Any Given Team: Improving Leadership and Team Performance

by Ray McLean

one of the fundamentals of leadership is to know yourself and be comfortable with who you are.

honest feedback was delivered and received dispassionately and without any other agenda but to improve one another’s performances.

whether an opinion was valid or invalid was far less important that exploring and trying to understand why the person thought that way.

experiential training combined with regular peer feedback and evaluation sessions amounted to a very powerful learning tool.

Take any given team, find out what kind of team it wants to be, give them some work to do and then afterwards help them talk honestly in their own language about how one another’s behaviours matched up with that team they said they wanted to be; repeat the process, each time trying to do it a little better than the last.

self-management, peer feedback and performance evaluation sessions and open lines of communication between all ranks

getting the players together and finding out how they saw themselves as a team now and comparing that with how they wanted to be seen. Once we’d identified where the team wanted to go, we’d look at how they’d need to behave to get there,

in a perfect world, would they want their opponents to see them?

If they’re going to improve as a team, they needed to be able to manage themselves and before that could happen they had to be allowed to manage themselves.

What is the real purpose of this team? What kind of team did they want to be? What kind of behaviour will get them there?

develop an environment where each player has a vested interest in the development of his team-mates, and people are driving themselves individually and collectively towards the team they want be, the team’s performance will improve and continue to improve.’

one of the most important things in allowing people to give feedback is that if you accept it without defending yourself, sometimes they’ll go away and think about their behaviour rather than yours.

any feedback had to include a strategy for improvement and a commitment to support the player in their efforts to improve.

attaining systematic honesty about the team’s performance.

Everyone buying into everyone else’s improvement is crucial.

leadership group selected by its peers

how they thought they were perceived, how they wanted to be perceived and what kind of behaviours that needed to be in place to generate that perception.

who were the closest to modeling the behaviours that the team said they aspired to, and who would have the courage to challenge others if they saw others in breach of agreed behaviours?

Often a team will say it’s going to adopt some core behaviours that will help the team be the kind of team it wants to be by, say, treating the customers with respect and listening to their needs. But how can that be if all management monitors is the amount of sales that the individuals within the team makes?

Without there being rewards on offer for serving customers with extra care and attention, there can be no argument about it;

if the team’s espoused behaviours aren’t measured, supported and promoted above all other considerations, then, simply, they aren’t the team’s behaviours.