How Success Enabling Skills Create High Performance Teams

According to the Governance Report at Brookings titled “How Millennials Could Upend Wall Street and Corporate America,” millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025. The growing millennial presence in the workforce challenges traditional practices, changing the landscape of how we work and what creates high-performing teams and organizations.

With the evolving workforce comes major changes in workplace priorities and how teams work together. The most notable change is the growing importance of collaborative teamwork. Millennials are motivated by values-driven, collaborative work that makes them feel as though they are a stakeholder in the success of both their team and organization. Additionally, studies show 88% of employees prefer collaboration over competition and that collaboration can improve communication by up to 50%!

Unfortunately, due to different perspectives, experiences, and workstyles of today’s multi-generational workforce, effective teamwork is nuanced and challenging. Oftentimes, teams struggle to adequately balance team members’ technical roles and people skills, leading to lower productivity due to increased conflict.

Here are five Success Enabling SkillsTM that are key to building high-performing employees, leaders, and teams within your organization.

  1. Developing empathy and insight into your co-worker’s behavior. Raising your awareness of your colleagues’ behavior helps you accurately interpret and respond to their actions. It also improves relationships by enhancing your ability to recognize when relationships might be strained and respond appropriately.
  2. Cultivating and maintaining open relationships. By establishing and maintaining open lines of communications with your cohorts, you build the foundation for trusting, credible relationships. It creates a team of individuals looking to build up each other’s’ careers and reputations.
  3. Emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is largely defined as one’s ability to keep their emotions in check and deal calmly and effectively with stressful situations. Prioritizing the development of your employees’ emotional intelligence will create confident, collaborative and motivated employees.
  4. Maintaining a positive attitude. Approaching your work with optimism and excitement displays a sense of confidence and positivity about your company and your work. It demonstrates you are committed to and take pride in your work and as a result, builds the morale of your team members.
  5. Entertaining new ideas. Being open to considering new ways of doing things, and actively seeking out and considering the merits of alternative approaches, creates a culture of creativity and flexibility – two foundational characteristics to innovative and collaborative teams.

Therefore, the key to building high-performance teams is to create an organizational culture in which these team qualities can flourish. This is best accomplished through the professional development of your team leaders and members in the above Success Enabling Skills. These Success Enabling Skills are foundational to high-performing teams. But where can you find the training necessary to develop these Success Enabling Skills?

The Engineering Leadership Institute has created the Performance Certification SystemTM tailored towards exactly that – the development of the essential Success Enabling Skills needed for employees, teams, and leaders to make the leap to high-performers. Through affordable, easily accessible online trainings and guided skill development with our just released Team Leader Guide, organizations can build trusting, engaged, high-performing teams, and reap the benefits of increased productivity, lower turnover, and higher operational profits.