The 5 Tactics of High-Performing Teams

A huge welcome back to the show. Look, I want to talk about teamwork and of course I'm very fortunate to be around great teams and also to be around teams who are struggling and they're going through change and there's uncertainty and they're maybe not as productive or effective or as successful as they'd like to be. It's often why I'll go and work with them is to figure out where I can help support more productive work. Teamwork, more connected teamwork and better, sustainable high performance outcomes. Right. So whether it's in sport, whether it's in business, whatever it might be, teams can work more effectively if they get a few things right. So I want to share a few insights with you. And this comes from Gallup. Now if you've never came across Gallup before, they've got millions and millions of data research points around strengths, not just for individuals, but also teams. So I'm going to share with you tactics of high performing teams. These are the five tactics of teamwork. How do we work better together and why are we going to look at that? Well, we want to learn how to engage our teams more because when teams are more engaged, culture's better and of course productivity and outputs are going to be better as well. The disengagement rates are skyrocketing. I had a guest on recently who's been working in this field for 60 years and he talked about the engage disengagement rates rising and rising each and every year. So that's people that are at work that don't really want to be there. People that are in their organizations that would rather be somewhere else or they're on their phones or they're passing time, they're not truly engaged. There's a massive cost to that, not just for the individual, but also for the teams involved. So I'm going to share five key Cs that you want to remember if you want to be a part of a high performing team and perhaps if you want to lead a high performing team. Okay, so the first C is common purpose. Right? Common purpose. All effective high performing teams have a shared common purpose that everybody in the group or organization knows about. That's a vision that's been painted, that's a strategy that's clear so that everybody's not just busy being busy. There's a really clear purpose around why do we do what we do. So what's that like for you in the place that you work? Maybe you run your own company, maybe you're working for a company. Maybe you run a small team. Maybe you'd like to run a team. Maybe you're coaching a soccer team, Kids, sport, whatever it might be. Do you all know what the shared vision is? What's the common purpose, the meaning behind what you do? To me, that's one of the most crucial things to stop and take stock of. No matter what size of company I sit and work with or I'm on stage chatting to a larger audience, I always ask them, does everybody in this room know exactly why you do what you do? What's the purpose of this company? Now, inevitably, there are a multitude of answers that will be given back. But wouldn't it be great if we could all have one common shared theme? Here's why we do what we do. The greatest teams and organizations on the planet are all radically clear on their common purpose. So my challenge to you is, how clear are you on the purpose of what you do and the commonality of that across the team that you work within? The second C is connection. Now, again, if we look at the Gallup studies, they say roughly 43 or 44% of people work remotely at some point or another. So 43%. It's a large percentage. However, people with remote workers can still have great performance and great connection if they keep that connection tight, if they start to tap into each other's talents, if they are really prioritizing belonging, you know, connection and belonging, to me, they're one and the same. When we feel like we belong, we're connected to something. When we feel like we are not welcome, of course there's a disconnection. Connection is something that needs to be built, created, and sustained. And we do that through making sure we've got the common purpose. We do that through identifying what people's strengths are and allowing them to thrive and flourish with those. Connection is something that has got to be guarded and grown and nurtured and watered and fed. We can't afford to let connection break up. A few years ago, I had a professional athlete come to me, and it was in the kind of quarter final semifinal stage of a major championship. And I'd been working with them from a high performance mindset standpoint all season. And they said, look, James, myself and another of the senior players who'd been there roughly a decade in this championship team, we don't really want to be here. Well, it's finals time. This is the time you do want to be here. It's exciting. Well, no, we just feel like the coach doesn't really value us, doesn't really listen to us. When we do give feedback, it's kind of brushed off. When we're told things will change, they don't. We don't really feel like we're connected or I think the word was I don't feel like we're connecting with our coach and therefore we're not going to give it our all. Now that's disastrous in any, any team. When any team member feels like they're not connected to the coach, the manager, the leader, the CEO, whatever you want to call it, then things are going to go south real quick. So when I got that call, my first thing was, okay, well what's within your control to reconnect, to rebuild? And then of course I got to go to the coach and say, hey, not naming names, but there's an issue here. How do you reconnect with your team members? So connection is one of those important Cs. Never take it for granted. When you take connection for granted, I promise you complacency will be the result. Okay. The third C for those teams that are high performing and really deeply effective is communication. We've got to communicate. I often when I'm working with leadership teams, I take them through the seven laws of leadership. It's a half day program. I love working with people like this, quite intimate, get to know everyone and really understand the workings of their company. But one of the seven laws of leadership is the law of communication. And one of the key takeaways or tools I'm going to share that with you that I ask them to consider is to deploy SAS communication. So one thing I get them to write down, it's going to become part of their leadership language in their company is deploy SAS communication. What does that mean? Well, every time they're communicating it should be simple. That's the S. It should be accurate, the A and it should be succinct. Simple, accurate and succinct. Right. We want to be consistent with that. There's no such thing as too much communication in terms of frequency. Let's keep the frequency up. But certainly if we get complex, the opposite of simple, we add too many layers, too many big words, people lose focus. We've got such a distraction culture. We don't have a lot of attention. So we've got to make sure we keep things simple when we're communicating. Let's say inaccuracy, maybe even little white lies, maybe a little bit of hyperbole, you know, that doesn't help with communication. So we've got to be really radically Accurate. So simple, accurate. And then nobody likes a waffler. When people just blow on and they waffle, that doesn't help. We switch off and we don't connect. We've gotta keep it succinct, keep it really short. That's so, so important. So that's deploying SAS communication and a key point here and Gallup have backed this up with their studies. You've gotta make sure that you individualize your communication. You actually gotta talk to an individual. Don't always just blanket it. I remember running a team that was headed to the world championships and there'd be one, maybe two members on the team that were really letting the team down. Consistently unprepared, consistent mist. And at that stage in my communication journey and leadership journey, I was very limited. And I would tell everyone on the team that we needed to improve this and get this better. And I'd make everyone stay for two or three hours to get the thing right. But going back and looking at that, did that help the culture and engagement of the entire team? Hell no. I would have been frustrating people, annoying people. They would have been, you know, in the background very upset about it. So what should I have done? I should have had the courage and the clarity to go to the individuals, speak with them about the challenges, help devise a plan, ask them to go and work on the plan, give them the support where needed and keep the ship moving. So individualizing communication is critical. You can't just have a big week meeting once a week and you talk to everyone. Yeah, that's important, but you need to talk to individuals. Whoever reports to you, they need to be hearing from you face to face every week. Every single week. Don't miss a week. It's so critically important. And it's important that we start to learn about how the team's intra communication is looking. So, yeah, we're communicating to our teams, but how are they communicating with each other within a team? And how are they communicating within, say, the marketing team? Here we've got the sales team here we've got product development team here. How are they communicating? You've got to be challenging. The communication challenges. Is everyone deploying SAS communication? Is everyone timely with their communication? Is everyone friendly and approachable and consistent with that communication like it's one of the Cs you simply cannot roll over and forget. You've got to really prioritize that C. The fourth C is collaboration. Gallup said that 84% of U.S. employees said that they are matrixed, which puts real press pressure on them to collaborate and cooperate effectively. So collaboration to me is the absolute key to growing sustainably. It's the key to developing a deep sense of culture that people are proud of and want to be a part of. That collaboration allows people to be creative. So you've got to be asking yourself, are we collaborating? Whether you run a small business and you've got one other employee, or you run a team with 10 people on it, or an organization with 20,000, it really doesn't matter. Are you really doubling down and making the most of collaboration? If you're not, you're missing out on a huge opportunity there. People that I see running great companies are very curious and ask a lot of questions of their team members and staff. How do we collaborate better? How do we include your INET talents? How do we include your experience that you brought from a previous industry that's totally unrelated to this? How do we work together? Where's the compromise where we can learn how to collaborate? And collaboration doesn't just start from nothing. You've got to build a few things before that. Trust, respect and independence. If you've built trust, respect and independence within your team, then you can collaborate. Don't try to collaborate without trust because things are going to go pear shaped real quick. Don't try and collaborate if there's no respect because there's going to be a lot of fraying of the wires, there's going to be a lot of friction. Don't try and collaborate until people are confident in themselves. To execute independently, we all need autonomy to operate. When we're more autonomous, we can think better, we can challenge ourselves, we can fail for ourselves, learn from the failures and get back up. Only then trust, respect and independence can we truly get the most out of collaboration. So if someone's new to a team, it might take a little bit of time for them to effectively collaborate. But it's one of those Cs that you simply cannot miss out on or forget. Last but not least, celebration. The last of the five Cs. What do you do to celebrate the micro wins? What do you do to celebrate the big deals, the championship wins, whatever it might be that you read. A success, getting the big client, getting the pay rise, getting someone on your team to achieve something they couldn't do before. Are you good at celebrating your own successes and celebrating the success of other people around you? If you're not, I'm going to challenge you to prioritize it. Because when we celebrate, we are releasing dopamine. When we're releasing dopamine, we're filling that habit loop. You've got your trigger, your behavior, and then, of course, your reward, which is the dopamine hit. When you trigger, have the dopamine hit, it gets you to go back to the initial behavior, the trigger behavior, and dopamine release again. You're starting to develop this look of high performance. So if you don't celebrate, you're missing out on an opportunity to supercharge healthy high performing habits. So Those are the five Cs brought to you for my learnings from Gallup. Really incredible research company who've done so much around strengths, human strengths, team strengths. So I hope this has served you today, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode, but for now, please get out there and lead yourself on purpose.