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Here at Next Action Associates our focus is healthy high-performance. As a leader you may be curious about how to build a high-performing team and the traits and strategies that you can use to lead your teams.
My background is in managing a wide variety of hybrid teams, sites and projects involved in frontline service delivery for some of the local authority’s most vulnerable people before, during and post pandemic.
Here are some things that I’ve learned over the years about leading high-performing teams.
Communication is key
Before moving into consulting, coaching and training I spent many years managing a wide variety of teams across many sites simultaneously.
Naturally, I couldn’t be physically with all of my team members all of the time – and so I fell in the trap of assuming that my off-hand comments in the office would filter down to the remote workers on the team rather than implementing a strategy to keep everyone informed.
Most leaders are aware of the power of what they say and how they deliver certain key messages. What is often overlooked is the frequency of communications. This is particularly important in times of uncertainty surrounding employee’s future and job security.
It’s easy to forget that as a leader you have a wider view than most in the company, and whilst you may comfortably aware that there has been no change in circumstances / progress made on important matters, most junior staff will be anxiously waiting for any updates: the mantra that “no news is good news” often doesn’t ring true for those left in the dark.
The British Red Cross has spent decades perfecting how it responds to emergencies, learning from each situation it is involved in. As a former British Red Cross emergency Rest Centre manager one of the key takeaways from my training was the duty to ensure that it was clear to anyone attending a rest centre how and when they would be updated regarding any relevant news – even if nothing has changed – keeping your promise to update survivors whenyou said you would was vitally important in building trust and calming the understandable anxieties.
When I managed over 300 volunteers at a mass COVID vaccination clinic in East London it was impossible to see them all, but a weekly update with key information and wins to celebrate kept our team connected despite different shift patterns and a mixture of remote and frontline service delivery:
Consider keeping an Agenda list of items to update your team about weekly including the progress of key matters (even if there is nothing new to report), statistics that reflect the state of play and anything you’d like to celebrate with wider team such as business won, a great customer service story or a fantastic piece of work from a team member.
Warning: sometimes a deluge of weekly bulletins from a number of different departments and sources can be overwhelming – experiment and find the right balance for your staff.
Invest in People
In the thick of day-to-day operations this may be the hardest ask of the modern manager. If you ask leaders, would they like to spend more time one-to-one with their direct reports and invest more money in their development, the majority would probably give you a resounding “Yes!”
However, the heat of battle often means that performance reviews can be rushed, training opportunities shelved and leaders feeling burned out whilst their staff feel undervalued.
No magic wands here – the reality is that the time invested on the front end in designing better systems, ways of working andtraining staff will repay itself tenfold on the back end – I see this countless times with our clients who often remark that having taken two days out of work to do some GTD® (Getting Things Done®) training and coaching, to build a system that supports them has freed them up delegate more effectively, work more efficiently and spend more time developing their staff – which in turn leads to higher productivity and better staff retention as direct reports feel more valued.
Ask yourself:
What can I automate?
What can I delegate?
If I trained “x” staff member to do “y” how much more time could I have during the week?
Trust in People
Another common theme in our work is that very talented team members find themselves progressing because they are good at their job, and then find themselves in a management position requiring a very different set of skills – now they have to be good at their job and be good leaders.
I started my role in the most junior position in the company before progressing into management – the learning curve was steep and for a long time this was my downfall.
I thought it was noble to take the complex tasks off my team members or work the extra hours to practically doprojects for them. Whereas in fact, the message I was giving them by my actions was, “you’re not good enough to do this,” and “if you want to progress you must work late.”
But a desire to do things a certain way or support a team as much as possible can lead to micromanagement – not only does this mean you will lack perspective over your work (despite a lot of control) it also means you fail to empower those below you.
When delegating Projects or Tasks consider giving your staff:
- key desired outcomes
- purpose and principles (or the rules they need to play by)
- any relevant information/sources to support their work (this could even be other people in the company that they can reach out to for support or a different view)
Make time to check in and course correct where necessary – the more you do this, the easier it will get and the better they will get too.
When I learned to do this, I had an immediate sense of relief. And not only did I claw back many valuable hours, it also felt great to truly empower staff to achieve more and see the value of their different (often better) approaches to the same problem.
In fact, when I started at Next Action Associates, one of the things I loved was that I was immediately trusted to lead projects with the support of senior associates where necessary – after all you hire people because you believe that they are good enough right?
Different people learn in different ways – vary the way you train and engage with your staff.
One of the most effective organisations that I worked in had a policy of allowing staff to “shadow” staff members at all levels across departments as part of their professional development.
Not only did this bring new levels of knowledge back to and across teams, it also built understanding and respect across departments when staff could see first-hand what their colleagues were dealing with on a daily basis.
In one example a junior staff member who was interested in management shadowed a senior management meeting – they quickly realised the pace of work and the variety and complexity of strategic thinking that was happening in these boardrooms and was able to make an informed decision as to whether this was the right time for them to move up in the organisation.
These meetings were also efficiently run, and the staff member was able to explain to other team members that the management weren’t simply having meeting after meeting for the sake of it – further building trust between junior and senior staff.
What’s next?
Leading teams can be incredibly rewarding and there’s always so much to learn along the way – if you’re interested in learning more about building and maintaining high performing teams, please do get in touch regarding our courses, coaching and training.
