The right structure can set you free

By Paul Roos, 4th June 2019

There are some consistent reasons why teams use our services at Performance by Design. A few common ones are:

• My team is taking too long to make decisions
• Productivity is not where I want it to be
• There is not enough collaboration occurring between team members

For decisions to flow quickly, productivity to be high, collaboration to be fluent, dialogue to flow powerfully, there has to be alignment and trust.

One of the common trends we see lacking are the structures and systems they have in place required for their people to build trust. Teams need a framework for:

• Effectively make decisions in a timely manner
• Collaborating effectively to ensure consistent innovation

Business leaders have forgotten one essential truth to high performance, building trust in order to speak openly and honestly with another person takes 2 things:

• Time
• Interpersonal connections (time together building relationships)

Alignment has to be created by all members of the team, including the leaders. Trust is built through spending time with fellow teammates in a constructive format and the best way to do that is via engaging in conversations with an aligned purpose and outcome.

Many organizations simply avoid meetings as they have been deemed a waste of time. At the same time are left wondering why productivity and the ability to make decisions are causing performance issues. If you are consistently conducting meetings without a proper structure it’s not the meeting itself that’s the issue its the insufficient purpose and structure you’ve set.

Simply expecting your people to make decisions and collaborate is a massive morale killer. Just saying to your team “make decisions” and “collaborate” doesn’t achieve this outcome.

People drive performance.

The performance of any team is reliant on the strength of the relationships within the team. The strength of relationships are built on the depth of conversations. If you have not set up your team to consistently interact and engage with each other in a little and often manner, you cannot expect them to make effective and timely decisions together and assume they will collaborate effectively.

• In what ways are you enabling your teams to effectively interact with each other on a daily or weekly basis?
• How often are you making them praise or recognize a fellow teammate for their performance?

We can help you not only put the right cadence of meetings together, but guide what happens in those meetings to drive performance. Feel free to get in-touch today.