When an owner tells me they have a “people problem”, I look at how the team is led. Someone’s underperforming. The culture feels off. Good people keep leaving. The cause almost always sits in the leadership.
Strong leadership is a set of conditions you put in place on purpose. A winning team almost always has six of them in place. When a team struggles, at least one has slipped.
Use the six keys as a scorecard. Rate your business out of ten on each. Your lowest score is almost certainly where the performance problem is coming from.
Leadership and management are two different jobs
Before the six keys, get one distinction clear. Most owners blur it.
Leadership is the person, the future and where you’re going. The vision, the culture, the why. Management is the process of getting there. The systems, the KPIs, the structure. Your senior leadership team sets the strategy. Your management team executes it.
A strong leader does both. Inspire people about a future they never get closer to and they stop believing you. Run a tight process with no purpose and everyone quietly becomes miserable.
Strong leadership reaches the “body and mind” of your people, their capability to do the job. It also reaches their “heart and spirit”, the part that makes them want to.
Hold that in mind. All six keys sit on top of it.
1. Strong leadership
Everything starts here. Be assertive, decisive and clear enough that people want to follow you. They follow because you’re visibly going somewhere and getting results.
One principle sits underneath the whole job. Your first responsibility as the owner is to look after your team. The team looks after your customers. The customers look after the business. And the business looks after you.
Most team problems trace back to a skipped first link. The owner focuses so hard on customers, or on the business itself, that the team gets neglected.
You can see it in any service business. How well the staff are trained, supported and cared for shows up straight away in the customer experience. Look after your people first and the rest of the chain follows.
2. A common goal
A team is a group of people pulling towards the same outcome. Ask your people what the business is trying to achieve this year and what winning looks like. If they can’t tell you in plain terms, you have a payroll.
The word that matters in “team” (together everyone achieves more) is achieves. A good team wins, however pleasant it is to be part of. Leadership is about results. Results need everyone aiming at the same, clearly defined target.
3. Rules of the game
Every winning team plays by an agreed set of rules. In business, those are your culture and your standards, written down and agreed. What behaviour is expected here? What won’t be tolerated? How do we treat each other and our customers?
Vague rules mean people invent their own. You get inconsistency, friction and standards that slowly slip. Clear rules, upheld every time, mean people know exactly what good looks like and can hold each other to it.
A quick exercise. List every behaviour that would wreck your business. Then define your culture as the opposite.
4. An action plan
Vision without a plan is a wish. Everyone on a high-performing team knows where the business is heading. They also know what they personally are doing to get it there, and by when.
This is where leadership hands over to management. The plan turns the common goal into actions, owners and deadlines. It keeps a motivated team pointed in one direction, and it lets you measure progress.
5. Support risk-taking
Punish people every time an initiative fails and they’ll stop bringing you initiatives. A winning team knows sensible risks get backed. Trying something and learning from it is part of the job.
This is one of the hardest keys for owners who built the business themselves. The instinct is to keep tight control. A team that’s afraid to act does exactly what it’s told and nothing more. You stay the bottleneck for every decision.
Back your people to take considered risks. That’s how you build a team that grows the business without you in the room.
6. 100% involvement and inclusion
The last key is full engagement. Everyone in, no passengers. People support what they help to create. Involve your team in shaping the goal, the rules and the plan, and ownership follows.
This is also where you find out whether the first five keys are real. A team that’s clearly led, aligned on the goal, clear on the rules, working a plan and trusted to act will engage almost automatically.
Disengagement is usually a symptom. Look for the key above that’s missing.
Score yourself on the six keys to a winning team
Run your business through the six. Strong leadership. A common goal. Rules of the game. An action plan. Support for risk-taking. 100% involvement. Score each out of ten, honestly.
Most owners find one or two scores sit well below the rest. That’s almost always where the underperformance, the friction or the turnover is coming from.
Fix the weakest key first. The “people problem” usually turns out to be a gap in the leadership system. And a system can be fixed.
Which of the six would you score lowest today?
Luke Kay is the owner of ActionCOACH Liverpool, a business and executive coach helping established owners build leadership teams that perform without them. To talk through where your team’s weakest key is, book a free 30-minute Business Discovery Call.
