How To Improve Your Team
How To Improve Your Team
A significant reason that team-building initiatives fail is that too much emphasis is placed on the misconception that team-building should be fun. The purpose of team-building is to improve the performance of a work group, thereby creating better outcomes. This requires change, and for most people change is not fun … it is hard work. To drive change, team members must develop skills and gather information connected to the critical business outcomes they must produce. Team-building can be fun… if the members of the work group enjoy the learning process and relish the opportunities that change will bring. Sometimes the most trying struggles produce the most satisfying lessons.
If you want to improve teamwork and performance in your organization you have to look at the four core elements to driving team performance: relationships, goals, roles, and rules. All four of these elements must be executed well for the organization to flourish.
Relationships
Ironically, improving relationships is probably the last area you should focus on. Yes, the area that most leaders spend most of their time addressing is usually the symptom, not the problem. Almost every organization that has team-building issues will find their root of their problems in goals, roles, and rules. In my experience, when we address goals, roles, and/or rules, many of the relationship problems disappear.
Once you are comfortable with goals, roles, and rules, you are then ready to tackle relationships. Many of these relationship issues usually stem from different behavioral styles and people not appreciating and knowing how to deal with people whose styles differ from their own. I recommend engaging a Certified Behavioral Analyst (such as myself) to help iron out the rest.
Goals
The first step toward achieving success as a team is to state your goals properly. You know your goal is well stated when anyone who reads it knows exactly what you are trying to accomplish and in what time frame. The better a person states the goal, the easier it is to create the action plan. An acronym commonly used for stating a goal properly is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistically high, and Time-based). In my experience, most goals do not properly meet these criteria and thus diminish the success of teams.
The other Issue that dooms many teams is improper alignment of goals. On an individual basis, each goal may be SMART. However, when you add up all the goals, or look at them on a system-wide basis, they may conflict with each other. These conflicts distract the team as they spend more time dealing with the lack of alignment than actually working on achieving the goal. It is for this reason that an ongoing system for goal alignment needs to be established in your organization.
For a comprehensive discussion on goals please see my article “State Your Goals in a SMART WAY” to learn more on the subject of goals.
Roles
In order for a team to function properly it is important that every member of the team understands specifically the actions and/or activities assigned to them. This is not as simple as some make it out to be, which is why this is usually an issue for team. There are two different types of roles: task and maintenance. The “task” roles relate to driving the desired outcome of a team. The “maintenance” roles relate to managing team processes and relationships among people on the team. Many organizations take the latter for granted, as if processes and relationships will automatically fall into place, or underestimate the time required to do it well.
With regard to task roles it is important to break down the tasks required to produce the outcomes you want, and how much time each task will take. Many organizations only think about the big things and take the little tasks for granted. Those many little time-consuming tasks are what throw teams off course. Once all the tasks have been identified, roles can be identified and assigned to the appropriate people.
Rules
Rules are a very important component of teamwork. This is one of those areas many leaders, particularly in entrepreneurial and family-owned businesses have the biggest concern with. Everyone is fine with rules as long as they apply to others. You cannot have one set of rules for some people and another set for others. Owners are particularly vulnerable to this one. They love to pull out the old trump card, “Well it’s my business, so I can do whatever I want!” While this is true, they also must realize that the “need to be me” costs them a lot of money in worker productivity every year. People do as you do, not as you say.
When you have people playing by different rules, it creates conflict and problems, causing your organization to spend valuable time discussing and dealing with conflict rather than achieving goals. By making uniform rules one can eliminate unnecessary conflict and wasted gossip around the office. Let’s use the stop sign as an example. Imagine an intersection where there is a stop sign for drivers going north and south, but not for drivers going east and west. If you can trust that when you are traveling east or west that people traveling north and south will stop, you can drive full speed through the intersection with nothing to worry about. However, if you can’t be sure that the north-south drivers will follow the rules, then you need to slow down or stop at that intersection to prevent serious consequences.
The same thing is true of your organizations. If people are not all playing by the same rules, it breaks trust. People feel the need to be cautious and slow down.
Conclusion
Next time you think you are not getting maximum productivity out of your team, do not assume it is a relationship issue. Do not assume that one of those fun one-day or half-day team-building exercises will change your results. Instead, hire someone who can help you take a more systemic approach to help drive the results you are looking for.
How To Improve Your Team - To learn more about this author, visit Howard Shore's Website.
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Millions of dollars are misspent every year on team-building exercises and programs that do not get to the core of unlocking the potential of team performance. Teams are sent to exotic places to participate in fancy programs and fun activities that fail to help them achieve peak performance. This article explores why team-building programs fail and recommends ways to improve your team’s performance.
A significant reason that team-building initiatives fail is that too much emphasis is placed on the misconception that team-building should be fun. The purpose of team-building is to improve the performance of a work group, thereby creating better outcomes. This requires change, and for most people change is not fun … it is hard work. To drive change, team members must develop skills and gather information connected to the critical business outcomes they must produce. Team-building can be fun… if the members of the work group enjoy the learning process and relish the opportunities that change will bring. Sometimes the most trying struggles produce the most satisfying lessons.
If you want to improve teamwork and performance in your organization you have to look at the four core elements to driving team performance: relationships, goals, roles, and rules. All four of these elements must be executed well for the organization to flourish.
Relationships
Ironically, improving relationships is probably the last area you should focus on. Yes, the area that most leaders spend most of their time addressing is usually the symptom, not the problem. Almost every organization that has team-building issues will find their root of their problems in goals, roles, and rules. In my experience, when we address goals, roles, and/or rules, many of the relationship problems disappear.
Once you are comfortable with goals, roles, and rules, you are then ready to tackle relationships. Many of these relationship issues usually stem from different behavioral styles and people not appreciating and knowing how to deal with people whose styles differ from their own. I recommend engaging a Certified Behavioral Analyst (such as myself) to help iron out the rest.
Goals
The first step toward achieving success as a team is to state your goals properly. You know your goal is well stated when anyone who reads it knows exactly what you are trying to accomplish and in what time frame. The better a person states the goal, the easier it is to create the action plan. An acronym commonly used for stating a goal properly is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistically high, and Time-based). In my experience, most goals do not properly meet these criteria and thus diminish the success of teams.
The other Issue that dooms many teams is improper alignment of goals. On an individual basis, each goal may be SMART. However, when you add up all the goals, or look at them on a system-wide basis, they may conflict with each other. These conflicts distract the team as they spend more time dealing with the lack of alignment than actually working on achieving the goal. It is for this reason that an ongoing system for goal alignment needs to be established in your organization.
For a comprehensive discussion on goals please see my article “State Your Goals in a SMART WAY” to learn more on the subject of goals.
Roles
In order for a team to function properly it is important that every member of the team understands specifically the actions and/or activities assigned to them. This is not as simple as some make it out to be, which is why this is usually an issue for team. There are two different types of roles: task and maintenance. The “task” roles relate to driving the desired outcome of a team. The “maintenance” roles relate to managing team processes and relationships among people on the team. Many organizations take the latter for granted, as if processes and relationships will automatically fall into place, or underestimate the time required to do it well.
With regard to task roles it is important to break down the tasks required to produce the outcomes you want, and how much time each task will take. Many organizations only think about the big things and take the little tasks for granted. Those many little time-consuming tasks are what throw teams off course. Once all the tasks have been identified, roles can be identified and assigned to the appropriate people.
Rules
Rules are a very important component of teamwork. This is one of those areas many leaders, particularly in entrepreneurial and family-owned businesses have the biggest concern with. Everyone is fine with rules as long as they apply to others. You cannot have one set of rules for some people and another set for others. Owners are particularly vulnerable to this one. They love to pull out the old trump card, “Well it’s my business, so I can do whatever I want!” While this is true, they also must realize that the “need to be me” costs them a lot of money in worker productivity every year. People do as you do, not as you say.
When you have people playing by different rules, it creates conflict and problems, causing your organization to spend valuable time discussing and dealing with conflict rather than achieving goals. By making uniform rules one can eliminate unnecessary conflict and wasted gossip around the office. Let’s use the stop sign as an example. Imagine an intersection where there is a stop sign for drivers going north and south, but not for drivers going east and west. If you can trust that when you are traveling east or west that people traveling north and south will stop, you can drive full speed through the intersection with nothing to worry about. However, if you can’t be sure that the north-south drivers will follow the rules, then you need to slow down or stop at that intersection to prevent serious consequences.
The same thing is true of your organizations. If people are not all playing by the same rules, it breaks trust. People feel the need to be cautious and slow down.
Conclusion
Next time you think you are not getting maximum productivity out of your team, do not assume it is a relationship issue. Do not assume that one of those fun one-day or half-day team-building exercises will change your results. Instead, hire someone who can help you take a more systemic approach to help drive the results you are looking for.
How To Improve Your Team - To learn more about this author, visit Howard Shore's Website.
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George LudwigGeorge Ludwig is a recognized authority on sales strategy and peak performance psychology. An international speaker, trainer, and corporate consultant, he helps clients like Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern Mutual, CIGNA, and numerous others improve sales force effectiveness and performance. Though it's George's strategies and processes that help corporations increase productivity and performance, it's his tremendous energy and dynamism that spark the transformation. Again and again, clients remark on his amazing ability to unleash human capacity and inspire men and women to break out of their comfort zones. The result is a whole new type of salesperson. His customized presentations teach achievers to make stunning advances in their lives. From helping salespeople realize cherished dreams to helping corporations exponentially accelerate revenue streams, George Ludwig leaves audiences and individuals empowered, emboldened, and clamoring for more. George is the best-selling author of Power Selling: Seven Strategies for Cracking the Sales Code and Wise Moves: 60 Quick Tips to Improve Your Position in Life & Business. - Visit George Ludwig's Website |
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Dianne CramptonDianne Crampton is an executive leadership coach, team culture consultant, author and president of TIGERS Success Series, Inc. Dianne has been helping CEO's and Executives connect their employees to their core values and goals for over 20 years using the trademarked TIGERS team culture process, which stands for trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. To download a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that will predictably tear them down go here. Dianne's contribution to the 2010 Pfeiffer Consulting Journal (an imprint of John Wiley and Sons Publishers) entitled TIGERS Hearted Teams is available in November 2009. Her new book TIGERS Among Us: 5 Winning Business Team Cultures And Why, Three Creeks Publishing will release in March 2010. To receive publishing discounts, subscribe to the free TigerTracks Newsletter here. - Visit Dianne Crampton's Website |
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Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
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Stephanie RobeyStephanie Robey is President and CoFounder of Pivot Positive, LLC - an Internet marketing business focused on helping people start work at home ventures. Previously, she was employed at The Search Agency with over 20 years experience in graphic design and 10 years experience in online marketing. She was responsible for launching the Conversion Path Optimization (CPO) unit where she and her team have conducted hundreds of optimization tests for online companies across multiple verticals. She is a successful entrepreneur having started and sold 2 companies and remains on the board of directors of the third, PhotoSpin.com Stephanie began her career in the direct marketing realm creating and producing direct mail for many of the major cable television companies and directly attributes her understanding of Internet marketing to those early offline experiences. Stephanie is a graduate of San Diego State University with a BFA in Graphic Arts and also holds an Executive MBA from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. Read Steph's Blog Meet Steph and Dave Sign up for our Free 7-Day BootCamp: Self Employed & Rich - Visit Stephanie Robey's Website |
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