Nine principles for taking your team from good to great…and beyond

Average reading time: 2 minutes

1. Focus on team development, constantly. The only way to build a genuine high-performing team is to work, constantly, on being a high-performing team. Great teams are not built as a result of a single two-day offsite at a nice hotel.

2. Do the basics well, with ruthless consistency. Bells, whistles and marginal gains only add value when you have rock solid foundations. Are you building a house of sticks upon the sand or a house of bricks upon the rocks?

3. Create your own standard operating procedures (SOPs), ways of working and a regular rhythm for the team. A reliance on willpower and memory is a guaranteed strategy for failure.

4. Work harder than is normal at developing strong relationships and building trust. Teams with high degrees of psychological safety achieve incredible things, those without it will eventually implode.

5. Set ridiculously high standards and hugely aspirational goals. Never let up, work relentlessly hard to attain them but be totally comfortable with the fact that you may never do so.

6. Be positively restless. Celebrate, review and optimise all that has gone well (few teams have the discipline to do this on a regular basis) but continually strive to be better tomorrow than you were today in all that you do.

7. Focus on the result but obsess over the performance. Learn from the world of elite sport and adopt a laser-like focus on all of the things that you must do (performance) in order to make delivering the result (goal) inevitable.

8. Make your cultural expectations for your team explicitly clear and adopt a militant approach to uphold them. The way in which you, your team and your business deliver the result is as important as delivering the result itself. And always remember that the standard you walk past is the standard that you ultimately accept.

9. Trust your team and ensure that they feel fully empowered to act but never forget that you are ultimately accountable for everything. Be quick to praise in public and push them to the fore when things have gone well. Be quicker to protect them when things have gone wrong and always develop them in private.

What next?

Get an instant snapshot of how your team is performing with The Four Levels of Team Performance matrix here and then drop me a line if you’re ready to go from good to great…and beyond.

#LeadOn