Building Successful Teams: 5 Tips for Managing Performance

As a leader, you are responsible for managing your team’s performance, which means you must provide clear expectations and consistent feedback. Of course, managing performance is no easy task, but there are 5 steps you can take to improve both individual and team success.

1. Make sure team members have clear expectations for performance. Effective performance begins with communicating expectations. Each person must be aware of the team’s goals and how their individual roles help meet these goals. They must also know the standards for successful job performance. Team members need to be clear about their current strengths and weaknesses, and how they can improve weaker areas of performance.

two. Give positive and constructive feedback consistently. Feedback improves team members’ self-awareness of their performance. When facilitated, it can provide an extremely powerful learning experience. Positive feedback refers to the praise given to a team member regarding satisfactory performance. Constructive feedback consists of statements that describe unacceptable performance or problem behavior. While it is easier to give positive feedback, both are important for the feedback to serve as a learning tool. You can greatly improve the quality of comments by applying the following 3-step model:

* Describe the behavior – “I observed / noticed …”

* Describe the impact of the behavior – “It worries me because …”

* Discuss how the problem will be addressed: “How can we solve this problem?”

3. Connect performance rewards to team goals. One of the most effective ways to improve team performance is to ensure that performance rewards (for example, merit raises, bonuses, and promotions) are directly tied to achieving team goals. Historically, this has been a problem with team process implementation. Many organizations use teams and expect team results, but reward employees based on individual performance. That means employees can receive performance rewards even if the team doesn’t achieve its goals. There may be no better way to guarantee team failure than to employ this type of reward process.. If team members know that they will be rewarded based on individual performance, even if the team does not reach its goals, there will be little motivation for them to try to be productive team members. On the other hand, if team members know that their rewards will be based in whole (or at least in part) on team results, there is significant motivation to engage in team-oriented behaviors and work directly toward achieving the goals. team goals. Therefore, one of your main jobs as a team leader is to make sure that the reward structure is based on the performance of the team and not the individual.

Four. Challenge inappropriate behavior and poor performance. Sooner or later, no matter how successful your team is, you will have to address a performance or behavior problem. While this is never an easy task, you can increase your chances of success by using the 3-step feedback model outlined above. Always focus on behavior and how it can be improved.

5. Work with team members to identify acceptable values ​​and behaviors.. Another step you can take to create a collaborative environment and improve team performance is to work with members to define team values ​​and clarify expectations regarding team member behavior. This lets everyone know what is important and how team members are expected to act on each other. It also lets everyone know how inappropriate behaviors will be handled.