Three Ways to Build a High Performance Team

 

 

Sometimes a business or organization gets bogged down. It seems like you are trying to push a string uphill! Everything is a battle. Everything takes more effort than it should. As the leader, you think to yourself, “This shouldn’t be this way!” What we need is a way to build a high-performing team, and I’ve found some ways to make it happen!

Determine your values

The foundation to dealing with a low-performing team may come as a surprise to you. It’s not about new rules and policies. It’s not about calling a company-wide “rah-rah” meeting to get people pumped up.

It’s about determining your core values! When you determine and communicate your core values to your people, you create a guide, or model for them to aspire to.

This gives them a common way to view, and serve your customers, suppliers, and even their co-workers. The values of an organization are the core and catalyst of all that you do. You can read about how I determined my values <here> and <here>.

Once your values are identified and effectively communicated to your team, you’re ready to start building momentum and building that high-performing team!

The evidence from best-selling author Jim Collins’ research revealed that the organizations with the greatest financial results were the organizations whose employees shared the same core values. And they were like fanatics about their values.

“People are not your most important asset. The right people are.” – Jim Collins

Every leader can increase the performance of their team by incorporating their values into three important areas.

Interview for values

Start asking your job candidates more high-quality discovery questions in your interview process. This will ensure that the prospective employee’s values are aligned with yours.

There are two general types of questions:

• What questions, about facts, such as “What was your first job after you graduated from college?”

• How and Why questions can provide insights into the other person’s goals, plans, priorities, principles, values, behaviors, and ethics. These are questions like, “Why did you leave your last job?”

The what questions and the answers to them are important. But one of the most useful and important aspects of the what questions is the fact that they open the door for the how and why questions.

And it’s the answers to these questions that provide you the opportunity to hear how the other person thinks. The importance of assessing a potential employee’s goals, values, priorities, and behaviors can’t be over-emphasized!

Insight: Learn to wait to hire the right person even when you need someone quickly. In our company, we had a saying, “When in doubt, leave them out.”

Orient for values

With your onboarding practice, I want to encourage you to go to great lengths at the very beginning to assure that the new employee understands “Who you are” and how you want them to behave.

Observation: When you hire the right people with the same values, you do not need a bureaucracy to manage them. But you manage the systems that the right people use to perform their work.

Evaluate for values

Even though you should evaluate employees’ performance daily, your annual formal evaluations should include how well your employees are “living out” your core values.

For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. 1 Timothy 4:8. ESV

When your people understand that part of their performance will be evaluated against how they align with the company’s values, they become more intentional about exhibiting those values.

Insight: What gets recognized and rewarded, gets repeated.

You CAN build the high-performance team you’ve been longing for – by interviewing, onboarding, and evaluating based on your values!

How have you successfully hired a high-performance team? Please leave your comment <here>.