Recommended reading from September

Photo by Nufkin

If you haven’t already seen these six great articles on leadership and teams, I highly recommend them.  Each one is a quick read.

Who Says There is No ‘I’ in TEAM?

From Super Successful Manager: “Valuing the individual strengths, skills and experiences of every one of those in a team, can generate exceptional results.  Why?  Because a skilled leader can realize where best to focus key activities in their team.”

The Urban Legend of the Great Goal Study

From Three Star Leadership Blog: “Researchers surveyed the graduating seniors from the class of 1953 at Yale University. They asked if the class members had written goals for their future. Three percent did. The rest did not…  The only problem with this powerful finding is that there was no such study. Researchers at Yale and members of the class of 1953 all swear they never conducted or participated in a study like that.”

3 Important tips to help you destroy trust, but still make you feel like you are leading people

From Teamwork and Leadership Bloggings: “Do you want to destroy the trust of those you lead, but still feel like a leader? Well, I have three suggestions to help you get there sooner than later. Most leaders do one or all of these so I thought it might be helpful to pass them on in case you weren’t aware of some of them and needed some help.”

A Manager’s Skill – Balancing Fun and Focus

From Coach Train Learn: “Having fun is a vital component of any successful team. Managers will do well to encourage their people to enjoy their work, joining in when there’s a laugh to be had, where appropriate.”

Personality Poker

From 800 CEO Read: “You’ve got your own personality that helps or hinders others. And soon enough, it can be clear to see that work is not just about the tasks we do, but how we do them, how we internalize and understand our interactions with others, and how our reactions can change the path our work takes – for better or worse.”

What Makes a Great Team Member?

From Leadership Buzz: “I’ve learned from clients the best team members share common characteristics in both the ‘skill’ and the ‘will’ areas.  A common mistake leaders make when hiring is overemphasizing the need for skill and skill alone.”

 

Warning: Your team can’t act on hazy goals

Quick intro: this is one in a series about SMART goals.

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”  – Lewis Carroll

Photo by gemsling

Imagine this scenario for a moment.  Your boss sends you an email on Friday night, just as she’s leaving for a two week vacation.  You don’t get the message until Monday morning, when she’s already in the Maldives.  All the email says is, “Your next assignment is to improve employee engagement.”

What do you do with this hazy goal?  You’d like to ask your leader for more details, but she can’t be reached.  Your mind reader doesn’t work over long distances.  What are the chances of meeting your leader’s expectations on this new assignment?  You have plenty of other tasks you’re already working on.  Should you drop them all and dive into this new one?  Maybe you should update your resume instead.  Or take a nap.

This scenario doesn’t feel good, does it?

Your first job as a leader is to help the team envision their goal.  That means giving them a detailed, focused picture of what they should achieve.

 

29 benefits of teams

Successful teams can:

1. Spread success throughout your organization, because team members learn how to work well together.  They share these skills with future teams they join.
2. Generate more ideas during a brainstorming session.  Not only because each person brings their own ideas.  But also because one team member’s idea inspires ideas from the rest of the team.
3. Create better solutions, since the team can use the best ideas from each member.
4. Achieve large and complex goals that a single person can’t do alone.  Can you skydive alone?  Only if you don’t want your plane back.
5. Develop individual skills of the team members, since they can learn from each other.  And motivate each other to improve.
6. Bring an incredible amount of diverse experience to work on the team goals.  A team can easily provide 100 years of experience.  A single person can’t.
7. Constantly improve the team, since the members trust each other to share constructive feedback.
8. Give you more friends to eat lunch (or dinner, depending on the project) with at work.
9. Give the team members practice actively listening to others to understand their concerns and suggestions.
10. Make better decisions, because they learn how to facilitate constructive conflict.  The team is able to openly debate the pros and cons of each option to find the best solution.
11. Produce more and higher quality work than the same number of individuals.  Team members can trade tasks to engage each other’s strengths and minimize their weaknesses.
12. Build commitment to their shared goals, since they hold each other accountable.
13. Improve workplace and individual morale by forming bonds between team members.
14. Share a ride to the airport.  This saves not only money, but also spouse aggravation.
15. Get more work done in a given period of time.  If each person focuses on a single task, and you have 10 team members, the team can focus on 10 tasks at once.
16. Help its members learn how to speak effectively.  They practice informing, persuading, and inspiring the rest of the team, and get friendly suggestions for improvement.
17. Provide the well-rounded skills and experience necessary to accomplish a large and complex goal.  Each team member contributes their expertise, making an expert team.
18. Solve more complex problems, because each person brings a different approach.  One or more of their methods usually works.
19. Give you a bigger audience for bragging talking about what you did over the weekend.
20. Provides its members with the energy and enthusiasm to keep working towards the goal.  When a team member is down, the others will pick him up and encourage him to keep going.
21. Deliver better solutions, because the team can detect and fix more flaws that a single person might miss.
22. Laugh at your jokes.  If no one laughs at your jokes, just keep adding more team members until someone gets your sense of humor.
23. Keep each other grounded in reality.  A single individual may be overly optimistic, but the team as a whole will be realistic about what they can accomplish.
24. Maintain a sustainable pace while working towards a shared goal.  They set a realistic schedule up front, and help each other along the way.
25. Give you plenty of drinking buddies after work.  And if you get in a bar fight, one of your teammates probably has a first aid kit in her car.
26. Develop junior team members through collaboration with more experienced teammates.  The benefits of their experience are shared among the team.
27. Improve the writing skills of the team members, since they review and critique each other’s work before delivering it outside the team.
28. Make better decisions, since the team assembles a variety of options, and evaluates them from a diversity of viewpoints.
29. Bring a wider variety of food and drink to a potluck!

Photo by meddygarnet.

 

Deadlines prioritize your team’s goals

Quick intro: this is one in a series about SMART goals.

In a favorite comic strip, Dilbert asks his boss for help.  Dilbert says, “I have two top priority projects.  I can work on only ONE at a time.  Which one should I work on?”  The pointy-haired boss replies, “Combine the two projects and work on that one.”

How many goals, or projects, or client requests is your team working on right now?  One or two?  A dozen?  More?

You’ve already prioritized them into high, medium, or low.  Or if where you work is anywhere like where I work, they’re prioritized as critical, mandatory, or high.  Because every client request is high priority!

If your team has only one highest-priority request to work on, you’re lucky.  (Please email me your secret.)  More than likely you and your team have multiple top priority goals begging for your attention.

If you make all your goals timely, by giving them a deadline, you can use those deadlines to decide which goal your team should work on right now.

 

Are you setting measurable goals?

Quick intro: this is one in a series about SMART goals.

Imagine a Vice President gives your team a new goal at work: “increase sales of our products.”  The team jumps right in, and starts brainstorming new sales promotions.  A few months later, after lots of incredible teamwork, sales are up 15% over last year.  Your team feels great!  Time for a celebration, right?

But the VP walks by while you’re all dancing the conga line and asks what the hell is going on.  As you explain how you’ve increased sales, she cuts you off.  “15% is not enough.  Increase sales more,” she demands.

 

Looking for the meaning of team? Here are 7 team definitions

A team is:

A group of people who work together to accomplish a shared goal.

A small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable.  From The Wisdom of Teams.

Any group of people organized to work together interdependently and cooperatively to meet the needs of their customers by accomplishing a purpose and goals.  Read more of the definition of a team at About.com.

A number of persons associated in some joint action.  From Dictionary.com.  Team is also a verb that means to gather or join in a team, a band, or a cooperative effort.

Together Everyone Achieves More = TEAM.  Or Together Everyone Accomplishes More.  Or Together Everyone Achieves Miracles.

A group of people linked in a common purpose.  Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.  From Wikipedia’s team definition.

A group of people coming together to collaborate. This collaboration is to reach a shared goal or task for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.  Source: Growing a Team, by Don Clark.

What’s your definition of team?  Please reply in the comments.