3 tips for focusing on your team’s strategy, spirit & star performances

Imagine you are leading a team. There are three steps you can take to guide them to success. First, you can clarify your strategy. Second, you can employ people who embody the right spirit. Third, you can enable people to work well together and deliver star performances. Let’s explore these three steps to success.

1) You can focus on strategy.

You can focus on ‘What’ you intend to do, ‘Why’ and the general principles of the ‘How’. This rule holds true whether you aim to climb a mountain, sail around the world, build a computer, run a web site or whatever. ‘But some writers advise starting by getting the right people, then defining your goal,” somebody may say. That is one approach. But in order to get the right people, it’s good to have an idea of your goal. If you want to find a cure for AIDs, for example, it is useful to recruit superb researchers, doctors and other staff. Certainly you can involve individuals in some aspects of the strategy, but it’s vital to recruit people who can help you to reach the destination.

“Strategy is crucial,” explained one leader. “Choosing the ‘right goal’ may sound simple, but it can be challenging. Many teams work extremely hard, but are ‘climbing the wrong mountain’. Great teams focus on achieving the right goal in the right niche at the right time. They then stand a chance of success.”

You can find more practical tools on this topic in the piece called 3 tips for clarifying your team’s strategy. If you wish, however, describe what you can do to ensure your team has the right strategy. Try completing the following sentence.

The specific things I can do to ensure
my team has the right strategy are:

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2) You can focus on spirit.

Great teams are based on ‘similarity of spirit’ and ‘diversity of strengths’. So what kind of spirit do you want the people in your team to demonstrate? You may, for example, want them to be positive, to take responsibility and to help others in the team to succeed. “Recruit for spirit,” we are told, “because that is the life-blood. Employing people with the wrong spirit will poison the team.” Try completing the following sentence.

The spirit I want people in the team to demonstrate is:

*

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“Defining the spirit was the easy part,” explained one MD, “then came the challenge of retaining and recruiting people who demonstrated these characteristics. The steps we took to make this happen were:

a) To identify the people in the company who already demonstrated the desired spirit;

b) To promote many of these people – explaining that one reason was because they embodied the company’s spirit;

c) To populate the in-house magazine with stories about how various people had translated the spirit into action - especially in terms of giving customer service;

d) To redesign the recruitment and induction processes to ensure these embodied the spirit we wanted people to demonstrate;

e) To move-out people who behaved in a way that was counter to the company spirit.

“Getting the spirit right took about a year and involved making some tough decisions. But the fruits lay in producing many leaders who lived the values we want in the company.”

Let’s return to your team. How can you get the right people with the right spirit? Try completing the following sentence.

The specific things I can do to ensure my team
has the right people with the right spirit are:

*

*

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3) You can focus on star performances.

Let’s assume you have settled on the strategy and spirit: the ‘What, Why, How & Who’. Now comes the ‘When’. How can you translate the team’s intentions into star performances? One model is to follow the super teams approach. This involves aiming:

- To communicate the team’s road map towards achieving the picture of perfection;

- To invite each person to build on their strengths – their A talents – and show how they want to contribute towards achieving the goals;

- To make clear contracts with each person about their contribution – plus the support they need to do the job;

- To organise the tasks so that people get the chance to do great work – but also to make sure you also complete the grunt work;

- To hold monthly sessions where each person presents: a) The things I have done in the past month towards achieving the team goals; b) The things I plan to do in the next month towards achieving the team goals; c) The challenges I will face, the plans I have for tackling these and the support I would like to reach the goals;

- To invite each person to report on: a) The things I have done well in the last month – and how I can follow these principles more in the future; b) The things I can do better in the future – and how;

- To encourage people by ‘rewarding the behaviour you want repeated’ – but also being tough on poor behaviour and ‘never walking past a quality problem’;

- To educate, equip and enable people to do professional work that consistently achieves 8/10 – and to encourage them to add the touch of magic that delivers 10/10;

- To do whatever is necessary to guide the team to success.

Every leader has their own way of eliciting superb performances from their people. So try completing the following sentence.

The specific things I can do to ensure people
in the team deliver star performances are:

*

*

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There are many models for building great teams. One approach is to focus on the team’s strategy, spirit and star performances.