Do you have the teams and performance you deserve?
Sean Spurgin outlines how leaders and managers can block great team performance, and explains how developing performance focused leadership skills is vital for organisational change.
Great leaders and managers focus on creating a team climate where people want to do great work. They’re engagement-focused, develop deep relationships with their people and focus on performance. They motivate, inspire, coach, encourage, cheer, challenge and develop their people. But they also need to be able to swiftly address toxic or underperforming behaviour.
Many leaders and managers are good at cheerleading but lack the confidence and/or skills to have candid conversations and hold people to account. The result of ignoring issues is probably a slow decline in overall team performance – or worse.
As the saying goes, ‘you get the team you deserve’. If leaders and managers neglect what they need to do, then they can’t hold employees to account. They are as much responsible for performance outcomes as team members. The good news is, the mindsets and skills needed to hold great performance conversations can be learnt. It just takes a little time – and the payoff is immense.
How your leaders make your staff and volunteers feel about themselves says a lot about your charity. Treat people like they matter and they will reward you with high performance.
Have a look at the 10 leadership and management behaviours that we’ve identified that can contribute to low performing teams and organisations. All of us may be guilty of some of these, some of the time! Learning practitioners have a role to play in supporting leaders and managers to learn, practice and embed coaching and performance behaviours so they become the norm instead.
Sean outlines the 12 signs of a coaching culture in this previous article.
About Sean Spurgin, Learning Director at Elev-8
Sean creates learning that cuts through the noise, changes behaviour, elevates results and most importantly, inspires people to become better versions of themselves. He is passionate about developing learning that gets people to think, feel and behave differently and firmly believes there is a huge amount of untapped potential in businesses across the UK.
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