High Performance Leadership

If you abandon any part of your team, your whole team will feel expendable. That's NOT what you want. The lesson? Be careful about how you say goodbye to your team members. Be careful about who you ignore. And, be careful about taking anyone on your team for granted. -- doug smith

The job of a leader is to take care of, not advantage of, team members. -- doug smith

Does your team believe in itself? Here's how you know that a team believes in itself: Each person on the team can tell you the team's vision and mission People are remarkably not focused on the clock Smiles! Team members are enthusiastic and positive Team members come up with new ideas Problem solving is a way of life, not a chore A team must believe in itself to succeed.  What are you doing to help your team believe more fully in itself? -- Doug Smith

Does your team know how you feel today? They are probably paying much more attention to you than you realize. They probably do know exactly how you feel. We let people know our feelings in dozens of subtle ways. Whether or not we say hello. How we say hello. Our eye contact. Our tone of voice. Whether or not the door is shut, the music is on, the phone is available. People are going to figure out how you feel. Wouldn't it be helpful if they figured out how energized, motivated, and supportive you are? We communicate how we feel whether we like it or not. Why not communicate positive, productive feelings of friendly joy? It's entirely possible. And -- sparks high performance results. -- Doug Smith

What makes you happy? I'm lucky that lots of things make me smile. Lots of things make me happy. A really good baseball game (and yes, it does help if the Phillies win), a great guitar solo, a fabulous concert, a bike ride in the early morning, a walk in the woods, a hug from a friend (a real hug, not one of those little half hugs with an immediate pat on the back), Chicago stuffed pizza...playing with my children (and now, my grandchildren!) all kinds of things make me happy. And in many cases, other people have contributed to making those things available. But I'm the one who has to find them. And when I do - I'm happy! No one else can tell you how to be happy. They might try. Advertisements will entice you to find happiness in their product. People will offer you happiness by connecting with them. Events will promise amazing joy and miss the mark. It's up to you. It's up to me. It's up to each of us to make ourselves happy. Are you happy today? ...

Does each team member on your team know how much you care about your vision, your mission, your goals? Even more importantly, do they each know how much you care about them? Team members look to their leaders for skill, for initiative, for courage, compassion, creativity, and clarity but most importantly they look to leaders who care. Showing your team members how you care about them will develop the type of loyalty and effort you need as a high performance leader to solve problems and achieve your goals. It's what we want, but it is oh so easy to overlook. Leaders often take for granted that people know how much they care. Sometimes, leaders don't even invest the level of caring that is needed for people to feel valued and connected. It's hard to measure, this caring, but without it all of our other measures suffer. As leaders, we need to care, and we need to communicate that caring to our team. Team members don't expect us to be perfect. They know that we...

OK High performance leaders, here's a question for you: what's more important and comes first in your priorities -- customers or team members? I've worked with many organizations that always put customers first. A few teams would also focus on team member happiness (or at least say they do). Here's the problem. Unhappy team members create more unhappy customers. Here's another problem: really poorly behaving customers make it so rough for team members that they also become unhappy, spreading the unhappiness around. That's not the result we want. Conversely, nice customers recognize the hard work that team members do. Polite customer realize that they may not always BE the center of the universe. Smart and reasonable customers realize that you are not entitled to something just because you demand it and that demanding it progressively louder does not increase the merits of your case. Can't we all play well together? As a high performance leader, I e...