Set your team up for success (Get going)
This training plan is all about the practical steps needed to set your team up to perform.
It lasts 12 weeks and through it you’ll be working on different focus areas in 2 week sprints. It’ll take you 30 minutes to get going now, and then 30-40 minutes to create your plan at the start of each 2 week sprint.
Oh, and some effort and commitment to follow your plan during that sprint.
What's happening right now?
You want a high performing team (doesn’t everyone?) but you’ve never invested in making that happen. Your experience of collective performance development is limited to some models you can’t remember properly or team building events that probably involved water in some way. All good fun but not all that helpful!
Your challenge is to make the most of the collective talent and people. So that one plus one equals 3 (or more). But you’ve limited time to do this and have no budget to bring in external expertise. So if having a high performance team is important, which it is, you’re going to have to do it yourself.
Why’s it happening?
Your situation is not unusual because typically:
- Organisations focus pretty exclusively on overall business performance and on individual performance and little in between
- There are individual goals/targets/objectives, individual performance reviews and individual pay. If there are collective targets they’re owned by the leader/manager, not everyone
- As a leader your training has been about managing individual performance and overall outcomes, strategy and activity. Training has not supported you to get the basics in place for superb collective performance to happen
Your choices
You could choose to do nothing. That’ll take no time or effort and the problem might get better on its own.
However, that’s pretty unlikely. So the other option is to do something about it.
That’ll take some time and effort now and through the next 12 weeks, everyday. If you do choose this, you can expect to:
- Have a collective purpose that’s clear for all to align behind
- Have individual team members who are clear on their role for collective performance
- Have everyone knowing how they contribute to collective motivation
- Have everyone mutually accountable for the collective performance
Performance is a game of choices and now it’s up to you. Do nothing and hope or commit to getting better”
Paul's story
Paul used to lead by knowing everything that was going on. He was passionately keen about helping everyone to be successful and loved his job.
He was also super busy, never quite finding the time to do everything he wanted, let alone everything else.
When he took the time to step back and get everyone working as one, he found he had for time for development – his and everyone else’s. It became a virtuous circle. He became coach as well as leader and manager.
He also found he was able to play to the individual strengths so everyone could better support one another. Now he didn’t need to do everything himself. It felt like win for him, win for the collective and win for individuals on the team.
Ready to get going?
If you’re ready to get better, you better get going.
Start off by setting some goals.
1. Get a starting point.
Rate yourself for where you are right now. You’re familiar with the idea of a scale of 1-10 where 1 is total rubbish and 10 is that it’s as good as it can get.
2. Set a target.
Using the same high tech scale, set yourself a target for where you want to be on this. Choose a number that feels like a bit of a stretch and achievable with a bit of hard work in 12 weeks but is still realistic.
3. Think about the people who need to know that you’re using this tool
Tell them what you’re doing. That way they can support you and won’t think you’re just being weird.
Now get cracking!
You’re ready to crack on with your training plan!
You’ll be working in 2 week sprints over the next 12 weeks on stuff that will really make a difference – read How it works if you haven’t already. For this plan, you’ll spend weeks 1 to 10 working on these 5 most effective things to do:
Week 1 – 2: Focusing on the collective performance
Week 3 – 4: : Your collective purpose – Why you exist
Week 5 – 6: How everyone needs to perform – behaviour and roles
Week 7 – 8: Collective motivation – what you can control and connectedness
Week 9 – 10: Mutual accountability for collective performance
It’s important to work through them in this order.
In each 2 week sprint, you learn what to do and how, through an example plan we’ve prepared.
You then create your own plan. Just download, print out and complete the blank plan provided. You can use ideas from the example plan or not – but follow the same principles.
In weeks 11 and 12, you’ll be putting all the good stuff you’ve learned and done in these 5 areas together. You’ll be guided through this when the time comes, so don’t worry about that for now.