As you learned in part one of this two-part series, “Building and Leading a High-Performance Marketing Team,” you need to structure your team for success, building accountability and transparency into the process.

Once you have established the ground rules for your team, you need to be sure that each member contributes to the best of their ability and that everything runs smoothly. This includes recognizing achievements on an individual and team basis, establishing a clear mission and goals for the team, communicating effectively with team members, and creating opportunities for professional development and growth.

Recognition and advancement.

You can’t lead a high-performance team without incentivizing performance. If everyone is treated the same regardless of output, you’re going to cultivate a culture of mediocrity. That’s why it’s important to offer strong incentives for high performers.

• Verbal recognition in front of the team, division meetings and in front of senior leadership. Give credit where credit is due. Additionally, encourage every team member to recognize their coworkers—it shouldn’t just come from leadership. This recognition builds collaboration and appreciation into your team culture.

• Offer non-pay incentives, such as extra time off, additional remote working days, happy hours/team events and gifts to reward exceptional performance.

• Advancement is critical. You’re not going to keep strong performers if you don’t actively grow them into their next role. Every person on your team should have specific career goals. You should know those goals, whether they are short or long term, and you should actively look to advance each team member into the appropriate role. There should always be a way for you to advance a person’s title, compensation and scope of responsibility when they grow their competency and value contribution. If you don’t offer this, you’ll lose your best people, particularly in strong job markets.

Conversely, it’s just as important to communicate when team members aren’t meeting performance standards. Those who aren’t hitting specific standards of excellence shouldn’t be advanced or compensated. Leaders can’t reward mediocrity. This approach will incentivize lower-performing team players to look elsewhere for a new role, opening up potential for you to replace them with higher-quality talent.

Clear mission, values and goals.

There’s nothing more frustrating to a high performer than not knowing what they’re working toward. There should be no confusion about the mission of your team, your core values and your core objectives.

One way to do this is to have the entire team draft a formalized mission statement, documenting core values and outlining your objectives. Each person should have a part in the process, ensuring their voices are represented and gaining broad buy-in.

Not only will this create a unifying team identity but it will also help guide the interview process when adding new people to the team. In addition, it can help you remain focused on what's important–projects and activities that help you achieve your objectives.  

Radical candor.

Direct communication is critical. Teams should be encouraged to challenge each other directly and ask questions. The regular debate of ideas can lead team members to develop creative solutions while reducing conflict and reinforcing accountability. In this setting, team members will not be afraid to address a failure to follow through on a commitment.

Professional development.

Marketing is constantly evolving. The rate of digital innovation is enough to warrant a training budget in your broader marketing budget. If you want to build performance and set up team members for success, you have to keep them challenged.

To that end, leadership should actively seek ways to invest in the team’s growth. Leverage online trainings, college courses, conferences, field trips and more. Whether someone on your team feels like they're weak in a specific area or they just want to learn something new, encourage them to pursue training. This will help keep your top employees engaged and fulfilled, which is necessary for long-term retention.