Tag Archives: team

Working Together

Leave a reply

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
You have talked about managers and systems. And you’ve described the most important system for a manager as the People System. What’s inside that system?

Response:
There are three primary accountabilities for any Manager.

  • First, is that the Manager is responsible for the output of the team. I don’t listen to excuses that some team member failed to perform, or some other team member fell short. I hold the Manager accountable for the output of the team.
  • The element that supports that output is the ability of the Manager to assemble the team together. This has a great deal to do with identifying and selecting talent.
  • Once assembled, the Manager must lead the team to work together, competently and with commitment in pursuit of the goal.

Failure in any part of this system falls to the Manager.

Supernatural Powers

Leave a reply

“Who is responsible for the team?” I asked again. “Who is responsible for the performance of the team, and all the things that affect performance?”

Melanie started looking around her office, as if someone was going to appear. One of her team just quit.

I continued. “If it’s not you, as the department manager, if it’s not your accountability, then who?”

Melanie’s eyes stopped skirting the room. There was no hero that appeared. One last time, she floated her excuse, “But how am I responsible for one of my supervisors quitting?”

“That’s a very good question. How are you, as the manager, responsible for one of your supervisors quitting?”

“What, am I supposed to be clairvoyant?” Melanie snapped.

“That would be helpful,” I nodded. “But let’s say you don’t have supernatural powers. How could you, as the manager, know enough about your supervisors, to have predicted this departure?”

Too Busy

Leave a reply

“But I am busy,” protested Byron. “How am I going to find time to read resumes?”

“Schedule it. You need to be thinking, each and every day about your team and what would happen if any of them needed to make a change. Your most important function as a manager is personnel and recruiting. In fact, if that is all you ever did, was to build a high performance team, and then walked away, I would describe you as one of our greatest managers. Because you left behind, a high performing team that could carry on.”

“It’s that important?” Byron tested.

“Top priority. In the past 120 days, your labor pool has gone from record low unemployment to record high unemployment. Now is the time to look.”

New Team, New Manager

Leave a reply

It is always tough to become a new manager to an existing peer group or a new team. A new manager always means change. And most people don’t like change, at least the unknown parts of change.

Respect comes, not from the authority of the position, or the experience of the manager. Respect comes from bringing value to the problem solving and decision making of the individuals on the team.

In fact, team members will always seek out the person in the company that brings value to their thinking and their work. If it happens to be their manager, that’s great. All too often, it’s not.

We all work for two bosses. We work for the boss who is assigned to us, and we work for the boss we seek out. The boss we seek out is the one who brings value to our thinking, our work and our lives.

So, if you are the new manager, which boss are you?

The Team You Deserve

Leave a reply

“Ted, your team is functioning exactly as it was designed to function,” I started.

“What do you mean? You make it sound like it’s my fault,” he defended.

“Exactly, as the manager, the team you have is the team you deserve.”

I could tell Ted was getting agitated. It is easy to look at someone else to blame. It is tough when the responsibility is ours.

“The team you have is the team you deserve,” I repeated. “As time goes by, you will find that your team will be no better than you are. The speed of the pack is the speed of the leader.

“If you find that your team is not what you want it to be, if you find that you are not able to bring out the best in that team, to bring them to higher levels of performance, then, as the manager, you are not the leader who deserves better. At least not yet.”

Ted was quiet.

After a minute, I broke the silence. “So, what do you think we need to work on? Where should we start?”

Ted took a breath. “I guess we have to start with me.”

A Manager’s Stomach

1 Reply

“Every time you, as the manager, take a team problem behind closed doors, you participate in a grand collusion that cripples the team from solving ANY problem,” I said.

“What do you mean collusion?” Miriam asked.

“Faced with a problem the team doesn’t want to deal with, they panic and engage in non-work behaviors, so they don’t have to deal with the problem themselves. Remember your team of independent technical contributors, all very competent on their own, but they butt heads when they are required to work together?”

Miriam nodded.

“You give them a difficult project where they have to work together,” I continued. “What is the first problem they have to solve? And here is a hint. It has nothing to do with the project.”

Miriam was quiet for a moment, then, “You are right. The first problem they have to solve is how to work together. But are you suggesting that, as the manager, I put them in the same room and talk about their inability to work together?”

“Yes. And what is the reaction when you say, ‘Gentlemen, I called this meeting today to discuss how difficult it is for the three of you to work together. We are going to talk about your behaviors that derail projects and what behaviors need to change.’ Then you stop talking. How is your stomach feeling right about now? How are the stomachs of each of your team members?”

“Are you kidding? It makes me feel queasy just to think about saying that to the group,” Miriam admitted.

“Then, you know you are talking about a real issue. When everyone in the room has their stomach upside down, you know the team is dealing with a real issue. High performance teams get comfortable with discomfort. Low performance teams go into non-work and want you, as the manager, to solve the problem for them.” -Tom

Keep Them or Transition Them Out

1 Reply

From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
In an attempt to retain their highest producers, a call center instituted an incentive plan that highly favored a group of seven. These “Magnificent Seven,” as the partners called them, did produce a high percentage of the revenues. But they were also highly dysfunctional as a group as each one was high maintenance with lots of personal baggage in his/her own right. While the reward system worked to retain these seven, the churn rate for the remaining 23 seats was over 400%. In effect, the incentives to retain seven people came at the expense of morale, work environment, job satisfaction and even the bottom line. The cost of continuously replacing the 23 employees far exceeded the benefit of retaining the seven. Your thoughts?

Response:
So, if I was a direct manager and needed high volume sales for only the next three months, I would go the M-7 every time. But, that is not the way most organizations work. Most organizations need sustained revenue over years and decades. Most organizations need a sustainable system of sales which contemplates sales methodology, recruiting, orientation, portfolio growth, levels of work, promotion and retirement. This goes back to time span.

Three months time span – Magnificent Seven
Ten year time span – Not the Magnificent Seven

Leadership is Observable

Leave a reply

The group worked for ninety minutes in a simulation to complete a complex task. Once the task sequence and its steps were decided and practiced, the test was to complete the entire sequence in a twenty minute time frame.

I stopped the simulation to ask a simple question. “Which of you is the leader?” There had been no formal selection, but the group immediately looked at Sam.

“What is it about Sam, that made him the leader?” I asked.

The team members exchanged glances, wondering if they were all thinking the same thing. “Well, Sam seemed to know how to organize this thing together,” Marvin volunteered.

“How did he do that? You have not worked together as a team before.”

There was a brief moment, then Kyle piped up. “Sam pulled us all together, asked questions about what each of us thought. Within three minutes, he had a plan, assigned some individual responsibilities and we started working.”

Sam was chosen as the leader because he understood the complexity of the situation better (at least faster) than the others.

At that moment, Emma stood up. She was sitting on the sidelines, in fact, I wondered if she was paying attention.

“I think we can complete this task in five minutes, instead of twenty,” she said.

All eyes turned. In an instant, a new leader emerged. Leadership is an observable phenomenon.

Slow Way to Change the Culture

Leave a reply

From the Ask Tom mailbag – on Quickest Way to Change the Culture.

Question:
Okay, I got what I wanted about hiring new people who are more into process than firefighting. But how do you change the current team, whose culture has been more about firefighting than process.

Response:
Changing culture is a long term journey. It requires patience, persistence and paying attention. Same scenario for maintaining the culture you want.

Behavior – it’s all about behavior. We can put teamwork posters on the wall, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Culture is about behavior, not posters. Culture is that set of unwritten rules that governs our required behavior in the work that we do together.

It starts in the debrief, the post-mortem, the project review. That’s why you have to pay attention. You have to pay attention to behavior IN alignment and behavior NOT IN alignment. When you see it, you have to call it.

I like to use a group setting after a project, because I want lots of people talking, not just me. In fact, I just want to ask questions. Let’s stick to process vs firefighting, here are my questions.

  • When we attack a problem, using a process (checklist, model, protocol, step sequence) what are the major benefits in the result? [Your group or team should be able to come up with a dozen or so benefits.]
  • If those are the major benefits, what stops us from using that process? [Your team should be able to come up with a dozen excuses not to use the process.]
  • So, let’s look at the process. [You do have a process, don’t you, because if you don’t have a process, you may have to go back to firefighting.]
  • In what way can we stick to the process next time to get the results we want? [Here is where I go back to the excuses to reveal them for the head-trash they are.]

And I use this de-brief often, just asking the questions. BTW, this is a simple gap analysis.

  • What do we want?
  • Where are we now?
  • What’s in the gap, keeping us from getting what we want?

Rinse, repeat. Often. Slowly, the group will turn. Patience, persistence and paying attention.

Move a Team Out of Its Mediocrity

Leave a reply

“Why the long face?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Julia replied. “I have been working here for six months as a manager. And I feel like I have a mob on my hands. It’s almost like I need to dis-empower the team to get them to stop fighting me. I have a group of long time employees, comfortable in their mediocrity. They work together, almost as a team, to try to stop effective change or create resistance to it. They are very powerful for several reasons. First because we can’t fire them all and second because they have become a fixture in the organization and the idea of eliminating them is almost not an option.”

“Are there things that need improving around here?” I probed.

“Without a doubt. But, every time I suggest something, I get stiff-armed. Or they agree with me, and do the opposite behind my back.”

“Perhaps you should stop suggesting things,” I wondered out loud.

“But, we need to make changes in our processes, to become more efficient,” she protested.

“Who is going to execute those changes?” I wanted to know.

“Well, my team has to.”

“Then, who has to come up with the ideas and how to implement them? Here is a hint. The answer has nothing to do with ideas and execution. The answer has to do with your role as a manager.”