David’s book Wind In Your Sails has ten strategies. High performing companies have values and culture that everyone lives by. Create environments that let your people perform their best. This and more in David’s video on People Strategy.

Audio

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Transcript of People Strategy

Hi I’m Coach David J. Greer. Today I want to talk to you about people strategy. High performing companies have well established cultures. Many entrepreneurs completely ignore culture. Other entrepreneurs say they have culture and yet never live to the cultural beliefs that they espouse. The really great ones define that culture which really works for the organization and then make sure that everyone from top to bottom in the organization lives that culture every single day.

Sean Achor in his book The Happiness Advantage shows us how we can use positive psychology to improve the performance of our teams. While a professor at Harvard he noted that three out of five Harvard undergraduate students, despite being by definition the best people in the US, were unhappy. So he set about studying the two out of five people that were. One of the easiest things he talks about in his book that we can apply to our people is to start every meeting by celebrating the wins. Go around the room and make sure that every person shares one success from the last day or week. Then move into the challenges. It sets the tone for the meeting and reminds us of all those things we have already achieved.

If you want to create high performing teams, you need to be able to challenge them. You need to do that in a way that still lets it be safe for them to fail without killing the whole company. You need to be able to hold them accountable for those things they are doing. Create high performance with safety, challenge, and accountability.

What kind of environment do you create for your people? If you have creative people, do you provide them with enough white boards and small meeting space so that they can easily collaborate? It’s up to you to set up an environment where everyone can be their most productive.

Brad Smart teaches us that if a’s hire b’s and b’s hire c’s then soon we’ll be hiring x, y, and z’s. If you want a high performing organization, you need to hire a-level players. Then you need to help those a-level players achieve their next level of growth.

In my book Wind In Your Sails, I show you how a focus on people strategy will let you create high performing businesses with top a-players.