In this Newsletter:
Article: Now is the Time to Take Your Team to the Next Level
Exercise: The Team as Quality Editor
Editorial Comment: Is Economic Recovery a Ticking Time Bomb?
Now is the Time to Take Your Team to the Next Level
by Claudia Craven
Copyright TIGERS Success Series 2010
Is your team ready to handle business growth and expansion when the economic turnaround is here?
It’s an important question that often gets overlooked in the midst of all the bad news about the impacts of the recent recession. After all, the business media is dominated with stories about failing financial markets, bank bailouts, high employment, large numbers of layoffs, employees dissatisfied with their work, and companies calling it quits.
Most businesses, however, are surviving the recession. They might be doing so with lesser revenues, modest layoffs, hiring or pay freezes, or any other coping strategy for down times. Others are doing quite well, but may be in a holding pattern rather than expansion mode.
For those businesses clearly intending to survive the weak economy now is the time to prepare for the better times ahead. How? By building and improving your work teams so the company is ready for business expansion when the economy inevitably makes the turn upward.
The first step in team improvement is to do an honest analysis of what is working and not working today.
- Determine where the holes are in the current team culture.
- Identify if there are breakdowns in communication among team members, leaders, customers and venders.
- Determine if your current team culture is an authentic team culture or simply one by name only and if this impacts employee engagement and morale.
- Identify if your teams are already highly functioning, what can be done to maintain that valuable asset when business growth occurs?
Such an analysis is so important to moving forward that it must be done in a professional manner with employee inclusion and willingness by leaders to actually hear and understand what employees are saying.
According to team culture consultant and author of TIGERS Among Us – Winning Business Team Cultures And Why They Thrive (Three Creeks Publishers, 2010), Dianne Crampton, “Most of us know about businesses that struggle to keep a team together. They are beset with unmotivated employees and experience high turnover. Too often, the best employees, seeking a more satisfying work environment, look for a way out once the economy turns around or not long after being hired.”
Crampton adds, “Aligning team improvements with consciously choosing a business personality, or way of being, that allows a team to thrive is one of the most important decisions a business leader can make, and business leaders looking to expand their sales and growth often overlook it. That was why it was important to include a good team effectiveness evaluation in our book. It gives leaders a simple way to evaluate how to start a sound team improvement effort.”
Next, teams primed to move forward in a climate of company and economic growth must be true to the company’s core values and, if authentically team-based, encourage collaborative values. Indeed, having in place an authentic team-based culture ensures that in times of rapid growth the company and its teams will remain true to these core values, such as integrity, superior customer service, and a commitment to quality. Instilling collaborative values in the team culture ensures decision-making will be guided by the company’s core values. TIGERS Among Us identifies six collaborative values – Trust, Interdependence, Genuineness, Empathy, Risk and Success – that form the foundation of successful collaborations and improve a company’s core values, employee relationships and customer service.
According to Crampton, “Leaders who understand the importance of collaborative team improvements will not only find teams aligning with the company’s core values, but will also save themselves turmoil and cost inefficiencies when it is time to expand.”
Taking your team to the next level also requires a commitment to a process that ensures a teams’ “action plan” stays on track.
Therefore, a commitment to implementation, and results, requires that team leaders must take responsibility and accountability for an action plan. Team managers must ensure that notes are taken at meetings and distributed soon after to all participants. Key responsibilities should be assigned with clarity and an expectation of accountability. Deadlines should be real. Regular team meetings need to include thorough updates on progress with items in the action plan. Most important, leaders must make clear to team members responsible for implementing aspects of the action plan that managers at the highest levels of the organization support the change initiatives.
Finally, there is the issue of communication. It will be impossible to take your team to the next level without making sure clear and free communication is taking place among team members, between team leaders and team members, among company managers and team leaders, among company managers and employees, and among project managers, clients and stakeholders.
Mary McNally, president of Project Training Plus, notes that for project managers good communication is key because “they must be skilled at taking a group of often disparate skilled individuals and quickly forming them into an effective, productive, and cohesive work team focused on accomplishing project objectives.”
“The beauty of Crampton’s book, TIGERS Among Us,” McNally adds, “is that it doesn’t merely provide a review of the basic concepts of team building, but offers us the tools and techniques essential to create teams with the six key values necessary for achieving corporate success. This book has been added to a “must-read” resource list I share with my project management students and corporate customers.”
McNally, a leading authority on PMP certification and a popular project management speaker and coach, and PMP certification exam prep instructor, stresses that “project managers spend about 90 percent of each day communicating – planning, organizing, and controlling project activities, and motivating and managing their project teams. A project manager must foster an environment where trust, integrity, and respect are core team values to ensure project success. A project manager is capable of influencing the direction and success of a project through open and honest communication regarding project results.
“TIGERS Among Us,” she says, “supplies a framework any project manager can easily follow to build a successful project team.”
Economic forecasters say the business climate is expected to improve during the next two years. Therefore, the time is now for team-oriented businesses to prepare for expansion and revenue growth. Take steps to ensure you have an authentic team-based culture that will unleash your employees’ true human resource potential to better solve problems, create more innovation, and improve customer/stakeholder service. The reward will be increased market share over competitors who choose to hold back on taking their teams to the next level.
Thanks to subscriber Ian’s request, we will include team icebreakers and other team building facilitation ideas to help business owners and team leaders take their team meetings to the next level. And, if you have a favorite team icebreaker please share it. True collaboration builds excellence and is based on two-way insights and sharing.
A Team Exercise: The team as quality editor
Source: Creativity Games for Trainers
By Robert Epstein, Director Emeritus, Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies
Time: 15 – 30 minutes
Objective: To show the value teams bring to editing and selecting ideas.
Who this exercise benefits: Business Owners, Project Managers and Team Leaders
Supplies needed: Pens, paper and a place for 5 people to hold a brief, private meeting, flip chart or white board and felt markers.
The purpose of this hands-on exercise is to show how important teams are to selecting the best ideas from a list of generated new ideas what this means for team selection from larger groups of employees (diagonal slices, project teams, problem solving teams, etc.)
- Ask the group to compile a list of names for a new soft drink that will be released in the next few months. Tell the group, “This product will compete with Coke and Pepsi and will be positioned to occupy a third of the soft drink market within one year. The product name will account for 60% of product sales, so the right name is worth several billion dollars. The team is to recommend three names. The selection of the final name will be based on extensive marketing surveys. What do you suggest as a name for this new soft drink?”
Write the group members recommendations on the flip chart or white board until you have 25 names.
- Continue your exercise as follows: “We now have considerably more names than we can recommend, so we’ll need to narrow down the list. We’re going to do that in two different ways. First, may I have 5 volunteers to serve on a special editors team?”
Select the editors (if your team is smaller than 8 people, select 3 editors. If your team is larger than 20 people select 25% to be editors. This will take longer to facilitate.)
Then continue the exercise as follows:“I’m going to ask our editors to leave the room for a few minutes. While they are gone, I am going to ask them to work together to select the top three names in order of preference, from most to least preferred. Are there any questions from the editors?”
Send the editors out of the room and continue: “While our editors are working, I’d like everyone here – working individually – to make your own choices. Please write your top three selections, in order of preference, from most to least preferred. No collaborating, please.”
- While people are working, write the following recording tables on the white board or have it already prepared on a flip chart sheets ready to tape onto the wall.
TEAM INDIVIDUALS
LIST 1 |
LIST 2 |
LIST 3 |
LIST 4 |
1. |
1. |
1. |
1. |
2. |
2. |
2. |
2. |
3. |
3. |
3. |
3. |
PAIRED COMPARISONS
LIST 1 |
LIST 2 |
WINNER |
LIST 1 |
LIST 3 |
WINNER |
LIST 1 |
LIST 4 |
WINNER |
RANK ORDER
VOTE |
LIST 1 |
LIST 2 |
LIST 3 |
LIST 4 |
RANK |
LIST 1 |
LIST 2 |
LIST 3 |
LIST 4 |
- After a few minutes – and before the editors are brought back into the room – ask three people, chosen at random, for their top choices.
Write these choices in List 2-4 in table one (Team and Individuals). Then bring the editors back into the room and record their choices under Team List 1 in table one (Team and Individuals).
- Ask the volunteers to return to their seats and continue: ” We now have four lists recorded -- one developed by a team and the others by individuals. Let’s decide which list we’re going to submit to the makers of the new soft drink. We’ll do this is two different ways. First, let’s try simple comparison votes. To make the process fair, I’m going to ask our editors to not vote.”
By a show of hands, have the remaining group members show their preference for List 1 (team) versus list 2 (individual). Note the winner in table 2.
Then vote comparing List 1 (team) versus list 3 (individual). Note the winner in table 2. Then vote comparing List 1 (team) versus list 4 (individual). Note the winner in table 2.
- Next get a rank ordering of the four lists by having people vote for one list only among each of the four winners. Record the number of votes in Table 3.Exclude the editors from this vote. Then rank according the highest numbers of votes first to the least last. In a tie, vote to break the tie.
Debrief:
Team leader: “Normally, a team-selected list of new ideas is superior to an individually selected list of new ideas, at least in one important respect. It is likely to be preferred by the population of people from which the team is drawn. Creativity is an individual process, in the sense that ideas always arise in individuals. But it’s important that the raw creative output from individuals be subjected to the scrutiny of teams, and it is in that sense that teams play an essential role in the creativity of an organization. In an organization, new ideas have value only if they serve many people. Individuals are usually poor judges of the value that their new ideas may have for the larger community.”
How can this exercise fail?
If your team of editors isn’t representative of the group, their list may not be preferred over the lists obtained from individuals. If the worst happens, analyze the result with the group and learn from it. For example, if you pick five people who are all dressed the same or who are sitting next to each other, expect less than ideal results. This has meaning to all aspects of team selection for project teams, decision teams, cross functional teams, etc. It is also the reason why some management team decisions are not accepted by the general workforce.
Discussion questions that will help you capture the learning value.
- Teams can both help and hurt the creative process. In what ways?
- Teams serve an essential role as editors of creative output. What can a team accomplish that individuals can not?
- Was the editor’s list preferred by the larger group? Why or why not?
- Are teams used in your organization to produce new ideas? Are teams used optimally for their purpose? If, not, what improvements can you suggest?
Editor's Comment - Is Economic Recovery
A Ticking Time Bomb?
By Dianne Crampton
The New York Times recently published a story headlined “Despite Signs Of Recovery, Many Millions Face Years Without Work.” According to the article, men constitute the largest number of discouraged job hunters and make up 60 percent of the long-term unemployed.
What does this disheartening news mean for the businesses engaged in this economic recovery?
In my view, companies with business-as-usual strategies will continue to suffer longer than those operating under the guidelines for a new economy and authentic team cultures. (I define a new economy as one characterized by the absence of dramatic boom–and-bust cycles in which team cultures with good internal and external relationships thrive. People schooled and anchored in team culture are ideal for the new economy.)
Individualistic cultures have not prepared for scalability in the past and are still trying to figure out how to attract employees without investing in human capital. Instead of putting money into training and development during the recession, these companies have predictably followed strategies from previous recessions by cutting training and development budgets accompanied by staffing lay-offs.
Therefore, men and women currently employed by these companies have had to rely on their own career development strategies – or not. And, the training provided by local workforce readiness organizations, if effective, has prepared, motivated and talented unemployed workers to compete for their jobs. This means that the currently employed, if they remain with their current employers rather than seeking out greener pastures during the recovery and through 2012, will encounter new hires who are sincerely motivated to keep their new jobs and to compete for rewards.
For another reason, conditions of scarcity that drive individualistic cultures have created an internally competitive business climate that frustrates effective mentoring of new employees. This means that when hiring new employees becomes realistic, under developed training programs and under-funded employee development planning will not sustain business expansion. And currently employed employees who understand the principles of internal competition and who have avoided layoff will expect to be rewarded for their loyalty for the hard work they have put in during the recession.
Put these two conditions together – highly motivated new hires who have had to make due with unemployment benefits and maybe lost their homes and employees who have had to make due with less support and pay cuts – the conditions are ripe for individualistic cultures to drive salaries down rather than raise them to satisfy shareholders.
I hope I am wrong on this one. The upside, however, is that this bodes well for team cultures with leaders who know what to look for in new hires, who have established on-boarding procedures and employee development plans and who can expand through entry level employees – like Zappos, Dos Gringos, 4Refuel and Tribe, Inc.
Contact TIGERS Success Series today about scheduling a TIGERS facilitation or training at your organization. Schedule an appointment with Dianne Crampton.
