The Executive Education and Center for Leadership and Change Management programs at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania continue to generate an abundance of valuable material for executives in need of cutting edge thinking. Nao Tools offer an excellent case in point.

Nano Tools for Leaders® was conceived and developed by Deb Giffen, MCC, Director of Innovative Learning Solutions at Wharton Executive Education. It is jointly sponsored by Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management, Wharton Professor of Management Michael Useem, Director. Nano Tools Academic Director is Professor John Paul MacDuffie, Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Director of the Program on Vehicle and Mobility Innovation (PVMI) at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management.

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The STAR Model: Close the Saying-Doing Gap to Build a High-Performing Team

The Goal: Transform team goals from talk into action by applying the four-step STAR model.

Nano Tool: American philosopher Will Durant famously paraphrased Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Ample research shows that this observation applies to individual as well as team efforts. High-performing teams (HPTs) promote habits — repeatable, consistent behaviors — that produce excellent results.

Team performance begins with well-defined goals. But goals are just a start, since by themselves they are often little more than lofty-sounding words. HPTs close the gap between words and action — what we call the “saying-doing gap” — by creating habits that encourage effective action.

The STAR model describes four steps that help leaders and their teams develop and maintain a painstaking focus on small, repeatable actions that produce a practical culture of success. Team leaders need not be charismatic visionaries. Teams do best when they focus on seemingly insignificant, observable habits that operationalize shared goals and values.

Our research has shown that HPTs create a culture of success by acting like “STAR”s. To be a STAR, you should:

o Target Specific objectives
o Take small steps toward achieving those objectives
o Alter the environment to facilitate taking action
o Cultivate a Realistic optimism about the challenges of implementing new behaviors

Then what?

Here’s a direct link to the complete material.

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Mario Moussa PhD, President, Moussa Consulting, and co-author of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas (with G. Richard Shell) and Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance (with Madeline Boyer and Derek Newberry).