All organizations should have high performance as a goal, that’s a given. Companies want the best employees they can possibly have, but hiring all the best people and then expecting them to work together won’t necessarily result in high performance.
There’s a lot of ground work that needs to be laid first.
Here’s an example:
Ever since professionals have been allowed to participate in the Olympics, the United States has taken some of the best basketball players, such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and put them on Team USA. When this first happened (in the 1984 Olympics), Team USA would get on the court and dominate simply because no other country had the basketball talent that the U.S. had.
But over the years, since other countries have become more competitive, putting 10 or 12 of the best U.S. basketball players together is no longer enough to guarantee high performance. It even reached a point a few years ago where Team USA barely even won a medal and got defeated in several world championships.
In order for Team USA to be as successful now as they were back in the 80s, the team needed a new, more comprehensive and long-term strategy for high performance.
This same idea can be applied to business.
If you want a high performance team, you need to do the following:
- Choose a manager or “coach” to lead the team—In the case of Team USA, they hired Coach Mike Krzyzewski (pronounced: “Sha-zhef-skee” in English).
- Define the team’s mission—Obviously, Team USA’s goal was to win the gold medal, but they needed to have some additional reasoning behind that goal and carefully select players committed to that objective.
- Don’t assume your best “players” will always be the ones that start off as high-performance “players”—Team USA developed a try-out system for recruiting team members. They held try-outs well in advance of the Olympic Games, so they weren’t trying to put a team together right before they were due to compete.
High performance starts with the organization.
A Common Mistake
There’s a misconception in business that you can take high performers that were high performers in other organizations and just throw them together and let them run, but that doesn’t always equal a high performance team.
High performance typically comes from the organization having a defined mission and goals.
Organizations need to ask themselves:
- What makes a good performer in our organization?
- What standards are there for high performance?
- What are our hiring guidelines for recruiting high performers?
Of course, creating a high performance workplace doesn’t happen overnight.
Going back to my Olympics example, initially, the team was able to throw together the best of the best right before the games and win. But as global competition grows, this “method” is less effective.
In order for high performance to happen, there needs to be a commitment from the leaders of the organization.