Execute: The Foundation of Building a High-Performing Leadership Team

We start with Execute because most of my clients at their level (with already existing leadership teams) will likely already have some form of vision, mission, and strategic plan in mind. However, the biggest problem is putting it into action daily and from week to week. Vision without execution is just dreaming. A high-performing team a) knows their roles and responsibilities clearly, b) sets challenging and clear goals, and c) has a culture of built-in accountability and feedback. A well-functioning team is a vital part of achieving these goals and ensuring success.

Define Roles and Responsibilities Clearly

Your leadership team members must be clear on what they do (and what everyone else does). There are many reasons for this, from reducing redundancy to increased communication. Still, most importantly, when a role is clearly defined, it allows for ownership of the role. Teams are made more effective when responsibilities are clearly defined, enabling individuals to take full ownership of their tasks.

Why Psychological Ownership Matters:

There are a few outcomes that research pays special attention to because of all the good they do for a company. One of those is called organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), a fancy way to say that someone who performs better is likely to go above and beyond their job duties, such as helping other team members and taking the initiative. And that is exactly what psychological ownership does. On top of increasing the OCB, it also contributes to motivation, innovation, and the willingness to share knowledge with other team members for their joint success (Chen, Lien, Lo, & Tsay, 2021; Dai, Altinay, Zhuang, & Chen, 2021). 

To cultivate psychological ownership, it is essential to define roles and responsibilities. Here’s how you can achieve this:

Responsibilities Clearly Defined for High Performance:

• Develop Clear Job Descriptions: Outline specific duties and expectations for each role. This helps team members understand exactly what is expected of them and how their work contributes to the organization's goals.
  
  
• Assign Key Accountabilities: Limit key responsibilities to no more than six per person to avoid overload and ensure focus. Each member should know exactly what they are responsible for and how their success will be measured. The team knows exactly what is expected of them and how they contribute to the overall goals.
  
  
• Establish Ownership: Empower team members to take full ownership of their tasks. This means giving them the freedom to make decisions and the responsibility to deliver results.
  
  

By defining roles and responsibilities clearly and fostering psychological ownership, you can transform your leadership team into a high-performing unit. When team members feel a sense of ownership over their roles, they are more motivated, innovative, and committed to achieving the organization’s goals.

Set Clear Objectives and Goals

Nowadays, when I am scrolling through LinkedIn, I see so many hate posts on SMART goals, which I understand because it’s a catchy way to get someone’s attention by throwing stones at something popularly held. There’s a good reason why SMART goals are so big, though, because they work! However, what most people are missing is that SMART goals are only one of five elements of what makes goals work. Take it from someone who’s extensively studied motivation: goal-setting theory is THE motivational theory, with countless studies showing how powerful it is to have clear and challenging goals. I understand there are countless motivational theories, but none come close to how well-studied and understood goal-setting theory is. It has existed for 50 years and is still going strong in the field of psychology (Locke and Latham). 

Here are the five elements of a goal and how you use them in a high-performing team:

• Clear Goals: This is where SMART goals come in. Every year, every quarter, every week, set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals. “Becoming the best marketing firm” and “25% market share in Toronto by 2030” are worlds apart regarding effectiveness. One is vague, while the other energizes and pushes the team to work backward and strategize how to get there.
  
  
• Challenging Goals: Studies repeatedly show that groups perform higher if given a challenging goal than an easy one. This is likely because challenging goals force your group to focus on making it happen. Easy goals do not capture the imagination, but challenging goals activate people to make the impossible possible, especially in a great team setting. Teams striving for challenging goals are likelier to push past barriers and achieve extraordinary results.
  
  
• Commitment to Goals: This may sound obvious, but if there is little commitment to a goal, it won’t happen. However, many validated ways exist to increase someone’s commitment to a goal. Social commitment, for example, when everyone knows my goal, and I am accountable to the group for achieving it, will likely increase my commitment and strengthen our high-performance team.
  
  
• Feedback: It’s hard to accomplish goals if you do not know if you are accomplishing them. This is where having a feedback mechanism helps people to continue toward accomplishing their goals. Remember when they were fundraising in elementary school and putting a thermometer to show how close they reached their donation goals? That is a feedback mechanism that pushes students to go the extra mile.
  
  
• Complexity of Goals: In a recent re-examination of goal-setting theory, researchers started differentiating between performance and learning goals. In other words, if a goal is too complex, your team becomes paralyzed, and instead of performing, switch from a challenging performance goal to a challenging learning goal. Let’s say some young entrepreneurs decided to have a full-fledged bank in a few years. This is a challenging and specific goal, but the learning curve is so huge that they may not know where to begin. In this case, they may set another challenging goal, to consult with a certain number of subject matter experts or read a certain number of books within a certain set time.
  
  

So the haters are part right. If you and your team have ever rolled your eyes when told to do another SMART goal, consider that you are only getting part of it. Still, when you purposefully add all five elements of goal-setting theory, you will start to see the team coming together with purpose and passion, and their performance is high, which is what you need when leading a team.

When Teams Execute With Accountability

Think of a Dragon Boat. The drummer is drumming a beat. Every member is rowing, giving their all, and following the rhythm. They are all heading in the right direction and moving as if the team is one. This is what it is like to have an executing team. A lot of studies in the past have shown that employee engagement leads to job performance. However, recent studies also theorize that job performance can lead to engagement (Kim et al., 2019).  This highlights again why we start with Execute in the E5 framework, but next up is Engage.

Implementing the E5 Leadership Framework: Steps to Get Started

This was called a definitive guide, and it can be overwhelming. So, how do you make E5 a reality for your team? I have a diagnostic that has 25 items, 5 for each of the E foundations. I suggest getting an overall score from the diagnostic and seeing how you scored in each of the foundations. When I work with my clients, we start at the beginning and work our way down until each section can be scored at least 80% or above. So the first step is to diagnose, and you can do that right here.

Need help implementing this framework into your team? We have a program just for that, called the Empowered Leadership Intensive.

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