Great leaders are expected to build high-performing teams, yet many receive little formal preparation for the job. What behaviours actually make the difference; and can their impact be measured?

When Steven Mason entered a leadership development program, he wasn’t convinced he needed it.

Mason, Insurance Sales and Service Manager at Beyond Bank Australia, had been leading his team for 19 years. He had met budgets, maintained low turnover and built an experienced team. He had also completed plenty of leadership and coaching courses.

“I thought I could add value by helping [younger leaders] and guiding them, but I didn’t think that I needed another program myself,” he says.

It didn’t take long for him to change his mind.

By the second session, Mason had identified something surprisingly fundamental about the way he coached his people: “I do way too much talking.”

His experience illustrates a bigger challenge facing organisations trying to create high-performing teams. Leadership matters enormously, but simply becoming an experienced manager doesn’t necessarily provide all the skills needed to get the best from people.

Leaders set the ceiling

Sara Elmstrom, Chief Executive Officer, CXO2, says leaders play a significant role in determining both employee experience and performance.

Yet more than half of new people leaders enter their roles without formal leadership training.

Research presented by Elmstrom also found a disconnect between what leaders believe matters and where their time goes.

In a survey of more than 250 Australian operations, coaching and development ranked first among the most important elements of a leader’s role, followed by leadership itself and checking in with team members.

Around a third, however, said they didn’t spend enough time on coaching and development or checking in with their teams.

Instead, meetings, personnel issues, escalations and complaints can consume leaders’ time.

Elmstrom says the challenge is significant because leadership development isn’t simply a “nice to have”. Better leadership can influence engagement, employee retention, customer experience, productivity and ultimately commercial performance.

The six ingredients of high performance

So what should leaders actually be doing?

Maria Stavrinides, Practice Lead – High Performance Culture, CXO2, identifies six interconnected ingredients for building high-performing teams: connection, clarity, communication, capability, constructive leadership and care.

Connection starts with the bigger picture. Employees need to understand the organisation’s purpose, values, vision and expected behaviours and how their work contributes to them.

Clarity takes that down to the individual level.

People need to understand their role and accountabilities, their goals, how they will achieve them and how their performance will be measured.

Communication then connects the two.

Stavrinides says leaders need to provide the “broad brush stroke” of communication to the entire team while also providing the “individual brush strokes” that explain what those priorities mean for each person in their particular role.

Capability is equally important. Employees need the technical knowledge and skills to perform, while leaders need the capability to bring out those skills through coaching, feedback and development.

Constructive leadership is about “showing the way” and setting the standards that enable and engage people.

Finally comes care.

“It’s the human touch,” Stefanidis says. “It’s making sure that we’re creating safe environments for people to bring their whole selves to work.”

She argues that high-trust environments are also high-performing environments.

From telling to asking

For leaders, much of this comes to life in everyday interactions.

Stavrinides says the quality of working relationships is fundamental to performance, and some of the most important interactions leaders have involve feedback and coaching.

One practical feedback technique she recommends is the Situation-Behaviour-Impact, or SBI, model.

Rather than telling someone they handled something badly, for example, the leader identifies the particular situation, describes the observable behaviour without inserting assumptions, and explains its impact on the customer, team or business.

That creates a foundation for a coaching conversation about what happened and what could be done differently.

Positive feedback should be just as specific. Telling someone a presentation was “great” gives them little information about what they should repeat next time. Identifying the behaviour that made it effective does.

Stavrinides also uses the GROW coaching model, which guides people through their goal, current reality, possible options and the action they will take next.

The critical difference is that the leader doesn’t immediately provide the solution.

“The idea is to really draw this out of the person through open curious questions,” she says.

When experience isn’t enough

Understanding that experience isn’t always what matters transformed Mason’s approach.

He realised his team had become too reliant on him to make decisions or identify what they should do differently.

“I preferred [to] advise them or told them what I liked and what I didn’t like,” he says.

Instead, he started asking questions.

“What do you think a better outcome could look like?”

“What have you tried to do differently?”

“What do you think is holding you back?”

“What does success look like?”

Mason even carries the questions into his coaching sessions in an old manila folder he jokingly calls his “little Bible”.

The important change, however, isn’t the folder. It’s who does the thinking.

Previously, Mason estimates he could spend around 80% of a conversation explaining what someone had done and what he wanted them to do differently.

“It was all me, me, me talking,” he says.

The structured questions gave him a way to encourage employees to develop their own ideas and solutions.

“I know it’s simple, but it’s the tools and the questions which I didn’t have myself,” he says. “I knew what I wanted to achieve, but I didn’t have the tools and the structure.”

Can better leadership be measured?

The change wasn’t limited to Mason’s perception of his leadership.

An employee engagement survey had placed his team around 17% below the Beyond Bank benchmark following a period involving several issues and changes within the team.

Mason wanted to turn that around.

He invited employees to provide anonymous feedback about areas producing low survey results, creating what he describes as a safe space. The team then worked through the issues together, using the principles he had learned to understand the situation and its impact and ask employees what they thought could make a difference.

By the following March, Mason says his team’s engagement result had moved from 17% below the bank benchmark to 9% above it. The next result was another percentage point higher, while the most recent survey produced a similar result.

More importantly, Mason says his team began opening up.

His experience demonstrates one of the paradoxes of high-performing leadership: leaders don’t necessarily get better results by providing more answers.

Leadership sets the direction, expectations and environment. But developing capable, confident employees can also require knowing when to stop talking, ask the right question; and give someone else the space to answer it.

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