Use This 6-step Method to Improve Team Performance

Brief 

Team members perform better when they know what’s expected of them, writes Suzi McAlpine, who offers a six-step GETSET model that involves setting clear, explicit expectations, offering encouragement and tracking results. “With clarity, you’re giving your team members a better chance to succeed,” McAlpine writes.

Insight

So, you have a team member who isn’t performing.

It’s easy in this situation for leaders to fall prey to the fundamental attribution error where we attribute another’s actions to their character or personality, while attributing our own behaviour to external situational factors outside of our control. In other words, we tend to cut ourselves a break while holding others 100 percent accountable for their actions!

What if I told you that the source of their performance issue may be your leadership?

A global study conducted by Gallup revealed that a sobering 50% of employees don’t know what’s expected of them in their job. If you’re asking for performance without getting clear with each team member (and the team as a whole) on what’s expected of them in the first place, that’s on you.

Setting clear expectations for each specific role, and what success looks like for your team as a whole, is something we should communicate upfront and consistently. As Brene Brown says, “clear is kind.”

Clarity around what’s expected when it comes to behaviours and outputs:

• Helps your team members focus on what they should be doing (and perhaps more importantly what they shouldn’t be doing)
• Prevents high-performing team members from having to pick up the slack
• Reduces frustration and passive resentment within your team
• Enables your team to track their progress as they work toward their goals
• Help you bin all of the unproductive or unhelpful behaviours that cause issues in team culture

When onboarding a new team member, starting a new project, or even when you’re assigning specific tasks, the GETSET model is a helpful tool. Each letter in the acronym is a checklist for you as their leader to tick off before leaving your team members to their own devices. With a clear idea of what success looks like, there’s less chance of things coming unstuck later.