 All managers aiming to build great team performance are helping their team, themselves and the business. If your team is performing well and appears happy and motivated, then the chances are you'll be asked to manage more people. This is a great way to increase your influence and impact on the business and win promotions. How do you build great team performance is the key question. There are five methods to build great team performance no matter where your team is today. You can be very open with these methods to build team performance. They will work year in, year out, in pretty much all team situations. You are in exchange for asking for and expecting good performance. You are actively helping team members develop their skills and confidence to help them deliver a great team performance. Everyone wins and success helps everyone's career progress. My name is Jess Coles and I've had a 25-year management career in corporate and household names through to SMEs. I've successfully turned around multiple underperforming teams and repeatedly encouraged better efforts and results from team members using each of these steps to build team performance. And if you're new to this channel, enhance.training shares, business and people management expertise to help you improve your performance and that of your team and business. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. Everyone's idea of a great team performance is different. What does your manager and other stakeholders expect from you and your team? What do you expect from your team? What do you as a team need to deliver to meet formal objectives? Answer these questions clearly and you have a specific set of expectations. The first method to build great team performance is to set clear expectations with the team. If team members don't know exactly what expectations are being placed upon them, they are much less likely to meet or exceed those expectations. To reach targets, a team needs to collectively meet expectations through all the activities and projects it undertakes so the overall targets are met or exceeded. Fairly straightforward. Getting each team member to understand, accept and live those expectations is a little bit trickier. Two different approaches to setting clear expectations each with their pros and cons are. Firstly, you can tell the team what your expectations are. And then second, you can ask the team to build the expectations with you. The traditional approach is for the manager to tell the team what their expectations are and then work to repeat and reinforce those expectations through actions and decisions. This method works and is good when quick action is needed such as turning around performance. The expectations remain yours and the team may or may not buy into them. A better way of setting expectations is to coach the team, getting their input and collectively setting expectations which align with reaching the team objectives. This approach takes longer and uses coaching skills which not every manager has. The benefits are that their expectations belong to everyone. The team is much more likely to enforce these expectations among themselves which makes your job much easier. Do take the team through the purpose behind the goals that have been set. Giving context and talking to the why is motivational and empowering for team members in another way to develop team performance. The second way to build great team performance is to create visibility and measurement. Building visibility of progress against goals will help the team and the individuals own their part in hitting those goals. If you don't know you are behind then you won't put in that extra bit of effort to catch up. If you don't know that your colleague Steve hasn't done half the activities he needs to do so the team can make progress you won't prod him. If you don't know Sarah is miles ahead because of her hard work put in already you won't congratulate and thank her. The ability and measurement of performance create significant peer pressure effects. No one likes being at the bottom or seen to be not pulling their weight. So work out several key performance indicators that capture activity and milestones that will drive your team to reaching their goals. Measure your progress against these KPIs. Talk about progress in your one-on-one meetings with each team member. Talk about them in your general team meetings. Put the KPIs on a whiteboard on the wall. Send an email around sharing progress. Keep progress visible. By regularly talking about the KPIs and the progress being made you will keep the key activities in everyone's mind and increase the team's confidence in reaching its goals. Creating visibility and measurement of progress is a great way of driving accountability. The third method to build great team performance is to provide support and development for each team member. One of the best ways to build team performance I have found is to support and develop each team member. As a manager you have a significant number of skills and a large amount of experience that will directly benefit your team members. Make the time to mentor your direct reports during your weekly one-on-one meetings. Use this time to talk through their challenges and problems. Help them learn faster by sharing with them what you know works and help them avoid what doesn't work. As a manager of a team you are also in a great position to organise peer-to-peer training, lunchtime training sessions, organised talks from other managers around the business or any route that you can think of to increase the skills of your team. Talk through their problems with them. Help them learn faster by sharing your experience with them. Do everything that you can to leverage your own knowledge and skills into the team. To get the best performance from the team aim to help team members become leaders themselves. Leaders are agents of change and improvement. Help them grow in confidence and skills. Help them develop their problem-solving, decision-making and their judgement. If your team is truly learning they will make mistakes. Be constructive when talking about failure. Treat it as a learning experience rather than a reason to criticise or complain. Your complaining will risk the team taking no risks which will limit change and improvement. Staying close to what each team member is doing and you will significantly limit the impact of any mistakes made. Provide support to employees and help them learn in any way you can. Doing so is absolutely in your interest and a very important method to develop great team performance. The fourth method to build great team performance is to take action with those underperforming or being difficult. Underperformers and those being difficult are a significant danger to team performance. Outside the direct impact there is also the impact of morale, your credibility as a manager and what is deemed acceptable as defined by your actions. If you let underperformance or pole behaviour continue you are signalling that this is acceptable. Increasing team performance is nearly impossible in this situation. You can quickly enter a vicious downward circle. The good performers leave for better teams and better opportunities. Your credibility as a manager is blown. You get the picture. You must take action. Making sure that your actions are fair and reasonable without letting individuals off the hook is equally important. Take action and give the individual a chance and the support to improve. Let them choose improvement or being removed from the team through performance improvement plans and disciplinary processes. Take action early to reinforce the expectations that you have agreed with the team. The fifth method to build great team performance is to use external recruiting to increase skill levels. As expectations rise of what is okay performance and what is good performance within the team some team members will choose to leave. They will go to other roles with lower expectations and an easier life. This gives you a great opportunity to recruit replacement team members with more energy, a higher level of skills and experience and those personalities more likely to help you drive improved performance. Always seek to increase the average skill level and increase the energy within the team with each new recruit. The increasing standards and expectations will push all team members up a little bit thus improving the overall team performance. New individuals into the team will also be much more likely to challenge the status quo and ask valid questions about what is done and how it is done. Use these periods to find better ways of approaching the tasks and projects the team does. Use new ideas that new people bring to push through positive change. Use external recruitment to help build great team performance. In summary there is a huge amount you can do to build great team performance through the actions you take as a manager. Consistency of your actions and decisions will reinforce the expectations that you have set with the team. Making the time and effort to develop the team and improve their skills is worth every minute for improved performance, improved loyalty and goodwill from the team. Dealing with underperformers and difficult staff in a positive fair way is a must and recruitment is another great way of increasing performance in the team. Put into practice all these methods to build great team performance. The team's performance is usually a reflection of the manager's performance. Your team can be a great advert to your manager, to your peers, to the leadership team, etc. of your abilities and skills. Make the most of this. And if you have any questions on these five methods to build great team performance please leave them in the comments section below. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.