First, why the focus on teams?
Quite simply - top performing teams outperform poorly performing teams by 2.5x!
So if you’re planning for a stellar 2023, then focusing on building a high performance team will ensure you can all reach the stars.
We use the following research-backed themes to structure our thinking about how to build performance. Each one of them is guaranteed to move you forwards as a team. But there are 9 in total and that’s too many for you to try to cover simultaneously: you’ll risk diluting your effort.
So choose just one. Which will be your focus for Q1 2023?
Growth Mindset: Focusing on building your growth mindset as a team will improve your ability to learn collectively as a team, helping you create and embed a powerful engine of development at the core of your team practices.
Strategic Direction: Strategic planning is often delegated to one or two experts in a team. But if you ensure your whole team plays their part in creating aspirational, achievable and measurable team goals you will increase your chance of having a shared mental model across the team of your goals and strategy. And shared mental models have been shown time and again to be at the core of outstanding team performance.
Agility: If you’re clear about your strategic goals, are you equally clear about your priorities for the next 90 days and do you have believable pathways that move in practical ways from goals to initiatives?
Inclusivity: Building your team members' awareness of their own strengths helps develop their appetite to make their unique contribution. And then if you help each team member get excited about their colleague’s strengths and contribution, you’ll have a team for whom inclusion is as natural as breathing.
Resilience: If you’re going to achieve exceptional results, you’re bound to face obstacles: the bolder you are, the more inevitably you’ll face set-backs. So help the team by systematically identifying and preparing in advance for risk factors along the way. Obstacles successfully overcome will systematically strengthen and transform your team’s resilience levels.
Collaborative Working: No team operates in a vacuum. So how good is your team at knowing who it needs to influence and how, and can it build brilliant relationships with your key stakeholders? Focusing here will help you become a force for delivering transformational change as a team, seamlessly connecting across the wider organisation.
Entrepreneurialism: Reframe existing problems as opportunities. Encourage the team to experiment and explore novel approaches and context switching methodologies to generate fresh thinking and new inspiration around existing problems.
Inspire: They say that purpose eats strategy for breakfast, and blog-posts exhort you to ‘uncover your why’. What is the ‘why’ of your team and are you collectively able to articulate it in a way that connects with each of your inner senses of purpose? If you do, you’ll tap into a deep and sustaining reservoir of motivation.
Innovate: Creation comes from your team adopting a more open-minded and even playful approach, and then being able to switch to a fierce and resolute determination to see your ideas through to birth. Not many teams can do this. Can yours?
By choosing your focus wisely from these key areas, you will start the new year off on the front foot and set your team up for success.
Get in touch with one the team at Jyre if you’d like some help or advice on getting your 2023 off to the best start. Here's to a productive and fulfilling year ahead!
