Just One Thing: Talent without Unity of Purpose Equals a Failed Team

February 27, 2013 by 2 Comments

Image of an elevator button with the number 1 and the braile equivalentI love this quote by Manchester United’s Sir Alex Ferguson, as described in Mark De Rond’s book, There is an I in Team, “There is no substitute for talent but, on the field, talent without unity of purpose is a hopelessly devalued currency.”

The essence of good leadership includes not only bringing great talent to the party, but also creating an environment that encourages people to come together around a clear and compelling purpose.

Easier said than done.

People are complicated and not easily swayed to give of themselves for mundane (albeit important) purposes such as sales or earnings growth. No business professional at retirement will regale his or her compatriots with great memories of busting the quarterly targets or consistently coming in under the firm’s cost budgets.

The best experiences, the memories and the life-changing moments in a career come from engaging with a group of individuals who trust each other enough to give it their all in terms of talent and energy. For these discrete moments in time, ego and function take a backseat to exploration, experimentation and to supporting each other forward towards some mutually important goal. That goal is never a set of financial targets. Those are outcomes of a broader mission.

There’s no easy formula for managers striving to create this unity of purpose on their teams. It’s an outcome of understanding your firm’s broader purpose and strategic goals and translating these into the opportunity for people to create. The act and art of creation may be the most unifying force in a business setting.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Growing the firm to $100 million is not a unifying goal. On the other hand, creating the environment for growth and cultivating and supporting the development of people and social systems necessary to facilitate growth are indeed activities that unify.

How hard are you working at bringing purpose to the talent on your team?

–

More Professional Development Reads from Art Petty:

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register herebook cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’s New Leader’s e-News.

An ideal book for anyone starting out in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

Need help with Feedback? Art’s new online program: Learning to Master Feedback

 Note: for volume orders of one or both books, drop Art a note for pricing information.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Just One Thing, Leadership, Leading Change, Performance, Values Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Encourage Rethinking to Keep Your Team Sharp

November 18, 2012 by 2 Comments

image of a coffee cupBeware the dulling effect of a predictable routine on the performance of your team. It might just be the single most dangerous adversary standing between you and future success. 

A consistent operating routine is innately comfortable. It’s like that favorite sweater or, settling into your recliner in front of the game on Sunday afternoon. In business, the routine might sound like: monthly forecast meetings, quarterly updates, weekly staff meetings, March and October trade shows, summer strategy offsite, fall budgeting, year-end close. Rinse and repeat. The cycle is predictable and comfortable. It’s also predictably mind numbing.

We’re often at our best as leaders when we step into new roles with new teams.  Change is the order of the day, and managed properly, this opportunity for change creates a palpable level of excitement for everyone involved. Ideas fly, new approaches are introduced and for a period of time, there’s an environment rich in learning and experimentation. And then routine asserts its comfortable primacy and the sharp edge of creativity grows dull.

It’s this return to routine that is the problem. The most effective leaders in today’s ever-changing world cultivate an environment where anything resembling routine reflects an unproductive state of “running in place.” They challenge their team members to constantly “rethink” their assumptions and approaches and to try on new ideas in search of that competitive edge or performance break-through.

5 Ideas to Breakthrough Routine and Encourage Rethinking:

1. Encourage active consumption of ideas from the outside. Our information rich and device filled world allows a steady stream of great ideas from smart people to flow to you freely and without effort. Of course, you have to tune-in. Encourage your team members to find the smartest people in and out of your space, follow-them, engage with them and to take time every day to read or listen to what they have to say. And then create opportunities to relate the ideas and insights to your present challenges and put those ideas to work.

2. Experiment with structure. Structure is a powerful and often poorly wielded tool in promoting performance and learning. While perpetual reorganization is counter-productive, a state of frequent intra-team structural change can be invigorating. Ideally, let your team members provide direct input into changes. They often know best what might work better. Emphasize the positive… “what could we do more of, if we adapted our structure?” along with the negative of, “where must we improve?”

3. Rethink position descriptions. (Sorry for the added work, HR!) There’s an endless cycle of status quo perpetuated by static position descriptions. While the world is changing at break-neck pace, we’re still busy drawing upon position descriptions created in different eras. Constantly rethink roles, accountabilities and measures, and engage your boss and your HR counterparts in defining the roles you need to move forward instead of relying upon those that brought you here.

4. Promote a “discussions must lead to actions” environment. Many teams and many professionals are lulled into a style of talking about potential changes or interesting ideas, but not understanding how to move them forward. This situation exists most often in environments where the history is one of command and control and where you want to facilitate a movement towards empowerment and action. Lead by example…encouraging that ideas translate to actions and discussions where oceans are boiled end in a verb phrase and clear ownership. “What should we do about that?” is a question you should wield liberally in this situation.

5. Introduce “Agile” approaches beyond your product development work. I love to encourage teams to operate with the core strategies and vision clearly in mind, while working within their own headlights (the distance you can see ahead while driving at night). This headlights approach encourages a rapid process of turning ideas into actions. It doesn’t require you to have all of the answers up-front, and it engages everyone in learning and participation. It also redefines your role as a leader to be actively involved rather than serving as a passive overseer.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’m an unabashed fan of promoting constant and rapid learning as a means to enabling high performance. Routine allows fine-tuning, yet for many of our firms and roles, we don’t have time to fine-tune. Lead with and promote a culture of “Rethink” to ensure that your routines don’t lull you into a false sense comfort. That comfort is the enemy of your future performance.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register herebook cover: shows title Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development by Art Petty. Includes image of a coffee cup.

For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check our Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. 

Download a free excerpt of Leadership Caffeine (the book) at Art’s facebook page.

New to leading or responsible for first time leader’s on your team? Subscribe to Art’s New Leader’s e-News.

An ideal book for anyone starting our in leadership: Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.

Need help with Feedback? Art’s new online program: Learning to Master Feedback

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Performance Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-7 Suggestions to Strengthen Your Group’s Performance

May 7, 2012 by 5 Comments

image of a coffee cupPerformance counts. Efforts are nice, but ultimately, you are evaluated on the results of your team, not the amount of work you put into achieving your results.

The pursuit of performance is something that is too easily lost in some of the kinder, gentler content that is found in the leadership literature today. My advice: don’t forget for a second that you’ll only be successful if the team you are leading is successful.

In contemplating the “set context and communicate expectations to promote performance” theme for this post, I drew a portion of the content below from my book with Rich Petro, Practical Lessons in Leadership. Our focus in the original section was on building the operationally excellent team. While you may use different labels, the concepts will support your efforts to promote high performance.

-

Operational excellence starts with you setting the expectation that your team will perform at a level necessary to achieve or exceed objectives.  In seeking to establish standards of performance and behavior, your very public and very frequent statements of expectations are some of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Your ability to grasp your true priorities in support of your firm’s goals, provides the ability for you to articulate these priorities and objectives to your team and begin setting the expectation for success.

Everyone on the operationally excellent team must understand their responsibility for execution around key objectives, and be aware that their performance and progress are both important and are being watched.  The operationally excellent team always knows the objectives, where they stand in relation to achieving them, and what they are going to do to get there. 

7 Suggestions to Promote High Performance on Your Team:

 1. Communicate expectations for achievement of operating objectives from day one of your leadership role.  There should be no ambiguity about your intentions and your expectations for performance, progress reporting and ultimately, achievement.  Remember to link yourself as ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the team and to let them understand your role to both coach and support the team and individual efforts.

2. Kick-off all operations oriented meetings with a review of the key business objectives and progress towards those objectives.  Conclude every session with a reminder of the objectives—especially near term deliverables.  This is equally important for individual review sessions as it is for group situations.

 3. Praise, celebrate and reward milestone achievement and positive progress frequently and liberally.

 4. Acknowledge roadblocks, misfires and general problems quickly and calmly.  Your appropriate reaction to these occurrences will contribute to building an effective working environment where people can honestly and openly deal with the negative as well as the positive.

 5. Foster a culture that treats problems as opportunity for creativity and innovation. More than lip-service is required here. Let teams experiment and implement new ideas to fix or improve and challenge them to keep improving.

6. Seek out and deal with poor performers promptly and fairly.  As the saying goes, one bad apple can ruin the whole bushel, and the same is true with teams. Your handling of poor performers (professionally and timely of course) sends a powerful message to your team.  You build accountability into the culture by reinforcing that a mistake is a learning experience, repeated mistakes are a developmental or training opportunities and chronic poor performance is a reason for reassignment or dismissal.

 7. Set and share expectations for your own performance and be open about your progress and your own misfires.  The team needs to see that you practice what you preach.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Great performance is a function of many factors. While the formula may vary a bit from team to team, alignment on goals, a culture of accountability, clear expectations and constant assessment of performance versus expectations are core to the recipe for success everywhere.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. (download a free excerpt at Art’s facebook page.)

Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com/blog/

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance Tagged With: , , ,

Leadership Caffeine-What Do You Do with a Team that has Failed?

February 20, 2012 by Leave a Comment

image of a coffee cupWe’re often too quick as leaders to throw in the towel on teams that have whiffed. That’s a mistake that may be more costly to performance and morale than the initial and temporary failure.

My quick answer to the question in the post title is: absent any visible, destructive behavior that may have contributed to the team’s missteps, the point in time when it becomes clear that a team has failed is the right time to double-down with a fresh challenge. Preferably one of those big and ugly challenges.

We all know that success most often occurs after a series of failures, yet this same stubborn tenacity to overcome setbacks that is so widely celebrated in our culture and with our heroes, is too often ignored in corporate team settings. After all, it’s not comfortable for executives or sponsors to spend much time associated with teams that have failed.

Team Longevity and Success:

There are well-documented criteria (Hackman, Thompson et. al.) for creating team success: a clear and guiding purpose, clear membership, enabling structures, the right kind of leadership AND team longevity.

Perhaps I’m biased by the technical product development and IT projects I’ve hung around most of my career, but typically the projects are difficult and often, the team members are being asked to do something that’s not been done before…at least in their organization.  The need for team learning coupled with the socialization dynamics present in every (new) team environment, demand a commitment to longevity as one of the key enabling factors for success.

Beware the Mirages:

We’re quick to attribute team failures to external factors (fundamental attribution error) or, to see Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions in almost every struggling team environment. Just be aware, that you may very well be seeing a mirage…something you think you should see but that isn’t really present.

Building trust, developing comfort with conflict, committing to the effort, accepting accountability and focusing on results are all important, and realizing the team culture to foster those behaviors takes time.

It takes courage for a leader or sponsor to stand up and defend a failed team. That shielding effort expends political capital and if the outcomes continue to be poor, the capital is squandered.  Leaders and sponsors coping with struggling teams are well-advised to look for the following attitudes and behaviors as they assess whether to take a stand or fold the team.

5 Signs that Your Failed Team Merits More Time

1. An absence of finger-pointing and excuse-making. In my experience, there’s a direct inverse correlation with finger-pointing and the potential for team success.

2. Genuine group and authentic distress at the failure. While a judgement call, it’s not that hard for a leader to distinguish between embarrassment or fear or repercussions type distress versus genuine “We failed and it bugs the crap out of me/us,” distress.

3. An emerging Apollo 13 mentality… “failure is not an option.” A sense of emergency, an intense focus on the goals of the initiative and extraordinary efforts to innovate are healthy signs that the team merits more time.

4. External validation that the initiative is (still) highly relevant. There’s a tendency for firms and teams to irrationally pursue failed objectives. Avoiding this sunk cost/escalation of commitment trap is difficult and important. The assumptions of and need for the project from an external customer or market perspective must still be valid before offering more time to the failed team.

5. A hunger for insights and knowledge from outside the team.  Instead of turning inward and developing a bunker mentality, the team recognizes the need for help and pursues it.  I’m particularly convinced of a team’s legitimacy, when they seek outside critical feedback on technical and performance issues.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Sometimes, good performance is just a bit further down the road. Don’t discount how critical it is to give good people time to gel on big projects.

–

Don’t miss the next Leadership Caffeine-Newsletter! Register here.

Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Project Management Tagged With: , , , ,

Leadership Caffeine: 9 Ideas to Help You Jump the Gap Between Failure and Success

July 11, 2011 by 2 Comments

We didn’t see a way forward on this project, so we folded our tents and went home.

People and teams fail on their way to success all of the time. That’s great. That’s how it’s supposed to work. The people and groups I struggle with are those who just fail.

Often, the gap between failure and success appears wide, deep and ominous. This perceived gap keeps people frozen in place for a long while and then as time passes, fear turns to regret.

Regrets are soul killers.

Potential Author: I’ve always wanted to write a book, but who would care about what I have to say?

One thing is for certain…no one will care if you don’t start writing.

Newly unemployed individual: I need to go back to school. I’ve not upgraded my skills in 20-years. 

There must have been a lot of great television shows on for those two decades.

Student: I didn’t study for the final because I was satisfied with a B.

Why? Really….why?

Potential Entrepreneur: I want to start this business. People have told me they will contract with me. I just don’t know where to start.

Start by putting one foot in front of the other. Ask for help. Talk to those who have already passed this way. Get going!

Flypaper and Failure:

Years ago, people hung flypaper in their homes to catch and kill flies. This sticky, poison-treated paper offers a nice metaphor for what happens to too many otherwise capable people. They view the distance to success as insurmountable, and instead of moving forward, they sit there, stuck, slowly poisoning themselves in their self-defeating thoughts.

Instead of being consumed by the poison of inactivity and regret while staring across a chasm that looks insurmountable, you need to get moving. If you’re leading others, now is the time to show that you know how to lead.

Nine Ideas to Help You Jump the Gap Between Failure and Success:

1. Start moving. Immediately. Don’t get caught on the flypaper. When you’re close to being stuck, remember that action overcomes stickiness. Now get going!

2. Run, don’t walk to download or purchase Steven Pressfield’s book, Do the Work. Based on his thoughts on “Resistance” outlined in The War of Art, this is the best kick-in-the-ass,  get-moving book I’ve ever read. Buy one for everyone on your team if necessary. Pressfield will help all of you get unstuck and moving forward.

3. Ask for help. Get a good coach. We stink at coaching ourselves. Even coaches need coaches.   And yes, teams can most definitely benefit from external coaching.

4. Flush your mind of the negative thoughts.  Remember that no one cares that you think you cannot do something. No one. This is invisible to the world. It’s in your mind. However, people will care when they notice you doing something.

5. Ignore the critics. Critics show up once you start moving forward. Critics are typically people who feed on your actions because they don’t have any actions of their own. Ignore them.

6. Extra effort shrinks the failure gap. For writers, it’s butts in seats and hands on keyboards. For leaders, it’s often about taking the extra time to listen. For athletes, it’s the extra hour of training…beyond what’s expected or scheduled. No one has ever succeeded by doing too little. You know this…now, do something about it.

7. Get the toxicity out. More often than not, team troubles have their root causes in one or two toxic participants. These people are like critics. They have no actions of their own…only criticism of other people’s actions. Vote them off…or push them off.

8. Quit focusing on what you did wrong. Ask, what did I do right? Do more of it!

9. Become an Occasional Anthropologist. Go somewhere…anywhere but the couch or the office and watch people/customers in their native settings. Send your team out to the four corners of the earth. Observe and wonder. And then go back to work or back to your project and draw upon those observations for ideas and energy.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

The gap between failure and success is often much smaller than it appears. The catch is that you have to start moving to shrink the perceived gap and move towards success. Whether it’s your own professional development or that personal dream or aspiration, there’s only one way to jump the gap. Start moving now…and then start running. Happy landings!

–

About Art Petty:

Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Art’s second book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, will be published in September of 2011.

Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , ,
Next Page»