In the third of the short videos in the 11 part series on how to create motivated employees, I share the second of 10 key factors that when present will collectively enhance the motivation of your team members/employees.
How do you rate for this factor?
In the second of the short videos in the 11 part series on how to create motivated employees, I share the first of 10 key factors that when present will collectively enhance the motivation of your team members/employees.
How would you rate for this factor?
For more information on all 10 factors and the underlying belief, visit the OTM Academy.
The challenge is to determine whether they support or hinder great service. The ‘bureaucracy busting’ of the GE Workout program (Ashkenas, Ulrich, Jick, & Kerr, 1995) is an example of a process that at its very heart was about ensuring the company’s systems and processes remained aligned to serving people and achieving the organisation’s goals.
Quote from a research participant
We think that it is great when a new person starts work here. We encourage them to ask questions. So they do. “Why does this policy and that policy exist?” That’s what they ask. And if we haven’t got a genuine answer, then we seriously look at the policy or procedure and change it if it is no longer helping us to serve our customers.
How do your systems, policies and procedures enhance your capacity to meet and exceed the expectations of your customers?
One of my coaching clients is a coach of a semi-professional sporting team in Melbourne, Australia.
We were having a conversation about the excuses that he is receiving from players regarding their inability to make it to training. He was planning to ‘have a go at them for their lame excuses‘ at their next training session.
He provided an example that one player had told him that he couldn’t attend training because he would be attending his niece’s birthday party.
My client was frustrated. He felt that such excuses were pretty lame. “I would never have missed training for my niece’s birthday party. How lame!”
Just as I asked him if it was possible that this player did in fact place his niece’s birthday party as a higher priority than training, at least for this one day in the year, my client’s phone rang. It was one of his assistant coaches so I encouraged him to take the call.
After a few minutes he came back.
“Gee. The excuse was true. His sister is extremely unwell and her daughter is without her mum on her birthday. He’s doing the right thing.”
I couldn’t have been more excited. The information that my client received was perfect for what I was about to ask him.
“What have you asked your players to do if they can’t make training?” I asked.
“Ring or text me” he replied.
“Is that what they are doing?”
“Yes”.
“So they are doing what you have asked them to do?” I re-enforced.
“Yyyeeeesssss?” He said, his brow slightly furrowed.
The penny had not yet dropped.
“It seems to me that your players are doing exactly what you have asked. They are ringing you or texting you when they cannot attend training and providing their reasons. Yet your focus has shifted to the content of their reasons. You are focussing on whether or not you think their reasons are valid. As this example with the niece has shown, clearly you thought the excuse was lame, but when you found out the whole story you found out that it made sense.”
“What if,” I continued, “you stopped worrying about the content of the excuses you are being provided. Why not believe whatever they tell you, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. This example shows that the player involved was being honest with you. Ultimately, isn’t that what you want?”
“Yes it is” he replied.
He then said, “If I had used the niece’s birthday party as an example of the types of excuses for not training that I was getting, as I had planned to do, and I had ridiculed such an excuse I could have ruined my relationship with that player and shown the players that I didn’t really want them to be honest with me. Maybe I could use this example to show that I will believe whatever they tell me. Ultimately, if players want to lie to me, that’s about them, not me.”
He continued, “I was getting pressure from the other coaches to stop accepting all the ‘lame‘ excuses we believed we had been getting, but training attendances are actually far exceeding those of previous years. The collective data on the whole group is actually very good. I want the players to be honest with me and that is what they have been doing. I can see how easily I could have changed that behaviour and inadvertently encouraged them to tell me what they thought I wanted to hear. I’m glad we’ve had this chat!”
If you have ever played sport, or acted in a play or played in a band and felt the ‘sweetness‘ of perfect timing, this is how I felt at this point in the conversation.
I see this a lot in my work. Leaders asking their people to do something, which they then do, but the leader loses focus on what they had asked their people to do and shift their focus onto something else, albeit closely related. But they effectively ‘move the goalposts’. This causes confusion and triggers the “Guessing Game”. Team members start guessing what the leader really wants. This is extremely destructive. Yet the leader, from my experience, has little awareness that they had in fact moved the goalposts.
One of the great challenges for leaders is to maintain behavioural alignment between what they say and what they do. Fortunately, in the above example my client was able to maintain his.
What are your examples of this challenge?
Unfortunately poor company cultures exist. This is why Organisations That Matter was created – to try, one company at a time, to change this reality.
So, what can a Team Leader do to improve the motivation of their team members when their team exists within a poor company culture?
The first thing is to control what you can control as the Team Leader. My experience and research indicates that pay is a massive de-motivator if it is not ‘fair’ in the overall context of pay within the company and the industry that you are in. If a person is not being paid fairly in this context, then pretty much everything else that the company does becomes less relevant over time. The pay issue becomes the core de-motivational issue.
If pay is ‘unfair’ then you must do what you can to fix that situation.
Most companies have systems and processes for accurately paying people. As such, if you believe that a person is being paid unfairly, go in to ‘bat’ for them. Let them know what you are doing but also let them know that you have to follow the system’s rules. Providing you have a record of being genuine, most people will be very pleased that you have taken the time and effort to go in to ‘bat’ for them. This act of support will often increase a person’s motivation. However it won’t last forever if the real problem isn’t addressed. (Please note I accept that the research indicates that most people feel they are underpaid. However, when ‘pay’ is placed in the context of company and industry, it is my experience that most people are able to identify if they are paid within an acceptable ‘range’ of pay.)
If pay is ‘fair’ then it is the cultural issues that come into play. It is possible, within limits, to create a positive sub-culture that may exist only in your team.
From my research from conducting many leadership development activities on this exact issue, the simultaneous things that you can do are very controllable.
You can genuinely appreciate and recognise the efforts of your team members. This starts with saying, “Thank you.”
You can look out for developmental opportunities (including projects) and offer them to your team members.
You can listen to their suggestions and genuinely take them on board and then get back to them about why their idea has/hasn’t been implemented.
You can assign tasks to team members that truly reflect their talents while at the same time creating some ‘stretch’ for them. Of course, this means that you will have bothered to find out what their talents are!
You can create team celebrations to celebrate successes.
You can bother to remember the whole of life details that your team members have felt comfortable sharing with you (ie their partners and/or children’s names, their birthday, special events in their life, their sporting teams and heroes etc.)
You can articulate how your team is contributing to your organisations vision and mission and help each person to ‘see’ how they are personally contributing to bringing these to life.
When times demand it you can make decisions that are timely and help the team to achieve its objectives.
These actions are all doable and are well within the control of a leader, irrespective of company culture.
It is my experience that when these activities are done with genuine intent, most people respond with an increase in self motivation and perform to a higher standard which is ultimately what leadership is trying to achieve.
How have you worked to increase the motivation of the members in your team?
Webinar Recording, November 2010.
Gary Ryan introduces the seven key elements for creating Teams That Matter. High performing teams are rare, but they don’t have to be. Discover the key elements that will help you to create a high performing Team That Matters.
Please contact me if you would like to learn more about how I can help you create a Team That Matters.
So you are in yet another meeting. The conversation is flying back and forth yet you feel frustrated by the lack of people really listening to each other. In fact, you find yourself waiting for a ‘gap’ in the conversation so you can throw your two cents worth into the debate.
The meeting ends. Everyone respectfully nods at each and walks out feeling that the meeting was largely a waste of time, again! You wonder why so many of the meetings that you attend seem to go around and around without people really listening to each other. You try to listen yourself but you find that your listening is just as bad as everyone else’s. The real cost as a result of the time wasted in these meetings seems to high to even calculate. Yet the problem persists.
Yes you have been to communication workshop after communication workshop. But it seems that learning to become a better listener is like shouting at grass to grow. Just because someone says that you should listen and paraphrase and watch your body language doesn’t actually mean that you’ll become a better listener, just like grass won’t grow any faster just because someone is shouting at it!
What if there was a technique that enabled you to become a better listener, yet didn’t require you to specifically focus on listening?
If you shift your focus away from becoming a better listener to becoming a contributor to higher quality conversations, it is amazing how your listening improves! Higher quality conversations or Conversations That Matter® enable us to see things differently; new horizons, new possibilities, new ways of working together which result in tangible benefits such as new innovative products, new savings, better efficiencies. As Juanita Brown and David Isaacs shared in their wonderful book, The World Cafe, “…accepting the centrality of human conversation as a key organisational means for achieving desired results entails a profound shift of mind – from seeing conversation as a peripheral activity to seeing conversation as one of the organizations most valuable assets.”
So how do you even start to create this profound shift of mind?
One way is to start to focus on the quality of the questions that you ask in a conversation. Think about it. What positive difference to the quality of conversations that you participate in would an improved quality of questions (even from just one person), make to that group’s conversation? Brown and Isaacs suggest that focusing on the right questions themselves is a powerful way to enable people to open their minds to higher quality conversations. For example, what if in one of the meetings described above you asked, “What questions, if answered, would enable us to achieve the results that we truly desire?”
Part of the reason for the consistently low quality of conversation that many of us experience in organisations is due to the fact that most people are focusing on answers rather than discovering the right questions that are worthy of an answer. For example, how easy would you find it to come up with questions in response to the question above, without trying to answer your own questions first? It is my experience that many people are uncomfortable focusing on generating questions (without answers) largely because it is a skill that has had little attention or focus throughout their development.
At your next meeting, as you follow the conversation, try focusing on this question, “What’s the most powerful question that I could ask that will help to improve the quality of this team’s conversation?”.
A side benefit of focusing on asking powerful questions is that your listening will improve, without you having to focus on it. Try it, you will see that this is true.
I’m interested in hearing about your experiences with regard to enhancing the quality of your workplace conversations through improving your questioning skills.
If you are interested in discovering how to ask ‘Questions That Matter®’ you may wish to join my free webinar on that topic on Thursday 22nd October, 2010. Please register here if you are interested.
The sacking this week of professional footballer, Brownlow medalist and three time premiership player Jason Akermanis by the Western Bulldogs (Australian Football League) highlights the challenges of being a ‘specialist’.
Meredith R Belbin (www.belbin.com) has conducted a vast amount of research and written many books on the subject of creating effective teams. Belbin’s nine team-roles include a role known as the ‘Specialist’. A Specialist is a person who has exceptional and rare technical skills that the rest of the team do not possess. However, a specialist has a very narrow focus and tends not to be interested in the many facets of being in a team that are being their role as a specialist. Teams are able to tolerate specialists because of their technical brilliance, but that tolerance can come at a cost when the team members are not aware of their various personal team role preferences.
This is one of the reasons why we advocate that teams should be aware of the various preferences of the individual members who participate in the team. Belbin’s research shows that teams can be successful when a specialist is in the team. However, the specialist MUST be a true specialist (that is, they must possess a current skill or technical ability that is currently rare and outstanding) and the rest of the team MUST be able to accept that they will ‘play’ to different rules than the rest of the team.
Jason Akermanis (Aker) is an example of a ‘used to be specialist’. There is no doubt that for much of his career he displayed a rare and exceptional skill set. So much so that his individual approach was sustained by the teams with whom he played. However, as he aged and his career progressed, his specialist technical skills became less rare and his ageing body found it harder and harder to perform at such a high level of individual talent.
As this occurred the tolerance of the rest of the team to him ‘not playing by the rest of the team’s rules’ became less and less. Until, of course, the tolerance for his ‘specialist behaviours’ could no longer be outweighed by his lack of ‘specialist’ performance. In other words, the progress of the game and Aker’s age eventually caught up with him – he was no longer a true specialist, yet he continued to behave like one (which, of course is his preference so he was unlikely to change. In addition, he had in fact been justifiably rewarded for such behaviour for 325 games, reducing further the probability that he would change his behaviour.)
If you watched the ‘Footy Show‘ on Thursday night many of Aker’s comments were consistent with those of the ‘specialist’ team role. He mentioned that he wasn’t very interested in the feedback process meetings and that he still considered that all that mattered was how he performed on the training track and in games. This is exactly how a specialist views the world and there is nothing wrong with that. Except, of course, when the ‘specialist’ no longer performs to the exceptional standards of a current day ‘specialist’.
Belbin’s research highlights that a person can have a preference for a role and no longer ‘perform’ according to the expectations of that team role preference. Belbin goes on to say that the most damaging condition that reduces a team’s performance is when a team member has what is known as an ‘incoherent team role preference’. This means that the person’s team role preference is NOT how they behave. This underpins the great challenge of being a specialist. The minute you know longer display rare and exceptional technical ability, no longer are you a true specialist. The very nature of specialists is that they are unlikely to see this change themselves. They will still see themselves as a specialist and will therefore display the characteristics of an ‘incoherent team-role preference.’
Another challenge of the specialist team role is that Belbin recommends team sizes of no more than ten members. AFL squads include 40 team members when ‘rookies’ are included. Such a large team size increases the challenges of working with specialists because the increase in numbers also increases the chances that a number of tthe team members will not like having to tolerate the ‘individual first’ approach of the specialist. In other words, specialists must have other team role preferences that they can also behave in alignment with, so that they aren’t ‘just a specialist’ if they are to survive as team numbers grow.
The challenge of course for elite sport is that specialists have, over time, contributed to team success. I do wonder if the evolution of the AFL is such that the specialist team role preference (if that is the only functional preference of the team member) is unlikely to be sustainable for long periods as the challenges of working with a specialist increase the complexity of team cohesiveness.
That said, Belbin’s research highlights that teams can tolerate and take advantage of ‘specialists’. In order to do so teams need a high level of both individual and ‘team’ awareness.
I appreciate that the concept of team-role preferences is foreign for a lot of people, and that some people see this type of concept as ‘fluff’. However, in my 15 years of Personal & Professional Development experience I have seen time again the lack of awareness of these issues cause teams to perform well below their capacity.
How aware of team role preferences are you regarding the members of your teams? Do you talk about these preferences and how they manifest themselves in how team members behave? If you do have a specialist in your team, how are you managing the complexities that arise from such a preference?
Please feel free to share your experiences of working with specialists and/or how you use team role awareness to enhance the performance of your team.
Anecdote
Gary Ryan has worked for several years in elite sport and currently sits on an Advisory Board for the AFL Coaches Association.
Major international sporting events like the World Cup create a terrific opportunity to focus on the elements that enable high performance. These elements are applicable not only to elite and social sport, but also organisational teams.
Specifically the Australian Socceroos Round One loss to Germany by a record breaking four goals to nil score line highlights the power of team talk. The Australian media have gone into a frenzy debating whether this current Socceroos team has what it takes to create success at the World Cup. Success, in the media’s eyes and re-enforced by the Australian Socceroos themselves is reaching the competitions quarterfinals.
Imagine the possible team talk in the Socceroos change rooms regarding next Monday’s game against Ghana. “If we lose this game it is all over. Our World Cup Campaign will be finished. Our reputations will be equal to mud if we get thrashed again.”
Such team talk creates a focus on the outcome rather than the moment, and also creates a strong and vivid image of failure. Humans have a remarkable capacity to focus on what they don’t want and then go ahead and create it. When I ride my motorbike I have to be aware of the truck that is coming toward me. But if I focus on the truck I will ride my motorbike straight into the truck (the same is true for bicycles – you travel where you look). Clearly I don’t want to ride my motorcycle into a truck, so I have to become disciplined at focussing on where I do want to go, while being aware of the truck at the same time.
The same is true for teams and team talk. Your team talk reflects what you are focussing on. As the image highlights, team talk leads to team image which then affects performance. Negative team talk leads to a negative team image which, like a magnet, draws the team’s performance in that direction. Of course the performance then re-enforces that the team talk was accurate and a vicious cycle is created.
Team talk by itself does not guarantee success. Nothing does. But positive team talk that focuses on what the team can control, such as its systems and processes when balanced with the right work or training increases the chances that success will be achieved. When negative team talk is present it significantly increases the probablility that failure will occur.
In this context teams must focus on what they can control and the team talk that relates to success. If the Australian Socceroos are to achieve the success they desire then focussing on their team talk is a powerful approach to adopt.
I believe Henry Ford was right when he said, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right either way!”.
What is the team talk present in your teams? Is it positive? Is it negative? Is it focussed on what you can control?
Please feel free to comment on this article.