In this article you will learn 7 unusual ways to improve your team performance. They’re unusual because they focus on the good things. They really work!

Time to Read: 3 minutes

1. Work means more to your team than you, or they, realise

AlL of us are guilty of looking at the absence of performance as indicating a need for help. The absence could be a lot of things: From late arrival, to disengagement, or poor customer service.

It’s more powerful to know that work means more to you – and your team – than any of you realises. Work is what helps us to feel connected, to feel important, to feel that we are contributing.

So, knowing this is the case, you can change the conversations from how can we improve your performance to how can I help you be happier here? When your team is happy, performance often follows a positive trend.

2. Help your team to see the best in things… and lead by example

Picture yourself drowning in complaint calls, drowning in email, and dealing with an avalanche of requests. You also have a whole lot of work that’s just behind. What is your reaction?

If it makes you feel defeated, think about how you display it. Do you make comments about how horrible the day is? Do you complain about your emails? Do you moan about the deadlines?

If you do, you can’t expect your team to behave any differently.

Even if the only silver lining is that you are doing 1% better than yesterday, take a positive view of the situation. Everyone is well and healthy; everyone is doing their best; and you have an amazing team to help you.

Your attitude, like the common cold, is catching.

3. Keep your team focused on what is important right now

Many improvement articles talk about collaborating with your team and getting them involved in planning. But did you know that just dealing with what is happening right now is even more powerful?

In an average work day, a massive 47% of the time is lost to unfocused work. This means just doing tasks you always do, while thinking or worrying about other things. This is often the root cause of errors, inattentiveness, poor service.

When your team is 100% focused on what they’re doing right now, their efficiency, productivity and accuracy will increase. This one step may be the most important thing you read all day.

4. Be grateful for their efforts

When is the last time you expressed genuine gratitude for the work of your team members, and didn’t sound like you were told to say it? We can get into patterns of using manners mindlessly, or of just expecting good work.

We also forget that people accept gratitude in different ways. For some team members, thanking them in front of others can be the worst thing you could do; when for others, that’s the very thing they crave.

Find out how your team members relate to compliments, and then offer your gratitude to them for their efforts, in the ways that they will receive it best.

5. Leverage the excitement of team goals

Goal setting, to-do lists, strategy. None of those words is sexy, and none of them sounds like something you would leap up and down about.

Team goals are important because it helps everyone strive towards the same outcome. Like rowing a boat, it’s much easier when everybody has an oar, and gives it a go.

Getting your team excited might be as simple as helping them to visualise the outcome. It could be that the goal doesn’t seem exciting because they haven’t really grasped what it means to have achieved it. What would it feel like? How can you celebrate? What are the fabulous things you can do next if this goes well?

6. Recognise your team’s strengths

Every team member has his or her own strengths. One might be extremely good at powering through complicated data entry. One might have an amazing knowledgebase in his head, and be ready to share it at any opportunity with whoever needs it. One might be the best in the team at helping things to stay on track.

The strengths in our teams, once we start recognising them, feel endless.

As a leader, start recognising the strengths and throwing light on them to the team as a whole, so they can see each other’s – and the group’s – strengths all together.

7. Get everyone involved in improvements

One element of team resilience we often forget comes from the team being involved in identifying and actioning ways to improve. When you have empowered your team, the result is exponential improvement.

That empowerment might include:

• helping each other recognise their limitations
• brainstorming, to new ways of working
• being curious about what would happen if they improved this one thing.

Then, rather than worrying so much about how to improve performance, you might find yourself trying to work out which of the improvements is going to have the greatest impact. But you can involve your team in those decisions, too.

Healthy teams are high-performance teams

Team performance isn’t often just about addressing the surface issues of poor performance. Helping your team members to be happier, resilient, and empowered can often solve the problem. Treat the root cause, and gain long-term benefits, together.

Eat ORANGES and be happy

The ORANGES program is a systematic wellbeing program that helps you to change the root cause of poor performance. It addresses patterns of thinking, behaviour and habit. Once you change them, the shift it can create in your business can be staggering.

Training x Design is the only facilitator for the ORANGES program in South Australia.

To find out how your organisation can reap its extraordinary benefits, call us on 1300 662 997.

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