Do these terms sound familiar?
■ Vision
■ Strategy
■ Quality
■ Mission
■ Commitment
Come on, you can admit it. Aren’t there times when corporate-speak makes you nauseous? Don’t get me wrong; I live in the corporate world. It’s from there where my bread is buttered and bills are paid. Yet, those running the big businesses often forget what the keys for optimizing success are, thus garnering less than stellar results.
The construction of a high-performance team needs to be centered on the how. Having worked intensely with executive teams in the last five years, we take an unconventional approach to helping them maximize performance, as reflected by the following:
Key No. 1: Vulnerability
Each individual starts out standing front and center before their peers and speaks to how they contribute to the success of both the team and organization. They must speak on the areas they believe they’re most measured against and where they believe they’re strong and where they need the most improvement.
Vulnerability can be terrifying. But it also shows tremendous strength when an individual can get up and bare all in front of his or her peers. The comical irony about this activity is those who think this is soft or too touchy-feely aren’t strong enough to be vulnerable; are you and your team members?
Key No. 2: Feedback
Author Ken Blanchard said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” Unfortunately, too many people skip breakfast or don’t want to be told they have to eat it to be healthier. Feedback is the same. How can we remove blind spots that risk so many crucial business issues if we don’t get input?
Many performance reviews will discuss certain levels of improvement needs, but they often lack the specificity of observable indicators. In other words, how will we know you are improving? What actions will reflect your growth?
Perhaps the best way to create team trust and inspire a desire to improve is to provide feedback that is candid and constructive in a shared forum. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s for those committed to optimizing their individual and team growth.
Key No. 3: Action-based standards
We’ve all driven home and taken a different route because of traffic or construction. Sometimes, retracing the route we selected slips from our memory. Yet, we know we stop at the red light, advance on the green and adhere to the driver on the right at a four-way stop sign. Why? They are the rules of the road that become memory-formed habits.
Benign mission statements are just that because they lack verbs that execute. Action-based standards don’t describe what we will be, but how we will conduct ourselves.
If they are agreed upon and authored by the group, not by one guy at the top, they become the fabric by which everyone works. It becomes much more likely that members of the group will hold each other accountable to these standards. They become the rules of the road, which become burned in our hard drives.
If you want to establish a truly high-performing team, you need to engage people in the way that team will effectively function. When they are part of that effort, it builds long-term traction and optimizes effectiveness. ●
Joe Takash is the president of Victory Consulting, a Chicago-based sales and leadership development firm. Takash is also a keynote speaker for executive retreats, sales conferences and management meetings. Reach him at (818) 918-3999 or www.victoryconsulting.com
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