How to Have High-Performing Individuals on Your Team

Have you tried everything in your own power to motivate your team without seeing the results you were looking for? If this is where you are at, then it’s time to stop looking at them as a team and instead view them as the individuals that they are. This is because high-performing teams are made up of high-performing individuals.

I started a life coaching business for this very reason. Getting to the heart of performance is one of my passions, and there’s no other way to do this than to look at each individual. This is because individuals have different goals, different passions, and different problems, so they all have different strengths. This then becomes your job to help them identify these strengths, and then use them to benefit the rest of your team. Treating different individuals as one team at all times is a detriment to finding the strengths of your team and allowing each person to do their very best work.

Sure, after you reverse engineer your team and look at each person as the asset that they are, you can then treat your team as a high-performing whole, but not until then. So, if you’ve tried everything you can to get your team moving with no luck, it’s time to focus on the individuals who make up your team. Here’s how:

Help your team identify their personal and team priorities, and then help them construct a plan to reach their goals.

Where do you and your team want to go? Now, work backwards. Are you and your team currently planning and doing what’s necessary to reach your goals? If not, now is the perfect time to make changes to your priorities and plan.

Your plan is what makes your priorities so important — having a purpose, a vision, and a mission statement, all tell your story and give context to your plan. If you don’t have these things identified yet, then it is best to first identify where you want to go, and then work backward from there. Once you do this, you will be able to see if your current priorities line up with where you want to go. If they don’t, then you can make changes right now to ensure that they will get you to where you want to be in the future. You may be on the other side of this and already know what your priorities are, but can the rest of your team see them? If not, communicating these ideas is a good place to start before moving ahead.

Priorities reflect where one spends their time and what they believe. Once top priorities are identified, one can then focus on making them happen every day to lead to something greater, both in their  personal life and in business. Trust me, you want this for your team.

You won’t have the high-performing team that you desire until you have high-performing individuals inside and outside of work. Five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years — most people only think in terms of this week or next week, but when you are able to take someone’s current priorities and apply them to their future, you can only then make sure that everyone is heading in the right direction.

Know who your team is, know who they want to become, know how they can help your team, and then help them create a plan to get there. Not only does it show that you care about them, but it makes them better individuals, who can then contribute more to your team.