Last month, I showed you the value of creating a high-performance team (HPT) of people at your firm and how such a team can make your entire practice more successful. With today's roiling financial markets and stressed-out clients, it's more important than ever to be able to depend on your team. To build and manage an effective team, it's crucial to understand the four key components of HPTs: team beginnings, work effectiveness, communication effectiveness and change management.

Team Beginnings

To develop an HPT, you must first focus on the basics of team building:

• Recruitment. On an HPT, you trust and value the feedback of your team members. So get your people to contribute to your hiring decisions. During the recruitment process, pay attention to skills, diversity and overall fit. Have relevant team members agree ahead of time on what job you are recruiting for, along with the minimum skills and the "stretch skills" you hope the recruit will grow into. Spending substantial time on recruiting leads to a much stronger team—and less turnover.
• On-boarding. The process of making a new hire a part of the team is critical. Ideally, you'll assign a mentor to help the new person learn the ropes and feel comfortable. Also make sure that you (or the new hire's direct supervisor) explain what role he or she will be playing.
• Getting to know teammates. Making a new team member feel valued from the beginning is an important first step that will motivate and create loyalty. For most teams, it pays to formalize the process. Having an introduction exercise at a team meeting is helpful. It's also good to have existing team members take their new teammate out to lunch in the first month.
• Vision and values. The idea is you will have communicated your vision, values and standards of excellence during the recruitment process. It also pays to cover these topics explicitly once again when the new team member comes on board.

Work Effectiveness

HPTs leverage the concept of work effectiveness, which puts egos aside and asks an all-important question: "Will this make us better in what we do and improve the level of service that we deliver to our clients profitably?" Your work effectiveness development efforts should focus on issues such as:

• Leadership and decision making. Enlightened team leaders know that they have weaknesses and that they can't know everything. They need to step aside and let others lead when that best serves the team's interests and effectiveness. For example, suppose you have strong opinions about a certain topic. It likely would be difficult for you to listen to team members' opinions and advice when this topic arises during a meeting, so it would make sense for you to let someone else run that part of the meeting. Here, the act of stepping aside shows leadership-and builds trust and confidence.
• Goal setting and commitment. HPTs regularly set goals and assess whether they have achieved previously set goals. Some goals should be easily achievable, allowing for early wins and confidence building. Others should be "stretch goals" that push your team members out of their comfort zones. All goals should be measurable and specific. For example, instead of aiming to "improve your marketing," try saying, "We will conduct 20 regular progress meetings with our clients each month. We will update each client on his or her investment and wealth management and then ask for referrals, so that those friends and business associates can have the same great wealth management experience in these challenging times."
• Work process. Work process includes every action required to complete a task from beginning to end—including who does it, what they do, how long it takes, interactions with other individuals or with information systems and the physical or information exchange that is needed. Systematically map out the work processes of individual team members and of the team as a whole. Include what needs to be done both for clients and internally. You can do this mapping on a whiteboard or with computerized flowcharts, but in any case, do it visually so that everyone can see what is at stake. A great place to start is to define the client experience you are delivering.

Effective Communication 

HPTs create a network of relationships between team members. This leads to superior performance and achievement, enjoyment, growth and overall team resiliency. Great HPT communication involves:

• Effective interpersonal skills. All team members need to recognize how they come across to other people and how they affect others. Even if you're not a team leader, it's important to develop the kind of awareness that lets you see things from the perspective of others.
• Listening. Reflective listening, in which you let someone know what you heard and that you understood them, is far superior to passive listening. By explaining to someone in your own words what you heard them say, you close the communication loop and ask good questions: For example, you might say to an unhappy client, "I'm hearing you say that our client relationship management techniques are not as effective as they could be. Tell me more about which areas aren't working, so we can address the critical issues." Listening is one of those skills that you can't practice on your own. You won't be sure you're a good listener unless you involve others in the process.
• Feedback. In giving feedback on an HPT, you're trying to improve the team or serve your teammate, rather than just criticizing for criticism's sake. Since giving and receiving feedback is often difficult, most teams need some type of structure.
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