4 Do’s and Don’t’s of Team Building

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Beth Miller

team building

Team are an important part of business. Build stronger ones.

When you’re managing a group of people, you can simply… manage a group of people. But the whole of those individuals can be greater than their the sum of their parts, and if you don’t create a team out of a disconnected group, you could be missing out on all the creativity, innovation, and other developments a great team can offer.

Linda Hill, Kent Lineback, and Beth Comstock, who each have blogs at the Harvard Business Review, all have thoughts about how to build winning business teams.

1. DON’T: Manage individuals. Of course, there will be times when you need to have one-on-one management with your employees, but in the course of general business, don’t spend all your time managing one person at a time and neglecting the collective power of the group. When you do that, Linda Hill and Kent Lineback say, you “rarely use [your] groups to diagnose or solve problems. And when issues arise that clearly affect the group as a whole, [you] tend to handle them one on one.”

DO: Use the social dynamic of the team to solve problems. When issues arise, your team can rely on each other, and have confidence in their capabilities because they have someone else they can count on to have the abilities and knowledge they may not have.

2. DON’T: Allow vague boundaries about your team members’ roles and responsibilities. It sounds like something that could allow for greater innovation, not being put in boxes, right? Instead, a lack of clear roles means that each team member spends a great deal of time worrying that they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, and they’re not being productive. Worse, it can lead to team conflicts, as roles overlap and turf wars begin.

DO: Recognize individual roles, contributions, and strengths. Each of your team members are part of something bigger, and when they can be comfortable in the knowledge they are doing the right thing, their skills can shine. When all are doing this together, then they are free to collaborate and create in a meaningful way.

3. DON’T: Succumb to groupthink, Beth Comstock advises, calling it “the creativity-killing phenomenon of too much agreement and too similar perspectives that often paralyzes otherwise great teams.” In a group of similar thinking people who need similar things, and come from similar backgrounds, consensus is easy to gain. But that solution may not be a good one, if it lacks critical input from someone willing to question things taken for granted by everyone who thinks alike.

DO: Utilize diversity of every kind. If your doctor was diagnosing an illness and coming up with a cure, you would want a variety of tests; you wouldn’t want your doctor to just perform one test, no matter how good that test was. It works the same way with teams: what one person misses, another person will already be thinking about, and them bringing it up means that another person may have experience to provide the perfect solution.

Diversity may cause conflict and disagreement. If you manage this disagreement constructively, great things can come out of it, as each team member prods another into thinking their hardest and doing their best. When assembling the best team, you may consider both the types of people who will agree and inspire in all the right ways, as well as the people who will poke each other into action in all the right ways.

4. DON’T: Be unclear about goals and purposes. Life in the office can become dull for employees, and can feel meaningless if they have no clear purpose as to why their presence is required. When no one makes it clear why they are not alone and why the work they do is a valuable contribution, burnout is not far away.

DO: Make your team members feel that a worthwhile purpose unites them. Show them the results your organization has on the world, and how their work is part of that. When your team comes together motivated and with a mission, they are ready to put together the solutions that will make the company much more successful.

Now that you know some do’s and don’t's of team building, you might be interested in reading about signs that your team members aren’t trusting you.

Your team is important. What plans do you plan on implementing to an existing or future team to improve results?

Photo via Flickr user  CPX Interactive

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How Understanding Team Roles Can Improve Your Business Leadership Skills Part 1

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Beth Miller

Belbin team roles

Using Belbin team roles can improve your teams.

Teams have been the topic of my blog lately. I’ve shared with you about how different team types make business possible and how to tell when your team members don’t trust you. Next up? Team roles.

For business executives looking to select and develop high-performing teams, having an understanding of team roles can help in this process. It’s important to understand that team members who understand their roles and what is expected of them will work better.

There are a few ways to approach the idea of roles in teams. The method most widely used and researched on team roles is Belbin Team Roles.

Using Belbin Team Roles to create stronger, more effective teams

People have strengths and weaknesses. Belbin assessments can measure positives and negatives in people’s behavior as they relate to team roles. (Personality assessments, such as Myers Briggs, are different. Belbin measures what can be seen, while psychometric tests reveal what’s below the surface.)

Many executive coaches, including myself, use these assessments as tools to help leaders build better teams.

After seven years of research in the 1970s of management teams, Psychologist Meredith Belbin determined there were nine team roles. Some of these roles are natural, some can be adopted if necessary and others will be a challenge for a person to adopt. Usually people have primary and secondary roles they can naturally fill. A 20-minute assessment can identify a person’s team roles. The nine roles are:

Plants

Creative people who come up with new ideas.

Resource Investigators

Extroverts who are good at making outside contacts and developing ideas.

Monitor Evaluators

Analytical people who are shrewd and can be slow moving.

Coordinators

Mature individuals who are good at ensuring talents within the team are used effectively.

Implementers

Task-oriented people who are loyal and practical.

Completer Finishers

Meticulous workers with an attention to detail.

Teamworkers

Caring people who enjoy working with others.

Shapers

Dynamic and challenging people.

Specialist

Professional people with high technical skills.

Belbin discovered that a balance of people with the different roles would lead to a team’s success. However, balancing of team roles may not be of the same importance in all types of teams.

Here are some case studies involving Belbin Team Roles. 

If the key to success in any organization is not the individual but the team, as Belbin says then it’s crucial for business leaders seeking success to understand how to create and develop teams. My next post about teams will continue to talk about team roles and their importance to an organization’s success.

How balanced is your team based on Belbin’s roles?

Photo via Belbin.com.

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Best Practices for Team Leadership Success

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Beth Miller

executive leader team

Effective leaders perform in certain ways to help their teams.

All successful teams have good leaders. While there are many nuances to leadership, what are some best practices you can seek to follow to improve your teams?

Research and common understanding demonstrates the crucial importance of communication in any relationship; so it makes sense to first focus on how leaders should try to create a context where communication can occur. This way decisions can be made and goals achieved. To do this, they must put the team first and design an environment that inspires and enables teams to do their best work.

An article from MonsterThinking talks about four ways leaders can increase engagement through communications.

1. Encourage employees to be vocal. Each employee should feel comfortable and have plenty of opportunities to talk and communicate.

2. Promote honesty and accountability. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. And make sure you hold yourself and others to tasks assigned and goals desired.

3. Utilize performance reviews. The article also encourages leaders to have a conversation about engagement, something that HR Solutions’ Research Institute estimates only five percent of reviews include.

4. Convey mission and strategy. Not only the mission of the organization but also of the specific team goal.

Good leaders believe in their missions, and they believe in their people. A sense of camaraderie, or affiliation, within business relationships is something leaders should encourage. However, according to a 2008 study of 20 executive leadership teams, too much emphasis on positive relationships by the team leader can have a negative effect on team success. Managers should seek to find the right balance without pushing people to put their relationships above their jobs.

According to research by the American Psychological Association, four personal qualities distinguish excellent team leaders from average leaders. The last one contains a best practice for leaders to follow:

The leader must act with courage and be willing to challenge group norms and disrupt established routines. Achieving the right amount of assertiveness may be one of the most common weaknesses holding leaders back, according to a 2007 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In a Forbes interview, the widely known writer, thinker and lecturer, Peter F. Drucker provides several best practices for team leaders.

1. They ask what needs to be done. “They don’t tackle things they aren’t good at. They make sure other necessities get done, but not by them,” he said.

2. They check their performance. They write down what they want to achieve, and then they check their performance against goals.

3. They are mission driven. People know what they are trying to do.

4. They practice creative abandonment. They know when to stop pouring resources into something that is not working.

Here are a few more tips for team leadership success:

  • Align people with things they are passionate about.
  • Don’t provide all the answers. What do the employees think about the situation?
  • Don’t publically blame someone for a problem.
  • Provide constructive criticism.
  • Let your team members know you trust them.
  • Don’t demonstrate but coach members how to do something.
  • Back off, let employees do their work and don’t become overly involved.
  • Strengthen the mix and level of skills.
  • Consider each and every idea that is brought forward by the group.

What best practices for team leaders do you think have the biggest impact? And, what would you add to the list?

Photo via Flickr user Victor1558

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How Using MBTI Results Can Help Leaders Build Better Teams

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Beth Miller

myers briggs MBTI

Team members who seek to understand one another will likely improve their overall team effectiveness because their communication is better. And one tool that can help teams understand their members is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, also known as the MBTI, or simply the Myers Briggs.

The MBTI helps teams because it helps individuals see the differences in their innate personalities: how they perceive the world and how they prefer to act. And when used with teams, it helps team members to understand each other better.

As a business leader looking to place employees in roles that match their strengths and to improve teams within your company, the MBTI assessment can be useful. Here is an overview of its uses for team development:

  • Identifying strengths, resources and potential weaknesses within a team.
  • Improving communication throughout the team.
  • Helping leaders identify an action plan to improve team effectiveness.
  • Helps align teams and reduce background noise.
  • Resolving, preventing and managing conflict and stressors because of greater understanding and awareness of other people’s preferences.

Certain individuals may find it difficult to understand why other people don’t think or act the same way they do. For example, why do some people faced with a problem take their time and consider other options, while other people quickly analyze the problem, come up with a solution and then act?

It can be frustrating trying to understand the other people you work with, but knowing the MBTI results of yourself and others around you can make it clearer to everyone how people have different ways of approaching the world. Most business people take the assessment about five times during their careers, so many of your employees have already taken it, or they will at least have heard of it. Also, 89 of the Fortune 100 companies and 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies use personality tests based on the MBTI and its spinoffs.

Before using the MBTI, here are 3 Facts to help you understand it:

    1. It is built upon the work of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist who is credited with creating the idea of people having personalities in his 1921 book Psychological Types.

 

    1. Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers Briggs developed it in the 1940s. They created it to make Jung’s theory of psychological types more relevant to people’s lives.

 

  1. Four preferences are combined into 16 personality types. The four preferences are:
    • E or I (Extraversion or Introversion)
    • S or N (Sensing or iNtuition)
    • T or F (Thinking or Feeling)
    • J or P (Judgment or Perception)

What the different personality preferences mean

Extroverts

They enjoy interacting with people and develop new ideas during discussion. They often don’t know what they are thinking until they say it.

Introverts

They need to think things through before speaking. They enjoy focusing on a project and need quiet for concentration. They develop ideas internally and learn by reading and reflecting.

Sensors

Theys use specifics, such as facts, dates and times. They focus on the immediate and provide a realistic, practical perspective.

Intuitives

They look at the big picture and follow their inspirations. And they like solving new, complex problems.

Thinkers

They set their emotions aside. They prefer to step back from a problem and analyse facts and information. They focus on tasks and seek mutual respect and fairness among colleagues.

Feelers

They judge situations on a personal level. They are often able to see both sides of a situation and want harmony and support.

Judges

They favor exactness and following plans and schedules. They reach decisions by deciding quickly.

Perceivers

They favor tolerance and open time frames. They like to be spontaneous and enjoy the process.

It’s important to point out that no psychological model predicts behavior. So, leaders shouldn’t use it to determine skill or ability. People can behave inconsistently with their preferences when they are motivated to, or when the situation requires it.

Since you’re thinking about teams, check out my previous articles about team types and how to tell if your team members aren’t trusting you as their leader.

How have you used the MBTI results or other personality assessments within your teams?

If you and your organization are interested in using the MBTI as part of a team building process, Executive Velocity consultants are certified in Myers Briggs and team building. Contact us at information@executive-velocity.com.

Photo via Flickr user eraphernalia_vintage

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20 Signs You’re Team Members Aren’t Trusting You

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Beth Miller

teams executive

Successful teams trust one another.

Trust is one of three things—along with credibility and respect—that need to be established by leaders for teams to be successful. How can you (as the leader) tell if your team members are losing faith in you?

People have defined trust in many ways. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is, “the firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.” When you think about it, trust is more something that can be felt, something that is intangible, rather than something that can be defined.

In our culture overall, trust seems to be declining, especially in the workforce. A 2011 poll of almost 2,000 workers, conducted by Maritz Research Corp, showed that 25 percent of employees report having less trust in management than they did in 2010.

Stephen M. R. Covey, the author of The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything, believes trust is very important for a team to be successful.

“Significant distrust doubles the cost of doing business and triples the time it takes to get things done,” he says.

So, if you’re a leader, how can you tell if your team members don’t trust you? Here are 20 signs to look for from your employees. Employees who are:

  1. disengaged or checked out when they should be paying attention
  2. withholding information when they should be sharing, or only sharing knowledge and resources minimally
  3. being negative
  4. being rude to you or others in the group
  5. poorly coordinating with others
  6. poorly cooperating with others
  7. lacking enthusiasm
  8. grumbling or complaining more than usual
  9. showing a resistance to change
  10. over-relying on email
  11. not talking about what’s going wrong within the team
  12. unwilling to talk about what they did wrong
  13. gossiping too much
  14. increasingly absent
  15. creating conflicts with coworkers
  16. not being as productive
  17. not organizing or creating order with their working environment
  18. exhibiting a lack of self drive, or desire to improve
  19. lacking in desire to participate in company events
  20. distancing themselves from others

In his best selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, consultant and speaker Patrick Lencioni describes five things that go wrong as teams attempt to work together. When trust is lacking, these other problems often arise.

Absence of Trust

Trust is critical in building a high-performance team and lack of trust is very visible in a dysfunctional team. For her, the most obvious sign of a lack of trust is when no one will bring up any issue or problems that will show him or her to be weak or vulnerable.

Fear of Conflict

When people don’t trust team members, it means that conversation and feedback cannot be candid and difficult questions cannot be asked.

Lack of Commitment

If team members don’t feel like they’ve been heard, due to a lack of trust and the fear of conflict, they begin to lose interest in the work.

Avoidance of Accountability

When people aren’t committed to projects, they begin to blame others and external factors for any issues.

Inattention to Results

This occurs as a result of all the other dysfunctions. The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the focus on collective success.

If you begin to notice some of the above signs in your teams, take action quickly so that your team can be productive, reach its goals and support each other effectively. You may also want to check out my article about how to increase trust in the workplace. Also, here are 10 clues that employees are disengaging.

What other signs do you know to recognize when team members are losing trust in their leaders?

Photo via Flickr user seekingthomas

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7 Team Types That Make Business Possible

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Beth Miller

business teams

Teams work together to accomplish a common goal.

Teams are a part of business. They make things, accomplish tasks, provide services, offer advice and seek to meet other goals. While people have used teams to come together and accomplish tasks since we were hunters and gatherers, the concept is always evolving. And, today, more and more companies are incorporating teams—of a variety of sizes and types—into their workflows.

It’s a good idea for any business leader to understand the types of teams and the distinctions among them. Different ways to break teams into categories exist, but the following are a few common ways to think about them.

Functional Teams

These types of teams, also called functional teams, perform specific functions in an organization. They include members from the same department or work area who meet regularly. A manager holds the primary responsibility, with subordinates reporting to this person. Often, these are permanent.

Cross-Functional Teams

Workers across functions, or specialties, of the organization make up these types of teams. People with separate areas of expertise work together; they are usually at about the same hierarchical level and can often make decisions without management. Often, these are temporary.

Leadership Teams

Management takes a strategic role in guiding business decisions. They are made up of leaders from varied departments. The goals of leadership teams are generally aligned with the mission and vision of the company.

Self-Directed Teams

Also called self-managed teams, these groups operate without managers, and no one is in a position of authority. They are designed to give employees a feeling of empowerment and ownership of the job. These types of teams are newer: they’ve been around in the U.S. for decades and originated in Great Britain and Sweden in the 1950s. Research has shown that employees in self-managed teams have higher job satisfaction, increased self-esteem, and grow more on the job, but these teams aren’t without their drawback.

Virtual Teams

These are comprised of members who are not located in the same physical place; they may be in different cities, states, or even separate countries. They use technology and specific skills to achieve a common goal. They tend to be more task and projectoriented and less about social interaction.

Quality Circles

These individuals seek to become aware of, analyze and address problems within the workflow of the organization. Overall, they hope to improve performance and make management aware of any issues. This idea originated in Japan by large firms striving for quality. Usually, these are made up of three to 12 people who do similar work.

Task Forces

These teams are experts—generally a cross-section of people—joined together to solve a well-defined and temporary assignment. They have a sense of autonomy and don’t need to constantly consult superiors to get things done.

In a 1993 article for the Harvard Business Review, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith wrote that there are three distinct types of teams:

  1. Teams that recommend things.
  2. Teams that make or do things.
  3. Teams that run things.

When thinking about teams, size is another important element to consider. Research has shown that with 12 members, teams begin to lose their effectiveness, so consider this when forming your own teams within your company.

What types of teams are critical to your company’s success this year?

Photo via Flickr user kevin dooley

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Five Qualities to Identify High Potentials

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Beth Miller

As business leaders, it is important to be able to see and cultivate the employees who will be the future of the company—and direct its present course. These high potentials, as they are known, can be identified in a number of ways, but are you identifying them in your business? Or are these emerging leaders slipping through the cracks—maybe to another company that will identify their ability to rise through the company ranks?

Quite a few different metrics exist among companies and the support systems companies use, and the methods they use to identify high potentials. But a review of expert opinions on the subject shows that there is actually quite a lot of consistency across the board when it comes to what qualities high potentials have—and knowing these qualities will help you be on the lookout those who possess then in your own company.

First of all, it’s important to know how to go about finding high potentials. Yes, they may have certain definable qualities, but how do you figure out who has those qualities? Several different methods are used by different organizations, but a survey by the HR consultants ERC of twenty-six organizations revealed that the most-used practices are identification through skills and personality assessment through testing, and reviews by peers, managers, and clients.

And now, the most burning question of all—what qualities make a high potential? How can you find the emerging leaders in your company and spend the resources developing them so they can become the high level executives of tomorrow, when you want to make sure your company is in good hands? So here are the qualities based on research conducted at places such as Cornell and Rutgers.

Ambition

Individuals with high potential are, unsurprisingly, ambitious. Of course, it takes a certain amount of ambition to move careers forward, but these high potentials are competitive, goal-oriented, and they take active steps to improve themselves and learn the things necessary to progress. This, naturally, takes a work ethic of steel, so make sure to recognize those people who always have their nose to the grindstone.

Attitude

High potentials don’t waste time being negative and doing their own thing—it’s all about the positive with them, and they infect their peers and supervisors with their good attitudes. They’re team players, and they create long-lasting relationships with the people they work with. But they don’t merely want a team of people who are just like them; high potentials value the assets that diversity and many differing points of view can bring. And, another check on the attitude list? High potentials have a great deal of integrity and professionalism. They can be trusted to make the company not only look good, but be good, as well.

Critical Thinking & Communication

Critical thinking and strong communication skills are not possessed by every employee, but it is critical that those you select as emerging leaders do. This means they can reason their way through complicated problems and consider several options simultaneously. But critical thinking without constructive communication is useless—and again, this is where a high potential is a team player who can communicate their ideas with others, and listen to their ideas as well to come up with even better ideas.

Expertise

It goes without saying that an employee who is going to move forward in their career must exhibit a broad technical expertise in whatever their role may be. Not only that, but a high potential should be able to understand their role in relation to the overall function of the company.

Boldness

Last of all, a high potential must have a quality that goes beyond ambition and skill: the boldness and courage to take risks. A high potential is a risk-taker who knows that every cost-benefit analysis can’t deliver a promise of how a venture will go, and can decide whether or not to go ahead anyway, rather than be crippled by uncertainty. They know that change comes, and they adapt to it and thrive rather than holding onto past practices—and even better, they will make those changes themselves. This quality will ensure that as they move forward, your business does too.

So look around you: which of your employees are thriving where they are, and which ones are high potentials who are going to lead your company ahead?

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Freeing Yourself From The Irreplaceable Employee Trap

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Beth Miller

So you have been wringing your hands over the fear of losing a key employee.  Your top performers have read all the articles about how to become irreplaceable and they have executed the plan. They now own key client relationships or are in the critical path of a product development project.

The problem with the irreplaceable employee is that she probably knows she is key to your success and you helped put her in the driver’s seat. How did you help? You helped to create this irreplaceable employee by allowing her to develop such strong client relationships that your company became insignificant in the decision making process by the client.

Coaching tip: Team sales people with client service reps so that the client relationship isn’t about one person. As part of their role as a sales person, make the development and teaming with service a priority.

Or you viewed the employee as a high potential who had the capacity to take on more responsibilities and decision making, yet you neglected the other team members. If only a few are developed, the remainder of the employees are left behind and aren’t ready to take on added responsibilities should a key team member leave.

There shouldn’t be an irreplaceable employee in your organization.  And you can insure that you don’t fall into this trap by doing the following:

  • Create a pipeline of talent through a robust development program
  • Measure managers by how well they develop their team members
  • Have robust knowledge management systems
  • Identify successors for key employees, before you need them
Once these steps are put in place and successfully implemented you will probably sleep better at night knowing your short term success doesn’t hinge on a key employee.


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Eliminate Communication Triangulators

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Beth Miller

Does this sound familiar?  You have just left a meeting and are headed back to your office to get some important work completed when one of your team members needs to talk to you. He wants to complain about another employee, one of your team members.  He may be a peer or subordinate and he is always complaining and venting to you. I call this communication triangulation when a third party takes on the ownership of communicating for two other parties.

Finally the time has come that you’ve grown tired of the complaints as it is counterproductive and wasting your time on the more important. How did it get to this point and now how do you stop the madnesss?

First you need to recognize that you are part of the problem since you have allowed a co-worker to use you as the potential communication conduit to a third party. You may have just listened to them vent and responded with an “I understand”. Or even worse, you actually carried the communication to the third party. Bottom line is if this has been going on for awhile, you have been a party to this bad communication behavior.

So now that you have come to the conclusion, that the time spent with this person is time wasted,  and that you need to be a part of the solution, what next?

The first step is to ask the question “what” to the person.

What do you want me to do about your problem with…?  What holds you back from talking to…? Get them to own the issue, not you. Here is where you need to show that you care but also be clear that this issue is not yours and that it is their responsibility to repair the problem.

Coaching tip: Ask a lot of  what and how questions and listen intently don’t provide the solution.

Asking questions and listening to them will demonstrate to the person you really want to understand and this process will help them to explore potential solutions that don’t involve you.

The second step is to get them to commit to resolving the issue without your intervention. During your questioning process, there were probably a number of communication processes they identified as possible solutions.  Have them make a decision on which alternative they plan on using and when they plan on completing the process.

Coaching Tip:  When a person identifies their own options to solve a problem then their commitment with the option they chose is much stronger than if you provide them with a solution.

Next time someone starts complaining to you about another employee, follow this easy two step process to get them to own the problem as well as the solution.

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Become A Better Manager-Coach With These Questions

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Beth Miller

Many leaders have the belief that they should be the solver of all problems because that is why they are a leader. Yet solving all your team’s problems holds the team and its members back from their full potential.  It also holds you back as a leader. If you aren’t developing your team members, how can you ever grow and take on bigger challenges if there is no one around you to pick up some of your existing responsibilities?

So the next time a team member has a problem and before you respond with your solution to the answer, stop and ask yourself the following:

  1. Does this person have the potential to solve this issue if guided by some questions?
  2. Is this a moment when the employee has the opportunity to learn from this issue? I.e. is this a teachable moment?

If  your answer is yes to these two questions, then here are some questions to help and guide the person to their own solution(s).

  1. Tell me what you have tried up until this point
  2. What worked and why do you think it worked?
  3. What didn’t work and what were the causes for failure?
  4. What other options do you have that you have not yet tried?
  5. What similar situations have you been in like this?
  6. What fears do you have that holds you back?
  7. What resources would you need to try these other options?
  8. How would you get these resources?

Remember that as a leader one of the most important responsibilities you have is to develop your people. Development will impact their performance as well as yours by teaching them how to be resourceful, innovative, and most importantly self-reflective. On the flip side, coaching your employees will build an important skill for you as a leader and build your own succession plan so that you also have professional growth opportunities. The more you develop your team members, the more time in the future you will have to do the bigger more visionary things that will have more of a long term impact on organizational success.

Posted in Coaching, Development, Employee Engagement, Leadership, Questioning, Succession planning | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment