Improving team performance in 4 easy ways

It was Ryan’s first day in his new office. Having met all the key stakeholders of the company during his interview process, he was pretty excited to join this growing unicorn. After a seamless induction and on-boarding, Ryan met his team.

What would have otherwise been a very happy first day turned out to be quite depressing and sour. Ryan realized that his team was full of non-performers who have been given numerous performance warnings by their previous boss. They were like a united group, all 8 of them; each filled with negative emotions and utmost disinterest towards their work.

Ryan, one of the most flourishing young leader in his previous organizations had learnt quite early in his career that the key to success is not only your individual abilities but also the strength of the team that works with you. And laying restlessly on his bed that night, he knew that this wasn’t the team that can be trusted to be his back bone.

The founders had shared during the hiring process that the previous incumbent was asked to leave because of his performance, which Ryan had taken very positively. He liked working in performance driven organizations, where a spade is called out a spade. What Ryan was also told was that he is getting one of the best teams and it’s only because of the lack of a good leader, the team has not been performing too well till now.

By the time he slept, he was clear of two things-

1. This is a good team, and he needs to believe that despite whatever he observed today and
2. He won’t survive long if he didn’t have a good team. Not because he doubted his own capabilities, but mainly because he didn’t like working with mediocre and below average performers.

By the time he had completed his morning routine of exercise, meditation and time with family the next day, he was pretty clear how he would transform his poor team into a star team.

And he did.

After the next 3 quarters, his team was declared one of the best sales team in the entire organization. Not only had all the 8 team members out-done their previous targets, but a couple of them had also been cleared by the promotion committee to take up next level roles in the organization.

Ryan had only now been able to create the team that he would have wanted from day 1. Every day of the last 9 months had been a patience test for him. This was not his natural style. He was a demanding boss, who thrived on constant business challenges. But this time, he was only working on people challenges.

But he had waited long enough, and now was the time to show what a truly motivated Sales team can achieve. Game on!

After a successful stint of more than 10 years in the organization where not only Ryan rose to top leadership roles, but his first team took up challenging assignments as well, Ryan still can’t forget the anxiety of his first 9 months. He shared with a group of first time managers, the only 4 things that he did to do the impossible-

• Played on the strengths of the team: Ryan did a thorough discussion with each of his team member on what they like doing, what are their core skills, what kind of work do they think they can do best. He also took help from the HR team and administered some scientific personality assessment tests for his team. Each member got their reports and in a group forum, everyone was told about each other’s strengths. Their job roles were then re-arranged so that each of them started playing to their strength.

• Co-created an action plan with them: On his second day at work, Ryan got his team in a room and explained why he chose to pick up this role. He also made it a point to explain them about his background, his achievements and his working style. He laid down the vision for the team there on the table. We either be the no. 1 or we don’t exist, his message was clear. He had rehearsed on his powerful speech a couple of times, because while he knew that since his heart was into it, he would be able to use the right words, but he also knew that as a leader, he can’t choose wrong words. Such meetings became a norm for everything they had to do. Everyone’s buy-in was as important as the milestone. Ryan would ensure that he co-creates the team’s action plan with them. While he knew where he wanted to take them, he was completely flexible with the way the team decided to move there.

• Clarity of goals and speed of action: Each member was doing the task he was best suited to do and they were given this sense of ownership to choose their action plans but what remained was stitching it up together. And that’s what Ryan knew he could do well. Reaching from point A to point B looks easy on a paper but while actually executing on the ground, there are a lot of internal and external challenges that a team faces. Ryan would take a stock of every individual’s goal sheet every week. It wasn’t an assessment, but a progress review. He would do these reviews during beer, dinners, coffee sessions because he wanted to act more like a coach then a boss. His only question to them would be- what is it that YOU think should be done?

• Alignment with senior leadership team: Ryan knew his plan of only focusing on strengthening his team would fail if the leadership team wasn’t aligned with them. So, Ryan gave them a plan, which his team didn’t know about. He asked the senior leaders to split the annual target into chunks of smaller achievable weekly numbers, starting off the bare minimum for the first few weeks and then a 1X, 1.25X kind of increase every month. So whenever a target increase would be given to his team, he would motivate them to push the peddle a little bit more. Ryan also ensured that he didn’t take up any additional strategic project for the first year, because he wanted to focus on building his team first.

It’s not an easy thing to lead teams. In fact as per studies, leadership skills for managing teams is one of the top most desirable, yet lacking skill in managers.

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