The Manager - Edition 58 - Building High Performing Teams - By Rob Lambert
Welcome to the Cultivated Management Newsletter
Hi,
I hope you've had a cracking weekend and are looking forward to the week ahead.
I've had a great weekend with the family. A cold football game on Saturday morning, food shopping in the afternoon and family round in the evening. Doesn't get more normal than that.
I started my new gig last week and have enjoyed my first week - plenty of questions and observations. I often have to reign myself in as I tend to get quite carried away with moving quickly - but when consulting you often have to sit on your hands a little while, until those relationships form.
I also had an article published on the Sullivan & Stanley blog, of which I've included most of it here.
Enjoy and see you next week
Rob..
Building High Performing Teams
Entire post published here. (sorry, was quite long for a newsletter post!)
I often get asked how to build high performing teams. It seems that few managers and leaders align the stars when it comes to having people working with their strengths, cooperating towards commons goals and growing in their careers – and all of this whilst delivering business results.
Firstly, it’s important to understand that high performing teams are made of high performing people.
Secondly, high performing team members have high performing managers.
In most companies, neither people nor managers are flourishing – and you need both. It’s a harsh reality but many managers have little idea about what they are doing, and they are wrongly spending their time trying to develop underperforming people.
So, what do managers do to build teams of high performing people?
Step 1 – They become a high performing manager.
To talk about being a better manager means to talk about being a better person.
It is a mistake to ask others to behave, grow and achieve in ways we, as managers are not prepared to ourselves. The first step therefore, is to develop our own skills, abilities and behaviours, to become a better person able to encourage others to reach their potential too.
Step 2 – Be Visibly Passionate and paint a bright future
We must become a VP. Not a Vice President but Visibly Passionate at work. It’s about getting behind the mission of the organisation and encouraging others to be more than they are.
High performing managers paint a beautiful, inspiring, concrete and realistic picture of the future and constantly shine a light on it, even when times are tough.
People want to work with others who are visibly passionate. It’s contagious. It’s a behaviour of high performing managers.
Step 3 – What’s stopping us from achieving this bright future?
Effective managers must articulate the challenges and problems that are standing between where the team are now, and an inspiring future. After all, if the future was easy to obtain, the organisation would already be doing it.
What problems need to be solved? What’s stopping the team from getting there? How does the organization, and the people in it, need to change or grow in order to reach this True North?
Step 4 – Develop people
People must feel like the job is developing them. It’s a manager’s job to create the right environment and opportunities for people to thrive.
This is done by setting clear expectations about the behaviours that are expected within the organisation. After all, a company’s culture is nothing more than group habit, it is what people do every day.
If you want a great culture, you need great behaviours. It’s important that managers make it clear what’s expected from people. It seems bizarre to have to articulate positive, co-operative, energetic, creative, respectful, professional behaviours to people within the organisation, but every day stories emerge of companies with cultures that are toxic. Toxic cultures are caused by toxic behaviours. I see some terrible behaviours in the workplace that managers are tolerating. Managers get the behaviours they tolerate, not the ones they expect. And if you tolerate poor behaviour, the culture of the organisation is set on a downward spiral.
Step 5 – Build systems of productivity and good habits
The fifth step is to build systems of productivity and good habits that create flow in your organisation and deliver value to customers.
I often talk about “Releasing Agility”. Agility is the ability to move quickly and with ease towards a goal. It’s therefore the role of management to release agility in an organisation – to free up forward momentum, remove friction and help people move with ease towards the end goal.
Employee Engagement
If you get all of these elements correct, you’ll have aligned the stars and be working within a high performing team, or at least on the right journey. It’s an amazing thing to see – people and organisation in harmony – getting better and better every day.
And you know what?
As a side effect of getting your people foundations correct and Releasing Agility, you’ll get Employee Engagement for free. And all of this is achievable without a HR lead engagement initiative, company slide, waffle maker and crayons at break time.
Entire post published here. (sorry, was quite long for a newsletter post!)
My week in pictures
Had a wonderful morning walk along the River Thames in London earlier this week. Beautiful morning and the sky was looking ridiculously good for a photo.
But this is my usual morning view - a carpark in Maidenhead with a Lidl in the distance :)
Cool Stuff To Click On
1 - Good idea for facilitating sessions where ideas need to be a mix of solutions to problems or challenges to overcome.
2 - Whoot - couldn't agree more. Collaboration creates mediocrity - and high performing people leave organisations where mediocre people are left unchallenged. Don't collaborate.
3 - A guide to keeping stress levels low
4 - As we push forward with tech, it's important to point out that archaic, tactile and non-internet ready devices are coming back in to fashion. I for one love a good tape-deck.
5 - Oh my - Cryptocurrency company boss dies with the only known password to currency vault.
6 - Online whiteboard drawing tools - often needed when co-working with remote people.
Book Of The Week
This week's book is "Make Your Bed : small things that can change your life...and maybe the world" by William H McRaven.
This is a short and enjoyable little book which spawned from a brilliant talk McRaven did at Texas University. It expands many of those original ideas and adds some detail to the stories.
Very short, but very enjoyable where he reminds us to focus on what matters, lead with love and be courageous in what we do. Many of the stories are very impactful, but none stood with me more than when his Pelvis was separated in a parachuting incident (Eeeuuurgh...) - powerful storytelling.
If you like inspirational reads and fancy something light and easy - then this book is pretty good. I would say though, if you read lots of inspirational self-help books then he doesn't really cover new ground. But his stories are interesting and the book is light enough to breeze through and get something from it.
"Make Your Bed : small things that can change your life...and maybe the world" by William H McRaven.
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Thanks
Rob..