Conversations to Maximize Your Team's Performance
Conversations to Maximize Your Team's Performance
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If you’re a leader in your organization, you’ve probably spent some time thinking about how to improve your team's performance. Perhaps you’ve invested hours analyzing annual reviews or looking for new software. After all, your talent management team always brings on the best and brightest employees. Why isn’t that enough to help your teams perform?
The Wisdom of Your Team
High performing teams are almost always made up of highly engaged individuals, as well as star performers. While most managers look for strategies to help their teams gain efficiency, performance-focused managers cultivate the wisdom of their team to create conditions to maintain and sustain performance.
As team director for a remote team, I wanted to leverage the insights of my star performer as described in “Exemplary Performance: Driving Business Results by Benchmarking Your Star Performers.” In Chapter 1, Paul Elliot and Al Folsom identified the following six distinct work systems to enable exemplary performance:
- Expectations and Feedback
- Rewards, Recognitions, and Consequences
- Motivations and Preferences
- Skills and Knowledge
- Capacity and Job Fit
- Environment, Systems, and Resources
I decided to use this framework as inspiration for having a performance focused conversation with my staff. I was curious how my team would respond when asked about the expectations, rewards, motivations they needed to perform. I already had weekly All-Team meetings scheduled, and I used the next opportunity as my chance to engage the team.
I set the stage by prompting my team to imagine their best performance on a client project. Using a Google Jamboard to capture responses, I invited everyone to record what came to mind when I asked the following questions:
What kind of expectations help you perform?
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What preferences/motivations allow you to execute your best performance?
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What feedback would you need and/or want to support your best performance?
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What does recognition or reward for great performance look like?
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How would you prefer to acquire the skills and/or knowledge?
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What capacity would you require to be a great performer in this project?
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What is the environment like for your best performance on this project?
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By the end of our 45-minute conversation, I was clear on what my team needed to perform their best. I had captured specific data that I could use to create a system of performance for my team. Referencing “Exemplary Performance”, I was able to categorize the questions and feedback as either internal or external to the individual.
Internal to the Individual
- Preferences and Motivations (Question 2)
- Skills and Knowledge (Question 5)
- Capacity (Question 6)
External to the Individual
- Rewards and Recognitions (Question 4)
- Expectations (Question 1)
- Feedback (Question 3)
- Environments and Resources (Question 7)
My next step was to identify how I can develop or refine processes to support my team's performance. For example:
Internal to the Individual
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External to the Individual
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Trusting the wisdom of my team by asking these seven easy questions gave me critical insight towards what my team needs to perform. Now that I know what will help support the performance of my team, I’m able to work strategically with Operations, HR, and IT to drive greater results.
Facilitating this conversation provided meaningful insights that will strengthen my team and promote a better atmosphere at work. Consider a similar activity during your next team meeting!
Author: Holly Benner
Holly Benner is a performance consultant and coach. She is passionate about driving organizational performance through analysis, research, learning, and development. Trained as an industrial-organizational psychologist, Holly utilizes the science of human behavior at work to design informed, impactful solutions. For more than a decade, Holly has developed unique performance solutions for corporations, government agencies, and higher education. She also leverages her unique experiences as a former professional athlete to accelerate team effectiveness and transform outcomes through behavior change. Holly believes that the training industry is ready for an evolution, one that moves away from the status quo of what training has become to actionable solutions designed to improve performance.