4.
4 Team culture, everyone is a fit
We look at one very important factor when we interview
someone to be a potential team member: will they fit our
culture? It does not matter how experienced they are or
how great they are at the skills needed. If they are not a
natural fit in our culture, they will never work out. Period.
5 Every team member has skin in the game
5.
If you want your team members to be consistent high
performers, they will need to have skin in the game. A
compensation plan that fairly rewards team members for
performance will always weed out the low performers and
encourage high performers to step up their game.
6 Support and tools
6.
Every high performing team has the full support of their
leadership. This support means that they provide the team
with every piece of equipment necessary to accomplish
the mission. If you expect 100% from your team, you must
provide 100% of what the team needs in order to succeed.
7 Air tight processes and systems
7.
Processes and systems are what will allow your team to
consistently perform at a very high level. The better the
processes and systems, the better the results you will
receive. Processes minimizes the need for judgement
calls and systems deliver accurate performance results.
8 Measure team performance
8.
High performance teams want to know if they are winning
or losing. Great teams will make adjustments if they are
losing so that they will win. But if you wait until the end
of the period to give the score, it will be too late to make
adjustments. Give your team real time scores whether
measuring sales dollars, product volume or billable hours.
9.
9 Diversity in personalities and skills
If you only have team members that are just like you, you
will only get results that you can produce. Every high
performance team has diversity of personalities and skill sets.
Imagine that a team looks like a bicycle wheel and your skill
and personality type is a single spoke. The ride will be bad
with only one spoke. Fill the wheel with as many different
spokes as you can for a much faster and smoother ride.
breakthrough ideas are created that help the entire company
advance. However, in an environment where an individual is
punished for taking a risk and failing, you will send a message
to the entire team to stop thinking about doing new things
that may spark improvement. All great innovators took risks
that most other people couldn’t tolerate.
12 Losing is learning
Henry Ford said, “failure is an opportunity to begin again
more intelligently”. In the real world, you cannot always win
and it sucks to lose. Losing is always a teachable moment for
the team. It is a time of corrective action, not assigning blame.
Perform an autopsy as to what went wrong so that a process
can be created to prevent it from happening again.
Put it all together
Now that all of us trailer dealers are in peak season, we
should have a very good idea if our team is performing as well
as they should be. One thing that all high performers know is
that self-improvement is never ending. One of the questions
that I asked several of the racing team members was this:
what does it take to win a race? Almost every person that
I asked gave me the same answer: “stop thinking about
winning…and only focus on being better tomorrow than we
were today. The win will come when we are at our best as a
team”.
10 Be a coach, not a manger
Managers manage things like time, inventory and money.
Coaches lead and teach people. It’s your people that make
the difference between winning and losing. You should be
spending at least 80% of your time coaching your people.
Your people need training and mentoring so that they can be
100% effective. The other great thing about coaching your
people is that it is highly gratifying when they succeed. That’s
a win-win!
11 Allow mistakes
Encourage your team to try new things. That is how
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NATDA Magazine www.natda.org