Maintaining a High-Performing Team
Cultivating a high-performance team through above-the-line leadership is the goal of a dedicated leader.
Once you have achieved this, how do you maintain the performance, especially as your team grows?
Proactively identifying the things that can undermine our high-performing teams allows us to be aware and keep them at bay.
Research highlights that there are many negative factors that create risks to the health of an organisation or team. While there are plenty of below-the-line factors, you’ll want to keep a special eye out for the following:
Lack of feedback: Feedback is extremely important for high-performing teams. Consistent, positive and constructive feedback helps you and your colleagues build on strengths, learn from mistakes and become more effective together.
Unreliability: Members of high-performing teams know that they can rely on each other. For instance, if a task is assigned to one team member, the entire team knows that it will be successfully completed. Unreliability leads to second-guessing and wasted time, meaning that the entire team is less productive.
Impatience: High-performing teams recognise that great work takes time. While we all have deadlines to meet, proper time is given for the team to meet those deadlines. Impatience adds unnecessary stress to the high-performing team. Mistakes become more likely and resentment can build.
Pettiness: Harmful to every relationship, pettiness is very below-the-line and disheartening in stressful moments. Petty attitudes or behaviours make it much harder for the team to perform at its highest level.
If you are a leader, pay attention if these behaviours are proliferating among your team. Take steps to model and encourage the opposite behaviours, positive feedback, reliability, patience and valuing contribution. Also aim to extinguish the below-the-line-behaviours through direct feedback.
Even if you aren’t a leader, you can do your part to avoid these behaviours. Instead, try to invert them. If you are stressed, for instance, make sure that you are extra patient with your colleagues, talk to them and work together through the challenges. It may seem small at the moment, but collectively, these decisions add up and can help your team become more effective.
Further insight
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