The best managers build the best high performance teams.
They know how to select the top talent that aligns with their corporate culture, set clear goals in conjunction with the business strategy, and inspire the energy and commitment in their followers that it takes to achieve meaningful team goals. They know how to appreciate excellent performance and how to coach the good, the average, and the poor team members toward excellence. Good managers engage their team members so they care about their work contribution and the quality of their work product in a way that makes sense.
New manager training can teach you the skills for interviewing, communicating, influencing and coaching. But here in addition to learning how to manage are what attributes you should seek in your team members in order to excel as a team leader. If you can assemble a high performance team with these five traits in abundance, you will be well on your way to leading your team to success.
1. A willingness to work hard (on the right stuff)
A strong work ethic is vital to a company’s achieving its strategy. It is based upon a belief in the values of hard work and discipline. To maintain an organization at peak performance, employees need to feel responsible for their performance, to care about the quality and prioritization of their work, and to do their part for the team. This assumes that their efforts are pointed in the right direction.
2. Intelligence
Experience is helpful but intelligence matters even more when hiring. With enough smarts, the skills and techniques needed to get the job done can be learned and challenges overcome.
3. Accountability
Taking ownership of your work is a way to hold yourself accountable. When you “own” your work product, you are going to put in your very best effort. You want team members who are proud of what they accomplish individually and as a group. Pride in a job well done requires a dedication to oneself, the team, and the organization.
4. Integrity
Employees with high integrity foster trusting relationships across the board…with colleagues and supervisors as well as with customers. Supervisors rely upon the employee’s moral standards. Teammates know they will receive honest feedback. Customers value and trust the employee’s advice. Integrity is a difficult trait to evaluate in an interview. But you can try to assess a candidate’s dependability and decision making process by asking for times when they were faced with an ethical dilemma and for how they solved it.
5. Teamwork
Since most work these days is accomplished by teams rather than individuals, people need to trust and rely upon one another to get the work done. When there is a meaningful and aligned team goal, the workers who collaborate and support each other are worth their weight in gold.
