Business and Marketing » team

Celebrate Each Success

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:52:05 +0000

The use of small wins and breakthrough projects is especially important when organizations are going through difficult times and teams feel overwhelmed by the changes. Through this tactic teams learn to redirect their energy toward factors that are directly within their scope of control and are better able to buffer themselves against stress.

When selecting a small-scale improvement project for your team, begin by identifying one major performance area that, if improved, would contribute substantially to your organization’s success and at the same time make your group feel like a winning team. To ensure success, select a goal that:
1. Is urgent and compelling-a real attention-getter.
2. Is a first-step goal achievable in a short period of time-in weeks rather than months.
3. Is a bottom-line result, discrete and measurable.
4. Is one the responsible participants feel ready, willing, and able to accomplish.
5. Can be achieved with available resources and authority.

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Celebrate each success. It’s important to provide ample opportunities to celebrate team successes. Teams suffering from a deficit of positive feedback can quickly become demoralized. Take, for example, the manager of an international sales force whose team was responsible for selling sophisticated computer networks in the European and Middle East markets. Often the proposal development and review time for these projects stretched out over eighteen months or more. In consulting with the team on steps they could take to improve their performance, I discovered that over time members had been putting less energy into their proposals.

According to members, one problem they faced was their manager’s insistence that proposal milestone were not causes for celebration. Whenever a milestone was successfully crossed, the manager would quickly remind his team, “This doesn’t mean anything until we’ve won the proposal. It’s still early in the bidding process. A lot can happen.” What an inspiring speech! It’s sort of like standing at the twelve-mile marker of a marathon race and telling a runner, “Don’t start feeling optimistic yet. You’re only halfway there. You have more than twelve grueling miles to run under the hot sun.” Many marathon runners would soon drop out after such a pep talk.

Remind Your Team

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:00:52 +0000

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

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:59:54 +0000

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.

Experiencing Stress

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:24:42 +0000

In addition, be careful about playing favorites. If your team is experiencing stress, it becomes very important to balance your communications and to make an effort to reach everyone. Make it a point to eat lunch with a different team member every day and talk with members individually to find out about the status of their work. If time is a problem, use other techniques such as PC networking, electronic mail systems, or a note board in a designated area of your office to keep members on track regarding new information that can affect them.

Listen fully to members’ concerns. Allow members an opportunity to air their fears and concerns openly. When members begin to voice their anger and frustration, resist the tendency to respond immediately by justifying your company’s actions or telling them that you agree with their views. Just listen, and acknowledge that you under¬stand their concerns. Communicate that you want to work with team members to make certain that they perform at their best during these tough times.

Keep in mind that no one is expecting you to perform as a therapist or counselor during these discussions. You don’t necessarily have to have answers to everyone’s problems. The important thing is that you position yourself as someone who is open, interested and concerned for your team’s welfare.

Performance: Clone Your Superstars -2

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:54:10 +0000

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.

Performance: Clone Your Superstars

Sun, 17 May 2009 11:50:49 +0000

Clone Your Superstars. When certain team members consistently outperform others, both the low performers and their managers sometimes begin to assume that these performance variations are natural, unchangeable, and the result of an innate characteristic of the superstars. Nothing could be farther from the truth. One of the most effective ways of challenging the performance limits that your team has set for itself is by grafting on to your team the skills and competencies of your team’s superstars. The following four steps can help you successfully clone your superstars:
1. Measure the gap between the performance of your superstars and your team’s average performance level.
2. Determine whether these performance differences are the result of nonskill-related factors such as:
• Unique conditions (whether your top sales person was given the most potentially lucrative sales territory)
• Specialized technical skills that require extensive training (the engineer who specialized in advanced metallurgical processes)
• The fact that the top performer has been rewarded differently from other members (receives more attention and coaching from you than do other members)
If you are able to eliminate these factors, you are safe in assuming that the performance gap is largely the result of skill differences between your top performers and the rest of your team.
3. Break down the performance area under review into discrete activities, and identify areas in which superstars consistently outperform other team members. If you are managing a sales team, you could ask yourself whether the superior performance of certain members results from their approach to cold calling or their method of qualifying sales prospects.