with their work life. And we almost NEVER train on it in the corporate world. Guess where else it isn’t trained on? SCHOOL! This critical skill that has been studied and documented for nearly 30 years is still not being taught. And research shows that Emotional Intelligence is teachable!
If you want to achieve the best performance from your team, you’ve got to get down to an individual level. Understand your team members and what makes them tick!