High Performing Teams & Leadership Challenges

Founders, is your SaaS team a high performing team?👨‍💼

A founder I’m currently working with has had no prior experience of leading a remote team. He was trying to be the best boss, the team mate, he gave away bonuses even thought his team didn’t hit the goals, he was listening when his team had family problems, he even supported financially when his team had those family issues (which made number of those instances increase and he was wondering why).

However every single week the team wasn’t motivated and kept bringing new excuses. It seemed like there was no end to it...

But what could he do? He couldn’t just fire his team, otherwise he’d need to answer all the support ticket and fix all the tech issues himself again.
Here are the 4 things that helped make a 180 degree turn, boost motivation, make his team’s family problems disappear (wink wink) and team productivity skyrocket literally within 2 weeks (disclosure: this may not work in all situations of course, as there are lots of nuances, but it was perfect for this particular case):

• Making the founder realize that he was the bottleneck and he didn't let his team shine because he was involved in too many things that he should have just let his team handle;

• Involving the team into strategy planning. We set up a goal and collectively came up with ideas about what each of the team members could do to contribute to hit the goal. (Tip: don’t offer financial bonuses. Why? Read the book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” and you’ll know the answer);

-Having structured weekly meetings to discuss the progress and what needs to happen each week;

-Hiring another part time person to compete for the role of the team member who is underperforming. This method can not be used in every situation, but in this particular case it played out so dang well! In a matter of 1 day, the first person got their act together and right away got motivated and his productivity skyrocketed. Now they have 2 people on a team with somewhat different skills (one more technical support and another more customer success type) but what a difference it made to the personal and team productivity when now the 2 people have a friendly competitive environment!

Who here had similar problems with the team and how do you overcome this?