July 2011

Thanks to http://thegoldguys.blogspot.com/

While some teams stay together for years, others need to come together and deliver results quickly. These top 5 tips are taken from our Teamwork cards. Each of the following tips also has a full blog post to support it, should you need more detail.

Ace of Hearts – Develop a Shared Vision – There is no one right way to develop a shared vision but sometimes approaching it indirectly can be easier for people. Have each member of your team answer the following questions. Once everyone has identified their responses, have a team discussion and see what emerges as a result. This can lead to a vision statement in a more concrete way than just asking people to describe their vision. Think back to a great team experience. Describe that experience. What was it about that experience that was so positive? How did it differ from other team experiences? How can this team create that kind of experience? What would we commit ourselves to? What values would we demonstrate?
Jack of Spades – Play to your Strengths – Everybody performs better when they play to their strengths. Make sure that individuals’ strengths are taken into account when roles are assigned and tasks allotted. One way to do this would be to have the team discuss what strengths would be needed to accomplish a role or task before it is allotted. Also check out Gallup’s Strengths Finder book for a more formal approach to discovering your strengths.
Ace of Spades – Accountability – Knowing who is responsible for what is vital to a team’s success. It’s very easy for these accountabilities to be too vague, especially when there are changes in team membership. Who is responsible for what is the most important thing to have documented at the end of any team meeting.
Ace of Clubs – Deciding how to Make Decisions – One of the most important things a team leader does is decide how best to make any particular decision. There are numerous decision making strategies such as democratic, consensus, and autocratic, but knowing which to use in any particular context is the real key to successful decision making on teams. Leaders should pay particular attention to the number of people involved and the magnitude of the impact of the decision when selecting a decision making strategy.
Nine of Hearts – Be Present –People have become accustomed to being constantly connected to email no matter where they are. While some people can be effective multi-taskers, sometimes this pre-occupation with mobile devices can be a way to avoid unpleasant conversations and/or distract you from important activities and conversations. Monitor your “presence” and that of your team members, and use technology wisely. What message are you sending with your Blackberry use?

This blog post is inspired by Teamwork Explorer – an iPhone app. Along with this “winning hand” for a new team, the app features 12 other common team challenges and offers solutions for each.

No More Boring, Bad Meetings

Be honest … are you guilty of leading boring or bad meetings? I know I have been even though I should know better. Many years ago now, the brilliant (and much younger!) John Cleese dramatized his meeting sins in a now famous training video:

failing to prepare himself
failing to inform others of what a meeting was about
failing to plan the agenda
failing to control the discussion
failing to record the decisions

This shortened YouTube version of the original 30 minute training video, Meetings, Bloody Meetings, is worth a watch.

A more recent and complementary take on this topic is Patrick Lencioni’s fable Death by Meeting. Lencioni suggests that most meetings are bad because they lack drama, context and purpose. Given that the majority of important work needs to get done in meetings, he suggests team leaders become more accountable and address it in the following ways:

Take a lesson from the movies. Hollywood movie makers know that they need to introduce some confict or high interest into the movie within the first 10 minutes. Likewise, leaders should put the most controversial or engaging topic at the beginning of their meetings.
Schedule more meetings! Seems counterintuitive but Lencioni suggests that most leaders try to put every type of task or purpose into one meeting (probably to get away from spending too much time in meetings!) and in so doing, almost doom their meeting from the get go. He suggests teams set up four types of meetings:

Daily Check-in – as its name implies a quick 5-10 mins “how are things going?” Avoid the temptation to spill over into the next two or this meeting won’t work!

Weekly Tactical – This meeting should be no longer than one hour, and deal with the discussion and resolution of issues that affect the team’s short term and tactical objectives. The team should quickly decide which items should be discussed in this meeting and avoid the temptation to spill over into strategic issues. For this to work, the team needs to be crystal clear on its priorities in order to spend its time on the right issues.

Monthly Strategic – This is the meeting for discussion of topics that will have a long term impact on the business. These meetings should be longer and include time for exploration, brainstorming and open dialogue. Limit discussion to a few topics and allow 1-2 hours for each topic.

Quarterly Off-site Review – As the name implies these meetings are for people to step away from the day to day business, take a time out and reflect upon the entire big picture – how the team is doing, morale, engagement, the company’s strategy, trends affecting the business and so on. These reviews can last anywhere from half a day to two days.

In our work with many teams, we see a few patterns. One is the team that has a difficult time discussing strategy even when they are in a strategy meeting. This can be because people on the team lack expertise or the tools to discuss strategy. Two is the type of team who, as Lencioni suggests, tries to accomplish every task at every meeting. Three is the team that doesn’t ever take time away for an off-site review or retreat because they don’t have time. Ironically, the less time they spend on these types of off-sites the more time they spend frittering their time away on the wrong kinds of things and/or getting into interpersonal conflict.

What strategies have you used to ensure folks look forward to meetings instead of dreading them?

This blog is based on the 9 of Spades, When to Meet and When to Work, taken from our Teamwork Explorer. Written by Tammy.

When to Meet, When to Work