Building High Performance Teams

Every employee is either helping your organization succeed or fail.  Every employee can either produce, making the company grow or thrive or simply survive and eventually die.  Without advancing forward you are merely in a waiting game until someone bigger and better begins to steal your thunder.  Someone else will make the same product or service better and cheaper or they will provide something you don’t.  Maybe something, that had you been paying close attention and your staff been in tune would have seen coming and maybe implemented before your competitor did.  You cannot mandate High Performance.  You must inspire and foster it daily.  We have often heard the phrase “We must Do More With Less”.  This is very true, and will always be the case no matter what the economic climate.  But the doing more is not simply quantity it is in fact also quality.  You must always be making better widgets.  If you don’t someone else will and where will your company be then. 

There are Five Steps you can take to begin making an enormous difference in the success of your organization, and they are; Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill, Recognize Emotional Intelligence, Develop A Philosophy. Foster Desired Culture.

1.  Hire for Attitude – The most important factor in the success of any organization is the attitude of its employees. If anyone of them has a negative or lets even call it a nasty attitude, then your organization will suffer and certainly never be as productive as it could be. The naysayers may even turn into an enormous liability to productivity as well as legally; law suites, frivolous complaints and continuous distractions that you don’t need while you are trying to run your organization. So lets get right to it and talk about what you can do to prevent this problem. You must learn to hire slow and fire fast. Now you are probably asking yourself what does that mean. Well, you must learn to take more time in the hiring process.  There are many ideas to help with this philosophy but let me give you some examples.

1. Stakeholder Surveys – You must determine a base line for your employees. You should conduct a series of surveys designed to find out what your employees know, what they don’t know and what they think they know. First, do they understand the true mission of your organization? If you think so then think again, because making money is not the mission. The mission is providing a product or service that customers will buy. Do they know the vision or the mantra of the owner(s)? These questions will take careful crafting before you distribute a survey of any kind. I do recommend that this first survey be done anonymously online, through a service like (Survey Monkey, Constant Contact, etc.) You must learn your employees, no matter how many you have. (1-1000).

Often times while trying to make a point the thought escapes me. As a result I’ll ask someone to wait a moment, so I can reclaim my train of thought. Moments later I’m able to recall the thought and continue.

Thoughts, like trains, travel on tracks but sometimes they jump them. Sometimes when we speak to people they may not be traveling our track. Our message can be easily lost or misunderstood. True communication isn’t always easy because you must evaluate the message you’ve sent. Communication is statistically the number one problem in every organization, but did you know it is the number one solvable problem as well?