Set your team up for success (week 5 – 6)
Your focus area for weeks 5 and 6 is making sure that everyone is clear on the desired collective performance to achieve the collective purpose.
Spend 30-40 minutes creating your plan now, then follow it for the next 2 weeks, everyday.
Simple.
How everyone needs to perform – behaviour and roles
What to do
Most teams operate with lots of assumptions around who is doing what and lots of grey areas around what good performance is. In this part you will be working with everyone to get shared clarity of roles and how the team should operate to achieve the collective purpose.
Why do it
To be the best team you can be, standards will need to be high and everyone will need to keep them high. Clarity helps make this possible:
- Everyone needs to be clear how their role helps towards the collective purpose
- Everyone needs to be clear how everyone else’s role helps towards the collective purpose
- Everyone needs to be clear how everyone else’s role works with their own towards the collective purpose
- Everyone needs to be clear on the essential attitudes and behaviours for collective success
How to do it
There are 3 steps to take with this. Read these through, look at the example and then create your own plan.
1. Getting into how the team needs to be
This part involves two things: first clarity of everyone’s roles to achieve the collective purpose and then clarity of the attitudes and behaviours that are required. As before, you can get collective input. Role clarity will need some communication between everyone. With the attitudes and behaviours you will need to decide how you will decide and get agreement. There are tools in TPR to help with this.
2. What you’ll need
To clarify roles towards the collective goal – you’re going to have a collective discussion to remove any assumptions and confusion. There are then two tools you can use. One to help with collective goals https://www.theperformanceroom.co.uk/create-powerful-team-goals-that-really-work/ and one to help agree collective behaviour https://www.theperformanceroom.co.uk/how-this-team-rolls/
3. Get going
You will need to put some time aside for everyone to do a little pre-work and then meet. You could all have a phone or video discussion instead but meeting will be much better. You will need to put you’re own time aside to plan sending the pre-work and running the meeting.
Example plan
You’re nearly ready to get started with getting clarity on roles and team behaviour to achieve the collective purpose. To help you along the way, we’ve completed an example plan for this stage – focusing on how you need to perform. Read through it, get some ideas from it and then create your own plan.
1. Getting into how the team needs to be
Explain to everyone that you want to get shared clarity of everyone’s roles and of the attitudes and behaviours that are required from everyone if you’re to achieve your collective purpose. Explain that you want and need everyone’s input. Explain that you want everyone to do a little pre-work before getting together to collectively agree.
2. Key messages to get across
- Collective performance is at its best when there is shared role clarity amongst everyone
- Collective performance will be at its best when there is clear, shared clarity around the most helpful attitudes and behaviour
- That these are both essential building blocks for setting the team up for success
3. Pre-work and team discussion
- Ask everyone to think about or write down how their role contributes to the team achieving its purpose
- Ask everyone to think about or write down what they’re clear about in their role and unclear about in their role. Also what they’re clear about in others people roles and unclear about in other people’s roles. Make sure they include the role of the team leader (you!)
- Ask everyone to complete steps 2 and 3 in this tool https://www.theperformanceroom.co.uk/create-powerful-team-goals-that-really-work/
- Ask everyone to complete this tool about team attitudes and behaviour https://www.theperformanceroom.co.uk/how-this-team-rolls/
- Have a team discussion to:
- clarify roles (by removing assumptions and any uncertainties)
- agree what will tell you you’re winning
- agree how the team needs to think, act and behave
Coaching tips
When discussing roles keep referencing the collective purpose. Plan the discussion as best you can but remember to be adaptable too. You might need to arrange another meeting to finalise everything and get agreement. That’s ok because this is important. Remember that things change so the conversations about role clarity, attitudes and behaviour can be repeated anytime. In fact they need to be.