Team
Growth is a team sport. Hiring the right people, keeping them engaged, giving them honest feedback and building a culture that attracts more of the same is what turns a founder-led business into a company that can scale without the founder in every meeting. In the Scaling Up framework this is the People decision, and it sits alongside strategy, execution and cash as one of the four things every growth business has to get right.
This section gathers our articles on building and running high performance teams. They cover the full cycle, from deciding who you need to dealing with the people who are no longer the right fit.
Right people, right seats. The talent assessment chart is the tool we use to work out who your A-players are and who is in the wrong role. It pairs with the functional accountability chart, which makes sure every key function in the business has one clearly accountable owner, and the process accountability chart, which does the same for the processes that cut across departments.
Hiring and inclusion. Five strategies to improve diversity and inclusion in recruiting looks at how to widen the pool without lowering the bar, and the art of recruiting a manager covers the hire that most often goes wrong in a growing business.
Engagement and retention. The hidden cost of employee turnover explains why disengagement starts months before anyone resigns, and how to retain your A-team gives five practical ways to keep the people you cannot afford to lose.
Trust, culture and ways of working. How to build trust with your team, wherever they work is written for the hybrid reality most of our clients now live in, and breaking free from the busyness trap looks at why a team that is always busy is rarely a team that is performing.
Meetings that people value. A team's rhythm shows in its meetings. How to improve your team's mental health with a weekly meeting is a good example of a small, repeatable habit that changes how a team feels about its work.
Culture as you grow. Culture is what the team does when nobody is watching, and it is easily diluted by rapid hiring. How to maintain your culture during rapid growth, engage, empower, excel and turning a group of individuals into a high performance team cover how to protect and build it deliberately.
The latest articles are below, newest first. Our leadership, strategy and implementation sections cover the rest of the picture. If you want to understand how your own team is wired, our DISC profiling and training workshops are a practical next step.
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How Honest Feedback Can Motivate
Employees need both rewards and consequences to perform well. An environment that is skewed heavily as overly positive or negative will result in dysfunction.
3 Ways to Improve Communication During High Growth
When a business moves into high growth, there are several new problems that often manifest themselves.
How leaders discover new ideas in their lunch breaks
A great way, I learned whilst at Alliance Boots, to develop connection, belonging and an employees self worth in a company’s culture is for the MD (Managing Director) to have lunch with small groups of cross-functional employees on a regular basis.
Learning from the Red Arrows
Last week I was fortunate to spend a day with the Red Arrows behind the scenes at RAF Scampton.
What you need to know about working with teams
Today businesses must keep up with the rapid pace of change if they want to survive.
Unusual ideas to boost team meetings
Not all meetings are created equal – nor should they be treated that way.
Getting the most from your team
We all have too much to do and too little time to do it. In today’s complex and collaborative workplace, the real challenge is to manage not just your personal workload but that of your team’s.
How to manage your team’s stress
It can be difficult enough to manage your own stress. But how can you, as a leader, help the members of your team handle their feelings of stress, burnout, or disengagement?
Why your team is not engaged?
How many of your top performing team have left you, leaving you, as their leader, wondering why or what happened?
How to motivate a high performance team…..
A skilled team only gets you so far. Those leaders who really succeed not only assemble talented teams, they motivate them.
Getting your team ready to compete
No matter what company your run or what industry you are in, you need to be prepared for competition.
Creating a High Growth Executive Team
While most Managing Directors know that effective leadership requires the help of a solid executive team, creating that team can be a challenge.
How to get honest feedback from your team
As a Managing Director (MD) it’s difficult to get any real feedback from your employees. If asked each is going to lie to you and tell you how effective your motivational speech was during the weekly meeting or company update.
How to get your team out of a rut……
Your team is in a rut, but what can you do about it? How can you push everyone to be more creative? Where should you seek inspiration?
Multiplying the Effectiveness of your Team
Let’s imagine over the last year you have gone through a great recruitment and assessment process, the result of which is that you have both identified and acknowledged you have a highly talented team.
Give Your Team Confidence
One area I have noticed that really affects a teams performance is the level of confidence in their leadership, their goals, and most importantly themselves.
Leading Teams Through Change
In today’s fast paced competitive market, change is inevitable.
Are you communicating effectively with your team?
With the rapid evolvement of technology and communication tools the opportunity exists to raise communication levels to a totally new level.
How High Growth Company’s Engage Their Teams
When it comes to job satisfaction, financial rewards may be lower on the list than most people think.
Insights on Building a High Performance Team
To achieve your company’s potential you need to get ‘the right people on the bus in the right seats’.
Delivering a Great Customer Experience Through a Fragmented Team
Increasingly companies use outside specialists to do their work. This is partly driven by the ever-lower costs of communication and better online collaboration tools.
How High Growth Companies Engage Their Teams…..
HR experts speak about and evangelise about ‘engagement’. What does this mean? Of course engagement is all about the 4E’s: getting people excited, empathetic, ecstatic and energetic about the company and what it does.
How to Transform a Group of Individuals into a High Performance Team
It’s easy speak about the benefits of teamwork, but it is rare a group evolves into a high performance team.
Living and Breathing Your Culture
Last week we ran a seminar on being authentic to your brand values. Once you have defined your values the challenge firstly becomes embedding them in your culture.