Building Innovative High Performance Teams


Focussed and committed human resources represent your biggest expense and your greatest opportunity for achieving competitive advantage. Yet current research tells us that today’s worker is inefficient, disengaged, stressed out, feeling apathetic, distrustful, tuned-out and entitled. If these symptoms don’t characterize your workplace, you’re either lucky, complacent or simply not paying attention.

In today’s hyper-competitive, global marketplace, you cannot successfully achieve your business objectives without engaging your workers in the process of building high-performance teams. If ownership of the process of team building is not shared, you are destined to perish. You must begin by properly diagnosing the organization’s performance DNA and zeroing in on its areas of weakness. Then you need to address the critical issues with know-how, strategic intent and decisiveness. Because in today’s turbo-charged world, time is not on your side. 

To build and manage high performance teams, you need to know what actually makes a team great and why teamwork doesn’t get the same attention as strategy, finance, marketing or technology. You must know the #1 cause of low performance in today’s workplace, what sustains it and the primary reason why people leave their jobs (because retention is a lot less expensive than recruitment). Above all, you need to know the one critical ingredient needed to build high performance. 

Learn how to diagnose your team’s current effectiveness and readiness to embrace greater productivity, innovation and accountability, how to work smarter and accomplish more in less time, how to encourage genuine feedback, become stress and dispute free, how to motivate the unmotivated and “turn on” your workforce, especially the new generation of knowledge workers who will determine your future success. In short, discover how to become one of “the best” companies to work for.

In the time available in this one-day “crash course,” a number of practical processes and useful tools will be identified for rectifying pressing individual and team performance issues.

Topics include

  • The basic tenets for building high performance teams
  • Important questions to answer if you’re building a great team
  • The criteria and attributes that define (and stifle) an effective team
  • Diagnosing and measuring team dysfunctions and organizational health 
  • Intellectual capital: Myths, realities and the things you must do
  • The unique challenges that face the workplace in the 21st century
  • Principles and tactics of engagement: How to “turn on” workers
  • Building organizational trust: The fuel that drives innovative entities
  • The important art of giving and soliciting feedback (and follow-through)
  • Efficiency: Ideas and tools for accomplishing more in less time
  • The distributed workforce: Current status, benefits and caveats 
  • Becoming stress and dispute-free: Recommended process and tools
  • Motivating unmotivated and end-of-career employees
  • Stimulating workers of different generations and needs
  • Getting people to work smart rather than burn-out hard
  • Fostering innovation: Uncomfortable truths and new realities
  • Building innovative DNA: From audit through paradox to execution
  • Innovation strategy and tactics: The key principles
  • The critical role of managers in a high performance workplace
  • Finding and attracting “the right people” to manage
  • Becoming one of the “best companies to work for”
  • Getting further help and counsel when you need it.