2+2=5 Team*WORKS

Reader Question: How do you keep each member of the team involved and motivated, while keeping morale high? What steps do you need to take to achieve this?

Our Response: Often times it is crucial for team members to be involved, but not only that, motivated to exceed expectations. More often than not though, team morale is crushed when deadlines and other factors loom over the team. It is essential through deadlines and teams needing to be productive, that team leaders ensure that the team morale is still at its highest.

Team leaders need to first, work hard to develop respect for each team member, and make them feel like important assets on the team. If team members don’t feel respected and don’t feel important, performance will not continue and team morale will drop faster than gravity allows. When team members feel respected, team leadership is respected and teammates are respected. This will keep morale high, but will want team members to want to help the team succeed. Also, it is important, as we have discussed before, to create team incentives, rather than individual incentives to allow for team dynamic and productivity to surpass individual achievement. Without team unity and respect, motivated and productive teams with a high morale are almost impossible.

Try to use the old saying to “Do unto to others, as you would have them do unto you”, which will help team leaders to know the kind of environment and respect that is needed to keep productivity and team morale high.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/imcomkorea/3847294250/

Reader: My manager keeps setting these unrealistic goals for our team. I’m sure that she learned somewhere the importance of setting high goals but when they’re unattainable, its suffocating knowing that we’ll never reach them.

Our Response: There’s no doubt that a team without goals is a team without direction. And we believe in setting goals high to drive the best out of a team or individual. But there is a delicate balance between setting extraordinarily high goals and setting unattainable goals. And when that line is crossed into the unattainable, it can be even worse than having no goals at all.

I am reminded of one of my favorite books, The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch. If you havn’t had the chance to pick this up, I strongly recommend it. In the book, Randy talks about giving a project assignment to one of his classes. The students went and worked on the projects for three weeks and when they came back to the class, they blew Professor Pausch’s mind. I remember him saying, “If I had given them all semester to complete this project, I still would have given them all A’s.” Troubled and not sure what to do, Randy Pausch turned to a colleague professor, asking for help. To which the colleague said, “Go back into class tomorrow and say, ‘You all did a good job but I know you can do better.’ ” To which he further explained to Randy, “you obviously had no idea where to set the expectation bar with your students and to set it anywhere would be doing them a great disservice. Push them further.”

I believe Randy Pausch’s story is a good example of walking the line between extremely high goals/expectations and unattainable goals. The best managers have a strong sense of where that line is. How do we know where the line is? Managers must watch the signs from their team members, both verbal and nonverbal and react to them by managing the line. My advice to team members who are feeling that there are unrealistic goals/expectations, manage these goals by setting individual milestone goals that you can accomplish along the way, it makes the end goal not seem so far away.

Reader’s Question: Our team is working efficiently, except for the fact that one member is clearly not “pulling their weight”. What steps should we take?

Our response: It is extremely difficult when a team is doing well, but one person is not performing. Often times it seems as though the easiest thing to do would to get “someone new”. Well, often times that can be a hard task to accomplish. Sometimes it is easier for people to just deal with it and when evaluations come along, just show that person what the team really thinks. Often times this can discourage people to continue within the company on a team, especially if they thought they were pulling their weight.

Sometimes communication is the key area that must be pushed here; not evaluations or firing people, but rather, an environment should be created that works to improve everyone’s efficiency. First and foremost, team leaders need to pull together the knowledge that everyone possesses for the team’s benefit. When each person feels as though they have contributed, each individual has then contributed to the team’s goals and feel as though they are working toward a common goal that they helped to create. Secondly, the team leader should meet with each individual on the team, even those that are performing, so that no one feels as though they are being picked on, to discuss performance.  Lastly, expectations should be set clearly to discuss current performance and expectation for future performance.

For the most part, it is communication from the leaders on the team that will create team unity and optimum team effectiveness to improve the overall team efficiency. To communicate expectations and get everyone on the same page is what can make or break a team’s effectiveness.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/odalaigh/2533311083/

Reader Question: I’ve been thinking about some sort of incentive program like “employee of the month” in my office. What do you think are the implications on teamwork?

Our response: I’m sure that office incentive programs have varying levels of success or detriment in any office depending on the way management portrays the importance of the incentive, like employee of the month. If the benefits of the recognition are enticing (ie raise, promotion) there’s no doubt that it can serve to motivate employees, but at what cost?

Individual recognitions seem, to me, to tear down the team environment. Already, it is natural for people to look out for themselves, and adding management affirmation to that only serves erodes team culture. Our advice would be to base recognition and incentives on team goals rather than individual goals. By putting in place incentives that teams can accomplish together, it gives the group of employees an even stronger reason to bond together as a team under a common goal.

There’s no doubt individual recognitions have the potential to get the best out of everyone, but it certainly comes at the risk of  individuals seeking to advance themselves over the team.

Reader Question: My department is trying to work with another department to finish a proposal for a potential client, but we are having a lot of push back from the other department. What should we do?

Our Response: Often times it is very easy to create a team dynamic within a particular department, but how do you create a team dynamic between departments? When trying to mix team dynamics to accomplish a common goal, it is important to have both teams use their strengths to add to the “new team” dynamic.

Often times when different teams need to work together, it is hard for a “secondary team” to feel as though they are part of the “new team”. Our suggestion is to have a meeting to discuss the goals of the two teams, and the expertise that is needed from the other team to include in your proposal. If a team does not know why they are doing something and the effect of their work, they often times will not produce the results that are needed to get the job done, or may even resist the team dynamic.

Give the other department a chance to want to be part of the team so they know what the end result is too.

How would our reader’s respond?

Reader Question: I am a newly hired manager at my company… everyone working for me on my team does not really seem to be buying in to my ideas. They do what I say because its their job, but they always revert back to the old way of doing things. I am just getting frustrated and I don’t feel respected.

Our response: When a manager leaves a team in which they have full buy-in, to go work for a company where they inherit a new team, the manager expects the same committment from their new team that they had with the old team- – - Managers forget how long it took to build that level of connection with the old team and that committment simply can’t be replicated in the new team without one key ingredient— time.

Commitment is developed over time because trust is developed over time. Trust can’t be demanded of, trust can’t be bought, trust can only be earned, slowly over time. Trust is doing what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it, and sticking to it.

Your team will buy-in- give it time.

In an effort to more directly meet the needs of our readers, we would like to announce the new format of this blog. Our readers are invited to submit a question related to a real-world teambuilding problem that you may be facing. Each post will address one of our reader questions. Our posts are committed to offering real world solutions rather than hash hypothetical, theoretical garble. Please submit your question/topic to thepowerofteamwork@gmail.com.

We look forward to hearing from you,

Manuel and Scott

Teamwork and interpersonal skills are something that everyone can talk about on a job interview, in a board meeting, on the baseball diamond, or in a classroom, but while the nature of these skills seems simple in concept, they are extraordinarily more difficult in practice. Team skills seem difficult in practice based on the fact that they are overwhelmingly absent from many corporate environments. In fact, without much struggle, it is easy for most people to think of a moment when teamwork was missing from their own workplace.

Imagine you are an advertising account representative for a well known newspaper. Each month, you have an ad sales quota of $10,000. Not only is each sales representative expected to meet the quota each month and there are additional incentives for the top sales representative each month. On the 29^th of the month, you have met your quota with sales of $12,500. You are the leading salesperson for the month with the second place salesperson, Bob, trailing with $12,250. At your morning coffee break, you notice an incoming fax addressed to Bob with an ad request from a new client that would put Bob in the lead for ad sales with only one day left in the month. With a $1,000 incentive bonus looming, you decide that you will hold onto the fax until after the first of the month in order to secure the bonus. You win the bonus; three days later you put the fax on Bob’s desk. Excited for the lead, Bob calls the potential client and discovers that due to the delay, they had already placed their new ad with a competing newspaper.

            The company loses potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in future business. Who is ultimately at fault? While you have certainly acted unethically, the blame extends further. There are so many reasons why teamwork is missing in the office. One of those reasons relates to the way we are evaluated for compensation or promotions being based on individual accomplishment. Too often today, compensation and evaluation programs discourage the development of highly effective teams in work environments.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/penmachine/1440944894/

Isn’t it rather funny when you think about the number of ways in which teams form. Sometimes teams don’t seem as though they will jive at all. Some team are formed through technological means, others are formed when we are in certain social groups. Even other times it is through race, religion or some other common facet.

What is it though, that makes people click? Is it some innate formula or is it that we find common ground among team mates? Think of all the people you would consider talking to outside of work, or the social networks that you are in. Which relationships have lasted, and which ones have not?

Often times, the people we are closest with and are able to communicate the best with, are those that we have spent some time with, but more importantly, found common ground to spend time with. I am not just saying being on the same job, or working at the same company! It goes beyond that. Some people could work on a job for years and not considered to be friendly. There has to be a mutual respect and commonality among people that bonds them.

For the teams of people that are out there, what common ground have you found? Working on the same client or team is just not enough. Team mates have to learn to go deeper to formulate a team chemistry that is beyond recognition and indestructible. Often times, the teams that can accomplish this have the best results for any outcome because they found a common ground and enjoy working with the other people on their teams.

In six years of running the 2+2=5 program, I have found that without a doubt, far and away, the most successful teams to complete this activity had a strong mix of diversity and background. Our cultural and ethnic backgrounds provide us with a stored bank of information that we use all the time in decision making or, even more simply, how we see the world.

Of course, I am not the first one to say that diversity impacts the way we see the world and that diversity is an asset for teams. I think, for the most part, it is a pretty basic and universally accepted idea; but, a team of fourth graders taught me how valuable diversity of thought is to a team. Inarguably, we all look at the world through our different lenses.  We can leverage those differences by being conscious of each other’s strengths and considering the need for diversity when building our work teams. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we need just diversity of race, culture, or ethnicity, but also leveraging any other differences that we may have. Think about other difference that we have in the workplace and build a team that leverages those differences as opposed to selecting teammates that are homogenous in nature. Even just as simple as building a work team with someone from the marketing department, someone from the finance department, someone from sales, someone from management, and someone from manufacturing; each person will have a different view of how to solve a problem and a different view of the company as a whole.