Masterclass with Joyce Sebasma: Building and Leading High Performing Teams
Thank you for joining us. Today, we focus on a critical topic for leaders and business owners: how to build and lead high performing teams. We’re thrilled to have Joyce Sebasma, founder and CEO of Scalejoy, sharing her insightful lessons and proven strategies on achieving high performance in teams.
About Joyce Sebasma
Joyce Sebasma, a seasoned Chief People Officer, is the force behind two successful companies, Scalejoy and P5 Collaborative Consulting. With leadership experience in 2 global tech companies, she brings a wealth of practical knowledge and experience to our discussion today.
The Driving Force behind Scalejoy
Joyce launched her company, Scalejoy in 2020. The firm concentrates on providing customized leadership development for rapidly growing companies, offering a broad spectrum of services including management training, executive coaching, and facilitating leadership team retreats.
Build and Lead High Performing Teams
To build a high-performance team, Joyce emphasizes cultivating excellence in every team member. You need to define what excellence looks like; it could include specific behaviors or outcomes. Write down your definition and share it with your team members to understand and aspire to.
Joyce introduces the concept of a cultivation toolbox which comprise of four key strategies: hire, exit, grow, and move. These tools can be used simultaneously depending on the team's needs and individual circumstances.
Four Tools in The Cultivation Toolbox:
- Hire: Bring in high performing individuals to complement the team.
- Exit: Sometimes, transitioning an underperforming team member out of the organization can help them achieve high performance elsewhere.
- Grow: Training and coaching individuals to become high performers.
- Move: Adjusting someone’s role within the team can help cultivate excellence.
Ensuring high team performance also warrants strong leadership. Joyce recommends three tactics for team leadership, taken from Frank Slootman's book Amp It Up: increased clarity or narrowed focus, elevated standards, and increased velocity. She also points to the necessity of articulating expectations at the individual, team, and company level.
Lead High Performing Individuals
The approach to leading individuals should be tailored and flexible. Joyce uses a management continuum ranging from micromanagement, thought partner, to absent manager, allowing for a more personalized approach based on each individual's needs and capacities.
A high bar set for performance is also essential for a high performing team. The Pygmalion Effect posits that the level of expectations can impact performance; high expectations lead to higher performance.
Conclusion:
Building and leading a high performing team is not just about managing individual performances but also requires balance and integration at the team and company levels. Leaders must set a high bar, communicate expectations clearly, grow their people, and provide necessary support. These principles form the bedrock of a high-performance culture that can drive your organization’s success.
Stay connected with Joyce Sebasma via her LinkedIn profile or visit Scalejoy for more insights and resources on building high performing teams.