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For a business to succeed and establish industry dominance, its team must be on top of its game, constantly innovating and meeting short--, mid-, and long-term goals.
But What do you do when your team loses steam and is continuously underperforming? Or how do you prevent your team from experiencing such? These are the kinds of questions often on the minds of many executives. The answer begins with the reward system you practice. If your reward system is excellent, your leadership-employee relationship is great, and the work environment is not negative, then consider the following six things to do when your team is constantly underperforming:
Adopt a Strong Learning Culture
Knowledge and understanding are the keys to high performance. Nobody achieves a result better than the quality of the insight he possesses. By being intentional about cultivating a strong learning culture, your team would keep up with their performance level or improve on it based on the quality of their knowledge, which regresses as their knowledge diminishes. To keep your team's performance on the rise, create an appetite for learning in your team by creating and institutionalizing a system that promotes and rewards those who bring fresh knowledge into the organization. Apart from deepening expertise, a culture of learning promotes collaboration, innovation, and problem-solving.
Constantly Inspire Your Team
Low enthusiasm is a major cause of the lackluster team performance of a lot of teams. Without enthusiasm, teams lose steam and settle for convenience. To restore zest, you need to consistently inspire them. Employ diverse options to prepare your team members and deepen interest in cultivating the right habit, acquiring the needed skills, and embracing challenges with patience and resilience. Consider taking your team on a tour of other organizations that have what you want, to draw those virtues from them. Ideas, inspiration, and a positive corporate culture have often been transferred in this manner, causing an organization to catch fire in terms of performance. For example, G.E. once had to take a group tour of American Standards to get its employees to experience and adopt certain competencies that G.E. didn’t have, or at least in the desired proportion. Another way of achieving this is to invite an expert who has the requisite experience and expertise to impact your organization.
Review Responsibilities:
One of the greatest causes of underperformance is fixing the wrong people at the right job. Another is to make people get stuck on a particular assignment until it gets boring. There is no better recipe for an uninspiring performance at one’s job than to give a team member a job he is not at home and elated with. Ensure responsibilities are appropriately matched with skill, temperament, and passion. Teams perform at their optimum when there are no weak links. Misfits frustrate the efforts of others and drain their motivation, leading to unimpressive performance.
Unite The Visions
A strong shared vision energizes performance. Team underperformance sometimes results when personal agendas take precedence over entrenched corporate objectives. Taking time out to diagnose and deal with deep-rooted concerns that may be a source of irresistible distractions for team members and developing creative ways to constantly communicate the corporate vision will pave the way for greater engagement and performance. Communicate in clear terms what the corporate vision is and help the team members see how the achievement of the corporate objective draws them closer to their personal life vision faster than they could as individuals. This will unite the whole team under one umbrella vision. The ability of a leader to effectively bring everyone’s attention to one big common goal leads to unshared focus, synergy, and maximum dedication to the achievement of the objection.
Re-evaluate Your Goals
A great goal provides a sense of direction and focus and increases the appetite for its accomplishment. When a goal is either unclear or perceived as unchallenging by team members, it can have a strong demoralizing effect on them and may lead to a low level of commitment. The impact of motivation and attitude on a team's performance cannot be neglected. By assessing and analyzing how a goal resonates with team members you could effectively alter the way it inspires commitment, learning, and participation. Ensure to avoid unrealistic goals; they dampen performance. Always re-evaluating your goals to see how compelling they are helps you to create and sustain momentum and improve the team's resilience in challenging times. Identifying and fixing every valid concern team members raise in relation to goal execution will help you eliminate all the bottle-necks that undermine team performance.
Praise Extravagantly
Nothing warms up the soul like a deserving commendation from someone who matters. When it is glaringly denied, it drains enthusiasm and kills the drive to commit more. A survey shows that employees who receive genuine praise from their superiors are more passionate about their tasks and achieve more than employees who are consistently criticized. If you must criticize, the approach should be to praise first, logically criticize, and then end with another praise. Showering your people with genuine public praise each time they get it right will give them a sense of importance and make them more willing to go the extra mile.
Finally, the team is the vehicle for achieving meaningful and herculean visions. Like any vehicle, it requires nurturing. Any investment made towards increasing your team's performance is considered a great investment with a sure reward. Do everything you can to adopt the above tips in your quest for success, and you will be rewarded immensely.
