How to Improve Team Performance

Whether this is your first attempt at improving team performance or whether you’ve been working on it for some time, you may find some of these suggestions useful.

Focus on Outputs not Inputs

Ensure that your team understands, commits to and focuses on the high-impact business outcomes. You might find that a combination of the following suggestions will help you achieve this:

• Revisit individual and team objectives. Are the goals worded as outcomes or inputs? In other words, do they articulate the results that will really make a difference or are they simply a series of tasks? For example, ‘attend a German language training course’ merely describes what the team will do, not what they hope to achieve from doing it. This goal would be better described as: ‘to handle customer telephone orders in German’. If your team’s objectives are currently worded as inputs, consider revising them as outcomes.
• Organize regular planning sessions (perhaps monthly or quarterly) with key team members to agree on priorities for the team for the forthcoming month/quarter and deadlines for key pieces of work.
• Design and deliver a presentation to the whole team, summarizing your vision and the key outcomes the team needs to achieve. This should not only clarify the team’s priorities, but inspire, motivate and win the commitment of team members.
• Hold a team meeting to review everyone’s workload and allocate time to ensure the most critical tasks are completed. As a team, consider whether any of the non-critical tasks are really necessary, or whether there are ways of reducing the time they take.

Review Working Practices

Some of the working practices you have in place could be preventing the team from performing to the best of their abilities. The following suggestions will help you consider whether this is the case in your team:

• Revisit the structure of the team and the roles, responsibilities and accountabilities within it. Are the right people dealing with the right pieces of work? Would certain tasks be completed more efficiently by different team members? Could delegating your work to other team members help free up your time to support the team more effectively?
• Review the effectiveness of your team meetings. Are they run as efficiently as they could be? Take the time to plan an agenda, set a specific allocation of time and do not let the meeting run over. Ask all team members to attend the meeting promptly and explain that during the meeting, all discussion should be focused on the achievement of agenda items.

Empower Team Members

You may find that your team’s performance is being affected by how empowered they feel. This could be influenced by the amount of supervision you give them, the level of authorisation they have to make decisions, or the degree of responsibility they are given to interact with senior individuals in the organization. Here are some ideas to help you empower your team:

• Delegate important work to the appropriate members of your team. Let them know how and why the task or project is key to the organization and assure them that you trust them to do a good job. Suggest meeting with the team member(s) after a week or two to review their progress.
• Where appropriate, try to give everyone in the team some decision-making responsibilities. The level of responsibility can vary across different levels of the team, but doing this will let all your team members know that you trust them to make decisions. This, in turn, will help to make them feel empowered, confident and capable. Assure your team that you’re not looking to ‘sign off’ on every decision they make, but you are happy for them to approach you with questions or concerns if they are unsure of the best way forward.
• Create an atmosphere in which new ideas and creativity are welcomed. Encourage team members to take the initiative to suggest improvements to current working methods, or propose new ways of working. Implement the ideas and suggestions that you feel would work best to show the team that you do take their feedback on board and that they do have the opportunity to help make change happen.

Make the Most of Team Members’ Strengths

To maximize your team’s performance, it is important for you and the team to know and understand where each team member’s strengths lie. Here are some suggestions to help you do this:

• Teams are most effective when they consist of individuals with different strengths and skills, as this equips the team to perform in a wide range of situations. Consider the different strengths and skills your team members have, and whether this allows the team to perform consistently well. If you identify any gaps in skills or knowledge, consider how you might go about addressing this (e.g. by providing relevant training).
• Encourage team members to share their own strengths and skills with one another. Promoting the skills in your team will not only remind all your team members of how they and their colleagues can add value and contribute to the team’s performance; it will also serve as another means of empowering the team and boosting morale. You could even incorporate an exercise on this as part of a team development day. In addition, it might be a good idea to ask a team member with a particular strength (e.g. problem-solving) to deliver an informal training session to the team, or to ‘buddy’ one or two of their colleagues who might need to develop their expertise in this area.