Business and Marketing

Remind your team of its past successes. During tough times, people become preoccupied with the difficulties they are facing and the setbacks they’ve experienced. The talk in the hallways and the company cafeteria begins to focus on the big contract that was just lost, rumors of impending layoffs, or the problems created by the latest budget restriction. Sometimes it seems as if nothing is going right in the organization.

To combat this fatalism and pessimism, it’s important for you to provide a vehicle that encourages your team members to focus their attention periodically on what they’ve done right and on the successes they’ve achieved in the last few weeks or months. This shift in attention is particularly important when you are first trying to encourage your group to swim upstream against the problems facing them and to tackle initial improvement projects.
• Create small, incremental successes. Help your team develop a can-do attitude by generating a series of small incremental successes.

This article is second one from previous article: model limit-busting

Redefine achievable performance. An important tactic is to encourage members to raise their expectations for their own performance. You may find benchmarking a helpful tool for accomplishing this perceptual shift. Benchmarking can force members to challenge their assumptions about the best possible performance that can be expected within a given area and to identify the best practices that are consistently used by the top performers in a field.
As an example, one step that led to the revitalization of Xerox was its decision to compare its copiers to those made by its Japanese competitors. Xerox found that the Japanese companies could produce copy machines at a much lower cost, even when such factors as labor costs were taken into consideration.
To apply benchmarking as a motivational tool:
1. Identify an organization that has a function similar to your own and that is recognized for having demonstrated world-class performance. This function need not be in the same industry but should face challenges similar to your own.
2. Clearly determine the criteria that you will use to compare your operation with those of the benchmarked organization. If you are comparing your performance on delivery schedules, you could measure from the point a delivery order is received to final delivery or from the time a package leaves your shipping dock. Clearly defining your measurement process will keep you from attempting to compare apples and oranges during your benchmark study.
3. Measure the performance gap between your team’s performance and that of the benchmarked organization.
4. Identify those best practices used by the benchmarked organization that could be successfully adopted by your team.
5. Reach agreement with your team regarding the time frame that would be required and the improvement actions that would be needed in order for your team to close the performance gap.

4. Take the wind out of the other person’s sails. People often enter into conflict discussions pumped up with a high degree of anger, a defense mechanism against anticipated hostility from the other party. To defuse hostility, send messages that will calm the other person and take the wind out of his sails. Offer the option of  meeting in his office or at your work area.

Avoid meeting in a public work area, because people are more likely to become ego-involved in conflicts when their peers or subordinates can overhear (ever watch children daring each other to fight in a playground?). Select a time when neither of you will feel rushed or pressured. During the discussion, avoid standing or leaning over the other person. Sit in a comfortable position, and try to relax your face and breathing. Avoid talking in a rushed or clipped manner. Offer the other person some coffee. Before responding, say to the other person, “Obviously you have a lot of strong feelings about this.

Before we go on, I want to make sure that I understand you correctly.” Often, at this point, the other party will quickly throw out a few angry points and then brace himself (you can see this in a tightening of the face and muscles) for your attack. Once again, take the wind out of his sails by summarizing what you’ve heard and then encouraging him to continue. Then briefly summarize the speaker’s key point.

5. Place disagreements within the context of agreement. During conflicts, people tend to focus on those areas on which they disagree without fully considering areas of agreement. Before commenting on any disagreement, quickly list those points on which you and your partner agree, then lead into your area of disagreement. Say something like “I feel that we are in agreement on several points,” and then list them and say, “The one area where we seem to disagree is …You seem to feel …whereas I believe that …Is that the way you see things?”

Next article is Stress Situations Guide -3

Model limit-busting in your own life. If you want your team members to raise their own performance expectations, you must be able to show them you are willing to take risks and challenge performance limits in your own life.

To model limit-busting for your team, do the following:
1. Set challenging goals for your performance. During the next month, create a wall chart for tracking your personal performance in a selected area and include on the chart a clearly delineated performance goal. Share your goal with your team, and be honest in conveying your progress toward the goal. If you find that to reach your goal you have to put in additional effort or modify your procedures, share this with your team. When your team sees that you are testing your own limits, it will be more willing to follow suit.
2. Use the language of success. I’ve found that the language you use shapes your personal perception of the world. If you use words that convey powerlessness and hopelessness, you weaken yourself. On the other hand, language can be used to empower yourself and strengthen your team.
3. Volunteer to temporarily perform the jobs of your team members. This technique provides a number of benefits.

First, it shows employees that you are trying to see through their eyes the problems and difficulties they encounter on a daily basis.

Second, if you aren’t well acquainted with the jobs they perform, this approach shows that you are willing to shift, when needed, from the role of skilled expert to novice. It shows your team that you are willing to deal with the uncertainty of working outside your comfort zone.

Adjust the pressure value. Chances are there are a few team members on whom you rely for support. When work pressure builds, you may tend to put a lot more pressure on these individuals because you know that they are reliable and will put in extra effort. The problem is that if you aren’t careful, you will both quickly burn out your star performers and send a message to the rest of the team that poor performance is rewarded with less work.

If you discover that some team members are walking out the door each day at quitting time while others are pulling two or three hours of overtime, something is wrong. Talk to members to find out whether the problem involves an unbal¬anced workload or a performance problem; then act accordingly.  One way of balancing your team’s workload is through weekly meetings. Ask members to outline their assignments, estimate time commitments for the upcoming week, and suggest ways of reallocating assignments to provide for the fairest possible distribution of work. If members put in a lot of overtime, consider giving them compensatory time off to recover their energy.  Be a strong advocate.

An important tactic for managing stress is to be a strong advocate in representing your team’s concerns to senior managers or other groups. You might also ask your manager to meet briefly with team members to provide them with a broader picture of the changes now under way at your company.

part 2 of Clone Your Superstars

One word of caution: keep an open mind regarding the best practices for any given activity. I know of a service manager for a car dealership who was surprised to discover that the repair technician with the best record for service call quality and response time actually took much longer than other technicians to initiate repairs. The reason was that the technician spent more time diagnosing a repair problem, resulting in greater overall efficiency in the repair process.
4. Determine the most effective way to transfer these unique skills to your remaining members. Possibilities include:
• Instituting formal training classes;
• Having top performers lead informal coaching or practice sessions
• Having selected members shadow top performers to observe how to apply certain skills.
• Assigning top performers to observe other members and to provide suggestions for improving their performance.