High Performing Teams Have Leaders Who Refuse to...

Traditional business thinking leads us to believe a founder, CEO, or executive management team can facilitate growth, create innovative ideas in a vacuum, and make all the right decisions from a boardroom.

But the future of organizational growth is shifting and I have a simple theory for this:

There is too much information and opportunity for one leader

A management team or one leader can’t keep up with all of the information or potential areas of growth for a business. To open your organization up to all these opportunities, there must be a shift for thought-leadership, innovation, ideation, and decision making from the C-Suite to teams and their leader.

This mental shift is so important because teams exist and work every day where the information is. Team leaders know how important their team is to the growth of an organization, and they refuse to do these 5 things:

Allowing Non-Performers to Stay on the Team

A good football coach doesn’t allow a non-performing quarterback to remain the team’s starter if they aren’t performing. But many organizational leaders allow non-performers to remain on teams all the time. It just doesn’t make sense.

Mac Richard shared a story recently on the Follow My Lead Podcast where his first boss told him something that was fantastic, “I love you, and I will fire you.” Your team members need to know you are willing to replace them without performance. Business is a performance game.

Leveraging Fear to Motivate Team Members

We have all had that “my way or the highway” leader at some point in our career who leverages fear to crack the whip. Well, I have news for you, it’s not 1965 anymore.

To use our definition of discipline from the Welder Leader Program “To promote standards in order for an individual to choose to be at their best.” The key word here is to choose. People have to choose to be motivated and to do the work. Your team won’t do their best work if your leadership style is based on fear.