How to Improve a Team’s Performance: The Real Challenge of Leadership

By Noelia Pizarro, Corporate & Business Development Manager at Green Light GO

If I’ve learned anything from the field of education, pedagogy, and talent development—leading teams and working for bosses, directors, and managers—it’s that when someone dips in performance, the worst thing we can do is treat it as a technical problem.

Then we begin to rationalize: maybe it is outdated, maybe it needs a better system, a clearer program, more organization, more structure… If he is overwhelmed, it will be because he lacks time; if I help him to organize, he will feel better; If I give it more tools, it will see it more clearly. And the solution seems simple: “let more be trained”. One year, two, three… and that’s it.

But it doesn’t work that way.

I have seen it, I have lived it and I continue to see it: poor performance – or the distance between teammates – is almost never a lack of ability. It’s often a lack of connection. With the sense, with the energy, with the confidence, with the team… or with the manager himself. And when a person disconnects, you can fill their training agenda, propose an annual team building or even organize the best escape room. But you are not going to recover what has really been lost.

Performance is sustained in the invisible: in the quality of the relationship, in professional self-esteem, in recognition, in the place I feel I occupy within the team. And that is not fixed by a PowerPoint. As Viktor Frankl said: “When we find a why, we endure almost any how”. And it is not a matter of putting up with the unbearable. It is about understanding that motivation is not imposed or injected. Real energy appears when the person reconnects with something that matters to them. When they feel seen, heard and taken into account.

Also, be careful: the relationship between manager and collaborator is not always broken. Many times it is simply neglected. It has been filled with urgencies, tasks, emails and meetings, and has been emptied of real conversation. One of those conversations where one can say: “I’m not well”, “I’ve gotten lost”, “I don’t know how to get back”.

That’s where Executive Coaching makes a difference. It is not magic or an express solution. It is a space for reflection and responsibility that helps to regain clarity, reconnect with values, experience, enthusiasm and purpose. And, above all, to repair the relationship from closeness, sincerity and trust.

At Green Light GO, in addition to our training and certifications in coaching, we develop executive coaching processes in companies with an internal pool of CPCC, PCC and ORSCC coaches that accompanies leaders and teams in these key moments.

If there is disconnected talent in your organization, do not saturate it with courses. Listen to him. And if you want, we work on it together.

Write to us at empresas@greenlightgo.es and let’s talk.