Getting to Excellence in Hybrid, In-Person or Remote Teams
Wherever you find yourself and your organization after three years of ups and downs, I’ve noticed one thing seems to be on a lot of clients’ minds: Increasing team performance & happiness without overwhelm and burnout.
The traumatic experience of the pandemic has invited or in some cases, forced, organizations to reckon with the fact they have fostered a culture of productivity and efficiency to the detriment of wellness and joy. And now, when getting back to ‘normal’ is bandied about at large, it’s a great time to question what part of ‘normal’ do we actually want.
The fact is that excellence, effectiveness, and performance don’t need to exist on the opposite spectrum of wellness, passion and joy. They can co-exist. In fact, they can be a gorgeous virtuous loop to fuel individual, team and organizational outcomes.
Here, I’ll offer you an introduction into what it takes to lead high performing teams with 9 tips.
1. Ask more questions, provide less solutions. You want to train team members to find their own solutions which in turn fuels their confidence and competency. You want to be an inspired leader, not a ‘fixer’. By doing so, you also model being curious, which is in fact, how you want your direct reports to be with whom they manage.
2. Give intentional positive feedforward on behaviors and competencies you want to see grow – it helps the team members focus their energy as well as see how they contribute to the larger outcomes. Similarly, provide specific and intentional constructive feedback on behaviors you do not want to see.
3. Challenge team members to develop with new learnings and increased responsibility to engage their need for competence and confidence. Being a bit uncomfortable increases performance. (Being too uncomfortable can often decrease performance or lead to paralysis or indecisiveness.)
4. Hire to ensure you have maximum diversity of experience, age, gender, ethnicity, culture, etc. Only hiring folks similar to you or the existing culture can make teams operate in their own ecstatic bubble and decrease generative thinking and hinder innovation. You want team members to have an open mind to alternative perspectives.
5. Invite and develop team members’ ability to self-reflect and increase self-awareness. Doing so supports the ability to have both relational and contextual intelligence which are key for effective communication and leadership.
6. Create and encourage autonomy. Micro-management will not lead to long-term ease for you, nor will it build leadership skills in your team. Focus on the outcomes of a project; allow team members to design their own path and set timelines that can serve as check-ins if necessary.
7. Encourage social connection within and outside the workplace. Team members who get along and have mutual interests will perform better together. Team members who work on passion projects outside of work will bring new inspiration, networks and ideas into your organization. Humans are social beings at work and play. People are more than the role/s they do at work.
8. Retire your “I’m very busy” badge. Invite yourself into scheduling time where you are present for yourself, your family, your friends, and your community. You will then inspire your team members to be fully present to other domains of their life. A culture of “there’s not enough time” or “I’m too busy” sends frenetic ripples throughout the organization.
9. Clarify and connect a team member’s performance to the larger team’s and organization’s purpose. People want to be a part of something greater than themselves. When people understand what they are doing and to what purpose, they are more engaged and motivated to excel.
You may believe you already do all of the above. I’ll challenge you to take a closer look. If you are a workaholic and truly love to work 12-18 hours a day, you may be flourishing. But, if you are feeling overwhelmed, having erratic emotions, can’t wait for your next holiday, send emails and texts to your team at odd hours, feel depleted, are constantly putting out fires, or don’t have ‘enough’ time to do everything you need to do, I’d suggest you are leading a team that is not maximizing its potential. And most importantly, you aren’t maximizing your own potential.
It’s quite simple really and yet so complex. As a leader, penultimately, you are in the business of people.
Great attention is being given to what used to be known as ‘soft-skills’ as being the essential skills for leading people in the current context. Some of us have believed and practiced for sometime that human-centric organizations thrive - your corporation, at it’s root is a complex network of humans in relation to one another. Pay attention to that, and you and your teams will thrive. Passion, purpose, joy, and excellence can co-exist.
