The questions we get asked more than anything else by leaders within organisations are:
“How am I going to achieve the results I’m looking for? How am I going to get the financial results? How am I going to hit my targets?”
These age-old questions have been the core concern of leaders and managers for decades, in fact probably hundreds of years. However, how we approach these questions now is very different.
Years ago, the focus used to be solely on behaviour. Certain behaviours would be associated with strong performance, so it would be a leader’s responsibility to instill these behaviours within their teams by telling them to do very specific things.
How to Create High-Performance Teams
What we now know is that simply enforcing certain behaviours onto a team is not the most effective means of driving performance.
Instead, if you want to build a high-performance team you need to focus first and foremost on the culture that underpins everything else within your organisation.
If you’re questioning whether or not you have built an aligned culture within your organisation, think about these five elements:
1.Purpose & Cause
Are your people clear about the purpose and cause? Do they understand why you exist as an organisation?
2. Vision & Commitment
What’s the vision or the commitment of the organisation? What’s the number one thing you need to do in order to achieve that purpose?
3. Values
Are your team aware of not only the values in a broad sense, but do they understand how these translate into day-to-day performance, behaviours and interactions with the team and customers?
4. Strategic Priorities
Are your team clear on the strategic priorities of the business and how they personally contribute to achieving those strategic priorities
5. Organisation Foundations
Do your team understand the things that make the company unique and underpin its success?
Ultimately, if you establish a strong culture founded on these 5 elements, and recruit people into your team who align to that culture, you will no longer need to constantly micro-manage your team to do certain things day-to-day.
Instead what you’ll notice is that your team are more engaged and willing to give more of themselves and work harder, purely because they have bought into what you are doing as a company.
To dive deeper into how culture is the key driver of business performance check out the video below, where Phil explores the intrinsic link between these two elements.
