Creating High Performing Team
What are the key ingredients of “High Performing Teams”? There are many! When we build teams, we take care of areas like quality hiring, building mutual trust and also cover many other attributes. While each of them require special focus and are larger topic in itself, in my view, “Sincere Appreciation” stands out as the most underrated, yet an incredibly powerful tool a leader can ever possess.
Sincere Appreciation
Acknowledging team member’s good work promptly, not only in small groups, but also in larger forums is a magnetic force which will continue to draw the best out of people. Every human being craves for appreciation and if you provide that abundantly, yet sincerely, you will get such great results, which will always continue to surprise you.
For instance, you have genuinely appreciated a team member for the great work he did in an assignment. He will now strive to live up to the standard in the next assignment and will most likely surpass or match the quality of work he delivered earlier. This is akin to appreciating and clapping for kids when they learn something new or improve in their co-curricular activities or academics on a daily basis. On the contrary, if an individual is not appreciated and the excellent work performed is just treated as something which was expected, it would wane the energies and may kill morale in the long run. The negative effects will manifest in different forms like lower productivity, higher attrition and impact on bottom-line.
If 10 out of 10 team members are doing good work, appreciate them all. I have experienced managers who strongly resist doing this, think hard for months and choose 1 or 2 out of 10 to be recognized for good work. Instead, be lavish in appreciating the good work each team member does in daily scrum calls and sprint reviews. Some managers keep bell curve and performance appraisals in back of their mind when they decide to appreciate people in their daily routine. This is an absolutely flawed and short sighted way of thinking and it does great harm to people’s psyche and overall team morale. You can achieve mediocre results with such strategies, but you cannot create a large winning team which excels as a whole.
Humans do extraordinary work and are at their creative best when they are well appreciated.
Few of us are shy with our words, are too work oriented and focused on tasks and outcome. We do not express these basic emotions of appreciation freely or acknowledge the work, wonderful people around us do day in and day out. Go ahead and try this out in your daily routine. Take your team members out of mundane tasks, throw out a challenge, appreciate the smallest of ideas they bring to the table and the work they do. You will be surprised to see the renewed energy and positive outcome in them. Give them what they need, a “Thank You” and genuine appreciation, and they will give back their whole self, mind and heart to work on the goals you want them to contribute to.
Take a pause! Call out your peers, team members, mentors and leaders whom you think you should have said “Thank You” and speak few genuine words for the work they have done, for the guidance and support they have given you, for the leadership they have provided.
Sow the seeds of positivity around you.
