Written by: Maya Zack, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If you’re a business owner and you’ve got a team, big or small, you want them to be the best they can be in helping you create the vision for your business & the success you want. The most productive teams are the ones whose individual members’ personal goals align with the goals of the business. This is because team members are committed to their own ambition, which fits in with the bigger picture – also wanting to accomplish something beyond their individual self-interests.
A high-performance team is essential to a business’s success and to have a significant competitive advantage. They execute strategy more easily & effectively, make better decisions, solve complex problems more easily, and promote more creativity. They hit goals while needing far less management oversight because they’re empowered as individuals, responsible for and trusting in doing their best work while being accountable for results – which they are personally committed to, wanting to be part of shared success.
An average team becomes a high-performance dream team when they:
1. Clear on purpose, goals & vision
A real sense of purpose & enthusiastic commitment to one’s own goals as well as the team's collaborative mission and long-term vision.
2. Clear understanding of roles & responsibilities
Clarifying each person's role & how they can contribute to the collective goals enhances team productivity & performance, as do personal & mutual accountability. Additionally, this can promote growth and an ever-expanding potential, because goals that stretch a team member’s skills or comfort zone are encouraged, increasing the challenge while motivating them.
3. Feel confidence around their individual skills
A strong belief in one's self and own abilities allow people to work more effectively and encourages taking more risks, solving more problems, bringing out strengths, working on weaknesses, and achieving goals more easily. With a growth mindset, they can challenge themselves and learn from setbacks, failures, or negative feedback. They also focus on their personal potential within the role and team, believing they can learn, grow and improve along the way while being highly committed to the results. This is as opposed to those who may experience imposter syndrome, who feel or believe they already need to know all the answers and have all the skills and feel insecure when they don’t.
A great team has a diverse range of people and expertise that complement each other’s abilities. Empowered work teams not only value their own abilities, personality, thinking & working styles, but also the diversity of experience & background of their colleagues.
4. Engage in open & constructive communication
There’s a strong sense of trust & collaboration. Open & respectful expression of opinions & ideas and giving and receiving honest, constructive feedback promote motivation and cooperation.
5. Manage conflict and resolution effectively
This is essential to a high-performance team. When individuals have the capability to handle conflict in a constructive and solution-focused way, instead of viewing conflict as a negative, the high-performance team views it as an opportunity for progress and even as a strength.
Conflict is caused by differences, and when team members come together with the common aim of resolution, their differences in views, values, or attitudes can be an advantage. Diverse or conflicting views help improve thinking, decision-making and generating ideas, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, and overall performance.
6. Have resilience
More flexibility & adaptability to changing circumstances, pressures, or demands, personal or professional. This is something we’ve been seeing particularly in the last couple of pandemic years.
7. Healthier work/life balance
They have more fun & job satisfaction, both on a personal level as well as enjoying being part of something bigger than themselves. A happy team is a more productive team!
8. Have high-performance leadership
Effective team leaders focus on purpose, goals, relationships, skills enhancement, and commitment to results that benefit both the business as well as each individual.
How do you turn into a high-performance team for your business?
Personal development, performance & well-being should sit at the core of company culture. That is if they want to attract the best people – and retain them.
Especially now, post-Covid, mental health and well-beingbusiness are becoming a top priority for business leaders, with employee performance & retention a major issue. So focusing on personal growth and well-being is increasingly relevant. Team members with a positive, growth mindset are far better equipped to deal with any internal & external challenges. The pandemic has also been a time for many to assess their priorities and career choices. Many are looking for a deeper sense of purpose or meaning in their work. And, they want to feel they are growing and progressing.
So if your team members aren’t growing, and even more so if they lack satisfaction around where they are, they aren’t likely to stick around for too long, and even if they do – they probably won’t be contributing nearly as much as they could.
A business that cares about the well-being & development of its employees will retain its employees. A high-performance team is one where there’s a commitment – on the part of the individual to the team’s and business’ goals, and on the part of the business – to the personal health & growth of each team member. Successful businesses invest heavily in team members’ personal success, knowing the huge benefits this brings in the short as well as long term.
So how do personal development programs, particularly, for mindset mastery, fit in with these factors to create a dream team for your business? Self-awareness & self-regulation creates empowered individuals. Here are just some of the benefits mindset work can provide, empowering your team members individually, and collectively as a group working towards your business goals.
Team members will be able to:
1. Take charge of feelings & emotions
We can’t be in control of all the mind’s thoughts, but we can become free to choose our reactions to them. Having simple mindset tools such as the Sedona Method™ or hypnosis allows one to do that. This creates resilience, helps with stress management, daily and ongoing challenges, negative thinking, self-regulation, dealing with conflict and so much more. Becoming in charge of one’s emotions is true mindset mastery.
2. Choose their beliefs
Team members will reset negative or unhelpful beliefs that are getting in the way of productivity or hitting their goals – both personal as well as collaborative. This can be around confidence and self-trust in ones’ skills, abilities, or potential. Becoming aware of limiting beliefs and being able to change them, they’d be able to drop insecurity and be open to possibilities with a curious & learning mindset rather than focusing on weaknesses or failures. Beliefs can also be around other people, events, or experiences and one can choose to view them as positive opportunities, neutral events, or as negative ‘reality rules’ holding personal meaning.
3. Experience more clarity
When unnecessary information is no longer occupying the mind, there’s clarity. This is important for bringing out one’s strengths, problem-solving, ideas & creativity.
This can be around the individual’s role and the business’ purpose, how to execute strategy in the best way, or seeing opportunities for innovation or growth.
4. Be better communicators
Individuals will have a far better understanding of how they and others ‘operate’, and release the barriers to better relationships and collaboration.
Despite our differences, deep down we are the same. Our biggest motivators in life are wanting either control, security, approval, peace, freedom, or a sense of ‘oneness’.
Knowing which of these is driving one’s self in the moment, in different situations, or in the context of the bigger business picture & goals not only promotes self-awareness, self-reliance, and independence but also allows one to more readily accept others and their own needs and wants.
And by having easy to work with exercises to drop ‘demands’ or expectations for these wants to be met by others, we come into interactions with a far healthier, more accepting and positive mindset that promotes understanding and cooperation while enhancing one’s self-acceptance and confidence.
Conflicts are also far more easily dealt with as they are depersonalized. One becomes more assertive as well as receptive when they are not trying to control a situation, afraid for their job safety, or wanting confirmation or validation from others.
5. Powerfully set & achieve goals
With clarity and the right mind tools for self-regulation and being able to choose empowering beliefs, team members can easily set their own personal goals having removed barriers and mental & emotional habitual patterns while improving their sense of purpose and confidence.
They can then most powerfully & effectively align with the clear business mission and vision. Using mindset techniques for rehearsal of goal-achieving (such as hypnosis or visualisation techniques) not only promotes better performance but also enhances motivation, focus, and that sense of shared success leading to more job satisfaction.
6. Make better decisions
Empowered, clear-minded, and confident team members are able to assess, evaluate and take action, with better problem-solving and adapting to changing circumstances. Creating a growth mindset, individually as well as collaboratively, also means team members learn from mistakes or failed choices in order to progress and move forward rather than be held back by them.
7. Increase confidence, self-worth & self-trust
When an individual feels like their best self, they‘re able to contribute the most. A collective of confident, focused, resilient, and self-reliant yet open to learning individuals creates a confident, focused, adaptable business culture that promotes sustainable success.
Empowering individual team members may be especially relevant for ethnic minorities and women so should be a priority for businesses that value diversity & inclusion.
8. Have better work-life balance
Having practical tools one can easily use on their own, they can manage their time and stress, take control of their focus and attention, and keep healthy boundaries – preventing stress & burnout.
9. Enjoy their work!
All these factors not only enhance a team member’s ability to perform at their very best and contribute to the business’ shared goals in the best and most effective way, but they also keep personal contentment and job satisfaction high.
So whether you’re the CEO or an HR manager, you can create a high-performance team by genuinely caring about and providing for your team’s personal development and best interests.
This will benefit you and your business in the long term. They will think more clearly, will be able to motivate themselves and make any important changes to meet goals, act more decisively, and feel calm and in control despite business or personal challenges.
If you’d like more info on my award-winning 8-wk personal development & performance programs I can offer you and your team, feel free to reach out.
Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Maya!
Maya Zack, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Maya Zack is an award-winning personal development & mindset coach, peak performance specialist and hypnotherapist.
Based in the UK, she works internationally, mainly with women entrepreneurs as well as with businesses to create high-performance teams that aim to make a positive impact on people’s lives.
She helps business owners, leaders and teams free themselves from mental & emotional habits or blocks that prevent them from experiencing more success or slow it down. She has developed her unique signature 8-week step-by-step mindset makeover programs for aspiring as well as already established entrepreneurs that change thinking & feeling patterns on the deepest, subconscious level, reprogramming their minds for success so that new habits & behaviors quickly become automatic and effortless.
She believes it’s so important to our lives, joy and fulfillment to be doing what we love and daring to go for it regardless of the outcome. So many are held back by fear and she wants to change that. She believes success happens from the inside out alongside mindset mastery, and that as humans with imagination, we have the incredible capacity to become free, powerful creators of ourselves and our lives.
