Demonstrating best-practices leadership means finding new ways to reinvigorate your team and boost their performance.
To strengthen your team’s performance, you probably embrace the notion of continuous improvement. By always looking for ways to teach your team new skills and holding it accountable for steadily better results, you send a message that you won’t accept complacency or a halfhearted effort.
Here are four techniques for boosting your team management skills and maximizing your team’s performance. Tip: Find more team management advice and team-building activities in Best-Practices Leadership: Team management tips, a new special report from Business Management Daily.
1. ‘Hot’ tactics for heating up your team
“Hot teams” improvise, do more work with less supervision and make the extra effort to follow through.
Management consultant Laurence Haughton offers this advice for turning ordinary groups into hot teams:
• Don’t become rule-bound. Rules, intended to streamline and safeguard work, can hamstring your operation when common sense calls for exceptions. Before setting rules, ask if they’re really needed.
• Don’t criticize in public. Embarrassing employees in front of the team will only come back to bite you. Mean bosses think that they’re holding people accountable, but what they’re really doing is inciting payback.
• Show you care. If you like your people and show it, they’ll enjoy helping you when crunch time comes.
• Listen. Make it one on one, as well as in groups. Listening helps you correct misinformation, relax barriers, increase trust and let people feel good about what they do for a living.
• Make it their mission. Even when a project is not terribly exciting, you can make the work more engaging. Creating roles for each person, for example, gives people a sense of being special.
• Let them decide. Allowing people to devise their own processes boosts morale. Just make sure those processes keep improving.
? Adapted from “Creating Hot Teams,” Laurence Haughton, Leader to Leader
2. How to refuel a sputtering team
You’re thinking your team needs to push itself harder, but how do you determine that? Look for hard evidence. Ask: What has it accomplished so far?
Here’s a good exercise to measure your team’s progress to date:
At your next meeting, ask each team member to list “what you see as the team’s top five achievements so far.” Give them no more than five minutes to write down their responses, and then collect them. Explain that they don’t need to include their names—you’re not grading their answers as much as using them as a learning tool.
Share the results with the group. Rank the “consensus achievements,” the ones that appear in the most responses. Write these items on a flip chart. Then ask the group whether they’re satisfied with their work thus far. Encourage them to discuss the significance of their achievements. Prod them to explore whether they’re capable of making a more substantive, lasting contribution to the bottom line.
3. Why close-knit teams don’t always win
You’ve spent lots of time building team closeness and cohesiveness. You might have spent a lot of money on it, too. Maybe that was a bad idea. New findings suggest that close-knit teams are often less competitive than teams in which camaraderie is weak.
Sociologists at the University of California and elsewhere, who have been studying effective teams, see some compelling reasons why friendly teams finish last:
• Individual accountability is stronger in a “loner” team. When a player’s performance sags, he or she is more likely to say, “It’s my problem and I’ll fix it.” That happens more quickly than on teams in which everybody has to talk about problems before fixing them.
• Arguments are less likely to divide a “loner” team into rival camps. The battle plays out purely between the combatants. Sometimes, other teammates don’t even care who wins.
• Leadership resides more in each player and less in the coach. That may be one reason individual leaders are more likely to emerge in a “loner” team.
—Adapted from “Close Doesn’t Always Count in Winning Games,” Benedict Carey, New York Times
4. Dealing with team ‘negatives’
Negative team members are like poison. Left unchecked, they corrode morale through the ranks. They can take many forms, including:
• Cynics, whose superior attitude infects other cynics in the ranks.
• Political players, who attract other power-seekers to their sides.
• Laziness addicts, who attract others who want an easy way to the top.
If you’re dealing with negatives like those, keep the situation under control by taking these steps:
• Take strong action against them, no matter how popular they are. Giving preferential treatment to someone who’s not delivering results sends a signal that you’re afraid of him or her—hardly the message you want to send through the ranks.
• Avoid politicking against negatives. It’s tempting to try to build consensus against them or express your frustrations to other members of your team. Be careful, since doing so can degenerate into a power skirmish that will erode your integrity as a true team leader.
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