358 3 Things Successful Leaders Do to Create An Unstoppable Performance Culture

Speaker A: In this episode, you'll learn three things every successful leader must do to build and maintain a high performance culture. Welcome to leadership without losing your soul, a podcast helping human centered leaders master communication to accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. I'm your host, David Dye, president of let's grow Leaders. Uh, welcome to the show. Today you'll get three specific steps to build a high performance culture within your organization, organization or team. Do these three things consistently and you'll have more energized teams, get the important work done quickly and waste less time on drama and side quests. And you'll be a leader known for getting results and with whom people want to work. And as I get into this, I have literally over the last few months been all over the world, Europe, us, Southeast Asia, helping clients across a host of industries. And I'm talking finance, manufacturing, technology, like software, service companies, medical, even interior design firms, helping them dive into these three skills to build and maintain that performance culture. And it's been exciting to see how they're using these. And they will work for you too, if you do them consistently. So let's dive in. First thing you must do to build a performance culture. Level set. When I say level set, I am talking about a specific conversation that does what I call a, uh, then and now type of thing. So you acknowledge the past. Hey, up until this point or in the past, it was like this. Going forward, it's going to be like this. Now, what goes into that? Like this. This is where you're getting clear about expectations about what success looks like, what successful outcome does anything that's critical to, let's say you're doing it at the organizational level. You're talking about the organization's mission. What are the key outcomes you're trying to achieve? How are you measuring those? What are you in business to do? How do you actually benefit your customer? You know, that high level type of thing. If you're talking organizationally and then you get into your values, like, how do you do that? What does it look like for you to do that? We do that with White Glove service. We do it with a sense of urgency or we are scrappy. And if you're a smaller company, maybe a startup mode, um, this is what it looks like for us to succeed and how we're going to go about doing that. Every organization, every team has those things. So whether you're talking about it at the organizational level or the team level, what are you trying to do? You have to level set because people come in with past experience and past the set of expectations, whether they, you know, sometimes you might have just inherited a team. All right, so you listen to the team, you, you hear what things were like, you get a sense of that. You say, okay, in the past this was the case. Going forward, this is how we're going to work together. This is what it looks like for us to succeed at what we're doing. So we're get super clear about that. Um, let's say that it's not, ah, a new team. Let's say it's your team. It's. And you're just realizing that you haven't done those things. So you need to have a level setting conversation. You're not just going to come in and start, uh, all of a sudden holding people accountable for something you've never talked about before, just out of the blue. That'll be disconcerting for them. Instead, level set, you have this conversation, hey, listen, team organization. I recognize that in the past I have not been as clear about what success looks like, what a successful outcome does, how we should be working together, any of those things, whatever it is, you need to be more clear about, or maybe you've been totally clear and you haven't been doing the accountability or the follow through. Um, going forward. Now we're going to do those things. So I recognize in the past I haven't been as clear about X, Y or Z set of expectations as, um, I could have going forward. These are what they are. Or hey, in the past I have not been practicing the level of follow through as a leader that you deserve and that the team or the organization needs going forward. I am going to be doing that. You can expect me to be following through. And we'll talk about that in a moment, what that looks like. All right, so we're level setting. Acknowledge the past. There is a line in the sand going forward. This is the reality. You can't build a performance culture without creating clear expectations. And that means creating some contrast between what was and what is. And that performance culture, that level of accountability starts with you. So you're also role modeling personal accountability here. When you level set. All right, now the second thing you want to do is you build your performance culture. You've done your level setting. Now we're going to continue that conversation and we need to get really specific. And this is a step that many leaders miss because they'll take it for granted or they'll make some assumptions. What are we getting specific about? We have to get very specific about what a successful outcome does. And if you're a reader of Powerful phrases for dealing with Workplace conflict, our most recent book, you'll recognize this as one of the those goat, one of those greatest of all time powerful phrases. What does a successful outcome do? Whatever task, whatever project, whatever product, service, whatever it is that you're doing, there is a reason for it. That's the actual thing you're trying to accomplish. Work isn't done unless you've accomplished that outcome. So what is it? We have to get specific about that so that everybody can make the decisions about whether or not they are actually achieving those goals. It's never just checking a box and saying, hey, I did the work, I did the task. It's I have achieved this outcome. Okay, so what does a successful outcome do is critical. And what that does for you is it helps define why you're doing something. So now that you've been very clear and specific about what a successful outcome does, in other words, the why behind any task, project, or even at the broadest level, the work, the outcomes you're trying to achieve, the next thing we need to be specific about is behaviorally, what does it look like to actually do those things. And this is a place where many people move too quickly and they don't get into the weeds on this and talk about or think about what does it actually look like. How does the person successfully do what we're talking about here? And in some cases, that may be down to the. If you're talking about a customer service type of role and we're going to have empathy with our customer, we have to get real specific about what does empathy even mean or look like. It's easy to throw around words like we're going to act with urgency, or we're going to have empathy, or we're going to be committed. But those words don't mean anything. Or rather, they can mean so many different things to so many different people that they might as well not have any meaning. So what does that word mean? What does it look like? How do I, as a member of this team or part of this company, how do I do that? How do I have empathy for a customer? It might mean I do a reflect to connect and emotionally check in with how they're feeling. It might mean that I check for understanding and make sure that I've got a clear, uh, understanding of what their problem is and then express the confidence to quickly resolve it. So that's just one example. But you can take this to any aspect of team or organizational life. Get specific. We've got specific about what a successful outcome does, in other words, why we're doing it. And then second thing we need to get specific about how do you actually do that? What does it look like? Just one more example from one of our clients communicating, uh, with data. People were getting really frustrated because there were reams of data going back and forth but people were not using it in an effective way. So yes, we want to communicate with data, but what does that look like and for them, the way they defined it and this might work for you, it might not. Um, but the way that they defined it is we're going to include the data that's relevant to a decision. But whenever sharing data, we are going to offer our one sentence interpretation of that data followed by a, ah, one sentence recommendation based on that data. Then we can include following that, we can include the analysis and people can make their own decisions or take it a different way. But we're going to take a position and do some interpretation. That's what we're going to do. So we get specific. What does a successful outcome do? How specifically do I take action on that in a meaningful way? What's going to be make me successful? Okay, so we have number one, we have level set, number two. Second thing we need to do is get specific about what successful outcome does. So why we're doing it and how do I do it. The third thing we need to do, if you are going to build a performance culture, have to do this one. And this is where a lot of leaders drop the ball, is follow through. And that may sound simple, but it's not as. I mean maybe it is simple, but in practice it's not as common as it should be. And this is where consistency is your friend. It's the discipline of execution, getting things done. How do we follow through? There's two ways to do it. Celebration and accountability. So if you think about it, every time you set an intention as a team, you've got really only two possible outcomes. You did it or you did not do it. If you did do it, we're going to acknowledge that success. That's follow through, close the loop. So we celebrate. Now celebration can look like a very subdued, quiet. Hey guys, we just did that team. That was exactly, we did exactly what we said we were going to do. Well done. And for a small thing, quiet thing that might be totally appropriate. M In other cases you're leading a sales team and you just achieve some massive things like we're going to ring the bell and there's confetti and music and a lot of different big, louder things happening. Both totally appropriate forms of celebration in different ways. The key here is when you achieve what you said you were going to do and you keep your own word to yourself as an organization, as a team, or even as an individual, you give yourself a chance to build confidence by acknowledging it. You build momentum, you get more of what you celebrate and encourage. So we want to follow through on those things. It also closes the loop and acknowledges that intention has been fulfilled and allows us to then set the stage for the next one. On the other hand, if we did not do what we said we were going to do, if we didn't do the follow through, um, the way that needed to happen, our follow through, our way to close the loop is accountability. And accountability here is not beating one another up for poor performance. It's learning. It's asking the questions, okay, what happened? Acknowledging it. We did not follow through on our intention here. What happened? What got in the way? What can we learn from that? Um, what do we need to do differently to solve for that? Did we learn something that makes this entire intention irrelevant? Or maybe something we shouldn't do? Or is it no, we learned something that this is going to help us to problem solve and we're going to do this next time. Or maybe we can renew our commitment right now and get it done. Whatever that accountability looks like, the point is the learning so that we can get the follow through that we need. Either way, celebration or accountability. When you're doing that consistently, you are building the momentum towards performance. You get more of what you encourage and celebrate, less of what you criticize or ignore. When you have the follow through, accountability conversations, you help everyone coach their own thinking and behavior into alignment with where you've done the level setting, where you've gotten specific, then this is where the rubber meets the road and we really mean it. So if you want a performance culture, these three things you've got to do consistently, level, set, get specific about what the outcome does for the team, for the customer, for the organization. So you're getting the why in there. What specifically, how specifically people take action on it. What is that going to look like at a behavioral level? And then third, follow through, celebrate and practice consistent accountability. And you will be on your way to a performance culture. And you can start doing that this afternoon or tomorrow morning. And if you want to equip the leaders in your organization with tools like this to stay focused on what matters most. Collaborate better together, get more done while enjoying your work. Uh, if you want to. That same help that all those other industries I mentioned earlier are getting with their performance cultures. Love to partner with you. Give me a shot. You can shoot me an email at David dyed y e letsgrowleaders, uh,.com and, uh, we'll get you there. Have that conversation and figure out what's going to make sense for you. So if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss any of these practical communication skills that will help you accelerate your team's performance, reduce stress, and build a career with the respect and influence you deserve. Until next time, I'm, um, your host, David Dye, reminding you to be the leader you'd want your boss to be.