4 absolutes of peak-performance teams

By Madelyn Yucht

Leadership is what separates a “good-enough” team that simply accomplishes tasks, from a “peak-performance” team that achieves greatness by working together with passion, focus, and energy. Here are 4 absolutes that will help you lead your team to greatness:

• Make the time to get to know the people on your team and check in on a regular basis. Knowing what matters to them, what motivates them, how they think, what they enjoy, what they like about their job, don’t like, what they want in their career is vital to getting the best out of them. It’s simply impossible to motivate if you do not know what makes people tick. Not getting to know your people is the number 1 way to guarantee you’ll under-lead and your team will under-perform.
• Articulate your vision for the team. Model a strong work ethic and show them how to work together to produce superior results. It’s important to establish ways to deal with conflict, decision making, problem solving, and expectations of accountability. Don’t just pay attention to accomplishing tasks with a flawed assumption that the team will magically evolve into a collaborative, high-performing team with healthy behaviors without your input and without helping them develop the necessary skills.
• Give meaning to the work you ask them to do. The majority of individuals in today’s organizations say they are not inspired because most “leaders” just pass down a list of objectives and tasks to be done. So, without meaning and without a reason, work for them is just another day with more to do. If you want a motivated team, you must, as a leader, generate meaning and tap into the human spirit.
• Love them as hard as you work them. Organizations seem challenged to find out how to get people to engage when the answer is obvious, but illusive. You must lead with care and commitment to your team. The minute a team member feels you don’t care, you lose their full commitment. And if you don’t really care about your team, you’ll never get them to care about you, each other, or the work.

Are you leading your team to greatness or managing people to accomplish a never-ending list of tasks?

About Madelyn:

Madelyn Yucht is a principal consultant and the co-leader of Linkage’s High Performance Team practice. She is also an entrepreneur, consultant, and academic with over 20 years of experience working with leaders and their teams to improve performance and achieve strategic objectives.