Building a High Performance Team

Building a high performance organization is directly related to the quality of the team members of the organization. A high performance organization needs to recruit the best people, retain the best people, communicate expectations of excellence and recognize outstanding performance consistently.

Rules of thumb

• Recruit high performers
• Retain high performers
• Expect and demand excellence from all members in the organization
• Understand personality styles
• Do not retain personnel that do not fit the culture or meet the performance standards of the organization and of other personnel in the organization
• Constantly assess your team, including comparing to your peers and competition
• Recognize high performance

Accomodation of Poor performance

Accommodation of poor performance is a very bad message to all members of the organization. A common mistake is not realizing that “every knows” in the organization that certain employees are slacking, making mistakes or not being held accountable. This is demoralizing to all employees that are working hard to do their jobs well. The word circulates quickly in an organization that low performance is tolerated. Fundamentally this comes across as an issue of fairness and the rules and expectations applying to everyone equally.

Recognizing Personality Differences

It's important to remember, that different people perform in different ways, and one person might not behave in the same way as another. Failure to recognise personality differences can lead to top performers being overlooked in favour of more vocal "competitors" in an organisation. Personality profiling can help to understand your own personality, as well as that of those with whom you work, in order to maximise the way people work together in an organisation.

Recognizing High Performers

Management needs to recognize its high performers in the organization. If they do not sooner or later the competition will, or the employee will seek other employment. Organizations with rigid rules about advancement, compensation changes, no incentive pay structures will need to identify other methods to recognize outstanding performance. The danger in not recognizing outstanding performance is that the message down through the organization is that outstanding peformance is not valued.

Related Best Practices

• Building an Effective Management Team
• Action plan to build a winning team
• Building a Team

Other Resources

• Wikipedia article on Wikipedia:High-performance teams
• Wikibooks on Wikibooks: Managing Groups and Teams/How Do You Build High-performing Virtual Teams?
• "The 6 Benchmarks of High Performance Teams" by Jesse Stoner is based on research of 500 employers that developed an assessment of visionary leadership behaviors and good management practices and the performance of their team.
• KSL Training in the UK offers a free downloadable PDF copy of their guide (copyright protected) on building high performance teams as well a basic description on their website.
• Teampedia has a team building tools, icebreakers and activities list and a global directory of Team Building Companies on their website.
• The Personality Style Instrument gives an insight into how different personalities perform in different ways.

Author

The author of this article is Terry Gardiner.

Terry Gardiner is the founder and President of Silver Lining Seafoods and NorQuest Seafoods - a medium-size Alaska seafood processing company; and currently a Board member of the Anvil Corporation, an employee-owned company specializing in oil and gas engineering.

His co-operative experiences include member director of the Commercial Fishermen Co-operative association; creation of legislation for the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank; and advisor to the US Dept of Health and Social Services for the state Health CO-OPs.

Terry served ten years as a member of the Alaska House of Representatives -several legislative committee chairmanships, Speaker of the House, Chairman of the Alaska Criminal Code Commission and board member on various state and federal boards and commissions.

His non-profit experiences include National Policy Director for the Small Business Majority in Washington DC; working with the Herndon Alliance and ForTerra.

Terry authored the leadership book, "Six-Word Lessons to Build Effective Leaders: 100 Lessons to Equip Your People to Create Winning Organizations".

For more check: Terry Gardiner Long bio