High-performing leaders continually increase their interpersonal and professional capacity to accomplish more with less, resulting in innovative and efficient strategic solutions.
Leaders who build successful businesses relentlessly follow proven best practices to build continually improving and sustainable high-performing organizations. They are experts in ensuring that all stakeholders – employees, customers, partners, suppliers and influencers – are on the same page to each achieve agreed-upon aligned and desired results.
The articles in this series explain how high-performing leaders follow the practices of being trustworthy, visionary and inspirational, as well as help the business learn and adapt. Since leading a business is like conducting an orchestra – with highly choreographed simultaneous working parts – the next important best practice is being an effective team builder.
Excellent teamwork is a key practice for effective leadership. To help the business achieve its shared vision, successful leaders ensure all members of their senior team are high performing so they can effectively cascade improvements down throughout the business.
To achieve this, follow the five best practices explained below.
Build a senior team that complements your skill set
To be a high-performing leader, you should be self-aware, and understand the positive and negative impact your interpersonal and professional strengths and weaknesses have on the business. As the person responsible for building an aligned and focused high-performing senior team, you must recruit, select and retain strong individuals who complement your own skill set and add significant strategic value. Each must bring a perspective that deepens your envisioned framework and approach, making the sum of the parts much stronger.
Get the senior team to feel a sense of collaboration, ownership and pride in their results
The key to effective teamwork is building your senior team into a continually improving and sustainable high-performing team. As discussed in column #2 ("How to be a visionary leader"), you should first ensure that everyone on the team is pulling in the same direction to achieve the business' shared big-picture goals. Then use these shared vision statements to gain commitment, buy-in and ownership toward achieving the business' highest priority strategic objectives. This happens when your senior team assists you with building a strategic roadmap (the why, what and how of the business) so they work collaboratively and with a sense of ownership and pride in their shared results.
Focus the senior team on achieving goals by executing strategy effectively
One of the highest priority strategic objectives is for the senior team to identify and agree on the highest priority result areas – such as key accounts – in which the business needs to improve. Following that, they need to identify measurable and calendarized improvement objectives for each. Next, you as a leader need to facilitate everyone's efforts to achieve the common goal by gaining their commitment, buy-in and ownership to appoint project team leaders and teams with the necessary skills to achieve each goal. Team leaders then become responsible for building continually improving and sustainable high-performing teams whose results flow throughout the organization.
Build co-operative relationships inside and outside the organization
It is important to build a spirit of co-operation within your business. This results in all stakeholders considering themselves a member of a larger team that provides superior service. As a leader, you should demonstrate through action and results that you are there to deliver intelligent and outstanding service to all stakeholders, setting the benchmark for members of your senior team and others on how to effectively build shared accountability relationships throughout the organization.
Acknowledge and reward team accomplishments
Successful leaders effectively measure key metrics to ensure team members deliver over and above their baseline responsibilities. You should acknowledge and reward exceptional team service and this can appear in many forms: internal awards that are broadly promoted (such as "service champion of the month") or through smaller statements such as announcements about team members' sales results or customer service ratings. This reinforcement ensures that superior team service becomes an important cultural value within the business.
This column is the fifth in a series of edited excerpts from Don Andrews' forthcoming book "Increasing Your Performance Intelligence®: How High Performers Follow Best Practices to Effectively Execute Their Strategies."
