As a leader, it is your job to create the most favorable conditions for the team’s success. This includes removing barriers to achievement, helping staff deal with workplace issues, and acquiring the resources they need to succeed. Here are 5 ways to improve performance and create opportunities for success:

1. Get the resources the team needs to be successful. To function effectively, your team will need human, financial, information, and physical resources. As a leader, you must acquire these assets. While this is often a challenging task, you can make the process easier by answering the following questions:

* What are our main goals for the coming year?

* What steps will we take to achieve each goal?

* What resources are needed to carry out each step?

* What barriers will we find during the resource acquisition process?

* How can we overcome these barriers?

2. Recruit members who can help the team achieve success. Another important leadership duty is the recruitment and retention of high-quality team members. A team cannot perform at a high level without the right mix of skills, personalities, and experience. Answer the following questions to ensure the success of your recruiting efforts:

* What positions do we need to cover?

* What can we offer potential candidates (eg, salary, benefits, educational opportunities, job flexibility)?

* Can we differentiate ourselves from the competition to gain a competitive advantage?

* Who are we trying to hire and where can we find these candidates?

* How will we inform potential candidates about our job openings and encourage them to apply?

3. Retain members who can help the team achieve success. Once you have a productive team in place, you’ll want to keep your high-performing team members. To reduce turnover, it’s important to understand how employees make decisions about joining and leaving an organization. Specifically, there are seven factors that people consider when deciding to accept a particular job offer or stay within a particular organization. These include job location, salary and benefits, organizational prestige, career development and advancement opportunities, flexibility, organizational support, and the job itself. Organizations that do a good job of managing these factors are more likely to sustain the best results.

Four. Remove organizational barriers that can impede your team’s success. Even when you have a highly productive team, unexpected obstacles will occasionally hinder your progress. This won’t be a major problem if you do a good job of identifying the barrier and dealing with it in a timely manner. You can do this by determining the specific cause of the problem and working with team members to identify possible solutions. Be sure to include people who have the power to remove the barrier.

5. Identify and address the toughest issues you face as a team. All teams face issues that need to be addressed in a timely manner. You can enhance the problem-solving process through brainstorming, which is a relatively unstructured small-group technical discussion that helps team members proactively identify problems. You can facilitate team brainstorming sessions by selecting an open-ended question such as “What is the most important problem we will have in the next 6 months?” Ask team members to offer as many ideas as possible and record each response on a flipchart. Participants should continue to build on each other’s ideas and identify areas of consensus. By using brainstorming in this way, you can identify problems before they become a major problem.