BUILDING A HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAM: 5 WAYS TO DO IT

Ask the winning organisations, they better understand the value of a high performance team and the significance of keeping it up and running. Nothing builds a well-motivated and high performance team in an organisation like a culture of co-operation. The following are strong tips to help your organisation build and maintain a high-flying team:

1.Celebrate each member's unique ability (Capabilities) and leverage them accordingly. What makes a rounded team is when every of its member brings different talents, skills and capabilities to work on the team. Respecting each individual's make up and harnessing it appropriately would widen the operational perspectives of the team, thereby, making it multi-perspective capable of tackling and overcoming challenge from many dimension. For example, in a soccer team each player has different talent that is suitable for different wing. The job of a good coach is to fix each player where he can optimally deploy his skills to help the team achieve its objectives.

2. Never do an Open comparison between your team members. " A good team leader measures the performance of his team member against his strengths and not against someone else's". Unhealthy competition leading to strive is born in a team when its members are compared to each other. Your team will break apart faster when members realise that you often engage in comparism between them. Everyone begins to work for how to outshine the other at the expense of promoting the team's success. It may seem to bring result in the short run, but the sustainability and long term success of the organisation is being jeopardised.

3. Celebrate your team's success more than individual successes. What keeps your team a team is the fact that it has a corporate interest to serve and a corporate vision and goals to pursue. You cause the team a setback whenever you celebrate an individual team member's success rather than that of the team.

4. Grant everyone equal opportunities. Every member of your team desires and deserves a level playing field. Opportunities to contribute and be rewarded should be equal across board. Everyone's opinion should be as valid as the other. Opinion or views expressed on subject-matter should not be tied to personalities.

5. Reward and motivate for every milestone achievements in the organisation. Rewards come as a way of expressing your gratitude for a job well done by your team, while written or verbal recognition addresses your team's need for attention and gives them credit for their accomplishments. The two combined are a powerful source of motivation. Many leadership classes teach the concept MMFI (Make Me Feel Important), It's a valuable tool to keep in mind to build a high performance team. To motivate the team for milestone achievements, the reward may not necessarily be monetary, but some sort of tangible acknowledgement can go a long way. A celebration certainly helps too, but remember to leave them with something tangible for their efforts. It is also important to reward everyone who contributed to the success of the team's accomplishment, not just the immediate team member. This sends a message that you quite understand a team's success depends on the collaborative efforts of various groups. People will clamour to support your team's projects if you provide visible and lasting rewards and celebrate frequently.

WANT TO FAST-TRACK YOUR START-UP’s SUCCESS? COMMUNICATE YOUR VISION THIS WAY.

What distinguishes an enduring and eventually successful start-up business from a low-energy and stuck-in-the-mud one is the force of vision. Many start-ups launched out without an articulated vision for their enterprise, while those with one lack the understanding on how to galvanize their available resources to drive it to fruition.

I’ll like to state here that it is practically impossible for a single individual to drive a corporate vision to reality. The big multinationals all around us today started in the heart of one man but have become successfully established through collaborative efforts of a number of different individuals and talents. This transformation over a period of time could not have been possible without a clearly stated vision of the organization made known to employees to enable them find their places and apply their skills to support the realization of the vision.

Business start-ups must understand that the survival and success of their enterprises depend on a clearly stated corporate vision and their ability to mobilize the support of every single employee to key into it with genuine interest. This implies that beyond putting up a vision statement for your business, there must be an effective means of communicating it regularly to every employee. It is so important because if everyone in the organization shares the vision, it becomes easy to walk in the consciousness of achieving it through their different contributions.This will keep everyone in constant tune with the organization’s vision.

The place of employees support in the realization of a corporate vision is so strategic that organization that fail to explore it ends up surrounding itself with mediocres who lack genuine interest in the success of the business. They are only there to passively work for their 8am-5pm pay checks.

Since people tend to support more of what they are made part of, the following are ways to communicate your business vision and make every employee an important part of its realization:

1. MAKE IT PLAIN ON TABLETS. God so much interested in ensuring organizations and individuals communicate their visions effectively instructed man to write vision upon tablets. Some businesses underestimate the efficacy of hanging up large frames of their corporate vision in their offices. As clearly stated by the bible, it is to ensure everyone in the organization runs daily towards achieving the vision. I suggest that a frame displaying the organization’s vision and mission should be hanged up in every office from the janitor's to that of the president.

2. SPELLED OUT IN OFFER LETTERS. Every employee at the point of entry into the organization should be made to understand the company’s vision and their specific places in its pursuit. When the corporate vision is spelt out to employees as they join the organization, it leaves them with an impression they are coming into an environment where every job task is driven by the quest to achieve the firm’s vision. This will also give them a sense of personal responsibility in helping the business achieve its vision.

3. RE-ECHOED IN EVERY MAJOR MEETINGS. Re-stating the company’s vision in every major meeting sends a strong signal that the business is committed and serious about its vision. This would help sink it deep into all stakeholders, ranging from employees, suppliers to shareholders.

  Employing these three ways in communicating your organization’s vision will ensure every important business decisions made at any level within the firm synchronizes with its vision. Regardless, of the size of your business, corporate vision is a sure way of releasing corporate energy to race to the top against all odds.

6 WAYS TO GET FREE PUBLIC RELATION HELP TO PROMOTE YOUR START-UP.

Launching your business into the dog-eat-dog marketplace is every entrepreneur’s moment of truth, and it pays to get a jump on your competitors by doing it with as much innovation and flair as you can muster. Two absolutely critical ingredients in any launch strategy are advertising and publicity whose job it is to get your business noticed and patronized.

Pat Fallon, former President of Fallon McElligot Rice, a U.S based advertising agency, said "it’s tough to get good advertising in today’s brutally competitive marketplace without spending a good deal of money--- but it’s not impossible’’. What you have to realize is that good advertising cost fortune, it may gulp as much as your start-up capital or even more sometimes. I guess you don’t have that kind of money to spend, then, you’ve got to be awfully smart to get what you want.

  The following guerrilla tactics can jumpstart you in getting that PR help you desire:

1. READ MARKETING AND ADVERTISING PUBLICATIONS. A diligent search in marketing and advertising publications can expose you to tons of powerful and helpful info needed to fly your newbie into the public as fast as you desire at little or no cost to you. These materials are available offline; you can even

assess some of them online.  In them you can find a good number of advertising free-lancers who do ridiculously low-cost campaigns. These guys do brilliant campaigns for small clients with little money you can afford. They are more interested in doing a successful ad for you to raise a name for themselves than the cash you have to offer them. Listen to Pat’s experience, ‘’When my partner and I started out our free-lance business we spent almost seven years doing nothing but what in most cases were brilliant campaigns for small clients with little money’’.

2. DO SOMETHING NEWS WORTHY. Media representatives, daily scout for events and happenings around town that will make catchy headlines. For instance, identifying a CSR need in your community you can address with your employees talents and skills, and addressing it. There are no hard and fast rules as to newsworthy events you can do to attract attention. You may as well give away whatever you’ve got practically free for the period you can afford. That way you warm your way into the hearts of the public and your target customers/clients. Free publicity is important and feasible for you but to get it you’ve got to do something newsworthy.

 

3. EMPLOY CROSS-PROMOTION TECHNIQUES. One of the cheapest and easiest ways to promote your newbie is to employ the cross-promotion strategy. It is a win-win concept that helps you and another business owner get what you both want. Here is a story that clearly illustrates how this technique works; there was a fitness center run by three entrepreneurs. These men approached the owner of a Racquet club in town and showed him a magazine article in which some fairly popular tennis personalities can be seen using their fitness center’s equipment to increase their stamina, the power of their serve and so forth. They told the owner of the tennis club his members would greatly benefit from using their equipment, and suggested he offer them an exclusive, half-price introductory membership at their center, with his compliments. The first thing he asked them was ‘how much is this going to cost me?’ he was told it won’t cost him a cent; and they will even take care of the printing and mailing the offer to his one thousand members.  The whole thing cost the guys a little over forty dollars and they ended up with six new memberships worth $1,800. Cross-promotion technique entails identifying how your business can partner with another firm in a related business in a way that will benefit and promote both businesses. You’ve got to be smart enough to look out for a business that is doing well in its line of business or that possesses what you need to promote yours, and then leverage on it.

4. ADD PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSIONAL TO YOUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS. Getting seasoned public relations professional to serve on the board of your business will prove a worthy strategy in enjoying some free public relations help. You may have to sell them some inexpensive founders’ stock, but you’ll get good public relations and general business advice in return, and probably gain access to some wonderful new contacts. 

5. ATTEND SEMINARS BY PUBLIC-RELATIONS PROFESSIONALS. Showing up at speeches and seminars organized by PR professionals is another way to get your business some good advertising and publicity. You can either talk to them about your business right there in the spirit of the seminar or pay a visit to their office.  If you let them know you’ll like to work with them you’ll usually get quite a bit of useful information in an hour or so and it doesn’t cost anything. Some PR people will even allow you to hire them for a few hours or half a day of consulting, and if you don’t ask them for a written report, the cost can be fairly modest.

6. JUICE UP YOUR SALES PEOPLE. The sales team responsible for getting your product/services into the hands of customers holds a crucial place in ensuring you get good advertising and publicity. Motivate them with a juicy and irresistible offer of reward to make them go all out. There was an author of a book, who wanted to make sure his book didn’t get lost among all the other titles his publisher was hawking, what he did was to give each member of the sales team one two dollar share of stock in a new hotel chain, accompanied by a personal letter extolling the virtues of his book. PR experts believe that young companies can do a great deal to position themselves in the marketplace, and decide what to say about their business and to whom, without spending a fortune on public relations. So, if you’re just starting out in business with scanty resources, you’ve got to use every imaginative strategy you can think of to rise above the pack and get noticed.