Companies spend millions each year on creating a culture of peak employee performance. However, many still find their workforce stuck in the mediocre middle – often despite employees’ best efforts.

To move from mediocrity to consistent peak performance, business and team leaders must create a culture that allows employees to successfully implement what they’ve learned during training, mentoring, coaching and conference sessions.

Even the most well-trained and well-intentioned employees won’t be able to perform at their best in a culture that suffers from one or more of the following:

1. Lack of clear expectations

Business or team leaders should never assume that everyone is aligned in expectations simply because policies, procedures, and guidelines are available for viewing on the company intranet or have been mentioned in a meeting. Making expectations clear requires communicating them in a way that others can understand and checking whether everyone correctly understood what was communicated.

“Great leaders provide structure, training, trust, and quick feedback to enable an environment of peak performance.”

Employees also shouldn’t be expected to read the minds of their leaders or translate hurriedly relayed thoughts into clear instructions that will meet the expectations of leaders. Great leaders understand that they need to provide context and clarity when assigning tasks or requesting certain behaviours.

Supposed expectations aren’t clearly communicated in a way that resonates with them. In that case, employees will perform according to their own priorities and level of experience, which might then be unfairly measured as poor performance.

2. Lack of planning and/or prioritising

It is unfair to expect high-quality work and employee well-being when leaders are in the habit of piling on ill-timed ideas or demands without understanding the ripple effect it may have on activities already in line for delivery.

Great leaders know how their decisions and actions will affect a team, project or organisation, and they take responsibility for managing the impact of those decisions. They are also skilled at managing demands from others to allow the employees they lead to deliver quality work on time and within budget without suffering burnout.

3. Lack of autonomy

To create an environment conducive to peak performance, business leaders must keep red tape, compliance and administrative activities to a minimum so employees have more time and energy for delivering profit-generating work.

Instead of micro-managing every task of employees, great leaders regularly emphasise the purpose, vision and values of the business; and then trust that employees will get on with what they’re supposed to be doing in the way they’re supposed to be doing it.

4. Lack of feedback

Employees will have different views of their leaders’ expectations, so they must receive quick and ongoing feedback on their performance to highlight any misalignment.

To save the efforts of capable and well-intentioned employees, leaders must create opportunities for employees to do quick alignment checks without fear of being judged on the in-progress roughness of a task.

Feedback sessions on progress should leave employees focused and motivated, not confused and dejected. Employees can’t be expected to make improvements if their leaders aren’t specific in pointing out misalignments between expectations and current status and why improvement is necessary. 

5. Lack of capability

While an employee might have been appointed based on their proven ability to deliver what their role initially expected of them, changes to the business environment might require a change in capability. These changes require genuine two-way conversations about how each person sees their role within the changed context and whether they are willing to make the necessary adjustments.

If there are gaps between what the employee can do and what they need to be able to do, it is easier than ever to find training material in a format that will help them to bridge the skills gap.

To create a culture that allows employees to successfully implement what they’ve learned during training, mentoring, coaching and conference sessions, business and team leaders must figure out what they can change about their own actions that will set employees up to win.

Great leaders provide structure, training, trust and quick feedback to enable an environment of peak performance. This only works when each employee is the right fit for the job and if leaders are willing to act if an employee continues not aligning with reasonable and clearly communicated requirements.

Inc