6 Ways to Maximise Team Performance

Are you being asked to do more with less? Are the demands on your IT organization increasing but resources are not? Do you want to create a greater sense of teamwork and collaboration?

It may be time to look at how you are managing the performance of your team members. The days
of a performance management structure that relies on formal reviews or appraisals are coming to
an end.

To maximize performance and achieve the greatest level of productivity from your team, performance
management must be looked at as an ongoing orientation and not a task such as a review.

Using your team members to their fullest potential is a result of a structure of communication,
feedback, development, and support.

Here is the 6 step process to do this effectively:

1. Do your homework

When you want to drive performance, you need to understand certain things about each individual.
What’s their role? What are their goals and objectives, their strengths in achieving them, and
the challenges they are facing?

You also need to understand what motivates them, what coaching style they respond to best, and how to adapt
your communication to their personality and create a relationship of trust and respect.

2. Plan for performance

Once the plan is agreed upon and expectations have been set, it is time for that team member to execute and implement the plan. The notion of “plan your work, then work your plan” is the motto here.

It is now time to adapt your management style and communication frequency to your team member. Keep in mind that one of the biggest sources of motivation for individuals is autonomy and when asked about the best managers that they ever work for, most people will say “they held me to very high standards and then let me to go fulfill on them.”

4. Give timely feedback

The desire for autonomy must be balanced with the desire for feedback – most employees crave feedback on how they are doing. Create a communication schedule in conjunction with your team members to allow for sufficient feedback, ensure that your team member receives the support they need and that you have enough communication in return to maintain accountability.

5. Practical and developmental coaching

When proving feedback to your team members, keep in mind that you want to provide both appraisal feedback as well as developmental feedback.

Appraisal feedback is in regard to how they are doing in comparison to the execution and fulfillment of the agreed plan, while developmental feedback is providing coaching to help them grow and develop.

It is future based as opposed to past based and is designed to move someone from where they are today, to where they want to be in the future.

6. Formal review

The final step is the formal review and the rule is there should be no surprises. Everyone should know what is going to be discussed as it would be clear from steps 1-5 above.

It should be just a natural culmination of the above process and the least significant part. If steps 1-5 are done effectively and on an ongoing basis as part of orientation, you could even eliminate the formal review from your process.

The most common error in driving performance is thinking about it as the task of the performance appraisal rather than the ongoing process of setting expectations, communication, feedback, support, and coaching.

"Build A High Performance

IT Organisation"

FIND OUT MORE >>