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The 7 Characteristics Of A High Performing Team

  1. Empower Your Staff To Take Actions

Staff empowerment is essential for high performance teams. You need to be able to empower your team to make appropriate decisions and support them in this. You also have to coach them to make decisions well.

Empowerment requires that you let go of the reigns just a little and allow your team members to make good, educated decisions about what they are doing. This is important because it is far more motivating for most individuals to be able to make decisions for themselves, rather than having to come and ask you every time a small decision is required.

Making the right decisions means that your team will become more confident in what they are doing, and more effective in their jobs as that confidence grows. To make the best decisions, your team needs to be trained effectively so that they understand what the right decisions for the business might be. If they do not have all of the information at their fingertips, chances are that they will make damaging decisions. You need to ensure that you protect against that, by providing the information that they need to them.

If you empower your team, they will make mistakes from time to time. What’s important is that they learn from their mistakes and take action to correct them for next time, not making the same mistake over and over again. When a mistake occurs, you need to be able to coach the individual in such a way that they are able to figure out where they went wrong and put things right. If the team feel that they will be blamed for the making of mistakes, they will likely cover them up, making potentially damaging issues harder for you to spot.

  1. Encourage an entrepreneurial approach

Similarly, to being open with communication, you need to be open to ideas and suggestions in order to create a high-performance team that can help you to drive your business forward. Your team is made up of individuals, all of whom had a different upbringing, have a different outlook on life and have different friends and experiences. All of this can help them to provide a different view on decisions that the business could be making to improve.

All of these different minds have different perspectives that can make you look at your company in different and interesting new ways. Maybe you don’t want every single team member involved in every decision that you make, but it cannot hurt to be open to suggestions on improvement from your staff.

Being listened to by their manager is an important motivator for teams. Showing that you listen to the ideas of individuals in your team and actively encouraging people to come up with new ideas will help your team to improve and become even more high-performing, especially if they see some of their ideas come into fruition and achieve success for the business.

You might even consider setting up some kind of reward system for the best idea each month or quarter that helps to improve business success. This may drive your team to come up with even more entrepreneurial and interesting ideas than they may otherwise have had, resulting in success for your team and your business.

  1. Make the team accountable

While your team must not feel that there is a blame culture, they do still need to be accountable for their actions. If there is no accountability in your team, then there is less incentive for your team to feel responsible for what they do and the outcomes.

This balance between blame culture and accountability can be difficult to manage at times, but it is important that you are able to see the difference and to do this effectively. For example, your team must feel that they are accountable for not meeting objectives that are genuinely SMART. In this instance, you need to understand what they were doing rather than working to the clearly laid out objectives and why.

Accountability is also important for you as the team manager, and you should lead in setting an example in being accountable. If you have made an error, explain to your team why you made that mistake and what you plan to do to avoid it in future. That way you are showing them that you recognize a mistake that you made, but that you are taking responsibility for it and correcting things going forward. Your team will have much more respect for this approach than if you try to hide mistakes that you have made. It will also encourage them to behave in the same way.

  1. Celebrate successes

When your team achieves an important milestone, celebrate it with them. This doesn’t have to be through a big, expensive celebration. One option might just be to buy them a pizza for lunch, or get some a little beer in on the day of the success after work. Neither of these options has to cost much money if there’s not much available to use, but it goes a long way to demonstrate to your team that you are happy with their performance and that you appreciate what they did.

In summary, it takes time and effort to create a high performance team, but the results are worth the energy expended. You need to be clear with your team what their targets are and what your expectations are of them. You need to communicate with them effectively, and that includes listening to their ideas – maybe they have a great idea that will improve your business considerably.

You also need to create an environment where your team feel safe to express their ideas in the first place and steer away from the kind of working environment where blame for mistakes plays any part.

Finally, you should take a consistent and coordinated approach to the work that is required, ensuring that everyone understands the same plan and is working to it effectively. This does not mean that the plan can’t change, just that everyone needs to understand what the priorities are at any given time. If you stick to the principles outlined above, you have a good chance of creating a high performance team that will drive your business forward to new levels of success.

Andreas Jones
Andreas Joneshttps://battletestedleadership.com/
ANDREAS is the Founder of Combat Business Coaching, #1 Bestselling author of Business Leader Combat, marketing strategist, business growth expert, advisor, consultant and army combat veteran. Andreas works with small and medium-sized businesses and help them build meaningful businesses so that they can have more profit, fans and freedom. Service in the US Army forged Andreas’s character. It tested him, tested his endurance, faith, and internal fortitude. He describes it as “a trial by fire” and remains profoundly grateful for it. When he finally left the Army he did so with an astute understanding of self-ownership, implementing a vision, and the value in establishing trust and reputation. Jones applied all that he had learned serving his country to a series of jobs, including that of a VP at Sun Trust Bank. Each of his positions have endowed him with the type of knowledge required to start his own business and to provide a workable schematic for others to follow. Andreas has taken his hard-won Army lessons into the world of business, continuing to learn new skills and insight. Each fresh challenge, project or position has helped him grow into the individual he is today.

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