The SME Employer’s Guide: How to Build an Amazing High-Performance Team

You’ve spent years building your business from the ground up, and now you’re finally ready to expand. However, you find you’re still stuck with running the day-to-day operations of your company. This situation is a problem many SME owners face. To successfully grow your business, you need to know how to build a high-performance team. 

This “A-team” should be composed of high-performing individuals you can trust to take care of operations. It will free you up to focus on other tasks, such as planning for business development.

To form a high-performing team, you need to hire the right people. SMEs often struggle with competing against multinational companies for top talent. However, the right strategies can leverage your SME’s strengths to attract the right people.

The next challenge in recruitment is identifying top performers within your candidate pool. Top performers don’t just have excellent technical skills. They also possess soft skills such as stress management, active learning, and confident decision-making. 

During the hiring process, you can measure this by administering cognitive ability tests and asking behavioural questions. The former shows candidates’ ability to solve problems and learn quickly, while the latter shows how they deal with work situations. 

Ask them for more than one example of how they responded to a situation or demonstrated a particular skill. Candidates who’ve prepared rote answers will most likely have only one example, while high-performing people will have put their soft skills to use multiple times. 

Creating an ‘A’ Team doesn’t stop with hiring highly talented individuals. You must bring these individuals together into a team. Unless you’re a one-man corporation, collaboration is essential to success. Here are the traits of a high-performing team:

They share a clear goal. In a high-performing team, everyone focuses on one goal, and they’re committed to achieving it. Each team member understands their role in fulfilling the company’s mission, and all of their efforts align towards meeting this single objective. 

They have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. When each individual understands what’s expected of them, they can focus on delivering results. Everyone knows who does what and when, and this helps prevent conflict. When each team member understands how their tasks fit into the big picture, this gives them a sense of purpose as well. 

They’re ambitious. High-performing teams tend to set higher goals than average teams. It is because their members are competitive and have a can-do attitude. 

They have clear communication.  The best teams have an established policy on communication channels to use in a given situation. They know when to email, send a private message, or call a meeting. This system enables the whole team to work more efficiently. They also regularly share information and update each other on their progress so everyone is on the same page. 

They trust one another.  Trust is the foundation of good teamwork. Everyone believes each role will be fulfilled properly and everyone treats each other with respect and gives credit where it’s due. This kind of team celebrates each other’s achievements instead of engaging in petty rivalries. 

They are diverse. The most innovative teams comprise people from various backgrounds. Colleagues from different walks of life can contribute unique perspectives. This characteristic helps the team generate fresh ideas and gain insights about a broader customer base. For example, if your company is planning to implement a work-from-home setup, the perspective of a mother could be beneficial in coming up with a flexible, family-friendly scheme. As much as possible try to integrate workers from diverse races or ethnicities, ages, gender identities, sexual orientations, religious and spiritual beliefs, and physical capabilities in your team.

They’re constantly learning. Each member of the team constantly seeks training and development. They’re eager to learn about industry trends and best practices. They’re also unafraid to make mistakes and treat them as learning experiences rather than failures. 

Evaluate your existing team. Do you have the right people in the right positions? Or would some of your employees be better suited to other roles? Do your managers have the leadership skills needed to lead a team successfully? If you have employees who consistently underperform or behave poorly, it may be time to help them find areas where they can truly shine. You might also want to try various training programmes, such as mentorships or workshops. After all, underperformers can negatively impact team morale. 

Get your top performers involved in hiring. Great performers aren’t threatened by highly qualified and talented candidates. Instead, they recognise that these candidates can help them meet company goals. On the other hand, average performers may feel threatened by top candidates and avoid hiring anyone who could outshine them. 

Another hiring tip is to identify your top performers and list the traits that make them your best employees. Take these attributes and list them in your job ads. 

Establish a simple and clear goal. Ensure everyone is united toward the same goal, and don’t be afraid to remind them of it until you sound like a broken record. You must make your colleagues internalise the objective so they can work toward it and make the right decisions. 

The trouble comes when the company owner sets multiple goals and the team isn’t sure what to prioritise. According to The New York Times, the solution is to line up your priorities “as carefully as the trajectory of a rocket launch,” determine the success metrics, and measure them via a “shared scoreboard.” When everyone measures success by the same standards, they’ll spend less time arguing about the best course of action and whether their efforts resulted in the desired outcome. 

Create a team charter. When you lay down ground rules for how the team should work together, you create better synergy and reduce conflict. In an interview with McKinsey, Daniel Coyle, author of The Culture Playbook: 60 Highlight Effective Actions to Help Your Group Succeed, recommends asking these questions while drafting your team charter: “What tempo are we going to work at? How are we going to make decisions? How are we going to interact? How are we going to know that we’re making progress? Who are we going to for feedback?”

Share accountability.  Good team members take responsibility for their mistakes and the best way to instil this in your team is to lead by example. Another vital aspect of accountability is being willing to address problems and misunderstandings promptly. It can be challenging in our conflict-averse culture, but you must have these conversations instead of sweeping them under the rug and waiting until performance evaluation time. 

Empower team members to make decisions.  When members of your team own their responsibilities, they become more independent. In turn, you trust them to do their jobs well. Promoting autonomy enables your team to work efficiently by empowering managers to make decisions instead of requiring your approval at every stage. After all, waiting for approval from a busy executive can be a big source of delays. Besides, nothing is more demotivating than a micromanager. 

Invest in training and development. Set your team up for success by providing the resources they need to upskill and sending them to industry conferences. Coyle also recommends “flash mentoring.” As you work on a project, allow employees with a desire to learn to shadow you and allot time to answer their questions. 

For example, let them sit in a meeting and set aside five minutes for them to ask you questions like “why did you present that data at the start?” In this way, you’re getting things done and training people simultaneously. 

Implement project process tracking.  Many teams use SCRUM boards since they allow everyone to track the whole team’s progress on a project and remain on the same page. They also make it easy to spot problems and address them early. 

First, SCRUM boards entail listing all the tasks the team must accomplish to complete the project. The SCRUM master then assigns them to the individuals responsible. This is called your teams “backlog.” You then break your backlog into “sprints” – a.k.a. the tasks that need to be accomplished within the week. The SCRUM system is a popular tool for projects that require agility. If you see any standouts in your team, encourage them to get a SCRUM Master Certification (CSM) to further learn the ideologies of this method.

Here’s an example of a SCRUM setup: on Mondays, hold a meeting to discuss the tasks included in this week’s sprint. It allows people to pitch ideas and bring up any obstacles to completing tasks. Then on Fridays, meet again to review your progress. 

Create your team’s culture.  It’s best to be proactive about establishing a team culture. If teams are left on their own, they can develop rivalries and office politics can take hold. It’s better to define organisational values and make them clear when onboarding new hires. 

Creating an “A” team isn’t just about hiring high-performing individuals. You need to set them up for success by giving them a clear goal, investing in their development, and creating a culture whose values are conducive to excellent teamwork. A well-oiled machine is, after all, always more than the sum of its parts.

Now that you know how to build a high-performance team, start by hiring top talent through Talent Search. When you have a team who is on board with sharing your vision and goals, you’ll have a better chance of sustaining – and growing – your SME.