Wind in Your Sails – The Team Performance Perspective
Photo: Extreme Sailing Series. Photo rights reserved by Land Rover MENA.
A guest post by David Greer
In her blog post Set Up Your Team for Success Jesse Lyn Stoner identifies these six things behind successful teams. Teams are critical to performance so I would like to dive into each of these to remind of what can go wrong and how it looks when you get it right.
Vision and Values
Team Processes
Goals
Communication and Coordination
Authority and Accountability
Resources
I have worked on teams where there was not alignment of one or more of these six areas. In my new book Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Success, I provide numerous examples of high performing teams and best practices for creating and helping them.
Vision and Values
When starting a new project it is okay to have disagreement on the overall vision. The team is only going to work if after the first one-or-two meetings, the team agrees on the vision. Even if you personally did not agree on the final vision, the team will only be successful if you put aside your differences and commit 100%. Whether this is for a project, goal, organization, or company, everyone has to pull in the same direction.
If your values are not aligned, you will not build the necessary trust to create ordinary results, let alone extra ordinary ones. When everyone believes in the same things and then pulls in the same direction, magic happens.
Team Processes
Have you ever been on a team that meets weekly, discusses items, and never gets anything done? In my career, I’ve been completely frustrated with such teams. While a lack of a clear goal, which I’ll talk about in a minute, can often be the cause, a lack of agreement around team processes is more often the culprit. How decisions are made, who is responsible for documentation, how is documentation distributed, what are the milestone steps, and how will you know you have achieved them. These are just a few of the team processes that need to be in place.
Goals
I’ve lost count of the number of strategic planning sessions I’ve facilitated where a goal like “Be the best at Customer Service” is put on the table. The first problem with this goal is that it has no objective measure. What does it mean to be the best at customer service? There is no measurable goal in being best. How will everyone on the team know that you have crossed the finish line? Goals need to be simple and clear so that everyone understands what they are, how they are measured, when they are reported, so that everyone will know the exact point that the goal has been achieved or exceeded. With daily reporting against a goal, everyone knows whether they are on track or not. It is rare for such clarity to exist and when it does, amazing results are the outcome.
Communication and Coordination
Let’s be clear here—meetings are not communication or coordination. Consider weekly meetings. Publishing meetings notes is often a waste of time. So is repeating a laundry list of what was done in each meeting. A key point I discuss in Wind In Your Sails, is that you need Who, What, and When: clear, crisp, actionable, and measurable. Meetings are to celebrate your wins and then engage in debate, often heated debate, about what needs to happen next.
Authority and Accountability
Have you been on a team where goals are agreed, deadlines set, and then when someone doesn’t deliver the person in charge does not hold them accountable? Nothing deflates a team more than having clear Who, What, and When goals that are not followed through. One person must be in charge and that person has to have the authority to hold everyone else accountable to the things they say they will do. That person is not responsible for getting it done—they are the accountability point person. This is a subtle and often overlooked difference about team leads.
Resources
If you want to deflate a project, get it going and then starve it for resources. Both at the start and during the team’s existence, the resources that can be brought to the challenge must be clear. That includes human, financial, expertise, processes, inventory, internal, and external—everything that the team will need to be successful. This needs to be made clear at the start. Because things change, there needs to be a process to evaluate and adjust the resources that the team needs to be successful. One of the most powerful ways to provide more resources is to give people permission to stop something that the organization is doing today that makes no more sense. It takes incredible courage and support to stop existing processes and actions. Yet it is one of the most powerful ways to create resources.
Creating high performing teams is hard. In Wind In Your Sails, I provide many practical ways that you can create, build, help, and accelerate high performing teams. Focus on these six areas to make your teams successful from the very start.
