Workshop: Team Leadership Skills Training
By harveyrobbins | August 28, 2007
The economy has stalled. Smaller companies are either being gobbled up or cobbled down. Larger companies are undergoing the largest merger-fest in U.S. history in order to stay globally competitive. Business strategies have been painfully twisted and squeezed to bolster the bottom lines of too many companies with too few customers. The result of all this chaos is a shifting of resources. Hundreds of thousands of people are finding themselves in new roles with new responsibilities in new or reorganized companies. The creating and execution of effective teams has become critical to the organization’s success. This increase in the use of teams has put pressure on many leaders to learn how to run effective teams.
If you have found yourself a member of this next generation of team leaders, you’re probably scrambling. Because you have the title, or seem to know what you’re doing, or you’ve been there 30 days longer than the next person, people are looking to you for leadership. Asking you questions. Asking you for directions. Whether by choice or circumstance, you’ve been given the ball, you’re a team leader, and people are looking to you for the next play. What you really need is a quick guide to help you through the next few months.
Ideal Learner
Team Leader Training is a quick guide to effective team leadership; light on theory, heavy on application. It’s designed for those of you who perhaps never planned or intended to be a team leader, but find yourself in a position of leadership now.
What you will learn
• What you need to measure
• How to create a positive culture
• How to create team building activities
• How to set the direction and hold people accountable
• How to set up systems for feedback and rewards
• How to become a more versatile team leader
Put these practical skills to work immediately
• Where to go for help
• Defining both group and individual goals/objectives and roles/responsibilities
• How to overcome barriers to effective teamwork
• How to communicate your values
• Effective methods for giving feedback and holding people accountable for outcomes
To schedule this workshop for your company, click here to contact me.
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Workshop: Leadership Skill Training
By harveyrobbins | August 28, 2007
What do successful leaders actually do? They drive results, maximize people, communicate vision and goals, and leverage systems. Leadership Skill Training is a workshop about understanding and using your natural talent to succeed in these leadership arenas. It’s about enhancing your leadership skills and leveraging your natural personality.
This workshop discusses the two sides of leadership traits: skills and talent. The leadership skills are divided up into the four main human characteristics of People Skills, Thinking Skills, Action Skills, and Character. We will explore methods to improve one main skill in each of these areas.
Leadership talent is determined by the match between ones’ natural personality and the environment within which one must lead. The workshop will measure both your leadership personality (Controller, Promoter, Enabler, and Analyzer) and your work environment (divided into pummel, push, pull, or pamper); and determine where you will be the most effective leader and where you will fail.
What’s in it?
Some of the topics covered during this one-day workshop include:
• Leadership Skills: We will explore the 50 or so leadership skills identified in the latest literature. From these 50 we will spend time learning, in depth, one skill from each category of People, Action, Thinking, and Character skills. These specific skills will be teamwork, managing change, versatility, empowerment, and building trust.
• Leadership Personalities: We will explore the four main types of leader personalities: Controller, Promoter, Enabler, Analyzer. In each category we will discuss their strengths and weaknesses and measure where you fall in each of these four leadership personalities
• Environment: We will explore the four main environments leaders create in their organizations: Pummel, Push, Pull, and Pamper and determine where your leadership personality fits (leadership success) and where not (leadership failure)
Who should use it?
Leadership Skill Training is useful for all individuals, managers, or senior executives interested in discovering their leadership traits - strengths and needs - and assists them in developing the skills necessary to become a high performance leader.
To schedule this workshop for your company, click here to contact me.
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Workshop: Team Building Training
By harveyrobbins | August 28, 2007
What is it?
Today’s companies are fast turning to team building as a means for organizing and doing work. In theory, teams increase productivity; they improve communication; they make better use of resources; they are more creative and more efficient at solving problems; they make and implement higher quality decisions.
In reality, however, many companies and managers have found teams prone to problems that make them ineffective. Teams become confused about goals; they have difficulty in reaching decisions; individuals don’t accept their roles; team leaders don’t always act like one. In short, the promise of teams has fallen short of our expectations.
Packed with practical questions and answers about teams, this one-day team building workshop identifies the obstacles that prevent teams from achieving their potential and provides methods to remove them. This workshop is based on the book WHY TEAMS DON’T WORK, winner of the 1995 Global Business Book Award
What’s in it?
Some of the topics covered during this workshop include:
• The characteristics of effective team members
• Building trust on teams
• The five fundamentals to effective teamwork
• The major interpersonal barriers to teamwork: perceptual differences; behavioral style (personality) differences; cultural differences.
• A new view of the various stages of team building
• The differences between bad, good, and exceptional (high performance) teams
Who should use it?
Team Building Training is a one-day awareness version of the two-day MAKING TEAMS WORK workshop. It is designed for all individuals, managers, and senior executives who have a desire to learn why teamwork has not been as successful in some circumstances as had been hoped, to get the most out of existing teams, and to start off new teams on the right foot.
To schedule this workshop for your company, click here to contact me.
Topics: Workshops | 1 Comment »
Team Building: Team Tyranny
By harveyrobbins | August 20, 2007
One of the worst and most expensive decisions organizations make is to establish a high performing team system, when all they are really after is an atmosphere of greater collaboration.
Collaboration is a misunderstood commodity. There are managers out there who still associate it mentally with the negative collaborations (collaborating with the enemy) during World War II. So they are against it. Other folks blanch at the mention of collaboration because it sounds tutti-frutti and unmasculine. “What do you mean, share?”
Sigh.
Among people with plural brain cells, however, collaboration is a powerful component of the high-performing mindset. The whole idea of organizations is rooted in the notion of people working together - collaborating - toward a common goal.
Teams do not absolutely require a collaborative atmosphere. There are successful high performing teams operating in overwhelmingly competitive environments.
But leaders of these teams should consider boosting the amount of collaboration in the air. While teams can function in a primarily competitive atmosphere, they will do better when they are encouraged to share information and experiences - including failures, something forbidden in most competitive regimes.
Now we come to an important point. While teams can get by without collaboration, organizations can enjoy widespread collaborative efforts without forcing teamwork. There are ways to get the collaborative spirit short of adopting the team structure.
What companies should consider, before resorting to teams, is whether they can alter their culture directly, making it a better place to share and think together.
To throw the team switch when all that is needed is an infusion of collaborative spirit is to invoke the dread specter of team tyranny. Team tyranny is the heavy hand of the organization at large, forcing everyone to do everything as part of a team. The logic is underwhelming: “Teams are great, so let’s insist everything be done that way”.
Team tyranny (”You must be democratic, you must be open, you must share! All the time. Everyone must be on a team”) sounds ironic and unlikely. But it happens all the time. If you see it happening, make it stop. Not all outcomes are best accomplished via high performance teams.
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Team Building Activity: The Team Biosphere
By harveyrobbins | August 14, 2007
How do you create a great high performing team atmosphere?
First ask, whose job is it to do this?
It is everyone’s responsibility to create a high performance teaming atmosphere, by fulfilling their roles within the team. I use the phrase “organizational karma” to describe this shared responsibility for climate control - karma being the wheel of consequences, with good deeds and bad deeds alike coming back to us continually.
The life of a high performance team is full of negatives and positives. The negatives are differences in perception and behavioral styles (personalities) between team members. The positives are an understanding of the characteristics differentiating good team members from bad. All high performance team members need to incorporate positive teaming behaviors into their daily work life.
Characteristics of an Effective Team Member:
Professes a commitment to goals. It is difficult to work enthusiastically toward some outcome if you don’t know what that outcome is. So the first thing a high performance team member does is clarify what they’re after.
Displays a genuine interest in other team members. People don’t have to like each other to work together. But high performance team members develop a genuine interest in the well-being of other team members - not as a team survival mechanism, but as a human bond.
Confronts conflict. High performance team members intercede when other team members are in conflict, to help resolve the disagreement proactively. Bad team members turn their backs or ignore it hoping that it’ll just go away.
Listens empathetically. Empathetic listening means being sensitive to not just the content of the message the other person is sending, but to the emotion behind the message. It also means checking for readiness before you just burst into their office and start talking. When was the last time you called someone up and before you started talking asked, “do you have a moment to talk?”
Practices inclusive decision making. High performance team members run their “first draft” decisions by other team members before they pull the trigger so that there are no surprises with the final decision.
Values individual differences. High performance team members look at differences as positives. They respect the opinions of others and view others’ perspectives as pluses, not minuses.
Contributes ideas freely. High performance team members don’t hold back their ideas. When they have an opinion about something, they express it - even if it’s just to support someone else’s opinion.
Provides feedback on team performance. High performance team members develop an informal method for providing continuous feedback on how the team is working, what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and what to do about it.
Celebrates accomplishments. High performance teams find excuses to celebrate - not just for the heck of it, but to acknowledge successful outcomes. Even the little one’s along the way toward the accomplishment of a bigger goal.
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Team Building: TransCompetition
By harveyrobbins | July 29, 2007
I’ve beat the dead horse of high performance teamwork for some time now. I’ve even mentioned the bad things about being too collaborative. I thought it is time to get a more balanced view between being too collaborative (supercollaboration) and too competitive (supercompetition). A concept I call TransCompetition.
Think of TransCompetition as a grafting of fruit from the two trees of competition and collaboration. Each tree has fruit that’s good, and fruit that’s not so good. The job of your high performing team is to combine the best of both trees, the best attributes of each approach, for the task currently facing your team. Here are some of the fruits of both trees.
The will to greatness vs. the will to commonality. High performance teams require both ambition and humility. Ambition drives us to try great things. Humility lets us survive to try again when we screw up. As great as ambition is, the will to commonality may be greater. It seeks to find win/win solutions, common ground even when positions seem cast in stone.
Focus vs. empathy. This can also be called inwardness versus outwardness - valuable but opposite skills. Inwardness is capable of focusing on the task at hand to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Outwardness is forever scanning the horizon for more to understand.
Persistence vs. insistence. These are as different as conquistador and natives, the killer instinct and the instinct to survive. Persistence is heroic, the willingness to die for a cause. Insistence is about survival - in order to keep the cause alive. What is your teams purpose?
Results vs. process. A results orientation is an attentiveness to the “what” of the team: did we meet our goal? A process orientation is attentiveness to the “how” of the team. Did we deal with each other or our customers appropriately? It is imperitive for high performing teams to be both outcome driven and process oriented.
Play vs. work. Play is a team’s genius - its ability to generate, innovate, revolutionize from thin air. Work is why we show up when we don’t feel so playful. TransCompetition means abandoning the pain principle for the pleasure principle: work for the fun of it.
Personalization vs. depersonalization. Personalization is the talent for communicating in such a way that the person you are talking to feels the message has been custom-tailored to his or her understanding. It is a precious skill on high performing teams. But depersonalization is also very powerful. It is detachment, the ability to see a thing without regard to its effect on you. When detachment comes in, out goes paranoia, disrespect, and the blindness that so often accompanies self-interest.
Loose vs. tight. Which structure is stronger, one that is elastic but encourages innovation and experimentation, or one that achieves coherence through the imposition of order? Loose relationships permit wider latitude for expression - but tighter relationships, unions, and alliances have the power to effectively underwrite security. Let duration be your guide. If you are in imminent danger of destruction, tighten the bonds between yourself and others. If your survival issues are longer-term, let loose the line and encourage free minds to find solutions.
Think TransCompetitively!
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Team Effectiveness: The Hazards of Collaboration
By harveyrobbins | July 8, 2007
If competition is “bad,” then collaboration must always be good, right?
Wrong. Pure collaboration is as problematic as pure competition. Each has its purposes. But each, practiced to the exclusion of the other, leads to collapse.
Unabated competition, like a Panzer division rolling over Poland, creates a spirit of over-the-top, scorched-earth absolutism — legitimizing whatever means result in victory: treachery, deceit, corruption, murder.
Unabated collaboration is also problematic. It is the nemesis of individuality, progress, diversity, and change.
Here are some of the hallmarks of supercollaboration:
1. Sameness - Overly collaborative teams adopt rigid standards and impose them on themselves, foreclosing creative deviation.
2. Groupthink - This leads to purges of perceived outsiders, and stultification of the ideas of insiders.
3. Blurriness - Too much democracy leads to mush. When everyone has full and equal input into a process, you can bet that process will lack focus.
4. Slowness - Consensus doesn’t “snap to” the way intimidated agreement does. It is a slow ooze, and teams lose momentum waiting for the ooze to arrive.
5. Leaderlessness - When everyone is encouraged to lead, the end result often is that no one does.
6. Defenselessness - When everyone knows everything, because sharing is so important, there is no confidentiality, and there are no firewalls. Some teams become so intimate and sensitive with one another that they can’t function among outsiders.
7. Interiority - Teams who work too long together have a way of becoming cross-eyed over time, focusing on subjects of interest exclusively to the group.
8. Mercilessness - “The many are stronger than the one”, is the motto of supercollaboration. It is also the motto of fascism.
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Team Building: The Myth of Senior Teams
By harveyrobbins | May 20, 2007
There is a seriously mistaken notion that senior teams function like other teams, just in a more senior way. That teams at the top - teams comprised of board members, CEOs, presidents, vice presidents, and other senior level execs - roll up their sleeves and collaborate in the same way that grunt teams do. They don’t.
Anyone who has been on a senior team knows how rare true camaraderie is. The senior team table more closely resembles a play from the Renaissance, with dukes and earls and grand viziers jockeying for advantage, than the kind of team we have been talking about. At the top levels, politics reigns supreme, and “team members” are there less to cooperate on joint action than to pursue constituent agendas.
This is partly because of the personality type that tends to rise to the top of organizations - Drivers with a bullet. Hard-charging executives prefer disposing to proposing, and they are typically rewarded for superior top-down, command-and-control performance. Except perhaps for the Vatican, large organizations do not turn to pastoral types for leadership.
But lets imagine a generation of powerful, collaborative-minded managers rose suddenly to the top - people who share information, swap skill sets, and set their egos aside to achieve common objectives. In fact, this will happen someday, and not far in the future. Generation X-ers and Y-ers are much more prone to team action than their Baby Boomer predecessors.
However, today’s corporations will not welcome these generations, and will throw up powerful resistance to them. Today’s organizations are modeled after patriarchal organizations established centuries ago, when leadership was envisioned in a singular, Driver-driven, masculine, competitive, Machiavellian way. Intrigue and manipulation are built into the charters of these organizations. To expect companies like IBM or Daimler-Chrysler or Harvard University to lead the way in describing a new kind of leadership by team, is to ask these organizations to go against their own natures.
Senior teams are “teams” in name only. They don’t act like real teams because they are really parallel teams of one, each with their own constituents. Real teams share roles and responsibilities whereas senior teams typically have parallel accountabilities. They are never able to prioritize goals since each member feels that his or her niche’s goals are the most deserving.
Oh, it’s sad and hypocritical. While top management encourages teamwork among the rank and file, they have no clue about it themselves. They can’t. They are constitutionally prohibited from engaging in it. So, when top management cannot practice what it preaches, why should the rest of us take the preaching seriously? Because it’s their job to point the way, to encourage teaming behavior. But, never, ever, look to top management to display teamwork. They can’t team. Collaborate, hopefully, but not team.
Well, perhaps never is too strong a word. We will with the passage of time see the development of true senior teams. But it will happen in smaller, younger organizations. And it will be lifetimes before the model takes hold in their Fortune 500 counterparts.
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The Team of One
By harveyrobbins | May 6, 2007
If teams mustn’t be too big, how small can they be before they stop being teams?
We define a team as being two persons or more. But it may be useful, as you sort through the people available to you, to consider “the team of one.”
People think we’re joking when we talk about teams on one (”Why would you call a person a team?”) but we’re not.
A team of one is a virtual team, a single person with lots of diverse expertise treated by others as a separate team.
In complex organizations, it’s very common for teams to interact. A new product team, for instance, will have dealings with the design team down the hall. They’ll get input from another team in finance, and another team in marketing.
Usually these teams have a number of people on them. Occasionally, though, the connection is a single person. When this happens, it is good team politics to treat that person just like a bona fide team. You extend him or her the courtesy you would extend a group. Just because the team is a singleton does not allow you to go on a blaming rampage.
Meanwhile, contemplate the beauty of the team of one. It means that instead of putting several people from different functions on the team, the team’s diversity is integrated in a single person. Think of the arguments that never happen. Think of the handoffs that never take place. Think of the rapidity with which the team gets through the storming phase.
Diversity of knowledge is the reason for teams. But the age of the corporate specialist is yielding to the age of the one-man-band — technology driven, entrepreneurial jacks of all trades.
A team of one is so much faster, and is much more unambiguous than a team of more than one.
A team of one is also a splendid way to outplace a team member who doesn’t work well on a close, daily basis with your team, but whose knowledge remains valuable - or someone who just doesn’t want to belong to you. Simply take the individual out of the team box, draw a dotted line to a box that is all his own, and poof, you have a team of one serving as a resource to the team. No muss, no fuss, and everyone is happy.
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Change Management: Of Babies and Bathwater
By harveyrobbins | April 15, 2007
The age of change in organizational thinking - sometimes called New Age management theory - is occurring in part because of the influence of the baby boomer generation. The previous generations flourished in the mass-production economy that grew steadily from the 1920s through the 1960s. It is no Oedipal coincidence that the next generation has done everything it could to trash the success of the generation preceding it.
Organizations in the 1990s and 2000s are picking up and trying on new initiatives like a teenager in front of a mirror, uncertain of much, only sure that it does not want to be like its mom and dad. The New Age must be better; it is, after all, new. But you cannot discuss change in our time without addressing the enormous demographic and psychographic blip of our time, and why they (we) can’t help trying out every new thing that comes along - and are unable to make many of them stick.
Some of the factors behind the fads:
Globalization: Where the older generation made and sold to a single American market, baby boomers make and sell to (and compete against) the whole world.
Technology: Baby boomers possess much more intimate information processing technologies, and are thus prone to greater decentralization and individualization.
Speed: Baby boomers are impatient because technology has given them that luxury. Previous planned changes, like the moon landing, took years; this generation does not feel it can wait that long. If an idea doesn’t take hold and yield quick results, they move on to another idea.
Education: Business schools taught only one approach to business in the first half of the century; today there is zero “conventional wisdom,” even in the most hidebound academy. Years ago there was no “management theory” section in bookstores; today there is an avalanche of offerings.
Experience: People today travel more, read more, pursue continuing education, change jobs more frequently, encounter greater diversity, work across functional lines, and interact with people from other countries, cultures, and industries.
Diversity, cross-functionality, and “dress-down Fridays” all have their roots in the rebellious mod of the ’60s that railed against conformity, squares, button-down collars, and gray flannel suits. “The leader as servant” idea owes more to the I Ching and Che Guevara than to Iwo Jima and Dale Carnegie.
Truth be told, though, conventional wisdom of the industrial age is no less wise in the age of change. Organizations are remarkably like machines, no matter how we “humanize” them. Bureaucracies remain efficient ways to organize complex systems. In-the-box is still the place where most of us dwell, and think, and are happiest. A wise generation would take pains, in tossing out the bathwater from the previous generation, to conduct routine baby checks.
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Leadership Skill: Leaving a Leadership Legacy
By harveyrobbins | April 8, 2007
Take a look at all the leaders who have left a positive legacy of organizational effectiveness, and what do you find. Breadth, depth, and talent. But what do they actually do? They develop themselves, they develop others, they develop big ideas, and they develop high performance cultures. They leave a legacy by leveraging their natural personality gifts to guide choices about acquiring skills and developing their organization’s culture. One in which people have clearly defined goals, continuous feedback, and career alignment all within a culture driven by the excitement of achievement and the vision of destiny.
After a combined 45 years of experience in the field of leadership development, my wife, Nancy, and I have concluded that much of what is currently written about leadership is both confusing and misleading. It’s mostly descriptive, not prescriptive. First of all, leaders are being encouraged to think “outside the box;” attempting feats of magic and leaps of faith that go well beyond what most normal people can do (baring some major life-changing experience like a near death experience or getting married). They are told to think like Queen Elizabeth, Buddha, Attila, Zen, Tao, Jack, Al Jesus. As a result, people start popping their heads out of their comfort zones, start looking around, grasping at straws, and ignoring what’s under their noses. This is unreasonable, unnecessary, and contrary to human nature. Besides, thinking and acting are two different things.
Second, there are just too many leadership dimensions discussed (over 50) for any reasonable leader to master. Yet try they do. I’ve coached senior leaders responding to their organization’s leadership competency model trying to perfect all dimensions in the model. It’s hogwash! To invest across the board in development can result at best in mediocrity on many fronts. Average, no matter in how many arenas does not produce above average results.
Successful leaders don’t waste their time acquiring skills they don’t need. And since your brain is only so big and can only hold so much stuff, it becomes critical to optimize your capabilities. You don’t need to master the 50 dimensions required to be the perfect leader, just those that you need to be successful right now.
Finally, not only are there too many leadership dimensions, but the words and adjectives used to define leadership overlap to the point of creating confusion, both in literature and practice. A recent factor analysis performed on a 360 degree feedback instrument (a questionnaire with self, boss, peer and subordinate ratings) found only two major factors underlying the 50 leadership dimensions: “smart” and “nice.” The “smart” factor is action and thinking skills and the “nice” factor is people skills and character.
Becoming a legendary leader and creating a high performance culture is not that difficult if you are willing to follow a few rules.
1. Be outcome oriented
2. Be feedback rich
3. Create a balanced approach that gives people the motivation to move forward and a vision (and a pathway) to achieve success.
4. Know yourself
5. Coach others
6. Push for those ideas that will change the way you operate.
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Leadership Skill: Low/No Cost Rewards
By admin | January 27, 2007
Few effective team leaders have a laundry basket of financial favors to hand out to deserving team members. But there are still lots of no-cost or low-cost ways to keep team members involved and in the mood to perform:
1. Establish a prize.
Establish a quarterly “most valuable team member” award that teams themselves vote on. Or a “biggest improvement” or “best team spirit.”
2. Get ‘em involved.
People who have an impact on reaching goals appreciate being part of forming those goals.
3. Power to the people.
What better way to spur productivity than to give proven achievers authority to spend a few bucks to increase sales, please customers, or improve critical processes?
4. Not rich, but famous.
Establish a “Hall of Fame” in your unit or department - a gallery of pictures, trophies, and plaques with an emphasis on winning teams as well as winning individuals.
5. Praise in print.
If you have access to internal publications - newsletters, magazines, tabloids - get word of your people’s performance to the editors.
6. If they had a hammer.
Everyone’s dying for a faster laptop, cell phone, or wireless e-mail. See that your top producers have access to your best tools.
7. Meet the boss.
Getting a chance to hobnob with the group VP or even the CEO is a big deal, and shows you care about your people’s career tracks.
8. Share the spotlight.
A pat on the back means more when it occurs in plain view of coworkers. But be careful your reward ceremonies don’t divide workers into winners and losers, or over-stress individual achievement.
9. Privy privies.
Everyone likes perks - admission to the executive washroom, dining room, or gym; a parking place close to the building entrance; a direct phone line, bypassing the switchboard.
10. Free lunch.
Many companies purchase annual tickets to sports events, concerts, and other events, and many take travel, entertainment, and other goods and services as trade-outs. Why not share them with the people who make your unit a success?
11. Stock options.
If your company isn’t up to a companywide stock purchase plan, consider a smaller-scale plan as a reward that binds your winners even closer to the company’s fortunes.
12. Lavish them with attention.
Years ago, the famous Hawthorne experiments showed t hat people show more interest in their work when management shows interest in them. Paint the office, move things around, invite juggling clowns for lunch - anything to break the monotony and show that you care.
13. Show ‘em you care.
A good team works like a family, and is fueled by respect and even affection. Let performers know their contributions are appreciated by you, personally. Look them in the eye and tell them that. It beats dinner for two at the Pump & Munch, hands down.
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Change Management Strategies: Change and Personality
By admin | January 13, 2007
Back on March 25, 2002, I wrote a newsletter on personalities. But I didn’t go far enough when it came to telling how these personalities effect the way change takes place. Personality type naturally plays a role in one’s ability to meet change head on. You remember the grid that I described showing Controllers, Promoters, Supporters, and Analyticals. The same grid, with a little change, tells a story about change potentials.
Each type is perfectly capable of normal change. The center of the grid could be shaded in as “OK about change”. At their extreme edges, however, like when a Controller is a very strong Controller, or an Analytical is a very strong Analytical - pronounced differences become apparent.
Controllers love to lead, and true to leading implies change, so it is logical that Controllers have a special knack for changing. Pure Controllers are metaphiles, cheerful embracers of the new and untested.
Promoters like to play. Their natural mode is exploration, and that is an intrinsically useful part of change. Pure Promoters are metamaniacs, so enamored of change that they have to be changing in order to function.
Supporters are the people everyone else loves to have around. They are the perfect antidote in a marriage to a strong Controller - they smile, they shrug, they love, they forgive. Not exactly hard chargers. Thus, Supporters have a tendency to be metaphobes, people disinclined by nature to enjoy change much.
Analyticals are usually right, but they can be awfully tight about it. They are the perfectionists of the world, dotting every “i” and crossing every “t”. At the extreme, they become metamorons, people to whom change is completely unacceptable - because change ruins their data, their level thinking field.
What does it mean? It means you don’t load a change initiative team with metamaniacs - there will be hamburger all over the highway. Neither do you assign a metamoron the task of leading a team in a pilot change project.
Most teams contain people from more than one group. This is not a bad thing. A team with a metaphile on it will likely galvanize everyone else to follow. A team with a metamaniac on it will benefit from the reassuring foot-dragging effect of a metaphobe.
As always, the beauty of teams is the diversity of their members. A team of all metamorons - all people with a strong Analytical bent, like a lot of functional teams in finance, engineering, and the other analytical arts - is going to have a hell of a time moving off the dime.
By the way, in my practice, I have learned that not many people enjoy being called metamorons. Just remember that only extreme, off-the-chart Analyticals qualify for this august title. Chances are, you’re much too balanced to deserve such an epithet.
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Leadership Skill: Giving Feedback
By admin | January 20, 2003
One of the hardest tasks of effective leaders is giving people feedback. “Giving people feedback” is really a neutral description for something decidedly un-neutral - telling people how they could be doing their job better. And because it is a loaded area, with a high potential for ticking people off and alienating them, just when you need them to be “on your side,” lots of leaders get confused and inept.
Why is giving feedback hard for us? Probably because people think it has to be done very cleverly - delicately - so as not to offend people. And most of us are not clever, so we despair. And procrastinate. And when push finally comes to shove, and we sit down with the person in question, we criticize crappily.
How do we criticize crappily? Let us count the ways.
We do it too formally. We invite the other person into our offices. We sit across from on another. We refer to reports for information, sometimes hiding behind the pages. Six-month evaluations may be good for record-keeping, but a better way to keep people on point is to evaluate them every single day, with attention, instruction, availability, and acknowledgment of a job well done. Fix a problem informally, and it need never appear in someone’s file.
We wait too long. “Harold, it’s come to our attention you’ve been taking 2-hour naps every afternoon since 1994.” The time to step in and advise is early, before it becomes a bad habit, and before you become irritated with the behavior’s deep-seatedness. Also, workers have every right to protest. They would have been happy to make the change earlier - if someone had only asked. Delaying puts an unnecessary black mark on their record.
We keep it one-way. Feedback is properly described as a loop. You tell them something, they tell you something, and so on. The process belongs to both of you. If it’s just you informing a worker - much less, a teammate - that they have failed, doesn’t that tell you something about the team? And if the other person’s contributions aren’t appreciated here, what does that say about their contributions?
We apologize. We mince about. There is no way to tell someone an unpleasant truth and come out of it more popular than you went in. The proper and honest thing to do is say it directly: “Mary Ann, I’m concerned about the quality of your follow-up work. Several times I’ve had customers complain, and I want to fix the problem right now, before it becomes a real problem.” They may not like you more. They may emerge from the talk bruised and a little scared. But they will know what is expected of them. Clarity will help them survive, where friendly gobbledygook could lead them to destruction.
We beat around the bush. We say 19 positive nice things in order to soften the blow of the 20th item, which is negative. In all things strive for clarity. A good meeting has a single purpose. “Jack, I want to talk to you about your absence last week.”
We don’t think it’s feedback unless it’s negative. We’re not saying to camouflage the one negative observation behind nineteen compliments. But why is it that we only call workers in to see us when we have bad news? Invite them in when you notice something great. What a simple message to communicate: we value your positive contributions, and we want to encourage you to keep trying.
We go in with too much certainty. “Dave, you’ve not been attentive in your work.” Instead, try: “Dave, I’m concerned that you aren’t giving your work your full attention. You make a lot of funny remarks at team meetings, but I’m not sure you’re kicking in with the right amount of effort. Do you agree with that assessment?”
We put it all on the other person. Maybe Esther isn’t meeting quota for reasons that Esther has little control over. Maybe you think Esther has been properly trained, but she hasn’t. Maybe there’s something you can do that will help Esther perform.
We criticize, but we are vague about future action. Feedback must be action-oriented or it is just blather. State a desired outcome, and slap a schedule on it. Then, if the teammate misses the outcome by the date agreed upon, who can complain about the consequences?
Topics: Leadership Skill | No Comments »
Effective Team Building: When to Team
By harveyrobbins | January 6, 2003
If you are absolutely sure that a team is what you need, then you must map the team out. This means deciding who the right core and resource team members are, actually forming the team, and following the process of clarifying goals, roles, barriers to success, personality differences, etc. etc.
Even at this stage it’s still not too late to give up on the team approach. You don’t need teams when:
1. Decisions are best made by one person
2. Decisions are predetermined
3. The outcome is not critical to company, division, or department success (like what color toilet paper to buy)
4. Time is of the essence (a decision by tomorrow)
5. The project is either “back-burner” or a low priority
Teams are best used when they are formed to address short-term, high-priority, perhaps cross-functional, single-focused, action-oriented outcomes. You need teams when:
1. The wider the input the better the output
2. The issue is cross-functional or multidirectional in nature
3. The outcome/decision has potential high impact for department, division, or company
Don’t feel pressured to form a team because it’s the thing to do now. If it doesn’t feel right, the heck with it. Form teams only when they make sense, and the team output will be greater than the sum of the individual members’ inputs.
Topics: Team Building At Work | No Comments »