[bctt tweet=”Improving team performance requires that team members engage in a Collaborative Quest for Clarity. The Collaborative Quest is a journey where team members collaboratively engage in defining Clarity.” username=”@mitchdelmar”]
Teams are messy. Clarity improves teams through motivation, understanding, cohesion & trust.
In the new shared economy, complex-problem solving and collaboration are the top two skills in demand for organizations. As a result, creating and retaining high performance teams remains the top priority for business owners, executives, entrepreneurs and HR managers.
Improving performance on teams in the workplace is a dynamic task that goes beyond team building activities. Creating a high performance team is the art of facilitating a group of individuals to go on a Collaborative Quest; to learn how to take risks, challenges themselves, and learn through the art of being vulnerable together.
It is only when team members individually and collectively define what gives them personal and professional satisfaction, openly challenge their teammates to further develop themselves both personally and professionally, and work together to achieve their individual sense of integrity, that teams can achieve the highest levels of performance.
We combine details of Brendon Burchards, High Performance Habits to give three simple, practical steps to help your team gain more clarity.
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How 7-Figures Teams Crush It…Through Clarity!
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Have you defined what truly satisfies you?
High Performing Teams use clarity to reach their highest levels of achievement. Team members engage in conversations to achieve clarity in what they are (1) passionate about, (2) how they will find ways to “play” together to achieve unfathomable levels of “creativity”, and (3) how they will embrace peril to overcome obstacles together. Embracing passion, play and peril is really the secret sauce for a high performing team.
There is a team I work with here in San Diego that is the epitome of high performance. This year, their goal is to reach $7 million dollars in revenue, a $2 million dollar hike from last year’s goal. This team is hitting this high bar of performance, because they are all engaged passion, play, and peril.
During a session with this team, covering the chapter on Clarity in Brendon Burchard’s High Performance Habits, we shared that high performers are clear on what truly satisfies them.
Brendon’s formula for personal satisfaction is:
Passion + growth + contribution = Personal Satisfaction
Brendon defines satisfaction as leading a life where your efforts (1) correspond with one of your primary passions, (2) lead to personal or professional growth, and (3) make a clear and positive contribution to others.
This type of satisfaction can only be created through clarity. High Performance Teams collectively have conversations to create and share their definition of Personal Satisfaction.
In fact, the leader of this team had issues with the term satisfaction. He declared that he could never be satisfied, because being satisfied would mean he has given up.
The opportunity for high performance teams is to really share this level of vulnerability in the pursuit of everyone getting clarity on what personally satisfies them, what personally satisfies others (so that team members can provoke their colleagues to achieve their personal satisfaction,) and to share each person’s assessment of what it would mean to achieve satisfaction in the first place.
In our conversation, team members talked about how satisfaction can only be found in striving for something meaningful. It is the high performers’ gift to have a sixth sense that, unless they are striving for something meaningful, they feel uneasy, unaccomplished, and frankly bored. This is where you can begin to see how satisfaction ties in with clarity, through meaning.
When there is a conversation around how each person defines his or her own sense of satisfaction, and what it is like to go in and out of the state of being satisfied, you begin to have successful high performance team conversations. It is through this intense striving for clarity that the greatness of great teams are born.
How 7-Figures Teams Crush It…Through Challenging Each Other to be their Best.
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Do your team members rigorously challenge you?
High performing team members demand that someone on their team challenge them every day on their personal and professional quest. High performing team members know that it is in their “job description” to challenge the other members of their team.
It’s through challenges, that we develop. It is through being challenged that high performance teams make promises that they do not know how to keep. It is only through a spirit of personal challenge that we can grow to keep those promises which look almost impossible from the start.
What do we call a group of people who work together who consistently challenge each other? We call that a team. And, of course, the reverse is true – no constant daily personal challenges from your “team” members implies that no team exists.
The types of challenges that occur on a high performance team are unique. They happen with a balance of rigor and compassion for their teammates, through provocative and healthy conversations. These challenges don’t sound like “hit the numbers, or your fired.” They are positive, amped up for winning, and pushing each other to the next level. “This is going to be a great year, if we hit this, we are all going to learn how to be unstoppable”.
Some challenges on teams can seem impossible, and even be impossible, but the whole team feels a sense of responsibility to overcome those challenges together. They develop what’s called “team empathy” where if one person is really struggling to overcome a challenge on their team, the entire team feels their pain, and coaches them to achieve the impossible.
If your team wants help on learning productive ways of challenging each other, look into playing our 90-minute FreshBiz game, where we spend a lot of time creating healthy challenges in your workplace.
How 7-Figure Teams Crush It…Through creating a life story worth telling.
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Does your team share their stories?
The ultimate goal of every high performer is to create a life of coherence. Brendon Bruchard mentions that high performers have a clear understanding that their life story just makes sense. Coherence is created by creating a life that is consistent with one’s “story” of who they want to be, and the struggle of doing everything possible to create that story. Coherence is the act of understanding your life to be a powerful story, and then making that story your life.
Brendon mentions “high performers want to know that their efforts align with something important, that their work is significant, and that their lives are creating a legacy and feeding a larger purpose.” Brendan begs us to ask the question, what is the story of my life, and how am I living it?
In our work with a high performance team, we ask each of the members of the team:
What is the story of your life?
The leader of a team we worked with shared his struggle, and celebration, of being a high performer in his story. His story was one of constantly climbing a mountain, with a series of plateaus, but that has no top. As soon as he got to a plateau, he knew what was next was another mountain to climb. This explained a lot about who he was as a leader, and how he always had energy and confidence for the next mountain.
The sharing of each team member’s story is a powerful trust building experience for all members, as each person was able to define the coherence of their individual lives, and then learn how to challenge each other to live his or hers.
What does the Collaborative Quest look like? It is the work to create clarity and to improve performance by having the following conversations:
- Have you defined what truly satisfies you?
- Do you have people that challenge you?
- Does your team share their stories?
By having meaningful conversations and really getting clear with your team’s purpose and goals, you have started your first step to high performance.
