Most leaders agree developing their team is important, but finding the time, space and budget to make it happen isn’t always straight forward. If you’re looking to foster high performance in your team but don’t quite know where to start, here are some things to think about.
Explore where you are today
It’s often easy to gain a general sense that your team isn’t working as well as it could be, but difficult to understand what’s really going on under the surface. Issues can be interrelated, and root causes aren’t always obvious. The areas to target through team development activity might not be immediately clear.
To get started, it’s worth investing a degree of time and effort up front to explore where the team is strong, and where there’s work to do. Gathering different perspectives from within the group itself is critical, but also consider getting input from people beyond it. Large organisations tend to be complex operations, often with high levels of interdependence between functions. This means it can be valuable to understand the wider perceptions of your team among their most important stakeholders. Are you collectively having the impact you want to have?
Establish a baseline
The perennial challenge for leaders seeking to invest in team development is demonstrating the return. It’s often the reason L&D budgets get slashed when times get tough, with organisations finding it easier to sacrifice intangible benefits to retain tangible ones.
Establishing a robust financial ROI might not be possible but that doesn’t mean the impact of leadership development is entirely unmeasurable. Consider whether you can use your initial diagnosis – or a separate process if required – to establish a baseline that you can track against down the line. If building trust emerges as an area of focus, then how much trust do team members have in one another after you’ve worked on it versus before? You may not be able to quantify the ultimate impact on the business, but future investment is likely easier to come by if you can show leadership development activity has succeeded on its own terms.
Consider the best cadence
Creating space for team development work requires commitment. It can be tempting to hope that an annual offsite will be sufficient but in reality, creating a high-performing team requires ongoing practice rather than a once-and-done ‘solution’. You may benefit from finding a large chunk of time to reflect, connect and dig into deeper conversations, but don’t let this be at the expense of all things small-and-often.
The precise cadence of development activity will depend on your context but try to ensure that any sessions you run as a team are close enough together to keep momentum, but far enough apart to be able to put things into practice in between them. Taking smaller opportunities to check in on progress as part of your regular team meetings can help to hold one another to account outside of the bigger ‘moments’.
If your team is geographically dispersed and typically working virtually, then breaking things down into smaller interactions means you can still make progress between the precious in-person time together.
Know when to ‘hit go’
When setting priorities, development of the team often falls into the category of ‘important, but not urgent’. Leaders know it would add value in the long-term, but shorter-term goals can get in the way. It’s often tempting to defer.
Further barriers to getting going can come in the form of instability in team composition. At a typical turnover rate (15%), you can expect to lose someone from a team of seven every year. And that doesn’t take account of the various shifts to roles and reporting lines that can happen in between.
Given these factors, it’s wise to ask yourself whether things feel stable enough to get going? The perfect moment when things are quiet and the team is fully settled is unlikely to materialise. Waiting for it can mean your team doesn’t get the investment it needs, and you don’t yield the value as soon as you’d like to.
