What High Performing Service Teams Have In Common

In his fantastic book, "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups", author Dan Coyle explores why some teams consistently outperform others. Often those high-performing teams aren't even the most experienced or talented teams, but together they have a special ability to succeed.

He found there were three key elements they all had in common that boosted trust, teamwork, motivation, and overall performance. Those elements are Building Safety, Sharing Vulnerability, and Establishing Purpose.

Here are those 3 items and how it relates to your service technicians:

1: Building Safety:

It’s really hard to work together as a team or even trust those around you when you feel like you’re going to be judged or punished for saying or doing the wrong thing.

With our technicians, we want to cultivate a Positive Reinforcement culture. Open lines of communication, actively listen and make their big picture goals the focus.

Regular and consistent coaching is so important to building safety. Coaching should be constructive with a focus on what is working. Consistent communication means success can get reinforced, trust and honest conversations can happen, and negative trends can get adjusted before they become problems.

2. Sharing Vulnerability:

Coyle observes that high-performing teams tend to intentionally engage in vulnerability-increasing exercises and often uncomfortable ones. They practice, together, make mistakes in front of each other, and debrief and review everything to learn how to improve.

Technicians need to attend training together. These are powerful and highly motivating opportunities for them to spend time together and try things outside of their comfort zones. It is in the uncomfortable moments of growth that your team will bond together and strengthen. One example of this is having them role-play potential customer conversations together.

3. Establishing Purpose:

The book defines this trait as shared values and goals. Often teams have goals tied to business metrics such as revenue which are important, but also consider how you might create measurements that are tied more specifically to the why, core focus, and core values of your company.

Purpose requires constantly reminding them of their shared goals and the narrative of your company's identity. Encourage your team to share success stories with each other and then make sure to show how that success impacts the customers you serve for the better.