As a leader, a business owner, or a manager, it falls on your shoulders to assemble a hard-working and high-performing team that’ll help your business flourish and succeed. Building a high-performing team isn’t all about pulling together a group of talented people with the right skills. It also requires careful development, filtering, and nurturing of the key characters.
Working with an incompetent team can lead to ongoing conflicts and a lack of motivation, whereas being part of a successful, high-performing team can be a rewarding and motivating experience for everyone involved. Thus, in this article, we’ll be discussing the following:
- What is a high-performing team?
- How to build a high-performing team.
- What are the characteristics of a high-building team?
So, let’s dive in!
Contents
What is a high-performing team?
A high-performing team is a team of competent individuals with the same goals who strive for excellence through communication, mutual trust, shared leadership, and clear job roles. Each team member knows and accepts accountability for their workload and actions.
How to build a high-performing team
- Stimulate an environment of secure communication.
- Creating a stable team.
- Emphasizing the importance of learning.
- Tackle conflicts.
- Develop emotional intelligence.
Stimulate an environment of secure communication
That lack of psychological safety in which team members often hold themselves back from voicing out their opinions and thoughts in meetings is ineffective and counterproductive in a team. Leaders should take care of building and fostering a work environment that negates interpersonal risk-taking.
Productively, this kind of working environment will boost employees’ motivation, and help them voice out and take part in every decision made by the team. Leaders should also understand and take note of team member’s working styles on an individual level in order to increase the effectiveness of a high-performing team.
Creating a stable team
It is proven that team composure and stability are the very foundation and beginning of building a high-performing and effective team. Meaning, that a high-performing team should be kept as small as possible so as not to diminish its effectiveness, as when a team is big, the sub-team inevitably starts to form, leading to divisive behavior. The team should also not be kept too small because it is likely to result in poorer and slower decision-making.
It Is important for a leader to take time to handpick stable teams, and after the team is formed, maintaining its stability should be a top priority.
Emphasizing the Importance of Learning
Emerging technologies are always changing, and different digital transformations are needed to build a high-performance team. Because of this, emphasizing a culture of continuous learning in the team negates the skill gap issues. Upgrading a team’s ability through documentation tools and training is important in building a high-performance team.
Also, learning through online platforms that provide industry-recognized and certified courses on relevant topics helps employees to skill up faster. These online platforms focus their training on aligning with corporate development plans, and they also offer interactive learning. They are likely to be more effective than simply reading or watching course material on company web pages or knowledge bases.
Tackle conflicts
Conflicts are inevitable, even for the best high-performing teams worldwide. That’s why leaders should take note of individual team characters, to know which are compatible to work with. While in certain cases, limited conflict can be beneficial, the best way to approach this is to expect it and be ready for it when it happens.
As soon as a leader notices conflict arising in the team setting addressing it is a matter of utmost urgency. By resolving the conflict quickly, leaders can prevent it from getting out of control and causing a bigger problem that may hinder the team’s success.
Develop emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence, which can be described as the capacity to harmonize thought and emotion, is a powerful driver when it comes to teamwork and building high-performing teams. When a leader utilizes the knowledge given by taking notes of everyone’s emotions, the team can communicate effectively, and loyalty and engagement increase. This will build a comfortable work environment
What are the characteristics of a high-building team?
- Defined roles and responsibilities.
- Clarity of shared vision.
- Clear and respective communication.
- Continuous learning and improvement.
- Trust and respect.
Defined roles and responsibilities
One of the most important aspects of work is everyone being clear about their roles and responsibilities. Thus, it’s frustrating when not being clear about it, because only when responsibilities are crystalline can accountability take place.
Even when a person shows signs of high intelligence and capabilities when his or her role is not clarified it is inevitable that everyone in the organization will be frustrated. The reason because everyone will assume different sets of responsibilities for that person, and by the end of the day failure to meet these responsibilities is inevitable. It now falls on the leader to direct these roles.
High-performing teams are built on the foundation of clarity. As a leader, it falls upon you to communicate this vision practically and clearly. The vision must be of utmost importance and be kept front and center in the daily work lives of team members. Every action they take as individuals and as a group must align and be pointed to accomplish their portion of the vision.
Clear and respective communication
Communication is vitally important in building teams that perform at the highest level. Time must be spent to support communication between members. Team members must learn to respect viewpoints, learn empathy, and accept the different contexts and perspectives of each other.
Continuous learning and improvement
Because none of us know all the answers or have the skill sets to tackle every challenge, we must be open to learning and becoming better at our jobs. Knowing the gaps in a team’s skill set happens through ongoing feedback sessions and conversations. Participating in continuous improvement discussions as a group leads to insights into these gaps.
Trust and respect
Trust must be given in order to earn. As a leader, you must build trust in your team. Extending decision-making power to the team is one way to gain trust. You must also create a sense of trust as well. To create trust as a leader you must show some level of vulnerability and be responsive to the needs of the team.
That’s all for this article where we discussed the following:
- What is a high-performing team?
- How to build a high-performing team.
- What are the characteristics of a high-building team?
Hope it was helpful. If so, kindly share. Thanks for reading.
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