12 Actions to Step-Change Team Performance Through Knowing Your Team
Knowing your team as a manager gives you huge advantages in step-changing team performance. When you know how best to utilise the skills, character and experience of each individual team member, overall team performance will increase, sometimes very significantly.
Every company wants and needs its managers to improve team performance. The company’s ability to survive and thrive depends on it. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot of pressure to perform placed on managers, with great rewards for those who deliver and job insecurity for those that don’t.
How can you improve team performance without unearthing all the talents and abilities of the people you depend on to improve team performance? In my experience, easily 70%+ of managers don’t spend enough time really getting to know their team members. The result is a superficial understanding of who they are working with and what they can do. This guarantees you will be an average manager, or worse. Gain a massive management advantage by really knowing your team.
Learn my most valuable tips on how best to get to know your staff in 7 different areas vital to understanding enough about each team member to get the most out of your team.
12 Actions to Step-Change Team Performance Through Knowing Your Team
- 3 Big Management Advantages Gained by Knowing Your Team
- 7 Essential Areas to Learn More About Your Team
- 5 Key actions to Step-Change Team Performance
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Firstly, let’s go through why you should put some serious effort into learning about your team members.
3 Big Management Advantages Gained by Knowing Your Team
There are at least three big management advantages gained by knowing your team well and these are:
- Better use of team strengths and appreciation of team weaknesses
- Building stronger relationships with team members
- Creating higher levels of trust within the team
Gain all of these and you increase team performance. I will quickly explain the why for each.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Take any team and each person on that team is different. Each want different things and have different interests and motivations. Each all come from different backgrounds, have different experiences, assumptions, beliefs, and life references.
When you know the strengths and interests of each person on your team, you can adapt your approach, your management style and how you communicate. This significantly improves how well you work with them. You can also assign work that is more likely to interest them, play more to their strengths and create opportunities to further develop their skills.
These actions create significant advantages for the team over time in more motivated and skilled individuals, who get more done in the time available.
Build Stronger Relationships
Secondly, by making the time and effort to really get to know the individuals on your team, you are demonstrating your interest in them, showing you care about their hopes and dreams, what they want to get from work and their motivations and interests. Who doesn’t appreciate a boss that is trying to look after their employees. Being able to play to team members strengths more often than not, also builds appreciation within the team for you personally and your skill as a manager.
All of these factors help strengthen the relationships you have with team members.
Increase Trust
Thirdly, by playing to strengths, and communicating why you are assigning different types and levels of work to individuals within the team, you will build the team’s trust in your ability as a manager. Trust in you as a person is built through the care you take to help and develop team members; in flexing your style and approach to their needs; in working to help them realise their ambitions. High levels of trust within the team and between you and the other team members results in better teamwork, co-ordination, and support. These in turn drive increasing team performance.
These are significant advantages that managers should aim to gain through knowing their teams well. Managers are responsible for increasing team performance. Playing to strengths, stronger relationships, and more trust all improve team performance.
Next, how do you as a manager find out more about your team members.
Knowing your team – I have 7 Essential Areas to Help you Learn More About Your team
The 7 areas that I look to understand about each of my team members are:
- The extent and level of their skills
- Judgement and decision making
- Their character & values
- What energy levels
- Their ambitions and dreams
- How they react in different situations
- Their desire and ability to learn
For each I share what I typically do with each team member to discover more about each of these important areas.
1 Skills
For skills, the best way I know to assess skills is to put team members in different situations and observe how they get on. I ask what individuals think they are good at and what they enjoying doing in one-one-one meetings with them. By asking and observing, I also find out a bit about their self-assessment skills. I am looking to understand the breadth of each person’s skills and how strong they are in each skill. I also want to have a gauge of each person’s skill relative to other team members.
2 Judgement and Decision Making
The better a person’s judgement and decision making, in general, the more autonomously I let them work and the more hands off management style I will use. There are lots of ways to assess a person’s judgement and decision-making ability. 3 examples include:
- Outlining current problems and asking them to talk me through how they would make a decision
- Coaching them through decisions that they should make in their role
- Asking them to make decisions about real problems and then explain why they chose that option
Increase the complexity of the decision or the scale of the impact of the decisions, until you need to coach them through their decisions, so they don’t lose confidence. Know where they are comfortable and where they need support.
3 Character
A person’s character and values will come through their behaviours, the decisions that take and the actions they do. Pay close attention to what each of your team members do and how they go about it. How they approach work, their colleagues, you etc. Their actions will speak volumes about their character and values.
4 Energy Levels
Energy levels are important. Those with high energy levels are more likely to work hard, seek challenges, opportunities to learn and grow and increase skills, etc. They simply have more capacity to do tasks that use energy verses a person with lower energy levels. Observation of what each person does and how they do it should give you a very good idea of each person’s energy levels.
5 Ambitions and Dreams
When you can align a person’s ambitions and dreams with tasks and activities you need them to do, you will have a very motivated person who will try to do a good job. Build trust and then ask each individual to share their ambitions. Follow this up by doing your best to get alignment between what needs to be done and what they want to do.
6 Deal with Pressure
Observe how team members react in different situations. How are they at dealing with pressure? What people skills do they have? How resilient are they to knocks and setbacks? How do they learn and adapt? What are they like with change? Pay careful attention to what each person does and how they react in different situation. Listen for their emotions when they are talking about different situations and events. What gets them worked up and what are they calm about etc.
7 Desire to Learn
Knowing each individual’s desire and ability to learn is also very important within a team setting. Businesses are always changing. To deliver improving team performance, we need to help the team adapt and flex to those requirements. To achieve this at team level, we need to work with the individuals and help them learn as quickly as they are able to, matching teaching to learning styles. Create situations to test the learning ability of individuals, ask them what they think and observe their reactions to learning situations.
I hope you appreciate that there is a bit of work involved in finding out about each these areas with your employees. Make the time to work closely with each of your team members, spend time with them in meetings, in problem solving activities etc so that you create the opportunities to observe them in action. Great managers know their team members in quite a lot of detail. This gives them a big advantage over average managers who don’t understand their teams as well.
5 Key actions to Step-Change Team Performance
Know your team’s strengths and weaknesses and you can start to harness all the strengths in the team and minimise exposing their weaknesses. Playing to strengths nearly always increases overall team performance.
There are several key actions to take to harness strengths on an individual level – which in my view – are:
- Organise the right people into roles that best suit their individual strengths. This can take a bit of time, cross training and explaining, particularly if people are in unsuitable roles to start with.
- Re-organise roles to maximise the number of tasks and activities that play to the strengths of the person doing each role
- Think carefully when you are delegating work. Align as much work as possible with individual’s respective strengths, interests, and ambitions.
- Plan out how you are going to develop team members, what skills they need to develop or improve further to maximise the overall team’s output
- Explore how you might outsource work, recruit in or borrow individuals to cover skills gaps in your team, including yourself.
Take as many of these actions as you can to play to the strengths of your team and cover any weaknesses that the team has. All of these actions will improve team performance over time.
In summary
Great managers know their teams and to get the most out of your team you must know your team’s strengths and weaknesses. You can only really achieve this by putting in the time and effort to get to know your team members while working alongside them.
From personal experience, I know the investment you put in is paid back many times over in increased trust, stronger relationships, higher motivations levels and ultimately – in increased team performance.
To recap, we have covered:
- 3 Big Management Advantages Gained by Knowing Your Team
- 7 Essential Areas to Learn More About Your Team
- 5 Key actions to Step-Change Team Performance
If you have any questions on “12 Actions to Step-Change Team Performance Through Knowing Your Team” please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Knowing your team, in my view, is an essential starting point as a manager. It is like a carpenter know exactly how best to use each to their tools, which one get blunt quickly, which one works reliably etc. As a manager, you create value through your team. The better you know your team the more value you can create. To step change team performance, you must to get to know your team in detail.
Plus, working is a lot more fun when you have good relationships with your team!
For more information take a look at this great article by HBR.