7 Suggestions to Promote High Performance on Your Team

1. Communicate expectations for achievement of operating objectives from day one of your leadership role. There should be no ambiguity about your intentions and your expectations for performance, progress reporting and ultimately, achievement. Remember to link yourself as ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the team and to let them understand your role to both coach and support the team and individual efforts.

2. Kick-off all operations oriented meetings with a review of the key business objectives and progress towards those objectives. Conclude every session with a reminder of the objectives—especially near term deliverables. This is equally important for individual review sessions as it is for group situations.

3. Praise, celebrate and reward milestone achievement and positive progress frequently and liberally.

4. Acknowledge roadblocks, misfires and general problems quickly and calmly. Your appropriate reaction to these occurrences will contribute to building an effective working environment where people can honestly and openly deal with the negative as well as the positive.

5. Foster a culture that treats problems as opportunity for creativity and innovation. More than lip-service is required here. Let teams experiment and implement new ideas to fix or improve and challenge them to keep improving.

6. Seek out and deal with poor performers promptly and fairly. As the saying goes, one bad apple can ruin the whole bushel, and the same is true with teams. Your handling of poor performers (professionally and timely of course) sends a powerful message to your team. You build accountability into the culture by reinforcing that a mistake is a learning experience, repeated mistakes are a developmental or training opportunities and chronic poor performance is a reason for reassignment or dismissal.

7. Set and share expectations for your own performance and be open about your progress and your own misfires. The team needs to see that you practice what you preach.

The Bottom-Line for Now

Great performance is a function of many factors. While the formula may vary a bit from team to team, alignment on goals, a culture of accountability, clear expectations and constant assessment of performance versus expectations are core to the recipe for success everywhere.

This blog originally appeared at artpetty.com. 

It takes time to convey your dream and your standards for taking care of clients. And some of us truly believe that no one can do it better than we can. Well, it’s probably true for certain areas of your business but not all of it.  If you’re awesome at sales but you do all of your own administrative work, chances are there’s an administrative wiz right under your nose.

You need a team and if you have a team, they need some management.

Teams Cannot Train And Manage Themselves 

Even the smartest group requires clear standards and leadership (and micro-managing is not the same thing as leadership). Managing your people takes time on the front end, but it creates momentum on the back end.

With a well-chosen and well-trained team you can move faster, be in more places at once and serve more people. It’s like a new computer — it takes time to set it up, to transfer your data and to learn how to use the new features, but once it’s ready to go, you can NOT imagine handling business without it.

Management boils down to one basic standard.

Make It Hard For Your Team to Mess Up Or Miss Out

You want your people to get the message and take action. It’s not about “I told you so” or a litany of “what’s wrong with those people.” It’s about results.

To get the desired outcome, leave a trail that reinforces your core message. Tell your team what you expect from them in multiple formats.  Say it in the initial training/orientation.  Reinforce it in the ongoing staff meetings by role playing and other hands on experiences.  Use well placed signs around the property or well timed emails to your team. This allows you to use visuals to reinforce your message.

And then follow it all up with consistent consequences and rewards.

Give Your Team A Reason To Care As Much As You Do 

This requires some brainstorming up front (with your leaders, mentors and management experts). Find the kind of rewards that gets the response you want.

Finally, monitor the impact. You can’t just delegate and assume it’s done, you have to inspect the work. For the busy small business owner who tends to forget, put a reminder in your smart phone – 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks later a little note pops up reminding you to ask for the sample that Mark created (or was supposed to create).

Two Things Are At Work Here

Each team member has a responsibility as well as the space and opportunity to excel without being micro-managed. They also have a check and balance and a deadline.

Source:
Businessinsider.com

Read more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmallBusinessTrends/~3/-IX1CcUxqMI/team-communication-small-business.html#ixzz1uX9Bq7IX

Starting with a creative session under the sun, teams came up with core themes and messages that they wanted to incorporate into their design.  With our team of professional graffiti artists onsite to help out the team, it was onto the spray cans to bring their concept to life.

Amazing art piece, great team building!

Woody is an award winning author and flair bartender having mixed drinks for celebs and royalty around the world including a signature cocktail for Oprah Winfrey on Whitehaven Beach during her visit to Australia.

Hidden Door have teamed up with Woody for some exciting team events designed for high-end team building and corporate events.  The events are completely customised to meet your objectives but focus on the core messages of sustainability, food consciousness and encouraging people to think differently.

Available for groups of all sizes around Australia.

“The day was fantastic. We had a few mixed feelings initially from a few team members. It was amazing the turnaround as they all arrived back into the office – red faced, hot and some without shoes to be able to run faster!

The exercise had created memories in our office that will last for a very long time. Those who perhaps did not know each other very well can now have a laugh with each other. Thank you – the day exceeded our expectations.”

At just $45pp our DIY Paparazzi experience is the ideal cost-effective team building solution.

Even a kid out there who has access to the internet would know what Amazon – the online shopping portal – is. That’s the legacy of Jeff Bezos. His name might not be that famous but his business is. It has reached every nook of the world wherever the internet is available.

What’s more interesting is the fact that Jeffrey started his brand in just a two-bedroom apartment. He and his wife along with a couple of professionals and sheer determination ventured the show which now is an international brand shipping products to nearly 45 countries around the globe.

Here are a few tips to ensure your high performance teams get the required fuel to go the extra mile:

Consistent Training and Development:

No matter how well your team is performing, its members will always feel the need of learning more. Once you bring them to a standstill, a level where you make them feel they no longer need to learn anything, they will shift from the main goal with a sense of pride. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that regular training and development of high performance teams is always on the go to make them better and better every time.

Share Your Vision:

It is critical to share your organization’s vision with your teams. This way, you will build confidence and set future goals for them. In addition, all employees will know what the organization expects from them, which will help them improve and go beyond your expectations. However, it is important to make sure the goals you set for them are realistic and not just profit-driven.

Constant Feedback is Important:

Ensure that your employees are getting regular feedback from the management on their performance, behavior and discipline. Monthly or weekly feedback reports work best. Employees who work well are motivated seeing their stars shine while the ones who are lagging behind get to know their weaknesses.

Share the Leadership:

High performance teams are always based on shared leadership instead of a single man leadership. This is to ensure that each and every member of the team shares equal responsibility for the actions they undertake.

Future Plans and Strategies:

As mentioned earlier, it is important to share future plans of the organization with the teams in order to boost their morale and take them in confidence. Employees will only be able to give their best when they will know what rewards are there for them.

CBA Team Hula from Hidden Door on Vimeo.

Teams recently faced the obstacle of eating a cockroach or cricket as part of The Amazing Race in Sydney.  Here is our resident bug-man Adam demonstrating that the bugs are actually quite tasty.  Sure they are, Adam.