Is Your Team Striving for Excellence, or Satisfied with Mediocrity?

If you are like most leaders today, you and your teams are being asked to do more and more with less and less, every day. You not only have to do more, but you often have to do more, faster, with fewer resources including a shrinking budget. And as a result, never has leadership that inspires people to give the best of themselves been more craved, and never has the ability to mobilize groups of people been in more demand. The challenge though, is that with increased demands on you time, it is easy to become distracted from what’s most critical to the achievement of results: team performance.

Team’s that consistently thrive and achieve exceptional results with less struggle are teams that are fanatically focused on excellence and reject mediocrity, regardless of the demands and the change around them. As a leader, your key responsibility is to help create the conditions for your team to THRIVE, and one of the best and simplest ways to do that is by helping your team to consistently and wholeheartedly reject mediocrity.

How do you do that? Let’s keep it simple. First, take a minute to reflect on the behaviors and practices that are most consistently present within your team on a daily basis. If it helps, take out a piece of paper and do a bit of a brain-dump – list the practices that come to mind – the good, bad and ugly. Now review these practices, and ask yourself, ‘Do they reflect the practices of a high performing team committed to achieving success, or do they reflect an average, somewhat complacent team satisfied with mediocrity?’

To help you to better identify which bucket your team falls into, we’ve included a sample of the behaviors and practices that our work and research have proven to differentiate high performance Teams from the rest. These practices are measured by our team assessment, The Team Fitness Test, used by organizations around the world for over 20 years to improve productivity and drive results.

If the following practices are not consistently present then your team is at risk of feeding mediocrity instead of success.

Do your team members:

Proactively look for opportunities to improve service delivery/results/outcomes?
Demonstrate strong and agreed upon beliefs about how to achieve success?
Demonstrate a positive attitude towards change, regardless of whether they agree with it or not?
Effectively support one another through change?
Challenge one another’s thinking?
Regularly ask questions?
Speak up and productively share their honest opinion?
Invite input and ideas from one another?
Share learning with one another, especially learning from mistakes?
Encourage risk taking and innovative thinking?
Demonstrate commitment to continuous improvement?
Dedicate time to improving how the team works together to achieve its goals?
Demonstrate accountability for the team’s vision and results?

Take Action:
Bring your team together and ask:

What are the behaviors and practices that are most critical to achieving our vision of_____?
Of these, what are we excelling at? Which ones are consistently present?
Of these, what’s missing in our team? What do we need to be more focused on?
How are we going to hold ourselves accountable to these and stay committed to excellence?

Take Action: Monday Morning Success Huddles
Take 5 minutes every Monday with your team and start off on the right foot.

Ask: ‘How did we feed excellence last week?’ Ask for examples and recognize and celebrate accomplishments, even small wins.
Ask: ‘What could we have done better last week?’
Ask: ‘What do we need to be focused on this week in order to continue to reject mediocrity and feed success?’

As Aristotle said, ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore is not an act, but a habit.’

You can up your team’s performance quickly, easily and cost effectively.

Invite your team to take the Team Fitness Test and gain everything you need to up your team’s level of performance. Quickly and easily. You will discover your team’s habits that are most strongly feeding excellence and those that lead to mediocrity AND you will receive the tools you need to take your team to the next level of performance. Best of all your team can experience bringing out the very best of themselves and achieving more than they ever thought they could.

Want to learn more? Book your pressure-free demo and consultation. If you are looking for a simple, cost effective tool to change team habits for the better, and for good, then the Team Fitness Tool might be just what you need. Contact us to find out!