Leadership Caffeine: 6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today

July 19, 2010 By 2 Comments

A Cup of Leadership CaffeineThe world of work has increasingly become the world of teams and group activities, and to quote Richard Hackman, author of, Leading Teams-Setting the Stage for Great Performance,

“I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”

If your organization is like most, you’re leaving money on the table in terms of team productivity and performance. Social and interpersonal factors, motivation issues, lack of group cohesion and the general up-front churn that teams display as they form, are just a few of the areas where you can pick up immediate productivity improvements with a little bit of smart leadership.

As an aside, many senior project managers and executive sponsors provide this type of leadership for major project initiatives.  The focus in this post is on the gross majority of group, team or committee activities that fly below the radar of formal project management leadership and executive sponsorship. These are often manager-led initiatives or cross-functional groups coming together to tackle a problem.

6 Ideas to Improve Team Performance Today:

1. Control Your Urge to Put a Team On It-use groups carefully and sparingly and avoid the reflex action to set up a work group, committee or project team for every issue that comes your way. Carefully assess whether a group effort truly stands the best chance of success.  There are many situations where the right individual can work with stakeholders and across functions and accomplish the goals or solve the problem more efficiently and effectively than a team.

2. If You Must Set Up a Team…Please Ensure that Goals Are Clear and Compelling: unclear goals promote “churn and flail,” and mundane tasks drive lackadaisical performance.  As the responsible organizational leader (not necessarily the work team leader), you must ensure that the goal of the initiative is crystal clear and linked to a key business imperative.  Vague goals and unclear context are productivity and morale killers.

3. Starting Today, Rethink the Approach to Choosing Team Leaders.  Instead of seniority or rank, work-team leadership must be based on a single criterion: “Who is the person best suited to help us succeed with the task at hand?”  Depending upon the nature of the task, an individual with good facilitation skills, or a person that works well across functions might be better suited than a functional manager or the most senior person on the group.

4. Define the Group’s Values Up-Front.  Don’t make a career out of this, but definitely don’t skip describing and memorializing the required group behaviors for discussion, debate, attendance, participation and work-completion.

5. Use Simple Assignments to Save Time.  Every meeting must have a note-taker (scribe), a timekeeper and a traffic cop.  The traffic cop enforces the rules in play (e.g. brainstorming) and helps the team stay on topic and work towards an outcome.

6. Assign a Coach. If the group is expected to work together for more than a few days, it is helpful to ask for an objective 3rd party set of eyes to assess team processes and interpersonal dynamics.  You don’t need to spend money to bring in an outside resource with a fancy certification.  One organization used representatives from HR (a great way to help get this group engaged with the business of business) and another identified and specified a coaching role and rotated the responsibility between individuals.  The coach is not part of the working team, but rather an occasional and objective observer that reports back to the designated team leader on group dynamics and group processes.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

We are well served to identify continuous improvement opportunities for our collaborative endeavors.  I’ve watched great process companies with legions of people wearing colored belts forget about some of the simple suggestions above that can save money and time, spur performance and add to task enjoyment and morale.  Today is a great day to help your teams and groups boost their performance!

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth, Values Tagged With: , , , ,

Boost Your Effectiveness at Work by Creating Time to Think

June 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Most people that I know rush through their days from meeting to meeting, filling every possible gap in their schedule either with meetings or operational activities.  Lunch is either a hurried affair at the desk or possibly a fast dash with a coworker or two to the local sandwich shop.

And while that is the nature of work in this world, the one thing that suffers is finding a few spare moments to think and process on how to deal with a problem or leverage an opportunity.

As challenging as it sounds, it’s important for you to find 10-minutes in your workday to block out or step away from phones and e-mail and all of the other activities that keep your brain completely occupied, and just think.

I’ve made a habit of this over my entire career and I almost always come back from my ten-minute brain break with some fresh ideas on a vexing issue.  In comparing notes with colleagues, most have indicated that they have some sort of quick-refresh process that they strive to fit into their days.

5 Suggestions to Help You Create Time to Think

  1. Hit the stairs.  If you live in a multi-story building, grab an opportunity to step into the stairwell and hike some flights.
  2. Walk around your office complex-weather dependent of course.
  3. Turn off your phones and your computer, close your door and just think.  One colleague meditates and another puts on Mozart and soaks it up.
  4. Find an empty meeting room with a white-board and map out your ideas in living color.
  5. Take ten to read something.  It doesn’t matter what…just something that will allow you to focus.

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Regardless of your choice, your brain and with some of the ideas above, your waist-line will thank you.  Happy thinking!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People-It’s Time to Learn to Say No!

March 3, 2009 By 2 Comments

One of the themes that I hear consistently in workshops and in discussions with the professionals in my MBA classes is frustration over the propensity of a firm’s leaders to never say “No” to a project. 

Lacking a viable mechanism to compare, evaluate and select and reject projects, decisions are made based on politics, gut feel and the squeaky customer wheel. 

The net result of this lack of discipline is that the people doing the work end up overloaded and overwhelmed.  They operate in compliance mode, focusing on surviving until the next deadline and adding little creative value or innovation to their activities.

This is a perfect formula to waste money, squander creative energy and decimate morale.  This “we never met a project we didn’t like” approach is also the antithesis of the formula for performance excellence.

The current economic pressures amplify the need to create better screening mechanisms and to truly manage your investment in projects with rigor and discipline.  You need to deliver the right projects effectively, and you need to learn to say “No” to some that seemed like a good idea last year and many that will jump out at you during the next year. 

Take a look at the portfolio of projects that you and your colleagues are engaged with today and make each of these projects earn their way back into the portfolio.  It’s OK and even healthy to challenge yesterday’s priorities as they bury people in today’s work. 

Use these filters:

  • Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?
  • Is it a must-do or compliance initiative?
  • Is it strategic?  If yes, you should bounce it up against the current-state strategy and determine whether it is still relevant today.  If not, kill it.
  • Is it an operational improvement?  If yes, can you connect the operational improvements to something that impacts strategy and customers…even through one or two degrees of separation?  If you cannot connect it to something that allows you to serve customers (internal or external) more effectively, consider killing it.
  • Do we have the right balance of strategic and operational initiatives?
  • Are we evaluating projects based on a combination of objectively developed financial and non-financial criteria?  Does our evaluation approach allow for reasonable comparison of alternatives? 

If you struggle to answer these questions because your strategy is vague or out of date, you’ve got another problem that needs to be fixed.  While some decry the usefulness of strategy in a time of crisis, I would argue that now more than ever is the time to create a robust, dynamic strategy and execution program.  Instead of wandering aimlessly through the minefield of the economy, I want a team that is opportunistic, experimental and focused on finding and exploiting gaps and ignoring distractions.  This is strategy. 

The bottom-line:

Your organization executes strategy one project at a time.  Too many leaders fail to support the creation of processes that effectively evaluate and manage the nearly endless list of options to work on.  Start the process by refreshing on strategy and then work unceasingly to manage and cull the portfolio in support of the strategy.  Learn to say, “No” and you’ll be shocked at how much great work your team will complete.  You might even find them smiling as they work.  

Filed Under: Decision-Making, Leadership, Performance, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,