Team Culture: Good is the enemy of Great

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book, Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Great teams know something that good teams don't. And good is the enemy of great. We all want to have great teams. We all want to look around us and know that we've got a high performing team surrounding us. You know, it doesn't matter what industry we're in, we want to know that we're contributing to a high performance culture. High performance outputs, high performance inputs. That's truly something we desire. Nobody wants to work and lead and run mediocrity. Let's face it, we all want to be at that meteoric level. How do we do that? Well, today I'm going to share with you what it is exactly that high performance leaders of small teams, large teams, corporate teams, what it is that they do. They do one specific thing incredibly well. And if you can really embrace this, and you may already be embracing this, but if you can embrace this and implement it across your entire team. And it starts with mindset, but it's very much a tactical thing that we're going to talk about today. If you can implement this, you're going to see a difference. If you can implement this as a process, it's just going to be a phenomenal game changer. So before we do that, one quick ask if, if you enjoy the podcast. You know, we have three episodes a week. We love what we do here. We've got an entire team dedicated to your listening experience. We bring in the most incredible speakers week on week. So if you'd like us to continue bringing in the world's Best thought leaders, scientists, authors, leaders, Formula one team leaders. If you would like us to continue doing that, please do me a favor, follow the podcast on whatever you're on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Please leave a rating and review. That's a huge one. And share it with a friend. If you could do that today, that'd be massive. Thank you so, so much. So what is it that these leaders that are leading high performance teams are doing that the leaders of the good teams are not doing? Well, it comes down to this. It comes down to knowing what to measure. At the end of the day, we can measure hundreds of things and all this data and analytics, but if we don't know what actually matters, then we're just busy being busy. Truly, my big call to action for you right now is please measure what matters. What do I mean by that? High performing leaders measure what actually matters. How do we define what matters? Well, what matters are the different levers, the different behaviors that actually.

Impact output. They impact how you run as a company, that impact your revenue, they impact your retention. Right. That's what matters. The rest is noise. So how do we define what truly matters? Well, over the years, working with individual high performers, working with teams that are high performing teams, and working with teams that are not, you know, I've learned equally as much from teams that are struggling. In fact, I'll probably learn more around why they're struggling. And there's these common themes that come up that they're not measuring what matters. And I'm going to share six key things you need to measure. If you're not measuring these, you need to measure them. Okay. And this comes from all those years working with high performers. Also my own experience as a performer on the world stage and trying to sustain that over decades. So what are those things that we need to measure? Look, I want you, if you're out running, keep running. If you're walking, keep walking. But if you know, if you're sitting down, please write these out. And if you're not, come back to this. I'll make sure and keep it relatively short. The first thing you need to measure is this. How clear is the vision? That's it. That's the question. How clear is the vision? That could be company vision. How clear is the individual with their vision within their own responsibilities? How clear with my, with my vision as the leader of the team or the organization? That's the first thing. You've got to measure that on an ongoing basis. How clear are we or how clear am I? Where we're headed as a company. Are we very clear on that? Okay, so that's number one. Secondly, the whole idea of belief, right? What level of belief do we have in actually achieving the outcome? That's your second question. What level of belief do we have and actually achieving the outcome? I'm not too sure. I'm. But I'm doubting myself. It's a bad market. All that kind of rhetoric is going to impact your ability to have a high performing team. High performing teams have high self belief, very high levels of self belief. So if you're not measuring team beliefs, oof, you got to start next. Motivation, desire, right? You've got to be measuring that. On a scale of 1 to 10, what is the team's motivation right now? What is the level of engagement right now? And you could do that individually across the people that report to you directly. Do it for yourself. Self reflection. How motivated do I feel right now? 1 to 10. 1 being not at all, 10 being no room for improvement. If you're not motivated and your team is not motivated and the pulse across your organization is low motivation, then there's going to be low action taking. With low action taking there's going to be a lot more procrastination. With that there's going to be poor results, lack of growth, lack of retention of your staff.

So to me it's absolutely crucial. Another thing you got to be measuring is focus.

High focused. Am I on the tasks that truly matter? Easy to measure that. Just look at your behavior throughout the day. Grab your phone, look at your screen time, look at your computer. It tracks your screen time as well. Where are you spending time and is it on the things that matter? Or is it scrolling to buy that thing that you want for your boat? Is it scrolling to look at some houses that are coming on the market as potential investments? Where are you spending your time? How focused am I on those tasks that truly matter? And again, this is a question that goes company wide, team wide, organization wide. You should be absolutely measuring your focus and your commitment to doing what matters next. We're nearly there.

Habits, high performance habits. How committed am I to the habits that help me be the best performer I can be? And professionally speaking, that's making the calls or following up with clients or doing your work at a really high committed level over the long term. That's turning up to meetings with curiosity, you know, looking at problems and seeing them as possibilities. What are those high performance habits? Then you could go into the personal side of it. Nutrition, rest, exercise, meditation, connection with others. If we're not measuring our habits on and off the field. And the field could be, hey, if you're an athlete listening right now, then we know what field you're talking about. But for the rest of us, that field is the field that we work in. But we've got to be measuring things on and off the field that really impact us when we're standing on the field. So crucial now, last but not least, the last thing to measure. To me, if you're not measuring this, then forget about the rest of the things we just measured. Before I share that with you. Just a heads up that our annual event is just around the corner. It's limited tickets. It's the High Performance Leadership Program. Got a few special guests, including Sir John Key, our former Prime Minister of New Zealand who's returning again this this year. And it's limited to just 80 people. So there's a few tickets left. If you'd like to come and join us, Please go to jjlochlin.com HPL2023 and that's all in uppercase, HPL 2023. Love to see you there. We have a lot of fun. We go deep, we connect with great speakers. You'll have an absolutely amazing time. So if you want to come join us, you know where to go. But let's get back to that last crucial thing that you need to measure. That is growth.

What degree have I grown this week? If you're measuring it weekly or monthly or quarterly, and then explain what level of growth you've had. You've either grown or you've decayed. You've done one or the other. You can't do both. So if you're not measuring your growth, then you may as well. As I say, forget about the rest of those things. Growth applies to all of those. Growing your mindset, growing your skill set, growing your heart set. These are key things that high performing leaders understand lead to high performing teams. And high performing teams get what high performing outcomes right. That's why the best are the best. When we look at the world's best basketball players, the world's best tennis players, the world's best leaders of corporate companies, the world's best innovators. Yep. They've got high performance mindset, skill set and heart set. So my challenge to you, the person who's taken 10 minutes out of their day to invest in their own growth, my challenge to you is what are you measuring? To find that and with what I've shared with you today, please think, what if you just picked one of those. Hopefully you'll do them all. But if you could pick one of those, which thing could you start measuring today that would make the most difference in your forward trajectory? But for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose. Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.