All Articles Leadership Do you consider your team to be "high performing?"

Do you consider your team to be “high performing?”

2 min read

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: Do you consider your team to be “high performing?”

  • Absolutely — they’re consistently excellent: 26.32%
  • Kind of — they’re good but have room to improve: 60.15%
  • Not really — they’ve got their share of issues: 11.09%
  • Not at all — I’m in disaster-recovery mode: 2.44%

Driving high performance. The high performing team is elusive. It requires a special chemistry among the team members and you are the chief chemist. If your team is currently high performing, beware of throwing off the mix with new hires, role changes or revised priorities. If you’re trying to elevate your team, step back and list what’s working great and what’s holding the team back (caveat — you might be on that list of things holding them back). Building a high performing team is about leading, following and getting out of the way. Try changing one variable at a time and see how it affects performance. Time spent thinking about your team far outweighs time spent in many of the meetings you attend. Prioritize accordingly.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”