TEAM BUILDING WITHOUT TIME WASTING

By Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan

As major organizations have to learn to deal with increasingly rapid change, teams are becoming more and more important. As the traditional, hierarchical  school of leadership diminishes in significance, a new focus on networked team leadership is emerging to take its place. Leaders are finding themselves members of all kinds of teams, in¬cluding virtual
teams, autonomous teams, cross-functional teams, and action-learning teams.

Many of today’s leaders face a dilemma: as the need to build effective teams is increasing, the time available to build these teams is often decreasing. A common challenge faced by today’s leaders is the necessity of building teams in an environment of  rapid change with limited resources. The process of  re-engineering and streamlining, when coupled with in-creased demand for services, has led to a situation in which most leaders have more work to do and
fewer staff members to help them do it.

Research involving thousands of participants has shown how focused feedback and follow-up can increase leadership effectiveness – as judged by direct reports and co-workers (Goldsmith and Morgan 2004).  A parallel approach to team building has been shown to help leaders build teamwork without wasting time.

While the approach described sounds simple, it will not be easy. It will require each team member has have the courage to regularly ask for – and learn from – ongoing suggestions from fellow team members.

To successfully implement the following team-building process, the leader (or external consultant) will
need to assume the role of coach or facilitator and fight the urge to be the “boss” or “instructor”. Greater improvement in teamwork tends to occur when team members develop their own behavioral change strategies rather just executing a change strategy that has been imposed upon them by the “boss”.

Read Marshall Goldsmith advise in 14 simple steps here: http://www.stamfordglobal.com/userfiles/File/Goldsmith_Team.pdf

Motivating and Engaging Team Members

I have recently spoken with former EMEA T&D Director, Kieran Hearty about motivation. This is what he told me: “How NOT to do it?  Give them a dictatorial leader who doesn’t really empower them and they feel the sense of powerlessness.”

The secret to motivation:

1. Purpose – creating a sense of meaning and purpose within the team;
2. Providing the opportunity for professional and personal growth;
3. Providing new challenges and variety of challenges as well; and
4. Working with great people, providing the opportunity to work with great people.

Certainly meaning and purpose, is the starting point, because you’re moving with intent towards something that really gets you up out of bed in the morning. But motivating and engaging is not expensive. It’s not expensive! It doesn’t have to cost any money. There is a consistent theme here. Also, interesting research from MIT shows, that a typical rewards system doesn’t work in this kind of world. This is what does work: growth, challenges, people, purpose – that’s what really counts.What if you don’t have a perfect project team, its only about 50 percent, could we build on that and end up with great?

Yeah! How can we do that?

Proper resource allocation – making sure not just that you’ve got the right people on the bus but that you got enough of them. So proper resource allocation was pretty important.

Providing clarity – clarity, clarity, clarity, resonated with everyone.

Empowerment – not people feeling powerless because that’s de-motivating and not engaging but feeling empowered – somehow there’s goodness there.

Inter-dependent thinking – that means that we work for each other. There’s no silos – if you’re working with a team that is inter-dependent, who supports each other, works for each other, thinks about each other’s needs, then that feels good and wholesome.

The opportunity for creativity and innovation – it’s not just about doing the boring stuff but being creative, especially thinking outside of the box.

Recognition vs reward – recognition is good but doesn’t have to cost anything. That’s what makes you feel good, you go home and say wow I was recognized – somebody said ‘thank you’ to me, I felt great all day. It’s less about reward more about recognition.

2012 Employee Engagement Maturity Survey

Employee Engagement has become top priority for organizations across the world. There are countless studies show that a fully engaged and aligned workforce drives business success and contributes toward buttom line profitability.

And yet, the topic remains elusive, even murky. The chemistry of individual engagement is complex, creating an engaging culture that attracts the right people in the right position and offer long term passion for the job is a challenging responsibility.

The 2012 Employee Engagement bi-annual research aims to create a comparison on how employee engagement practices have developed across organizations in the past 2 years, what the current organizational practices are to develop a fully engaged and aligned workforce, what HR and business practitioners consider the key to successful people engagement, in addition our report on the survey aims to provide practical answers to improve enterprise wide workforce engagement for business success.

If you wish to receive a copy of the survey findings please add your contact details at the end of the survey. Thank you for your contribution!

The end of performance management (as we know it)!

Traditional performance management has run its course. It does not make us the agile and human organizations we need to be. Can we learn from something from traffic?

Bjarte Bogsnes, VP Performance Management Development at Statoil, Chairman Beyond Budgeting Roundtable Europe surely thinks so.
“We have continuously developed our management model “Ambition to Action” with “agile” and “human” as key guiding principles.  For instance, in 2005 we abolished traditional budgeting, and we decided in 2010  to leave the calendar year in our management processes where-ever possible . “Self-regulation” has become an increasingly important word for us on this journey, not as a goal in itself, but as a great way of achieving great performance. We found inspiration in something which one initially might think of as very different from organizations and business, but where we all also want the best possible performance. I have yet to meet anyone enjoying being stuck in traffic or exposed to inefficient and dumb traffic controls.  We would all like a safe and efficient traffic flow.”

Leadership Demystified – interview with Dr. Gareth Jones

„Great organisations become great because of their talents. You have to keep your eye on an absolutely critical thing and ask yourself: Is this an organisation where the best people want to be?”

(Gareth Jones)

Hundreds if not thousands of articles and books have been written about the subject of leadership. Many authors and thinkers  have tried to list those attributes, which are essential to become an effective leader. Yet, organisations still find it a challenge to develop leadership that impacts across the organisation. A recent interview with Dr. Gareth Jones, visiting Professor at London Business School, INSEAD, Instituto de Empresa in Madrid reveals a more holistic view on this ever-green question

PODCAST

 Download the Interview in PDF

The 2020 Workplace – interview with Jeane C. Meister

Ten years ago Google was operating out of a garage, Apple was in the skids, and the founder of Facebook was in high school. What a difference a decade makes. Mihaly Nagy, the chief moderator of HCM Excellence Network recently spoke to Jean C. Meister, the author of The 2020 Workplace.

This conversation takes you to the future yet is anchored in the leading edge talent practices of today and sheds some light about what is required from an HR perspective to attract, motivate and engage tomorrow’s workforce. Learn about how companies are innovating today to prepare for the future from this interview with Jeane C. Meister, author of the book, titled The 2020 Workplace

Podcast: 

 Download the interview in PDF.

Harvard professor Teresa Amabile on Employee Engagement – The Progress Principle

Harvard Business School professor and author, Teresa Amabile, in this presentation for Google describes her research into what makes people happy, motivated, productive, and creative at work. Using stories from her own life and from the diaries of professionals working on creative projects inside companies, Dr. Amabile explores inner work life — the emotions, perceptions, and motivations that people experience as they react to events in their work day. Her research team discovered that, of all the events that can deeply engage people in their work, the single most important is making progress on meaningful work.