Team Building and Workplace Communication For SUCCESS

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High Performance Teams: How to Make Them Work

A popular maxim states that the only constant in business today is change. Whether the result of growth opportunities, new competition, technological advances or other internal and external factors, every business enterprise must manage change. Since the 1980s, companies have experimented with a method for driving change—High Performance Teams (HPTs), work teams that achieve a quantum leap in results in less than a year. Drawing from over 25 years of experience with HPTs, Marc Hanlan trac

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Build and Manage High Performance Teams: The How-To Guide

You know the saying is true: “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” So how do you build and maintain a winning team for your business? Download “Build and Manage High Performance Teams: The How-To Guide” now and start building your dream team. With this Vook, you’ll learn all the key strategies for managing an effective team, from assembly to overseeing operations. First you’ll learn the characteristics of an effective team and who should be included. Then you’ll learn how

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High Performance Teams: How to Make Them Work

A popular maxim states that the only constant in business today is change. Whether the result of growth opportunities, new competition, technological advances or other internal and external factors, every business enterprise must manage change. Since the 1980s, companies have experimented with a method for driving change—High Performance Teams (HPTs), work teams that achieve a quantum leap in results in less than a year. Drawing from over 25 years of experience with HPTs, Marc Hanlan trac

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9 Management Philosophies to Develop Teams Into Elite High Performers

I met with a prospect the other day and he asked me “What do high performance managers do differently than average managers?”

I paused for a moment, scanned the long list of behaviors in my mind; distilled my answer down to the critical few things and told my prospect…

High performance managers:

* clarify their understanding of their roles and responsibilities

* set non-conflicting short and long term priorities

* use a logical, transparent and duplicable decision-making process

* create a well thought out plan of action – they don’t wing it

* create a realistic schedule for executing their plans

We discussed my answer in relation to the challenges his company was facing and agreed to involve the final person I needed to meet to close the deal.

I started the hour long drive back to the Atlanta airport and pondered a much deeper question.

Why do high performance managers behave the way they do?

I remembered asking my mentor and colleague Alex Nicholas, (the author of Applied Concepts Institutes’ Sales Management Leadership Program), this very question.

Here’s his answer – High performance managers have a set of management philosophies at the root of their priorities and decisions. This keeps them focused on achieving results through development of themselves, the team environment and the individual team members.

All management behavior is based on daily, demonstrable, non-negotiable standards, values and ethics.

* Personal conduct, decision-making and daily activities must consistently reflect the values and high ethical standards embodied by the company

Leadership skills focus on vision, strategy, values and spirit

* Leadership includes communicating a clear direction for the team, in concert with the corporate vision, strategy, values and goals. Leadership also entails developing and executing longer term business plans and promoting a strong sense of the importance of individual and team contributions.

Management skills target tactical, shorter term development

* Emphasis is on improving results by using proactive behavior, making sound tactical business decisions, improving near term planning, enhancing the daily work environment, and fostering developmental relationships with individual team members.

Focus on team development

* The most important priority for managers is the development of an elite, high-performance team. While accommodating individual employee’s needs are important, business and employee decisions should primarily be made to support the greater good of the team.

Team performance improvement begins with the manager’s acceptance of personal responsibility for team actions and outcomes.

* Improving team performance starts with improving one’s self in personal management/leadership skills, job adaptability and business maturity.

The foundation of employee performance improvement is daily development that addresses their behavior.

* All employees are recognized as having unique personalities. Management focuses primarily on developing employee behaviors that are required to successfully perform the job.

Communication between Managers and employees become more effective through a collaborative communication style.

* Situations require differing styles of decision-making and communication, however collaborative communication and decision-making processes can be synergistic.

Develop employees using nurturing relationships

* By consistently using a collaborative coaching process, managers help employees take personal ownership of the job and their productivity. Managers treat employees as “major accounts” for development and coach in the areas of job skills, business maturity and personal adaptability.

Improved employee productivity results in increased employee tenure and sense of self worth

* Leading and managing employees to work through a focused, disciplined, high-energy, and consistent approach is the most effective way to increase results for the team and build employee job satisfaction and tenure.

So it all comes down to the congruency between your management practice and the value system that underpins the priorities you set and the decisions you make.

What are the management philosophies that underpin your approach to making the numbers?

Building High-Performing, Collaborative Teams in Schools

High-performing, collaborative faculty and staff teams are essential to school improvement and high quality education. In my view, a high quality education is inquiry-based, project-based and transdisciplinary. Students in top-notch schools are engaged in meaningful and relevant learning. They love to go to school, are excited about learning and make excellent progress academically, intellectually and socially. To create this kind of school, teachers and administrators must work together collaboratively in high performing teams. Make no mistake, team building and school improvement are hard work, and deeply rewarding for those who are passionate about education.

To create collaborative, high performing schools, leaders must provide strong school leadership and the necessary resources. Otherwise, it won’t happen. The Team Performance Model and Team Performance Indicator by Allan Drexler and David Sibbet are excellent tools to assess and build teams. Drexler and Sibbet identify seven stages of team development in their model: 1) Orientation, 2) Trust Building, 3) Goal Clarification, 4) Commitment, 5) Implementation, 6) High Performance, and 7) Renewal.

At what level is your management team? Your faculty? Your board? Are they stuck in the Orientation stage where people are trying to figure out whether they fit and will be welcome and happy on the team? All too often, people struggle to move beyond this stage.
If they do, they move on to the Trust Building stage. Do your teachers trust each other? Do they plan together and coordinate what students are learning across disciplines? The Trust Building stage is often the toughest stage, but it’s absolutely crucial. People have to trust each other to work effectively in teams.

After building trust, team members must clarify their goals and figure out their priorities. In the Goal Clarification stage, teachers, administrators, board members and other members of the many teams in schools, must discuss and determine how to get from point A to point B.
Then they need to make commitments to each other to get the job done. In the Commitment stage, people need to agree on who’s doing what and hold themselves and others accountable.
In the Implementation stage, teams move from talking and planning to doing. This is where it gets exciting. We see firsthand the fruits of our labors. Students and parents begin noticing the difference too. They sense greater camaraderie and enthusiasm among staff, and feel more excited about coming to school.

As staff continue to work together collaboratively, they move into the High Performance stage. Team members have learned to trust each other. Methods have been mastered Implementation has been successful. The fabulous part about this stage is that teams can now focus on adapting to changing circumstances with ease and flexibility, and surpass expectations.

Teams are constantly changing. People come and go. The Renewal stage is a time to rejuvenate and prepare for a new cycle of action.

Team Oracle

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Building a High Performance Team

How productive are your people?

How can you create an environment that generates results for today?

How can you tap into the true potential of your team?

Today’s business environment is one of which individuals are working harder than ever just to achieve the same results as in past years. It’s tough to accomplish the goals that your annual strategy promises and to find more effective ways of working.

The average team in business achieves only 63% of the objectives of their strategic plans.

Where is the gap and what gets in the way?

The key issues are how your people communicate as a team, align on key goals, develop short and long-term plans and hold themselves accountable to deliver the results. The amazing thing is that many know this but view them as “soft skills’, so lack the ongoing discipline and rigor to develop the culture to ensure that these issues are addressed each and every day.

What can you do to close the performance gap in your business?

Know that your people are your business. More than your strategy, your marketing plan, or your systems, people are the key to your success.  To transform your business, transform your people.

Getting your people to work together in a powerful way, taking personal responsibility for their own performance, as well as that of the overall business, will generate measurable improvement every time.  The secret lies in making sure that everyone—including you—is aligned and committed to a high say/do ratio to results.

Here are 5 key disciplines to make this happen

1. Include everyone in your top team in the creation of the real plan that’s going to drive the business for the next year.  They have a chance to let you know how things look from their perspective and you have the benefit of their experience and insight.  We’ve learned time and again the truth of the adage that people will not destroy what they have helped to create.

2.  Review what happened in the past and learn from it. Start with a thorough review of the past year—what did we achieve together and where did we fail?

First focus on achievements—just the good news. It’s easy to focus on issues and problems to the exclusion of achievements and successes.

Then consider those areas where you came short of your goals. This exercise has nothing to do with pointing fingers and everything to do with creating a realistic picture of the current status of the team and the business.

Finally, discover the lessons from what happened and align on the top three that would make the most difference to your success.

3.  Examine limiting assumptions and shift them. The most challenging job is to tackle the limiting beliefs that drive the entire business—they shape culture.  You’ve got to shift limiting attitudes or paradigms to those that generate the culture and vision you want to produce together.  The right attitude generates excitement, commitment and buy-in that shows in every area of their work as individuals and as a team.

4.  Align on the top team priorities at every level of the business. Ask each person on the top team to identify the one or two priorities for their area of responsibility and to present those to the entire team and explain their choices.  Once all the goals have been presented, together select the top ten goals for the year.  Although all goals may be pursued, your team will benefit from a focus on the ten that most ensure overall success.

5.  Establish monthly review sessions to monitor progress and learn from what happens.  Anyone can make a plan, but executing it to get the desired results is where the breakdown usually occurs.  The most important discipline to ensure success—no matter what—is a monthly review session that checks progress against the plan.  This is what drives teams to produce results.

Top ten factors for building high performance teams. By Jack W. Peters www.jackwpeters.com
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Building High Performing Teams

One of the ways to get an immediate return is to leverage the innate creativity of teams.  Many leaders try to solve challenging problems alone, but teams can do much better than individuals in coming up with creative solutions to difficult problems.  In our fast changing world, innovative solutions are the source of your competitive advantage.  In addition this type of collaboration energizes employees by improving motivation and increasing communication.  This will also strengthen your team’s ability to address the next challenge of gaining alignment and commitment to the proposed solution. 

The top ten points below are designed to help you foster creativity within your team.

1.  Establish clear outcomes for teamwork.  You will derive the best results from your teams when members clearly understand what is expected of them.  They need to understand both the overall big picture and vision for the organization, as well as your expectations of them operationally (what results/deliverables you want from them.)

2.  Believe in the capabilities of your team.  As the leader, you need to expect the best from your team, keeping your expectations high and realistic.  This is a challenging balancing act, but people need to be inspired to perform at their best.  In terms of creativity, a group is more likely to come up with innovative solutions if you believe that they can.  However, your optimism and strength need to be realistic.  Raise the bar for top performance, one step at a time.

3.  Encourage and respect new thinking.  It takes courage to bring up a new idea or a fresh perspective within a team.  Creativity is a mindset that needs to be championed and valued by the leader.  Make sure that you are open to new ideas, and that you suspend judgment during the idea generation phase.  Encourage people to build on ideas, not tear them down.  Dismissing ideas too soon is a sure way of losing the best solutions and suppressing creative thinking.

4.  Hold regular brainstorming sessions.  Brainstorming is a great way to get lots of new ideas on the table.  Operate within clear brainstorming rules:  go for quantity not quality, don’t evaluate, defer judgment, appoint a scribe to capture the ideas verbatim on a flipchart and tagging on or combining ideas is OK – the wilder the better.

5.  Strengthen relationships.  Creativity is generated when you have a collaborative environment.  Collaboration can only exist when there is trust between team members.  The leader sets the tone, so make sure you encourage, recognize and reward collaboration and interdepartmental communication.

6.  “Empower your employees”.  An easy thing to say but much more difficult to do.  Start by sharing more of the decision making with lower levels in the organization.

7.  Hire for creativity.  During the interview cycle make sure you recruit people that have creative ability.  Hiring groups of people who all think alike will not generate new ideas.

8.  Encourage risk taking.  Encourage your people to take risks, recognizing that at times mistakes will be made.  It is critical that employees know that, so long as they take the appropriate steps to maximize success, failures will be seen as opportunities, for new learning, not blame.  Fear is on the other side of the coin from creativity.  It’s up to management to recognize and acknowledge that fear is present and to set the tone that risks need to be taken anyway.

9.  Build diverse teams.  Diversity of backgrounds, thinking, experience and culture is the key to creativity.  Although it is more difficult to build alignment and consensus among a group of divergent thinkers, you will get better ideas and ultimately more upside from a diverse team.

10.  Have fun.  Humor is a fuel of creativity.  Make sure you fuel the fire of creativity by encouraging laughter and play.  The key here is to maintain respectful interactions.

High Performing Teams

Any high performing team will always demonstrate an element of pure class. They’ll have the guns or the stars who have the ability to do extraordinary things – whose competence in the technical aspects of their work make them outstanding contributors to the team.

We all recognise the importance of ‘having the right cattle’ in the pursuit of high performance and getting results; but a group of individuals coming together for a common goal does not automatically constitute a strong and effective team. It runs much deeper than that.

In our pursuit of seeking “the right cattle” we can encounter other issues that come with accessing highly driven people. Can they work together in a team? We must constantly challenge ourselves as managers and leaders to not only look for the best people but for the ‘right’ people for our organisation.

For performance to be efficient and effective we must challenge individuals to come together on a more personal and deeper level than simply being joined by name or company; and get them to work together for a common purpose and a common result.

Two characteristics that differentiate high performing teams are support for one another and mutual accountability or responsibility for shared team results.

We can get so wrapped up in our own world of achievement, we can often forget about the impact that our own behaviour is having on those around us. That at times, we are willing to do something that doesn’t just look like ‘by numbers’.

Great teams are willing to look out for one another. To cover for a teammate until they are able to resume their role. They have players who swallow their own ego and perform a role for the team even though they think they may be too good for that role.

Great teams have players who have the ability to not only perform their role for the team, but to also help others around them to achieve their goals. To think beyond themselves, not only when they are playing well, but when they are playing below their best.

Great teams have players that ensure team rules are followed and that the style of game they want to play is encouraged and supported by everyone.

They have a group of people who accept mutual accountability for the result of the team. They share the glory or the pain irrespective of personal performance because their commitment is directly linked to team results.

This is difficult to balance, because with high achievers and high performers there will always be strong individual ambitions, goals, wants and needs.

It’s about submitting your ego to the team cause – accepting a role for the good of the team, and appreciating and recognising others who do likewise.

If we have too many individuals who want to be the star then we can encounter problems in the work environment. Not enough people will want to contribute the most to the team cause or be the person who has the most influence on the team result.

Sport brings us so many analogies of what this is like. We get to go to the footy and make observations about what role someone has played for their team and how they went about it. We see the admirable qualities the team has, yet we also see individual ‘players’ on our team that give their all alongside the ones that contribute little to the team outcome. Sometimes, because of personal brilliance, individual players get away with behaviours that simply do not reflect a team attitude.

I had the pleasure of playing along a player by the name of Shaun Hart. He was the benchmark of team attitude for me at the Brisbane Lions. Despite pressure and fatigue, his decisions always reflected what was in the best interest of the team. Under-rated in the public arena but pure gold within the inner-sanctum, he was respected enormously by his peers and was the ultimate support player. The worker-bee.

Sydney is a team filled with examples of support and responsibility. Their ability to cover for one another is typical Swans style and is admired by everyone for achievements on and off the football field. Even Barry Hall who, despite a brain fade against West Coast when he lashed out and punched an opposition player, stood up the very next day and said it wasn’t good enough, it was unacceptable and that he had let his team down and the young fans for whom he is a role model. That’s leadership. It doesn’t matter who it is – personal behaviour is a team priority that drives a team result.

This all starts with leaders. If leaders can take enough ownership for the performance of the team and measure people on this, despite other technical competencies alone, then peer pressure ensures their survival in that environment.

And if they don’t … well I would argue that it is best at some point that they do make the decision to leave as your team will be better for it.

Look across your own team. Who is taking responsibility for the team results; who is supporting others to achieve their outcomes and driving the standards that are expected within your work environment?

Be the team that becomes the contender rather than a bunch of talented individuals who could have been anything.

Michael Voss is a former triple Australia Football League (AFL) premiership captain of the Brisbane Lions and is regarded as one of the all-time greats of the modern era. He played 289 AFL games from 1992-2006, won the coveted Brownlow Medal in 1996, was a five-times All-Australian selection, including twice as captain, and skippered the Lions for 10 years, including the 2001-02-03 premierships.