The Golden Rules for Creating Awesome

James Clegg is a highly effective trainer, presenter, facilitator and coach and also has an outstanding business background gained through many years of experience working in high profile senior leadership roles. Here James draws on his experiences in leadership and performance management to outline his three golden rules to help you create awesome teams and achieve a high-performance culture in your organisation.

Find the right people and play them to their strengths

It’s vital to find people who will fit in with your team’s culture, ethics and the passion, engagement and inspiration of the team. Ask yourself if a new person will bring something different to the team in terms of approach, belief and mindset that isn’t already present?

Very often we recruit based on someone having the right skills, rather than them being the right fit for the team. It’s also important to play to peoples strengths, to use a football analogy – you’d never put a striker in goal, or vice versa. Find the right people, with the right mindset, and let them find their role within the organisation and position within the team. Let your people add value – for every new person you recruit you get a free brain. Your job as a leader is to inspire them to use their brain to engage  their skills, personality and emotional commitment. Be awesome.

Create an inspirational and clear vision of what success looks like

Every organisation and every team has a vision, that is for sure, whether it is a clear vision or not is another question. The vision is clear when every person is clear on what the team’s aspirations for the future not only looks like but what it will feel like when they get there. Create not just clarity of goals, but an emotional connection and engagement with the vision – a vision that everybody understands and can feel.

Set the bar high and create a culture where success is inevitable

Creating a high-performance culture is very often something companies will wish to do, however, the number of low performers within the team may lower the bar for performance overall. As a leader, if you create and expect consistently high standards for your team, you will create a dimension of awesome where by the team know what great looks like and set the bar themselves for their own high performance, they expect to deliver high standards and also make sure that other people do within the team.

How do you as a leader start to create an environment where success is inevitable and know what’s expected of your team? Create an awesome culture where people are rewarded and recognised for doing a great job – think about the last time you thanked your team for the great job they’re doing. Recognition will reinforce success and a high-performance culture in your team.

For more information on James, contact our team at enquiries@raisethebar.co.uk or on 0203 137 7353.