How To Cultivate A High Performing Environment

Morning Leaders,

Individuals alone do not create successful teams or organisations, it’s the collective effort of everyone’s contribution and behaviours.

All Leaders should focus on nurturing an environment for success. People will flourish, enjoy their work more and achieve so much when they are in the right environment. Of course, it doesn’t happen overnight and it requires a high level of thought, conditioning, accountability and care.

How do you think the people working in an environment with strong leadership at the helm, high integrity, super supportive people, value-driven culture and accountability is going to perform when lined up against the exact opposite? The opposite being a lack of trust, high attrition rate, disengaged people, low hope, hidden resentment and fear.

Both environments may well sell the same product and serve the same market, but one is going to have a huge competitive advantage over the other and achieve so much more.

Creating the right environments leads to the right behaviours occurring.

Photo by Karsten Würth on Unsplash

Here are 5 things that I have experienced and are commonplace in high performing environments.

1) Core Values - provide a benchmark of the behaviours you expect your people to exhibit. Core values support the company vision, shape the culture and reflect what the company values. Whether that’s Ownership, Energy, Commitment or any other important value to your organisation. If you want harmony and consistency in your people’s behaviours you need core values in place which people are held accountable to.

2) Hiring - hire people that share the company values. I cannot stress how important hiring is. You have to get hiring right. Bringing in the right people can make or break your team. Hard skills aside, hire people that have strong soft skills, share the values and you see as complimenting your existing people, you can teach them the hard skills.

3) Leadership - from the top down. Leadership needs to be strong, and always living the core values. Try and develop a culture that is not level sensitive, for example, Directors and VPs actively engage and encourage conversation with those on many levels below them. Spot check your own leadership through skip levels or periodically carrying out employee engagement surveys. This will provide feedback on how you and/or your leadership team are doing and where there is room for improvement.

4) Psychological Safety - this is where people feel safe speaking up, making mistakes and sharing feedback without fear of retaliation. Give your people a voice. You 100% want people to speak up, challenge you and tell you when something is not right, or they don’t feel good about something. Why? Because that’s the healthy way for people to deal with emotions, and you get valuable insight to help you make the right call. We as leaders don’t know everything and shouldn’t claim to. We don’t always have the same perspective or experience as our people. Giving your team a voice will lead to more effective decisions, bring about meaningful change quicker and will empower your people to contribute more.

Photo by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash

5) Growth - develop your people as a priority. People with a path forward and a sense of progression are high hope people. They will develop growth mindsets, bounce back quickly from failure and are very optimistic about the future. They demonstrate high levels of engagement and energy. If your employee doesn’t have direction or a sense of purpose they’ll quickly plateau and motivation will drop. If they don’t know what they feel passionate about it’s up to you as a leader to give them more experience in other areas, and ask them questions to discover what they want to do next or what drives them. One of the main senses of fulfilment in people and what makes them happy is progression and growth. Your job as a leader should be to develop your people into their very best and then set them up for the next step in their career.

You won’t see overnight success with this, it’s a journey, an on-going commitment to your people and your organisation. Humming environments is a special experience. What are you working on to develop a humming environment where your people love what they do?

All the best

David

Resources Of The Week

• Leadership Community - we’re launching a Leadership Community in the next few weeks. This will be a private safe place for leaders and aspiring leaders to calibrate and improve as a group. It will include a knowledge base of resources, Slack Group, Monthly Q&As and Book Clubs. If you are interested in joining to develop your leadership and professional skills for a small investment within a nurturing, positive and supportive environment, please register your interest here.

• YouTube Video - Jack Welch - What is the role of the leader? Jack was a hugely successful leader at GE. He talks through the importance of finding meaning in your team’s work, and why as leaders we need to remove blockers from our team’s environment to ensure they can be successful.

• Blog Article - Leading by Example. Mindtools is a fantastic resource for all employees. There are loads of resources for leaders to help develop their own competencies. Bookmark!

• App - Blinkist. Do you ever read books and think there was a lot of fluff in there? Blinkist saves you hours with its premium book summary app which condenses hours of reading down into a 10-15 minute summary for you to read or listen to. Try this app to save you time and learn quicker.

Quote of the Week

“There’s no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.”

- Richard Branson

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