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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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: , , , , ,

It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Teams to Succeed

May 18, 2011 By 5 Comments

“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.”  -J. Richard Hackman with Diane Cotu, Why Teams Don’t Work, HBR (article requires fee/subscription).

If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable and potentially career altering.

For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.

This Would Be Easy If it Weren’t For the People:

If you are in the unenviable role of pulling together a group to tackle a project, you’ve got more than a few obstacles to overcome, including:

  • People
  • The egos of people
  • Histories, biases and prior experiences of people
  • Politics (yep, people again.)
  • Communication challenges in working with…you guessed it, people.

Compounding the interpersonal and social challenges found in groups referenced above, groups struggle to learn how to make effective decisions, how resolve conflicts and how to be creative together.

At the end of the day, this group stuff would be really easy if it weren’t for the people.

The Basics Provide the Foundation, But Sometimes You Need a Little Help from Your Friends:

Even if you get everything right up front with a new team…a clear and compelling reason for being, clear roles, group-generated team values, proper organizational support and so forth, you will still run head-on into the human factors referenced above. Every time.

Sometimes you just need help to get beyond the noise created by throwing a group of people together and expecting them to become productive at a high level.  A number of years ago in my role as a software company executive, our team and Board agreed that we would invest  to completely redevelop the firm’s core software.  This Bet-the-Company project called for adoption of new approaches and new technologies and after sputtering along for a period, we recognized the need for help.

This strategic initiative would have died on the ash-heap of failed software development projects if it weren’t for the help of some great people at the firm, Construx , who helped us rethink not only our development approach, but, how we worked together to cut through all of the issues described above. (Note: I have no affiliation or relationship with Construx,  just high regard. Thanks, Jerry)

The true value in the approach provided by Construx was not so much the consulting…it was great, but the cultural transformation that resulted in how teams and people worked together.  And while not every project merits (or can afford) high-powered consultants, can you truly afford to allow your teams to sputter and struggle along, seriously endangering the health of your business?

If getting work done in groups and via teams is important in your firm, perhaps it’s time to get some help in rethinking how these entities work together.

A Timely and Relevant Editorial Comment:

As an aside, one of my unofficial observations on team performance inside organizations is that over time and based on a series of poor experiences, managers and leaders begin to accept suboptimal outcomes from project teams as the norm.  Team members are very aware of the group’s performance problems, but for many reasons, too few people feel empowered to take on the problems and drive change.

Strengthening Team Potential and Performance Beyond the Building Blocks:

Great groups and high-performance teams find a way to be creative together, to fight and then move forward together and to make many more right than bad decisions together. They move quickly across the gap spanned by starting up and breaking the ice on one side to achieving trust on the other side.  For some groups, this span is simply never bridged.

Whether you draw upon great outside advisors and coaches to help your teams improve, or, you leverage your best internal talent (good formal and informal leaders) to observe and coach your teams on the difference makers, just do something.  Don’t accept consistently poor performance, when high performance may just be a short distance away.

Recognize that new groups don’t naturally know how to work together…don’t know how to fight together and they don’t know how to make decisions together.  In many cases, they don’t really know how to talk with each other on the tough performance topics.  It’s not that you don’t have smart people in your organization and in these groups, it’s more about how difficult it is to do this right together.

Teach your teams great practices in creativity and problem solving and hold them accountable to applying those practices and tools.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

I’ll echo Hackman’s quote at the opening of the post: the potential for extraordinary with teams is always there…just don’t count on it.  Improve your chances of success with group efforts by teaching your teams to work together.  A little effort will go a long way towards strengthening your organization.

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

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: , , , ,
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