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    The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team: ...And Why Everything Else is Just Leadership Fluff
    The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team: ...And Why Everything Else is Just Leadership Fluff
    The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team: ...And Why Everything Else is Just Leadership Fluff
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team: ...And Why Everything Else is Just Leadership Fluff

    By Stephen L. Kalaluhi, Ph.D.

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    About this ebook

    The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team...And Why Everything Else is Just Leadership Fluff is a tool designed to help high performing leaders build high performing teams. This book covers those dimensions of leadership that are considered crucial to effectively building a high performance team, and those dimensions of leadership that are considered crucial to building an efficient culture capable of sustaining a high performance team.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJan 2, 2015
    ISBN9781483547503
    The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team: ...And Why Everything Else is Just Leadership Fluff

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      Book preview

      The Secret to Building and Sustaining a High Performance Team - Stephen L. Kalaluhi, Ph.D.

      inspiration.

      Introduction

      Let me be the first to tell you that I don’t know everything there is to know about leadership. Anyone who tells you that they do is a liar. Leadership as a construct has developed significantly over the last century, and leadership as a construct will continue to develop throughout the centuries to come. It’s through this constant development that new insights come to light, and it’s through this constant development that fresh ways of being a leader are discovered.

      Much of what you’ll read in this book represents the best information currently available to you in regards to building and sustaining high performance teams, but to rely solely on this one book for the rest of your leadership career is absurd. The true value in this book comes from your willingness to accept the fact that leading well is a moving target. You must remain humble enough to realize that the skills that got you and your team to where you are now may not be enough to get you and your team to where it needs to be.

      Lead well, stay humble, keep moving forward!

      Chapter 1

      What Every High Performance Team Needs

      Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.

      - John D. Rockefeller

      There are literally thousands of leadership development programs available today that claim they can turn an underperforming team into a high performing one over the course of a two-day seminar. While I agree with the concepts associated with the litany of developmental programs offered, I take issue with the fact that the majority of these programs don’t adequately address the root cause of why a team is underperforming in the first place – namely, you.

      Numerous leadership development programs provide you with insight as to how to build a high performing team, and their energies are rightly focused on building teams that are productive, results-driven, and effective. It doesn’t matter, though, how many development programs or training seminars you attend that teach you how to build a more efficient team if you, as the leader, aren’t making the necessary changes needed to support and nurture any growth your team may make as a result of the seminar or development programs.

      Every high performance team has, at its core, the need to be led by a high performance leader. Mary Kay Ash, founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc., once said, The speed of the leader is the speed of the gang. As it relates to building and developing high performance teams, she is absolutely correct. As the leader, you are, and will always be, the limiting factor in how well your team performs, how effectively they communicate, and how adept they are at addressing challenges as they arise. You limit their growth, you limit their potential, and you limit how high your team is allowed to climb.

      It should go without saying that a high performance team cannot be sustained if it’s not led by a high performance leader, but more often than not, the opposite is proven to be the case. High performance teams, and the individuals who make up those teams, need constant reinforcement in order to sustain expected levels of performance. High performance teams need to be continuously fed as it relates to their accomplishments; high performance teams need to be constantly nurtured in order to attain continued growth; high performance teams need to be constantly developed from both a technical and relational aspect.

      Know, Go, Show

      John C. Maxwell once said, A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way. This is the underlying belief system of a high performance leader who is building and sustaining a high performance team. A high performance leader knows where their team is supposed to be, and more importantly, provides the necessary tools to get it to that point. Simple jobs can easily become complex undertakings when the right tools aren’t available, and the high performance leader understands that in order for their team to succeed, they need the right tools to do the job right. In addition to knowing the way, the high performance leader goes the way, meaning they exemplify all the characteristics and behaviors expected from their high performance team. There are no double standards as it relates to the high performance leader. Their teams can easily and readily identify actions and characteristics they need to emulate in order to successfully accomplish their goal. Lastly, the high performance leader shows the way, meaning they lead from the front. Sitting behind a desk all day barking out orders is the antithesis of high performance leadership. Showing the way involves actually getting up and taking your high performance team to where you need them to be.

      Destroy the Roadblocks

      Your role in the success of a high performance team is one of removing obstacles and destroying any roadblocks that may prevent your team from reaching its fullest potential and achieving lasting success. Many leaders fail to realize the importance of their role within the dynamics of the high performance team, and sometimes even become obstacles and roadblocks themselves. In order for your high performance team to produce the desired results in the timeline you’ve set before them, you need to take every measure you can to clear the path for it to operate as desired. Clearing the path for your team to succeed allows it to focus solely on producing results and being as efficient as possible. If your team isn’t worried about the minutia typically found within a workplace environment, then they’re free to focus on what matters most – getting the job done.

      What High Performance Leaders Do

      As a leader, you need to ensure that you’re constantly on the lookout for roadblocks and obstacles that have the potential to derail the performance of your team. Congressman Bill Owens once said, True leadership lies in guiding others to success - in ensuring that everyone is performing at their best, doing the work they are pledged to do and doing it well. The process of guiding others to reaching their potential in the workplace means identifying those roadblocks that have the potential to prevent others from excelling.

      For example, high performance leaders understand the importance of engaging and mobilizing all the members of their teams. Leaders who engage and mobilize their teams benefit from higher productivity, increased morale and decreased turnover, and the luxury of not having to constantly deal with fires and hassles as they arise. Engaging and mobilizing your team takes a great deal of effort as a high performance leader because the ability to engage and mobilize your team isn’t given to you, it’s earned. One of the ways to earn the right to lead involves you knowing what makes each of your team members tick. Once you’ve earned the right to lead and are familiar with each team member, you must then use that knowledge to adjust your leadership style to each of your team members in order to elicit from them their best.

      In addition to engaging and mobilizing teams, high performance leaders are also adept at readily resolving conflicts that arise between team members, other teams, and other departments within the organization. Leaders who are well-versed in the ability to resolve conflicts within teams benefit from improved productivity, reduced stress levels, and better overall teamwork. This skill set is often times the most confounding of the leadership roadblocks because efficiency in conflict resolution within teams means understanding the situation, understanding what both sides want to accomplish, and understanding how to bring the conflict to an end.

      One way high performance leaders prevent conflicts from occurring in the first place is through effectively fostering collaboration within their teams. Leaders who are able to foster collaboration within their teams benefit from greater levels of innovation and improved team work. High performance leaders foster collaboration in their teams by ensuring individual perceptions and behaviors match the overall goal of the department. Leaders also foster collaboration by considering how collaboration can help their teams both

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