Five tips to help drive consistently high performance with your team

Managers often feel frustrated when team members show inconsistency in their performance.  This lack of consistency jeopardises stable business success.

Here are our 5 Top Tips to driving consistently high performance:

Crystal Clear Expectations – clearly articulate your business or department’s Purpose and Vision.  Each person needs to understand:

• why their role exists
• how it links with others’ job content
• what difference it makes if they achieve everything on their job description
• their personal short- and long-term goals and how these impact team goals

Team members also need to understand behavioural expectations, tied back to the company’s values and culture.

Management trip hazard – don’t spend all of your time pushing out your energy and information, endlessly reiterating the above.  Start to ‘pull’ energy and ideas from your team by asking open and probing questions.  This will help you check understanding and whether the messages have hit home.

Be Consistent Yourself – in stepping back to monitor progress and performance.

Consistently catch each of the team as they ‘do things right’, rather than only notice when things have gone off track.  Recognise individuals by regularly giving positive, specific, behavioural feedback which will encourage them to deliver more of the same.

Be consistent in giving constructive feedback too, helping people understand how they can improve.  People rarely come to work to do a bad job.

Management trip hazard – lead by example.  Be consistent in your own performance and stick to promises you make (e.g. don’t let monthly 1 to 1s slip).

Competently Coach – build capability and confidence in your team by becoming a competent coach. Through coaching:

• help each team member recognise the impact of their performance and behaviour
• empower as you delegate, so individuals take ownership and feel valued

Management Trip Hazard – check you know what coaching means in this context – it is different from sports coaching.

Continuously Develop – take time with each individual to identify what training and development support they need.  This could be mentoring, attending supplier training, online learning, etc. Tailor the type of development support to that person, with their level of performance and role.

if you want consistency and continuous improvement, it’s nonsensical to only speak about this once a year in an annual appraisal.  Use 1 to 1s as an opportunity to focus on personal development as well as tasks.

Management Trip Hazard – businesses are constantly evolving and therefore their people need to too.  If someone ‘stands still’ they potentially fall behind.

Healthy Culture – cultivate and sustain a collaborative, high performance culture that people are proud to be a part of.

Create an open and honest environment where teammates are able to give feedback to one another and also speak up if they are struggling.

Management Trip Hazard – watch out for a healthy life/ work balance in your team.  If people are working excessively long hours and regularly eating lunch at their desk, how likely are they to be able to sustain or grow their performance?

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For more leadership tips, read through our past Leadership Matters articles on Hampshire Biz News. And as always, if you would like to bounce any ideas or undertake coaching, mentoring, or training with our team of leadership and employee engagement experts, please get in touch.

• alisoncraigcoaching.co.uk