Go first – As manager, you have to go first, show that you’re vulnerable, that you’re human, and that your team can trust you. If you aren’t willing to go first, why would anyone else want to contribute?

Share something folks don’t already know – Sure, it’s great to share the adversity story your team has heard 100 times…but not if you really want to build a team. Share something new, something surprising, that folks don’t know.

Let folks not participate – Some folks won’t participate in your team building activities. So WHAT! Make it safe for those who want to participate, and perhaps you can leave your non-players back to watch the phones or to do work while the rest of the team has fun.

Don’t play YOUR favorite game – Everyone wants to win, and everyone knows what the boss’ favorite game is. If you play your favorite game, you risk the trust of the whole team because folks either won’t play with you because they don’t want to risk beating you, won’t play as hard (and then will complain behind your back) or they’ll see that it’s your favorite game and try to ruin it for you. Not good outcomes. Instead…

Find out what your team enjoys (and play that instead) – Ask your team what THEY want to play–and then play their games. Let them set the rules, let them organize things, back them up so it’s safe to fail–and give them all the kudos if it’s a huge success.

Make it fun – Fun stuff is more apt to build teamwork than more work stuff. Make it fun, and folks will play. Just remember that everyone’s definition of fun is a little different.

Keep it simple – Simple stuff is more likely to get done than complicated stuff. Make it as simple as possible for folks to participate, and they will be more likely to do so.

Pizza is NOT teambuilding – Just because you bring in a pizza does NOT make it a team building exercise. Unless you’re making a pizza, or you’re eating pizza at Dave & Busters, pizza doesn’t equal teambuilding.

What are YOUR best teambuilding suggestions?

soccer practice photo credit to woodleywonderworks

Post from: EveryJoe

Teambuilding 101

Play requires you to be vulnerable and let your hair down. It may be uncomfortable at first, and it may feel forced.

DO IT ANYWAY!

How can you play with your team?

Trivia Days – Send out a trivia question (no Googling allowed) and give the first correct respondent a coffee beverage of their choice, or a small gift card. Winner asks the question next week (but you still buy the coffee!)

Flashback Friday – Share your favorite song from your childhood, and encourage the rest of the team to share theirs.

Name That Tune – Take Flashback Friday up a note and  see who can figure out the title and artist…and let someone go home early for guessing the most right.

Share Your <insert personal tidbit here> – One of the best things my team has every done was during a morning meeting (at 6:30 AM), we shared a personal note about ourselves. Things like what we liked, what we don’t like, where we went to high school, favorite movie, biggest fear, stuff like that. Send out 10 questions and encourage folks to pick 5 they are comfortable answering…and YOU go first!

Two Truths and a Lie – Instead of just sharing information, turn it into two truths and a lie, where folks share 2 odd facts and 1 that SOUNDS close but is a lie, and have folks guess at what the li was.

All of these things are easy to do, but they require you to give up control, to be a little vulnerable, and to let your team take things where they are comfortable.

WARNING: If you’ve never been vulnerable and open with your team before, they may wonder what’s wrong with you. DO THIS ANYWAY!

What’s YOUR best team building tip? Please share it in the comments below.

Photo credit to silwenae

Post from: EveryJoe

Play With Your Team: 5 Tips

Pizza isn’t teambuilding.

Jeffrey Brooks reminded me of this over the past week. Quoting Jeff: “I’ve never eaten a piece of pizza and thought ‘I feel closer to my family.’ Have you?”

Of course not.

Pizza is just PIZZA.

Sure, your team has to eat, so why not pizza.

Used in small doses, like when you really need them to skip lunch, pizza might make folks a little happier.

Just don’t confuse pizza (or any other food) with teambuilding.

Unless you’re making a pizza together that they can take home to their family.

Pizza isn’t teambuilding.

Extreme pizza & wings courtesy of the pizza review

Post from: EveryJoe

Pizza Isn’t Teambuilding

• Confront the slacker’s slacking behavior – If you don’t care enough to talk to the person slacking, then why should your manager care enough to take your complaints seriously? Sure, it doesn’t always work. You have to try or it doesn’t matter to me as your manager.

As a manager, I am not always available to micro-manage every slacking co-worker. YOU are in the best position to see the slacking first hand, and I count on YOU to do what’s in the best interests of our clients, our team, and have our outcomes in mind when things happen when I’m not around.

Other than confronting your slacker co-workers, what else can you do to deal with your slacker co-workers?

• Tattle to Share slacking with your manager – If you find someone who consistently is slacking AND you’ve already tried to deal with the slacker, then going to your manager is the next best step. It’s not tattling if you have examples.
• Thoroughly document the slacking – Is it occasional slacking that bothers you? Then make sure you document the slacking, pointing out the times and dates of the slacking, as well as the impact to the team. Did customers wait? Orders delayed?
• Appeal to the slacker’s desire to be a contributor – Was the slacker ever a good contributor? If so, appeal to his desire to be a contributor again. Point out how NOT being a slacker is in the slacker’s best interests, and will actually enable her to be MORE of a slacker.
• Catch them in the act of slacking – If someone is slacking, catch them in the act. Email them right away to point out the slacking, and make sure you copy in your manager.

What are YOUR tips for dealing with slacker co-workers?

Post from: EveryJoe

5 Ways to Deal with Slacker Co-Workers

Moving Toward Collaboration

Collaboration is a hot buzz-word these days with the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of a host of online sharing tools. There is however, a lack of training in collaboration and team-building in many businesses. With the economy the way it is, it is likely that anything but the most essential training is going to get sidelined or canceled altogether. Thus it is the responsibility of the manager or leader of a team to create an environment where collaboration skills can be learned. This environment must include room for risk-taking and failure, and the leader must be able to endure, if not encourage, failure to happen as rapidly as possible. Finding out what does not work can be more important than stumbling onto what might work, or only works in certain cases. To that end the leader must go first, be the first to take a risk and share something with the group:

The Leader Can’t Do It All

Takash describes 5 ways that a leader or manager can improve trust and the willingness to take a risk among the members of a team:

1. Question yourself honestly – Question your own motives before you question those of your team. Look deep within yourself to identify your true strengths and weaknesses, then use them to forge strong partnerships. If you are very good at being organized, aid those team members who are not. If you are not good at keeping on track, enlist the team members that are to keep you pointed in the right direction.
2. Solicit feedback from more than one source – It can be difficult to get honest feedback from your direct reports or closest peers until the environment of trust is pervasive. Until then go to your manager or your associates outside your department or company. Tell them about what/how you do things and ask for their honest opinion.
3. Act in your “work” life just like you do at home – Unless you are a spouse-abuser, you should treat your team members with the same respect and care as you would your own family. You are with your team at work as much or more than you are home with your family and your team is there with you. The team deserves that respect rather than being taken for granted (or worse).
4. Practice being authentic and open – This does not mean to act authentic and open, it means to take pains to be authentic and open. Help your team get to know the “real you”, and you will learn to know the “real them”. Few things drive down team morale and productivity faster than phony-baloney behavior. And they can spot it a mile away.
5. Commit to apologizing and forgiving – Your goal is to create an environment risk-taking and the potential for failure that these risks bring. As the leader it is your obligation to be ale to apologize sincerely when your decisions turn out to be wrong. Equally important is the ability to forgive, publicly, when a member of your team fails. Learn from the mistakes and missteps, and move on.

Creating an environment of experimentation can cause considerable anxiety within your team. The more risk-averse members may balk at the idea.

Reward Your Risk-takers

Thomas Edison famously tried 10,000 times before his team discovered the one material that would work for the filament for the light bulb. When asked about it, he is said to have quipped, “I didn’t fail 10,000 times. I found 10,000 things that don’t work.” Edison’s lab must have been a place of remarkable trust and collaboration for the team to press on through 10,000 experiments. On top of all of that:

Edison actually had to invent a total of seven system elements that were critical to the practical application of electric lights as an alternative to the gas lights that were prevalent in that day. These were the development of:

1. the parallel circuit,
2. a durable light bulb,
3. an improved dynamo,
4. the underground conductor network,
5. the devices for maintaining constant voltage,
6. safety fuses and insulating materials, and
7. light sockets with on-off switches.

Before Edison could make his millions, every one of these elements had to be invented and then, through careful trial and error, developed into practical, reproducible components.

Hardly a small project, and certainly one that required an environment of trust.

What can you do for your team to bring about an environment like that?

Light bulb image courtesy: The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.

Post from: EveryJoe

5 steps to creating an environment of trust

Fail to build positive and trusting relationships.

So simple, yet often completely missed by many managers. Management is a team sport folks, and if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be a manager.

If you get that point, then let’s talk about this a little more. Who should you build relationships with, and how should you build them?

Here’s a few ideas on how to build positive and trusting relationships. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

First, build a relationship with each person on your team. The folks that report to you are the most important people in the world, whether you manage a team of 1 or a team of 1000. How? Take the time ask a few questions to better understand what makes your team tick, at work and at home. Ask them first, and then figure out how you can help them get what they want most, and you’ll lead a much more successful team.

Next, build a relationship with your manager. When I was first promoted 5 years ago, I had no idea what my manager liked or didn’t like, and I barely knew she was married with a child and that she started out on my team some 15 years prior. I had to figure out what was important to my manager, and you need to find out what is important to your manager. What are those big, hairy audacious goals is she working on this year, next year, and long term? Ask her, and she’ll tell you. Then deliver the goods and set your goals around her important goals. Make sure and share your BHAGs too, and ask how she can help you achieve them.

Last but not least, you must build a relationship with your peers. I work in an IT department with 10 folks at my level of management/leadership. Some people, including some of my team, see our team as a launch pad to other opportunities in the department.  I realized early on that I had a choice on how I viewed my peers: I could view them as my competition, as folks who want to steal my best people as soon as they become competent enough to move to the next level; or I could view them as partners in getting our IT team mission done. I chose the latter, and though it might mean my best people get promoted to another team, I see the folks who leave my team as advocates for us, sharing my vision with other teams of the world’s greatest IT customer service organization.

I ask my peers what their goals are, and how my team can help them achieve them more rapidly. This cross-functional teamwork gives my folks exposure to things they’d never see or do without these relationships. Additionally, these groups will come to trust your team more, and be more forgiving of the occasional mistake, if they have a relationship with you, and eventually, with your team.

Who else do you need to build a relationship with in order to be a successful manager, and how can you do that?

Photo credit to http://www.lumaxart.com/

Post from: EveryJoe

Why Do Managers Fail?

There are lots of ways you can make great decisions. I’ve got 3 big ones:

• Interpret the Information
• Know your options
• Know your negotiables and non-negotiables

I credit Steve Bannister with the first tip. He does a great job sharing his 4 tips to interpret information:

• Rumor (Steve calls this rumour, he’s from Canada, I’m from Wisconsin)
• Belief
• Opinion
• Fact

Great advice! You must know how to interpret the information in front of you. I would argue it is the first step in making a great decision.

Another important key to making great decisions is knowing what options are available. What the worst that could happen? What’s the best that could happen? What’s most likely to happen? Are any surprises possible?

The last tip I’ll share is knowing your negotiables, and knowing your non-negotiables. If you don’t know what you really MUST have in order to consider the outcome a success will help you determine what you are willing to give up in order to consider the decision a success.

Now what do you think? What would you add to my 3 legged decision making stool?

Photo credit to Amazon.com product page

Post from: EveryJoe

3 Ways to Make Great Decisions

Those words rang in my ears as I left the 2008 HDI Annual Conference a few weeks ago, and they are still bouncing around in my head today.

Jason Jennings shared a great message, about how the organizations he studied all had a few key things in common, and sealed the deal with the quote I share with you above.

Great leaders…are great stewards.

So simple, yet so profound. Let’s break this down to try to understand what it all means.

What is a great steward?

A great steward puts his or her team before self…and doesn’t think twice about doing it. It gets done because it is the right thing to do, not because it is the easy thing to do. The right thing to do is always right, even when it hurts.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen few great leaders in corporate America, at least not in the newspaper headlines from the last 5-10 years. I read about the excess of CEOs from around the world, and even worse, politicians who are supposed to be “public servants,” who are out for their best interests so much servant leadership is the furthest thing from what they claim to represent.

The 10 companies profiled in Think Big, Act Small (the book Jason created his keynote from) consistently had leaders at the helm who took the role of steward VERY seriously and lived this every day. Many were shocked that their companies were selected, not because they didn’t realize they were successful, but instead because they felt they were doing nothing exceptional, and were amazed that others weren’t doing the same thing, the right thing.

Why is this important to leadership?

Simple really: If people don’t trust that you have their best interests at heart, if you don’t consistently model stewardship, people will stop following you.

Here are 3 ways you can be a better steward

First, make decisions with your people in the front of your mind. If the decision you make will hurt them, make sure it is the right decision for them and that you take their feelings into account.

Second, listen to what your associates have to say, and honestly value their input. This week I held a team meeting to ask my team what they felt we could should be doing to improve our team and our department. One of the things they shared was the desire to offer more flexible scheduling, and allow them to take time off without taking vacation time, as long as they make up the time during the same week. While I don’t know if HR will allow this, I value their opinions enough that I will definitely check into it and see if we can do it. I appreciate that they cared enough about our team to share this with me, and I let them know that. They know if I can do it, I will do it. I may need their help to find a working schedule, and HR’s help to ensure it’s legal, and listening to their suggestions is NEVER a bad idea.

Last, be honest in all your communication, and risk oversharing instead of undersharing. In my experience, I’ve found the more folks know, the better they feel. Yes, sometimes you may share things that need to be changed after the fact, or you may share something that you shouldn’t have shared, but at least your team isn’t surprised when things come up down the road.

Do you think it’s important to be a good steward? What are your suggestions for being a better steward? Please share your suggestions in the comments below.

Photo credit to Phil Gerbyshak

Post from: EveryJoe

Great Leaders are Great Stewards

When things get stressful, we often throw out phrases automatically to try and get beyond the issues for the moment without really doing what is right. But often these phrases don’t do much to help in the moment and don’t’ solve the true issues either. There are a few sayings that we hear in business all of the time that are about as ineffective as parents yelling at their children, “do it because I said so.” Even worse, these sayings in business cause people to make poor decisions and undermine their own leadership potential by repeating these phrases without really thinking about what they mean.

One of the most popular and most damaging of these sayings is demanding that people need to do “more with less.” This one is being used a lot these days because of the tough economic cycle. The most common use is to try to motivate employees to stretch further when budget and headcount cuts have reduced resource levels. The problem this causes is that people won’t have an ability to get it all done. But without a focus on priorities, each person may select different priorities across different parts of the organization. People are spread too thin and can’t finish any single project or task with quality and diligence. The result is what we refer to as corporate A.D.D. and it is a root cause of poor execution.

In our book, BIG Ideas to BIG Results, we suggest a replacement to this old and favored saying of doing “more with less.” We suggest that when budget or headcount reductions are necessary to first say, “we need to do more ON less,” meaning more resources, more staffing, and more focus on fewer initiatives. The result of this approach is a prioritization of the most important and high impact initiatives and getting the new levels of resources focused for delivering results on those top priorities.

Mark Hurd at HP is currently showing how this is done. A recently announced adjustment to their R&D programs is going to reduce a portfolio of 150 projects down to some “big bets” that number just 20-30 at the most. Their goal is to continue at similar resource levels but reduce the number and scope of the projects to for greater market impact. Rather than spreading resources thin, the idea is to concentrate resources on selective projects. In our book we outline another example of an entire company that was struggling to grow after reaching a few hundred million in sales through three business units. After reducing to just one business unit and delivering more depth of solutions to customers in just that one market segment, they were able to grow to multiple billions in revenues.

So next time you are on the spot and are asked to reduce staffing and budget levels, don’t fall into the automatic excuse and mentality of simply demanding “more with less” from your team. Take the responsibility to step up as a leader, determine the top priorities, and realign resources at the right levels that will ensure success and the ability to get from Big Ideas to Big Results and let’s get rid of an outdated and ineffective business phrase for good.

Michael Kanazawa is co-author of the book BIG Ideas to BIG Results, and has a blog by the same name.

Post from: EveryJoe

Never Say “Do More With Less” Again

OK, so it’s no shock I’m a HUGE proponent of training. I write at 3 blogs frequently (Slacker Manager obviously, Make It Great! and Joyful Jubilant Learning), attend as many conferences as I (and my day job) can afford, subscribe to about 300 blogs, 1 great podcast, and read as many books as I can, as often as I can.

In recent conversations with many other smart managers, we had a discussion about the importance of training, and I thought I’d share our conversation with you, and ask that you share YOUR thoughts about training in the comments below.

•  NEVER enough training
• Just in time training is number one way folks get trained – have a need, get the trainin
• All people learn differently – need variety of methods to teach your folks
  • In person
  • Videos
  • Hands on
  • Online
  • Reading manuals and documentation
  • Observation with others on team
• Learning is a PROCESS not an event
• Use the building block approach – today builds on yesterday
• Must schedule the time or folks will multi-task and not pay attention, or just miss training altogether
• Knowledge base/wiki helps with the knowledge curve

Key to training: Put the skills into practice shortly after training or retention is super low (if at all)

What do YOU think?

Do you agree training is important, or don’t you care about having a GREAT team?

Photo credit to lnx 

Post from: EveryJoe

Training Tips, Tricks, and Thoughts