5 Essential Steps for Leaders to Build High-Performing Teams

Even at the best of times, leaders want their teams to produce extraordinary results. However, with countries like Australia experiencing the biggest productivity slump in 60 years, optimising performance has never been more critical.

The challenge, however, is that high-performing teams are no accident – and they are not built overnight. While each team is as unique as the people within it, there is a shared understanding of what makes a team perform. Careful strategies are also in place to support and encourage outstanding achievement.

Research from international leadership training firm Dale Carnegie shows that 96 per cent of teams acknowledge they at least meet their performance goals. Less than one third of them, however, are considered high performers who have exceeded those goals over the past year.

What distinguishes high-performing teams from other groups, and how can finance leaders take their teams to the next level? Here are five key steps.

1. Lay the foundations for high performance

Workplace collaboration has evolved along with technological advancements, organisational changes and shifting workplace dynamics.

Teams can work together while being geographically apart. Part-time workers can bring the same vital ingredients for team success as their full-time counterparts. However, they all require leaders to lay the foundations for peak performance.

Communication specialist Leah Mether works with leaders to help develop their soft skills. She says high-performing teams operate within a culture that focuses on people.

“If people feel supported and valued and cared for, then they are going to want to do great work,” she says. “From a leadership perspective, it requires a mix of warmth and strength, empathy and accountability.

“You will also know that you have a high-performing team if people want to work for you as a leader, or they want a secondment into your team because they’ve heard you are great to work for, and that you have a great culture and you get great results.”

2. Create a sense of collaboration and commitment

The notion of team building stems from the work of Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo, who conducted experiments in the 1920s focusing on the importance of social and psychological factors in the workplace.

Before Mayo’s work, the ruling theory in workplace productivity was that employees were driven by pay. Mayo’s studies showed that employees are motivated more by factors such as attention and camaraderie than by monetary rewards or environmental factors.

Graham Winter, performance psychologist and author of Think One Team, has served as chief psychologist for three Australian Olympic teams. A starting point for finance leaders to build high-performing teams, Winter says, is to create clarity and commitment.

He says that while high-performing teams are generally “a function of the context in which they are operating”, they have a high level of alignment and commitment to a goal, a standard, a vision or a purpose.

“They also have a strong level of sharing and collaboration, and they value ongoing learning,” says Winter, who is also co-author of Toolkit for Turbulence.

“Even when an organisation is operating in a time of uncertainty, it is important to give teams a sense of meaning or something to get onboard with, whether that is an opportunity for profit or for making change in the community, for example.”

To continue reading this article in full click here: 5 steps for leaders to build high-performing teams

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