As a business owner, it's incredibly frustrating when your leadership team doesn’t live up to your expectations, leaving you to put out fires. That’s why you want to lead a high-performing team. Research suggests that high-performing teams have 25% higher productivity (Chamakiotis, Pantelli, & Davison) and generate 30% more innovation (Castellano et al.). Who wouldn’t want that?



I was once in charge of building a team to run a large campaign. I recruited the team, assigned roles, pulled together resources, and gave them autonomy. Just as the campaign was about to launch, I received a call about a family emergency. What happened next solidified my belief in the power of high-performing teams: I could trust my team to complete the campaign even in my absence. I want to create this kind of confidence and peace of mind for leaders.

But is leading a high-performance team repeatable? I believe you can lead a high-performing team, and that’s what this guide is all about. Drawing from my experience in leadership, coaching other leaders, and my research in leadership and motivation—including earning a Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology—I’ve identified key ingredients that can elevate your team to high performance. My superpower is turning high-level theories into diagnosable, understandable, and actionable strategies for your team. These ingredients are laid out in a framework that I call the E5, which I hope you can use and share with others!

Building a high-performing team doesn’t happen by chance and is much easier when you have a structured approach. That’s where the E5 framework comes in. It is unique because it holistically integrates psychological principles and practical strategies. Here are the five components: Execute, Engage, Envision, Explore, and Empower. Each foundation is one of the characteristics of a high-performing team, meaning your leadership team will become a team you can finally trust to take on your vision and bring it further than yourself.

Why the E5 Framework Works



The E5 framework is grounded in my extensive research in organizational psychology and practical experience in leadership coaching. It’s designed to create a self-sustaining team by focusing on leadership's psychological and operational aspects. Here’s what sets it apart:

1. Holistic Integration: E5 combines high-level theories with actionable strategies, making it versatile and applicable across different industries and company sizes.
   
   
2. Sequential Synergy: Each component builds on the previous one, creating a cascading effect that is essential to the success of overall team performance.
   
   
3. Evidence-based Underpinnings: The framework incorporates elements of positive psychology, goal-setting theory, appreciative inquiry, and servant leadership, meaning we work not with hearsay but principles and actions that make observable differences.
   
   
4. Diagnosable and actionable: The framework includes a diagnosis that quickly tells you what you need to do next to lead high-performing teams.



The Foundations of E5: Characteristics of a High-Performing Team

Execute: The Foundation of High-Performance 



Execute lays the groundwork for a high-performing team. It’s about setting clear, challenging goals and ensuring each team member has defined roles and responsibilities. Regular check-ins are the key to maintaining focus and achieving these goals. Team performance depends on having these elements in place.

Engage: Keeping the Team Motivated and Committed

Engage is about motivating and connecting your team members. This involves personalized engagement strategies, regular one-on-one conversations, and recognizing each individual's contributions. A highly engaged team is more productive and committed to the company’s success. As a good leader, it’s crucial to get to know your team members on a personal and professional level, ensuring they feel valued and motivated.

Envision: Creating a Compelling Strategic Direction



 A clear and compelling vision unites the team and provides direction. Using techniques like Appreciative Inquiry, leaders can build consensus around the company’s mission, values, and strategic goals, ensuring everyone is aligned and moving in the same direction. This helps to create a culture that fosters collaboration and innovation across the team.

Explore: Fostering Innovation and Sustainability



Explore emphasizes the importance of innovation and sustainable practices. By identifying high and low seasons, teams can manage workloads effectively and continuously seek new opportunities for growth and improvement. Teams that prioritize innovation through formal processes tend to see higher employee engagement and team growth.

Empower: Building High Autonomy and Accountable Teams



Empower ties everything together, focusing on giving team members the autonomy and responsibility to take ownership of their roles. This includes developing clear processes and a leadership pipeline to ensure long-term success and independence.

Why the Components are in This Order

The order of the E5 foundations is intentional and strategic:

1. Execute: Execution is the foundation. None of the other components can be effectively implemented without the ability to set and achieve goals.
   
   
2. Engage: Engagement ensures that the team remains motivated and committed to achieving goals once goals are set.
   
   
3. Envision: A clear vision aligns the everyone's efforts and keeps everyone focused on the long-term objectives.
   
   
4. Explore: Innovation and sustainability ensure the team remains dynamic and adaptable, continuously improving.
   
   
5. Empower: Finally, empowerment solidifies the team’s autonomy, enabling them to operate independently and sustain high performance.
   
   

Focusing on these five foundations—Execute, Engage, Envision, Explore, and Empower—can transform your leadership team into a high-performing unit capable of driving your business to new heights.

In the following sections, we will examine each foundation of the E5 framework, providing practical tips and strategies you can implement immediately.

1. Execute: The Foundation of Building a High-Performing 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.

2. Engage: The Heartbeat of a High Performing Team

If executing is the foundation for a high-performing team, engagement is the heartbeat that keeps the group alive. Engagement is the energy that individuals bring to the team. A disengaged individual will show up, do what needs to be done, and be gone. A highly engaged individual will be excited about where the company is going and will give above and beyond what is asked of them when contributing to the team. Studies find that engaged individuals also have more innovative and creative behaviors, perform better, and are better equipped to handle high demands and burnout (Kwon & Kim, 2020). In other words, this is a crucial aspect of being a leader, the ability to keep members of the team engaged in the work.

In our previous foundation, we discussed how execution as is pushes engagement. This section discusses the “soft” skills and relational aspects of leadership that develop engagement.

Here are the actions you can do to increase your team’s engagement:

1. understand the individuals,
2. personalize their roles,
3. have meaningful conversations, 4) praise, 5) foster relationships, and 6) allow for professional development. Let’s dive into it.

Get to Know Your Team Members on an Individual Level

I got this idea when I was under the tutelage of the Center for Executive Coaches. Andrew Neithlich teaches that the big mistake of most engagement initiatives is that leaders think of “them” instead of the individuals. For example, giving everyone a gym membership is nice but will not likely increase engagement levels.

Instead, by simply creating a plan for how to engage each team member specifically, it is found that these teams see a 3x greater increase in engagement than other teams who have not implemented this idea (Dai et al., 2021). In my coaching program, our leaders draft a plan for each leadership team member, collaborating with the individuals on how they can best be engaged at a personal level. 

One of my favorite ways to do this is to assess the individuals with powerful personality assessments as a document that can aid the conversation around how to engage the individual. There are many good ones: Myer’s Briggs, Birkman, etc. I prefer the Talent Insights developed by TTISI, which combines someone’s behavioral profile (DISC) and what motivates them (12 Drivers).

By doing this, you can co-create a role that best fits someone’s behavioral profile and determine what incentives would best fit their motivators.

Conduct Meaningful Weekly One-On-One Conversations

There are many validated Employee Engagement surveys out there, but my favorite is Gallup’s Q12 survey because it does not measure someone’s attitude but the leadership behavior that causes engagement. One of the best ways to boost engagement is to get to know your team personally and understand their motivations and challenges. T

his means it acts as a prescriptive list of things known to increase engagement. They found that the number one action that increases a worker's engagement is when a leader has a weekly 15-minute meaningful conversation with them. What makes a conversation meaningful?

If we look back at the format of our weekly meetings, you can use any of those: celebrating wins, dreaming ahead, asking about goals, and ensuring clear expectations are set. You can get personal and ask how they are doing outside of work. Go deeper by asking what someone is feeling about any of the above.

Here’s my framework for how to have a deeper conversation with anyone. Imagine a concentric circle with three circles. The outer edge is “what,” the middle circle is “feel,” and the inner circle is “mean.” If you ever want to have a meaningful conversation with someone, simply pivot from what you’re talking about and add, “And how do you feel about that?” as you work through feelings, you can pivot one more time by asking, “what does that mean to you?” 

The Power of Praise and Positive Feedback

While we are on the topic of weekly meaningful conversations, why not use this as an opportunity for positive feedback? There are so many benefits to giving regular and frequent positive feedback:



1. While we are on the topic of weekly meaningful conversations, why not use this as an opportunity for positive feedback? There are so many benefits to giving regular and frequent positive feedback: Teams that receive regular positive feedback are more motivated, productive team, and committed to their goals (Waltz et al., 2020).
   
   
2. Positive feedback increases the individual’s sense of competence and relatedness, which maintains high levels of engagement and helps build trust (Wang et al., 2018).
   
   
3. Positive feedback increases the individual sense of ownership and responsibility for their work, leading to engagement and willingness to go above and beyond their job duties, which is a hallmark of a high-performance team and helps the team thrive. Regular praise also helps motivate team members to maintain their productivity and commitment.
   
   
4. Not only does it increase or maintain engagement, but it also creates resilience during hard times and helps reduce burnout and disengagement (Chanana, 2020).
   
   

Your individualized engagement plan should include what kind of praise would most help the individual. For example, many millennials value a high frequency of meaningful feedback, which leads to higher engagement (Waltz et al., 2020). Some might like public praise; others prefer thank-you notes, so ask when co-creating the engagement plan.

Provide Opportunities for Professional Development

So many times in my entrepreneurial journey, I find that my motivation stalls because my work has stagnated. I read a book or attend a workshop, and suddenly, my mind is racing. There’s a new excitement about how I can apply some of the ideas I just learned. There are many good reasons why you need to make professional development a priority for keeping your team motivated and performing:

1. You convey that you value your team members' contributions and are committed to their future (Kwon et al., 2024).
   
   
2. Your team can help identify learning opportunities that align with their roles and goals.
3. It increases their sense of purpose and engagement (Mone et al., 2011).
   
   
4. It makes people enjoy their jobs better and makes them feel more competent (Morethe et al., 2020)
   
   
5. Helps the team become more collaborative and innovative (Luthra et al., 2024).
   
   

This ties into our previous discussion about goal-setting, too. Remember, one element is to switch the goals to learning goals if they are too complex. In other words, at least annually, review with your members what professional development would excite them, benefit them, and help them do their roles better.

When I worked at a nonprofit, the organization's philosophy was based on the servant leadership model: serve the individual’s needs above those of the organization. One of the ways they signaled this was by providing development opportunities that benefit us even if we were to leave. For example, they provide opportunities for higher education degrees. The risk is that people can take advantage, be highly skilled, and move on. The benefit is people are more committed to the organization, feel a sense of loyalty, and have fresh innovation and skills to bring to the table. How far are you willing to go to show your commitment to the individuals to build a killer, high-performing team?



When you have execution and engagement, you now have things getting done and the individual's drive, which is essential for a good leader. These are the foundational steps for building high-performance teams. In the next portion, we discuss how to steer the whole boat in the right direction.

3. Envision: Creating a Compelling Strategic Direction

Now, we come to our third foundation, Envision. Many companies have some form of a mission or vision statement, but how effective are they? Research shows that a well-defined AND well-integrated vision can see up to a 20% increase in employee engagement and a 30% boost in overall performance, particularly when teams need clear direction (Slåtten et al., 2021). Yet, Gallup surveys find that around 60% of employees cannot even tell you what their company is about or what they are unique from their competitors. People want to know what sets your company apart and how their work contributes to that vision. This is a huge gap and opportunity for you. In other words, this is not a nice to have but a necessary part of leading a high-performing team.

Using Appreciative Inquiry in Strategic Planning

One of my favorite findings in my studies on organizational change is the concept of appreciative inquiry, which focuses less on fixing problems and instead focuses on possibilities. It is a proven method that encourages positivity, engagement, and innovation (He & Oxendine, 2019). Appreciative inquiry means pulling as many stakeholders as possible together using positive questions to get a sense of the company's strengths, aspirations, opportunities, and results you are looking for.

The process pulls out incredible insight and creates buy-in and understanding from everyone in your company to get and own the vision. When I explain appreciative inquiry to others, I usually say, tongue in cheek, “Why I prefer SAOR instead of SWOT.” Let’s explore the SAOR phases and how they create a one-page mission, values, vision statement, and strategic plan. In the following paragraphs, imagine you pulled together your leadership team for a weekend-long strategic planning session. 

Strength: Defining Your Mission and Values

One of the first questions I like to explore with a team is: What are we the best at in the world? Any iterations of this question are intended to draw out the company's unique strength. Is the company best because it can produce better quality? Is it best because of its scale? Is it best because of how intimately it knows its customers? Your team would want to have a record of these conversations so you can draw out themes and come to a consensus on your top three strengths, which together make a company unique.

For example, in my therapy clinic, these are some of the identified strengths: 1) we are located centrally in our city, 2) it is easy to book an appointment, and 3) our therapists are hand-picked because they exude warmth and confidence. Together, they form our mission statement: we seamlessly connect locals to therapists they can trust.

Mission statements, once established, usually stay mostly the same, but it is worth doing this exercise every few years to see if it is still the true north your company is bought into! The mission statement is important because it tells your brand story and focuses all your actions as a team. Every priority ought to return to doing this mission better; otherwise, it is just another shiny object that needs to be cut out.

The second question is different and provides us with our values. It asks: “Who are our best workers who exemplify what we’re looking for in this company?” “What characteristics do they have?” Like the organizational strengths, your team has to come to a consensus on the top 3-7 characteristics, which double up as values.

This process is so important. Many people just make up nice words, like we are caring. But by asking these questions, you are drawing out the actual values of the group. For instance, you are in a high-powered sales group that values fast, persuasive, and humorous workers. C

Creating a caring, listening, and customer-focused list would be incongruent. The importance of having clearly defined values cannot be overstated.

When the crew knows these characteristics, you can set up hiring, selection, training, promotion, and firing policies based on these values. You want your team to be and to surround themselves with these characteristics, which pulls the whole group together and makes your team feel more cohesive.

Let’s take Elon Musk as a case study. According to his biography, he is a workaholic, working insane hours, solution-oriented, and risk-taking. What is interesting is that his leadership teams, and indeed the expectation upfront for anyone joining SpaceX or Tesla, required similar types of characteristics.

Yes, these characteristics have a dark side (like any good thing, there can be too much of it). Whether you like the man or not, it cannot be denied that these companies succeeded in what was considered impossible, partly due to this strong sense of who they are (values) and what they do (mission). 

Aspiration: Crafting an Ambitious and Achievable Vision

For the strengths portion, the questions ask what was or what is. In the aspirations portion, you are now asking what can be. We begin by asking, in the ideal, aspirational statements that describe the best that the company can be.

You can ask questions like:

“What would be the best possible scenario for us in the  next three years?”

“If we can choose, who are the types of customers or clients we would have?” You already have mission and values statements, so use those to craft your forward-facing questions.

Like before, summarize the themes from these discussions. The leadership's job is to hear and understand the stakeholders' views on what can be and come together to a consensus on what should be. To simplify this, you can ask your team to complete the statement, “By [three years from now], we will [result].”

We are looking for powerful, pithy statements that can capture the imagination of your whole team, who are excited to be a part of it. For example, my vision statement is: In the next decade, we aim to create 1,000 transformative leaders whose teams exceed performance benchmarks, making our company a global leader in building high-performing, autonomous teams. 

Opportunities: Setting your Strategic Direction

Now that you have the mission statement, values, and vision, your team can work on the key initiatives for the following year that will move you closer to your vision. I ask my clients, "What are the best opportunities within the next year that will help us move towards our vision?” We would have everyone pair up or in groups to discuss this and tell us their findings. We would list every possibility and comb through them to combine them into categories to reduce redundancy.

After creating the list, the leadership team will jockey and make cases for which ones should make it to the top 3-7. This process may take some time to reach a consensus. It may even take multi-sessions so that some people who are particularly passionate about certain initiatives can create a business case for why they believe an initiative belongs in the strategic plan.

The bottom line is if your company has more than seven priorities, nothing is a priority, but with only a few major priorities, this will focus your collective resources to hit your targets. By now, you have a clear mission statement, values, vision statement, and up to seven major initiatives for the year. All of this should fit on one page to communicate to your group, all your workers, stakeholders, and customers who you are, what you are about, and how you will do it.

Results: Implementing your Strategy

Now that you have your key initiatives for the following year, here is how you can make sure they become a reality. First, you want to set a numerical goal for how you know an initiative was accomplished. Let’s say, for example, your team recognized that employee engagement is a top priority in the company in the following year. You can find a validated scale for employee engagement like Gallup’s Q12, measure your current average, and set a numerical goal to increase engagement by 40%.

Putting numbers to your audacious goals makes it painfully apparent whether you achieved a goal or not. Secondly, you need to assign someone who champions the initiative and makes them accountable, and everyone knows it. Third, as part of the strategic planning session, you would want the champions to craft their plan to achieve the goal, including rough timelines and the resources needed to get there. Can you see how this connects back to the Execution Foundation?

Now that a year-long goal is set, all quarterly and weekly goals are to make this annual goal happen, creating clear expectations for everyone involved. It is important to track progress towards these goals, too, so that your team can monitor and adjust goals if necessary. 

What is the worst thing to do with a strategic plan after making the effort to formulate it? It is to let it sit in the shelf and collect dust. Instead, clear documentation and multi-media efforts should be put into communicating it to your company. Values ought to be celebrated and rewarded when employees demonstrate them. Quarterly, make a company-wide event or communication piece that reminds everyone of your mission, vision, and values, using stories captured in the last quarter. Update everyone on how far along you are getting with your initiatives, and announce any changes. 

By doing this, you now have three foundations of a high-performing team. You have highly engaged leaders who are clear about their roles and why, execute them well week to week, and tangibly move your company towards the vision. At this point, is there anything more needed? What we will look at next is how to turn this into a culture that can sustain itself into the future with or without you.

4. Explore: Fostering Innovation and Sustainability

Getting to market often requires immense speed and intensity during a company's start-up phase. However, any successful company must eventually become predictable and sustainable. Perhaps the most famous of these stories is that of Steve Jobs and Apple. Steve Jobs is famous for his vision and innovation.

Still, in 1985, he was ousted from Apple because his frenetic pace at launching new products led to internal discord, stressed-out employees, unrealistic deadlines, and failed products. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 with much more restraint and introduced an annual product cycle that streamlined the product line and made predictable product launches. This made managing workloads, allocating resources, and creating customer anticipation easier.

This is true of any great institution; consider schools; everyone knows when they start, end, and when teachers and students vacation. Professional development and planning times are also baked into their annual calendars. You must have predictable annual cycles for your leadership team to be sustainable and innovative.

Identify High and Low Seasons: Managing Workloads and Preventing Burnout

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for this because each industry, and indeed, each company culture, is unique. So, what I do with my clients is get the leadership team to discuss when the high and low seasons are in the company and when they would like it to be high and low.

For example, I identify that the beginning of September, January, and July are slow seasons in my practice. For this reason, I make these my vacation times, and because the pattern shows annually, existing clients can expect this. For myself, it means I can plan my vacations and work accordingly.

I had another client who held the busiest sports competitions leading up to competition season and the lightest just after. Since they can identify this, they can also build this into part of their company culture so that everyone knows when to take a break (and have permission to do so). A company must have fast and slow seasons. Fast seasons are for running hard after audacious goals (which, as we know, is one of the elements of goal-setting theory).

Slow seasons are for rest and reflection before setting up the next fast season. If your company is only steady-paced and never fast, you will fall to your competitors. Yet, if your company is only fast and never slow, your turnover will be high and creativity stifled. 

Encouraging Team Innovation through Cycles

Do you or your team have a formal innovation process? If not, most processes involve iterating through these four phases.

1. Generate: This is the phase where individuals or teams generate as many ideas as possible from different sources. From there, evaluate the ideas and ultimately choose one to test.
   
   
2. Test: Before scaling an idea, a pilot season should be given to test its effectiveness. If the idea is successful, move on to implementation. If it wasn’t, consider whether it needs more time to develop, pivot, or simply move back to phase one.
   
   
3. Implement: The idea is formed and tested; now is the time to scale it.
   
   
4. Evaluate: Like any good process, debrief what was learned in this process and move back to phase one of the cycle.
   

There are two types of innovation: 1) novel ideas (like a new line of product or a new way of doing things) and 2) iterative ideas (to slowly improve existing processes, products, or services). Both are necessary, and the individual and team can use the innovation process. One way to ensure this process is regularly used is to bake it into your annual cycles! Consider the high-low seasons you already mapped out; generate and test phases can usually be during the low seasons, and implementation and evaluation can be done during the high seasons. .

Studies have shown that organizations prioritizing continuous learning see higher employee engagement, innovation, and overall performance (Mone et al., 2011). For this reason, you need to make innovation one of your core values so as not to fall behind in your competition and to foster leadership skills within your team.

By having formal ways to capture ideas and formal processes for innovation and having it baked into your annual calendar, you will be cementing your business as an ever-growing, and sustainable business into the future even in your absence. Understanding team dynamics during these innovation cycles is crucial to ensuring smooth collaboration and effective problem-solving.

5. Empower: Leading a High-Performing Team through Autonomy and Accountability

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned I want leaders to feel the same kind of confidence and trust in their teams, that they can even be gone and still know things are working as they should. This is where the last foundation, Empower, comes in, and much of what we’ve already built up at this point leads towards this. When the team is truly empowered, they take ownership of their roles to deliver results without micromanagement.

Leadership development is critical to ensuring your team grows in their roles. Studies have consistently shown that when employees are given autonomy, their adaptability, job satisfaction, and overall performances increase significantly (Tabiu, Pangil, & Othman, 2020; Fallman, Jutengren, & Dellve, 2019). This kind of empowerment helps your team up for success, allowing you to finally take a back seat and watch the organization take on a life of its own.

Empowering Your Team for High Performance

Four Seasons hotel chain has told its employees, “Do whatever you think is right in serving our customers.” In other words, they signal to their workers that they are trusted with the task and also given easy access to resources to make the task happen. The following are a few tips on how to empower your team members, and you will notice that some of these have already started happening with our previous foundations.

Leaders need to set clear role expectations and provide regular feedback loops to create an environment of autonomy and trust.

1. Have Clear Role Expectations: Clear roles are like having boundaries set, where freedom can be found within the bounds. Let’s say one member is in charge of increasing employee engagement by 30% and is given a budget to work with. Then, they are told to do anything within these bounds to hit the goal. This would allow them to feel empowered for the task.
   
   
2. Encourage Decision-Making: When your team members come to you for help, try not to solve all their problems for them. Instead, be a good leader of a team and ask them what they believe will be the best strategy to solve the problem. Leaders often fall into the trap of micro-managing. As a team leader, make yourself more of a provider of resources than a provider of how to make decisions.
   
   
3. Provide Regular Feedback Loops: Feedback loops are essential for team accountability. This is where regular meetings come in. These feedback loops help to ensure that team members stay aligned with their goals and make necessary adjustments along the way. When autonomy is paired with accountability, it increases job satisfaction and boosts performance (Han & Hong, 2019). Regular feedback is essential for improving your team's performance and ensuring everyone is aligned with the goals,
   
   
4. Offer Continious Development: Already mentioned a few times in this article, development is a signifier of trust that your team-members are going to continue to grow in their expertise and roles and give them the chance to make decisions based on their learning.
   
   
5. Build a Trust-Based Culture: Trust is foundational to any great team. A good leader builds a culture of trust, where employees feel secure to take risks and make decisions. When team members feel empowered, they take more initiative and ownership of their tasks.
   
   

Systemizing Roles to Lead High-Performing Teams

I’ve seen many coaching programs teach people how to systemize their business. This is great and so necessary! Where E5 stands out is that it takes into account all the foundations leading up to this point. Here’s how you can systemize effectively:

1. Define Key Accountabilities: Every job role should have no more than 5-6 key accountabilities, priorities that they alone own that is clear, and everyone is clear on. Defining these accountabilities is essential for the smooth functioning of your team and contributes significantly to the success of any organization.
   
   
2. Create Clear Processes: For each of these accountabilities, a document (or you might decide to use process capturing software) should capture all the steps taken to accomplish the task within your team. Ask your team members to quickly make these documents, and then on a weekly basis, slowly edit it until it reflects reality better. The test would be, if someone were to take over one of their tasks, would they be able to accomplish it with little questions, if steps were given? By documenting and regularly refining processes, you ensure your teams understand exactly how to perform their tasks. This clarity allows for smoother delegation and higher efficiency, ensuring tasks are completed effectively without key team members. This will allow members to delegate tasks if they are gone on vacation, train people, or find replacement when necessary.
   
   
3. Empower Ownership: Processes should be assigned ownership, which allows team members in charge of the process to have the autonomy to work on it and tweak it as they like. Without clear ownership, teams can't fully take responsibility for the outcomes and will struggle to function at their highest capacity.
   
   

Building a Leadership Pipeline for Sustainable Success

Leadership is only leadership if new leaders are made. Strong leadership is critical to ensuring that new leaders can step into roles effectively, allowing you to step back and focus on the strategic aspects or, for some, become the owner of the company rather than the operator.

This is equally true for your entire management team. As the business grows and gets more complex, you need to ensure you have the right mix of skills across your leadership pipeline. When developing and leading a high-performing team, new leaders must be raised, allowing you to step back and focus on the strategic aspects or, for some, become the owner of the company rather than the operator. This is equally true for your entire team.

As the business grows and get’s more complex, some will grow teams that take on aspects of their roles. Some times your main leadership team might change as members retire, move on, or recognize their skills are better used in the organization “lower” down on the hierarchy. With this in mind, your entire team must always think about upcoming talent they are developing to become at least capable of taking their roles. 

A few things to take into consideration when building up the leadership pipeline:



1. Values and Character matter more than competence. If you have someone highly skilled who does not fit value-wise with your team and organization, it will cause unnecessary internal conflict that decreases productivity. If someone is neither hard-working nor humble (able to see their own faults and learn), they may temporarily succeed and fold during hardship. Skill sets are important, but they can be learned. So make sure you choose leaders carefully by aligning value and character first. Other things to recognize is, is there clear understanding of the roles and is it a fit? Do they desire the role, and do they have the capacity for it?
   
   
2. Always be training new leaders through mentorship, and leadership training. This will ensure you have a steady pipeline of ready-to-lead employees that you can select from.
   
   

Let’s do a recap: At the beginning, we set the pace and tone for Execution for your team. We ensured that the individuals are Engaged in their work for higher productivity and longevity. We aligned everyone by collectively Envisioning the future together. Then we set the culture of Exploration by making innovation and sustainability a normal part of the annual cycle of the team. Finally, we Empowered everybody to own their parts and to continuously work on training new leaders. At this point, you will see not only the real financial results of a powerful team rowing in the same direction but also the benefit of proudly seeing a vision that no longer depends on one person but belongs to a group doing greater things than any individual can. 

Implementing the E5 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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