Many workplace teams I observe are not much better than the typical nightmarish college class group project that most of us have lived through at one time or another. Here are 4 big reasons why workplace teams struggle and 9 ideas to help you do something about it:
One of the value killers found inside many organizations is the out of control pursuit of too many new initiatives. The root cause of this undisciplined pursuit of new initiatives rests squarely on the collective shoulders of the management team.
Post number 1 in this series focused on the behaviors that often stifle the pursuit of moving into a new area while sustaining the legacy business. In this post, we look at 8 behaviors and approaches that YOU and your management counterparts directly control that contribute to success with this challenging endeavor:
If you’ve lived through a successful migration of a business from a legacy market to a new world, you know that it’s a sometimes messy, often emotionally turbo-charged experience. Here are 8 leadership behaviors that are guaranteed to create “tripping points” for any organization or team striving to breakaway from the past:
Good ideas and good strategies are plentiful. The weight of the research on why strategies fail points at the execution side much more so than the idea side of the equation. In a career hanging around mostly technology organizations, the limiting factor has NEVER been on the idea front. It’s been on the management side and the ability of management to produce what I describe as the Rock Star Effect.
For leaders at all levels, there’s much to gain from James D. Murphy’s excellent book, Courage to Execute: What Elite U.S. Military Units Can Teach Business About Leadership and Team Performance. Of the many quotable and thought-provoking items in the book, one that jumps out at me is Mr. Murphy’s perspective on courage. His words: “…but remember, courage is not bravado. Courage is the confidence to act that comes from preparation.”
It’s the lack of confidence to act that I observe as a derailment factor for so many teams from senior levels to functional or project groups. Here are 5 ideas to help cultivate the confidence to act on your team:
While it’s reasonable to think that a group of intelligent, accomplished professionals…all peers, with deep individual expertise in their functional areas might be the stuff of a management dream team, reality suggests that we shouldn’t count on it. Here are two key challenges that must be overcome and 5 ideas to help jump-start senior management team performance:
Most senior management groups are teams in name only, but not in performance. Sadly, the costs to the organization of this failure to coalesce at the senior management level are heavy. Great functional performers are not automatically great team players, and the hard work of moving from a team by name to a team in performance is just that, hard work. In part 1, we kick off our series on creating high performance senior management teams with a look at some of the key conditions for successful teams and an exploration of the 4 key areas senior management teams fail and flail when it comes to pursuing high performance.
