Blanchard LeaderChat

One of the biggest challenges teams face is building trust and managing conflict. While you want differing opinions, it’s important that conflict stay focused on content and not become personal. How do you encourage healthy debate?  Here are five team attitudes and perspectives that can help you build trust and keep conflict productive in your work group. 

1. Team members must develop a learning attitude. Everything that happens in the team is “grist for the mill.” There are no failures–only learning opportunities. 
2. The team must build a trust-based environment. Trust is built by sharing information, ideas, and skills. Building trust requires that team members cooperate rather than compete, judge, or blame. Trust is also built when team members follow through on their commitments. It is critical that team members communicate openly and honestly and demonstrate respect for others. 
3. The team must value differences. Team members should encourage and honor differences. Different viewpoints are the heart of creativity. 
4. People must view the team as a whole. By seeing the team as a living system rather than a collection of individuals, team members begin to think in terms of “we” rather than “you” and “me.”  
5. Team members must become participant observers. To work well in a team environment, members should develop the skill of participating and, at the same time, observing. This practice, akin to being in a movie at the same time you are watching the movie, can give team members valuable perspective.  

How’s your team doing in these areas? Knowing the characteristics and needs of a high performing work group is critical. It gives people a target to shoot for as they progress from a collection of individuals to a smoothly functioning, high performing team.

In an article for Strategy + Business entitled The Promise (and Perils) of Open Collaboration, author Andrea Gabor identifies the challenges organizations face when they choose to adopt a collaborative work environment.   According to Gabor, the biggest obstacle for an organization is the deep change required in the way knowledge is controlled and shared — changes that have the potential to alter relationships both within the company and with its outside constituents. Anything short of total commitment, Gabor warns, is likely to lead to short-lived improvements and eventual failure.

For organizations considering open collaboration, Gabor recommends a clear-headed look at the challenges associated with the change and she identifies seven essential strategies to making it work including:

1. Creating a clear leadership message
2. Collaborating with customers
3. Building a culture of trust and open communication
4. Cultivating continuous improvement
5. Building a flexible innovation infrastructure
6. Preparing your organization for new skill sets
7. Aligning evaluations and rewards

The article points out that “open collaboration is a complex, all-embracing process, requiring genuine commitment from corporate leaders, a willingness to abandon many venerable corporate customs, and an appetite for unleashing and managing disruptive change across the organization.”  But Gabor also encourages organizations to move forward and continue to develop their approach to open collaboration, because for those that do there are great benefits as well.

Sometime today or tomorrow, be sure to read—or save, this article—it’s one of the best on collaboration that we’ve seen. 

And if you are looking for a little additional inspiration and insight on the subject, check out the on-demand webcast of Pass the Ball: The Power of Collaboration.  This is a presentation Ken Blanchard did together with Cisco WebEx in June as a part of their Pass the Ball initiative. Ken shares his thoughts on getting others involved, how a philosophy of “none of us is as smart as all of us” helps everyone accomplish more, and the difference between serving and self-serving behavior.

Most of us have worked on teams that, for whatever reason, never really achieved the results expected.  With all of the focus on the importance of teamwork, why do teams fail so often?  Research by The Ken Blanchard Companies has identified the top 10 reasons for a team failing to reach its potential. 

1. Lack of a sufficient charter
2. Unsure of what requires team effort
3. Lack of mutual accountability
4. Lack of resources
5. Lack of effective and/or shared leadership
6. Lack of planning
7. Lack of management support
8. Inability to deal with conflict
9. Lack of focus on creativity and excellence
10. Lack of training

How do you avoid these pitfalls? Here’s a checklist of seven key elements (represented by the acronym PERFORM) that can help you remember the components of a high performing team: 

• Purpose and values. A high performing team needs both a clear sense of what the desired  goal is, combined with a common set of values that will serve as the ground rules for how the group will work together.
• Empowerment. The team needs to have the authority to act and make decisions and choices with clear boundaries. Groups that are limited in their ability to carry out recommendations suffer.
• Relationships and communication. A high performing team is committed to open communication. People need to feel that they can take risks and share their thoughts, opinions, and feelings without fear.
• Flexibility. Successful teams prepare for shifting conditions by making sure that everyone has responsibility for team performance, development, and leadership.
• Optimal productivity. This includes a commitment to high standards and quality. Team members hold each other accountable and strive for continual improvement.
• Recognition and appreciation. High performing teams take the time to provide feedback and recognition. Recognition reinforces behavior, builds esteem, and enhances a feeling of value and accomplishment.
• Morale. Finally, high performing teams monitor morale to make sure that team members are enthusiastic about their work, proud of their results, and feel pride in belonging to the team. 

How’s your team doing when it comes to these seven elements?  To learn more about the ways you can improve your current—or planned team projects—be sure to check out the teams resources available in the Outcomes section of the Blanchard website.

In a recent column at Forbes.com business consultant Terry Waghorn, (who co-authored Mission Possible with Ken Blanchard) interviews teams expert Patrick Lencioni about the challenges of managing virtual teams.

Lencioni points out that the key to being a more effective virtual leader begins with acknowledging the fact that working remotely posing serious challenges. As Lencioni observes, “E-mail and voice mail and texting and instant messaging have all become so second-nature that we too often assume that a team member’s physical location makes little difference to the team’s effectiveness.

That doesn’t make sense to Lencioni who uses a family-based analogy to make his point. “After all, no family would say, “Well, Dad lives in New York, Mom lives in San Francisco, and the kids are spread around the country, but thanks to my iPhone and computer, it’s no different from living under the same roof.”

Lencioni observes that simple, daily interactions help build the bonds that people need to “thrive during good times and survive during challenging ones.”

For teams that don’t have the opportunity for daily interactions at the jobsite, Lencioni recommends that team leaders:

• Build relationships within the context of work
• Revisit their purpose, values and mission
• Develop trust and determine methods for hashing out differences remotely

To read the complete article visit: http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/16/virtual-meetings-conferencing-leadership-managing-lencioni.html

I was surfing various leadership blogs the other day and ran across an interesting post from Tony Morgan on 4 stages of leadership. Rather than looking at a leader moving through various stages in his/her career, I prefer to look at it as various “hats” that a leader has to wear, given the context and need of the situation.

The first hat of leadership is self leadership. This is a hat for all seasons! Self leadership involves developing the skills and abilities to set goals for yourself, to recognize the points of power you have to help you accomplish your goals and influence others, and to recognize and move beyond the assumed constraints, or self-limiting beliefs, that you’ve created for yourself over the years. Self leadership is independent of any formal position of leadership. If you can breathe, you can be a self leader!

The second hat of leadership is leading others. This hat utilizes various styles of leadership to influence others in order to help them accomplish their individual goals or the goals of the organization. This hat is often used when a leader is in a formal position of authority with direct reports, but it can also be worn by an individual contributor who has to collaborate with and accomplish work through others. A leader in this context needs to flex his or her style to meet the developmental needs of the followers. A second hat leader uses a combination of directive and supportive behaviors to bring out the best in his or her people.

Leading teams is the third hat of leadership. When two or more people are mutually dependent and accountable for achieving a particular goal, you have a team. Wearing the hat of team leadership involves not only using second hat leadership in your 1 to 1 interactions with team members, it involves managing the productivity and morale of the team as a whole. The team leader has to monitor team dynamics and modify his or her leadership style to keep the team moving to higher levels of performance.

The fourth hat is leading organizations. Leaders in this context have to be acutely aware of their own leadership points of view, setting the vision/mission of the organization, the nuances of managing other leaders, and how to implement and manage change within the organization. Competencies of fourth hat leadership involve strategic thinking, innovation, creativity, and having a global mindset.

Any one particular type of hat isn’t appropriate for every social situation. Nor is any one particular type of leadership appropriate for every organizational context. You wouldn’t wear a top hat to a baseball game would you? No! A baseball cap would be much more appropriate. The same is true with the hats of leadership in organizations. You have to develop the skills and abilities of each of the leadership hats so that you can quickly switch between them as the situation demands.

So which hat are you wearing? Is it the right one?

Dr. Margie Blanchard, past President of The Ken Blanchard Companies who currently heads up the company’s Office of the Future, loves real work problems.  That’s because when you work on real issues instead of hypothetical ones, it really sharpens the process. 

You also solve a problem along the way. 

That’s why we have included real work action learning projects into the leadership development programs we have been building for our clients looking to develop their high potential executives.  By incorporating a real work issue into the process, we’ve found that it increases learning, promotes camaraderie and collaboration, and yields cost-effective results. 

You can get a feel for how this might work in your organization by checking out a recent article in Chief Learning Officer magazine.  The article describes how Dr. Bea Carson led three action learning teams and the results they achieved. 

You can learn more about Blanchard’s approach to leadership development and how we build real work scenarios into the curriculum by checking out the work being done at Skanska, where action learning helped a group of high potential executives grow together while simultaneously solving real work issues that saved their company money and increased revenue along the way.

Most people do not pay attention to trust in their organization until it is broken.  But by then the damage is done: people withhold facts and information, managers set convoluted goals, management is not available, people talk behind each others’ backs, etc.  The list goes on and on. 

Part of the reason may be that people see trust as a “nice to have” cultural issue to work on once you have everything else in place. This is a fundamental mistake because the level of trust in your organization is a hard-edged economic driver that will impact just about every aspect of your organizations performance. 

Author Stephen M. R. Covey, in his book The Speed of Trust  describes this impact as either a high trust dividend that can add 40% to your organization’s performance or a low trust tax that can subtract up to 80% by adding to your costs. .

This dividend or tax impact occurs because trust is the ultimate determining factor whether individuals will be good team players, will make the commitment to change, and will work beyond minimum requirements to achieve desired outcomes.  

What’s the trust level in your organization? 

All relationships, personal and professional, are based upon trust. And there is a big difference between the way people work together when they trust each other versus how they work when trust is low or nonexistent. When employees who work together trust each other, they exert more effort in their jobs and expend less effort monitoring each other. This leads to increased productivity, lower costs, and greater satisfaction for workers as well as shareholders.

One of the biggest challenges that organizations face is how to improve coordination among team members. While most teams are aligned to some degree, they are often not aligned to the degree that they could be. Check this out in your own organization. Ask individual team members independently what the top three strategic imperatives are for their team. If you hear a wide variety of answers, you will know that team members are not as closely aligned behind a common vision as they could be.

When people are not aligned behind a compelling vision there is a risk that people will “check out” or end up “spinning their wheels.” Checking out occurs when people do not see how their work contributes to anything larger. When work is perceived as having little significance, it is common for people to disengage and resign themselves to low impact work that requires just enough effort to get by.

Spinning your wheels happens when people double their effort but don’t get any traction. These people are working hard but it is unclear how their work is contributing to the direction the group is heading. When this occurs, people experience false starts, have to redo work, or discover that others have already done the same work.

A clear vision and goal setting helps in both of these cases. When people can see where the larger group is heading and why heading that way is important, they can begin to work in the same direction. Instead of wasting their time on low impact projects—or redoing work that misses the mark—they can focus on high impact areas that directly contribute to shared goals and subsequently improve the company’s bottom line.

Tomorrow we are starting our annual 2-day all company meeting.  Over 300 Blanchard employees from around the world are meeting together to celebrate last year’s accomplishments and discuss this year’s strategies for succeeding in a tough economy.

A couple of us are doing presentations (including yours truly.)  I’ll be talking about engageable moments and specifically what rank and file employees can do to help maintain commitment and productivity during a down economic cycle.

My focus will be on what each of us can do individually to keep ourselves and others upbeat, focused, and positive.  That’s because all plans, no matter how well thought out, eventually work down to an individual level—to you and me.  And to a large extent, how you and I respond—and act on the initiatives that have been proposed will determine our company’s overall success.

Here’s the three points I’ll be making.  See what you think and how this matches up with your own experience.

Get clear on what you need to do

Today, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by bad economic news, become distracted, and lose focus. There are so many things that each of us want to do, what we need to do, and that the organization wants us to do. You need to sort through these competing priorities to create one list that you can focus on.

Ask for help

Don’t try to go it alone.  You don’t have to, no one expects you to, and it’s not going to generate the best results.  All of us are being asked to stretch ourselves, either in terms of doing more with less, or generating new and innovative ideas to help increase sales. Do you have the information, tools, equipment and resources to get the job done? You need to be able to ask for help.

Cheer each other on

Especially in tough times, we have to make sure that we take the time to pat each other on the back.  And don’t wait for big results before you praise.  Remember to recognize the small stuff too.

The current economic situation can have either a positive or negative impact on motivation. The pessimist will see these difficulties as de-motivators. However, the optimist knows that difficult times can bring us together in a common effort and goal.

It all depends on how you look at it.

Findings from the 2008/2009 WorkUSA Survey Report recommend that employers capitalize on “engageable moments” to increase engagement and productivity.

An engageable moment is a critical juncture for maintaining and building engagement. It might occur during such programs as new employee orientation, feedback during a one-on-one or when the organization goes through particularly challenging economic times.

Let me give you an example.

I had the opportunity to work together with some long time employees in our company on a wonderful project to try and capture the heart and soul of our company.  We asked everyone in the company to contribute a story that best defined our corporate culture.  All of the stories would be compiled into a book that will be distributed at our 30-year anniversary celebration later this week. Over 200 people, out of the 300 who work here, contributed stories.  Do you know what people pointed to time and again as our defining moment?  Our response to 9/11. 

Why?  It was during that difficult time that we best pulled together to achieve a common goal. We have that opportunity again.

You have a choice.  We all have a choice.  How will we enter the day?  How will we respond to the world going on around us?  Will we remain hopeful, optimistic, confident, and resilient when things look tough?

What about you?  What are the strategies that you have in place for yourself to remain strong, confident, and hopeful going forward? 

It is not the events of the day that define us; it is how we react to them.