Nurturing the right mindset to build a high performing team with Caroline Kay

Hi 👋

As founders, it can be difficult figuring out how to bring the best out of a young and evolving team. This week, we spoke to Caroline Kay, founder of Vincita to get her expertise on how to build a high functioning team.

For Caroline, it’s all about encouraging positive intelligence and approaching leadership with the right mindset to set the tone for your wider team.

You can catch up on our full discussion here. In the meantime read on for our top takeaways.

⚡Defining roles and core strengths

Caroline identifies three key pillars for building a high performance team; depth, time and happiness. As part of achieving this, clear business goals are a key factor.

Regardless of what stage your business is in, there will always be a continued focus on hitting goals and enhancing strengths within a team. As your business scales, you’re going to need a team of people with specific strengths.

Breaking these goals down into personal quick wins and longer term, deep work will help increase productivity.

With people working as best they can by making smaller, more specialised efforts, your team is able to feed into larger long term goals for the business as a whole.

⚡Mindset, mindset, mindset

As a leader, your mindset is crucial to setting the tone in your workplace. For Caroline, a great way to shape the mindset of a team is by applying positive intelligence to find the gift in challenges.

Training your team to spot the opportunities out of potential problems puts a positive spin on what could otherwise be viewed as a shortcoming.

For example, looking back to the start of the year when we lost a couple of clients due to budgetary constraints, rather than seeing that as a failure or cause of panic for us, we saw it as an opportunity to restructure our strategy and efforts to focus on clients that we can offer the most transformative value to.

But in order to do this, Caroline encourages us as founders to first know and understand ourselves as leaders In order to adopt the right approach to impact on a team.

⚡Encouraging transparency…

For Caroline, confusion and uncertainty are common reasons why people within a team aren’t performing at their best. As a leader, it’s important to set the precedent. And so she encourages founders to nurture a culture of transparency where people feel as comfortable sharing responsibilities and taking part in conversation.

Often many team members may attend meetings without participating or will passively agree to tasks they may not fully understand, simply because they don’t feel comfortable enough to express difficulty. This can result in wasted time or a habit or dishonesty.

A great way to encourage more input from your team is by applying the ‘yes, and’ tactic when working through ideas. This way, you are still able to find the 10% in an idea that may not necessarily work as a whole, while your team benefits from the positive reinforcement you give them.

By opening channels of communication, people feel comfortable contributing to ideas and in some situations can collaborate with others to find solutions through more honest conversation.

Caroline’s parting advice to founders is in all circumstances your mindset is the deciding factor in building a team. Even with all the strategy and tactics possible, if you don’t encourage the right mindset, you’re less likely to get the best out of your team regardless of how skilled or experienced they are.

What lessons will you be stealing from Caroline when building your own team? I’d love to know!

Lucy 👋

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