Part 18 – How to incrementally improve your Team - End of Series Summary
This post brings to an end the series of lesson excerpts from the How to incrementally improve your Team course. The posts progressively moved a team through three stages of development, namely a Good Team, a Great Team and finally a High-Performance Team.
Management Training
Management is all about our relationships with people. Within our professional sphere, most of us seek out someone whom we see as a leader, someone who takes an interest in us, that we are happy to follow, be loyal to and who makes us feel good about ourselves. Management is all about people leadership, being that leader that others are seeking out.
Management Style
Team members are trained to become High-Performance Managers who care about and develop their staff. They are a role model for others who will aim to emulate their management style. Team members understand it is vital to know their people and as a manager in an organisation who wants to develop teamwork, spend time with their teams, talk to them, and come to understand what they care for individually.
A High-Performance Management Style is developed that focuses on professionalism, people development and business performance. The Management Style is a description of the way a manager acts and how others can expect them to react in a given situation. The style acknowledges the central finding of EI (Emotional Intelligence) research that emotions are contagious, attitude and that energy ‘infects’ a workplace for better or for worse. The High-Performance Management Style combines Traditional management qualities and Transformational leadership qualities which are complementary and inexorably linked to each other.
Professionalism
High-Performance and professionalism are synonymous. The High-Performance manager understands that personal biases and prejudices, for example, cannot be part of a professional persona. Nor are they allowed to play a role in a team as they can cause a team to fail. Even though team members should be concerned and caring about each other, this does not extend to displays of personal emotions or blackmail. The High-Performance team member accepts that being professional means:
Development of specialised knowledge.
Ideally having a theoretical foundation.
Intellectual development.
Professional development.
Use of techniques and knowledge.
Competence, honesty, integrity and respect.
Accountability.
Self-regulation
Common Goal
Ordinary teams respond to a mandate from outside their team. However, to be successful, a team needs to develop its own common goal. Creating a common goal is essential as it acts as a target to direct and motivate team members and staff. It gives direction to all actions and serves as a measure of success after a task is completed. The team common goal needs to consider likely changes in the organisation’s business environment, competitors’ movements and the future behaviours of consumers, combined with the team’s aspirations. It answers the question of why the team exists. The best common goals merge organizational and team aspirations into one. The team common goal must be a goal the whole team will embrace and work towards in everything they do.
Performance Goals
Individual performance goals that support and contribute to the achievement of the common goal are created for each team member. The High-Performance manager establishes more challenging and ambitious performance goals for their team members as compared to the other teams. All the team members are supported and motivated to deliver excellence and are expected to be more passionate about the achievement of their goals. Team members are empowered and motivated to take risks and pursue individual initiatives.
Team Meetings
A Management Team meeting, aside from being an essential general management practice, is required to support the team. It focuses team members on matters such as staff, performance, productivity, customer satisfaction, service and quality. Team members adopt the same meeting format and rules for their team meetings. This approach guarantees the equal dissemination of information to all staff.
Mentoring
Is used as a positive method to support and encourage both team members and their staff, allowing both to develop to their fullest potential. Mentoring sessions change and evolve as the needs of the person being mentored changes. There is a general aim to understand each other’s situation and out of work stresses and obligations. The person being mentored is encouraged to share information about his or her career path aspirations, is given guidance, motivation, emotional support and assistance with problems.
Team Training
Roles and Responsibilities
When team members know what their roles and responsibilities are and how they support the team, and how they contribute to the success and results of the team, this produces greater job satisfaction and commitment. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities remove overlaps, identifies and fills in gaps and make it clear as to who is responsible for what.
Motivation
Managers who actively support and motivate feel closer to those whom they are helping. By showing a sincere interest in their staff, managers build trust and inspire others to achieve higher levels of performance. A High-Performance Team is not just a healthy team, but it is a team where people are supported, motivated and recognised for their achievements. Team members understand that every time they speak to someone is an opportunity to provide feedback on their performance and to offer support and motivation. Everyone needs to receive positive feedback so that they understand that they are important, are a contributor, a team player and believe they are receiving an honest assessment of their performance.
Team members will also understand that when they give someone a difficult task or one outside of their skill set, they can remove any fear of failure by using a technique. High-Performance Team members do not make criticisms of others but instead make unfavourable observations. One of the most important management functions is to support and motivate team members. A negative or positive comment goes around and around in a person’s head all night.
Mutual Accountability
Team members must accept that they are accountable to each other, which guarantees better performance and excellence in teamwork. Being accountable to each other means team members accept that the team’s successes or failures fall on all their shoulders. (one for all, all for one). If one team member fails at something, delivers a poor project outcome, for example, then all team members are equally accountable for that outcome. Successes are similarly shared. Each team members work activities belong to the whole team; everyone owns them. Accordingly, all team members need to take a constructive interest and participate in all the team’s activities as and when required.
Selfless collaboration
Selfless collaboration is perhaps the most excellent quality of a High-Performance Team, with people working together to achieve any task, with each other’s goals and the common goal in mind. In High-Performance Teams, there is a very high level of initiative, sharing of ideas and cohesiveness amongst the team members. The members of a High-Performance Team act as business partners and they enjoy a higher degree of flexibility to achieve work goals. Planning and coordination are done by the team members collectively instead of being undertaken by a manager exclusively. They actively assist others with their work. After the completion of their work, a team member is willing to help other team members with the completion of their work.
Team Rules
The establishment of clear ground rules gives the team its cultural baseline. It is a fundamental step in High-Performance Team development. In the case of a new team, rules also help to remove the inevitable confusion and anxiety that usually exists as new team members get to know each other.
Interpersonal Skills
1. Trust
High-Performance team members have great trust in and mutual respect for their colleagues’ ability. Everyone values and supports each other, and feedback is welcomed. To build trust, they make commitments and honour them. With their staff, they adopt an approach of striking a balance between appearing as warm and competent so that they come across as credible and human. Staff are generally aware of their manager’s background, namely, the credentials that gained them their current management position. With credibility established, it’s then time to demonstrate some vulnerability and show that as a manager, you are indeed a fallible human being.
2. Open Communication
Team members keep each other appraised on important matters, share fears and seek counselling from each other. It is a higher form of communication-based on trust and mutual respect that doesn’t just refer to discussions during a meeting or other work activities. Team members engage in frequent communication for discovering newer or improved ways of reaching their own goals and the common goal, resolving differences by collaborative problem-solving and sharing of experiences. In High-Performance Teams, dialogue with active listening is the norm. Misunderstandings are viewed as a good thing because they prevent groupthink and spurn innovation.
3. Decision-Making Process
Team members agree on a decision-making process to diffuse conflict; a good decision-making process is adopted.
4. Respect
Team members know that respect isn’t an entitlement linked to a job title; they, therefore:
Lead by example.
Are humble.
Show commitment every single day.
Share their expectations of others.
Help people succeed and advance.
Balance delegation:
Teach and encourage creativity.
Recognise success
Compromise.
5. Body Language
Nonverbal behaviour, or body language, is a language, so team members think about it as a form of communication. Team members understand that body language must work for them; they focus on the following:
A firm handshake.
Meeting someone’s eyes.
Hand gestures.
Crossing their arms.
Nodding too much.
6. Persuasion
Team members learn the ability to persuade people to do things they either don’t want to, have a fear of or think they will fail at. They know the key to persuasion is motivation.
7. Charisma
Believed to be an innate personality trait that cannot be learned, something that you have or something that you don’t. However, team members know that exhibiting gusto and alacrity, being curious and always upbeat is perceived as being charismatic. Putting forward a positive attitude also infects peoples thinking and feelings.
8. Emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, and control emotions. It is the ability to be able to identify and express feelings, perceive and evaluate others’ emotions and use emotions to facilitate thinking. Daniel Goleman, the author of ‘Emotional Intelligence,’ researched models from 181 different job roles from 121 companies and discovered that 67 per cent of the competencies deemed essential for effective performance was “emotional” competencies. Emotional intelligence skills are developed through learning from real experiences.