How to Build High Performing Teams

" Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress and working together is success "

Building High Performing Teams Teams tend to face a lot of tensions and distractions in their daily working life and so in order to keep them on track and create better focus, direction and empowerment, starting with three core areas will help to lay the foundations for your team to take your growth to the next level. Studies have shown that teams with defined goals, roles and norms are better at performing and are quickly adept at being able to alleviate many issues that can to arise.

1. Setting Goals

Goals are important for teams understanding how their goals make a difference to the companies success. As a leader, you to be able to guide the discussion and empower the team to collaborate and help shape and build their goals and mission as a collective. The more you your employees in setting goals, the more committed to those goals they will be. For goals to be effective they should be set using the S.M.A.R.T framework; being Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Once your goals have been defined it's important to write them down somewhere where the team can all see. Lastly, don't forget to regularly check-in to see how your team are progressing and review your goals as the team evolves and grows.

2. Defining Roles

Clear roles help employees succeed in the company by helping them to understand what their responsibilities are and how their role adds value to the organisation. A lack of defined roles can foster additional conflict within teams in regard to who should do what and cause confusion around expectations for those who are executing the work. A good way to define roles is to facilitate a roles and responsibilities workshop. This workshop helps to build accountability and guides the team on responsibilities and sets expectations from the start. It is also a good forum for the team to discuss their individual needs and highlight any areas for support.

3. Laying Norms

Team norms set guidelines for the team to help shape and guide the way colleagues interact with each other in the team and with those externally from the team too. Laying norms also empowers the team to call out any unacceptable behaviours or anything that may be negatively hindering their success. Creating team norms can also help to can also alleviate some of the common problems teams face: - Ensuring everyone is respected and all voices are heard. - Resolving conflict and team disputes. - How the team make decisions. - Ensuring meetings are effective of everyones time. It's always best to start with a couple of norms at the start to see how the team are progressing. Once they're off to a good start, you can then start to review how those norms and adjust if the team would like to add more.

Regular follow ups and check-ins Once the team has created their guidelines of how they would like to work, it can be extremely beneficial to regularly check-in to assess whether we are still committed to those goals, roles and norms. Check-ins helps the team to build momentum, feel supported and keeps everyone on track. As a team you can also decide on how long you would like the check-ins to be and how regularly you would like them to happen. Once this has been established you can gradually start to tailor your processes and unlock those doors to an invincible team!