Category Archives: Teamwork

Expert Tip – Motivation – Belief

Over and over in the programs that I facilitate for both Senior and Developing leaders I am asked this question, “Gary, how do I motivate my team members?”

Below is the first short video in a an 11 part series that answers this question.

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Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Are your actions undermining what you have asked your team to do?

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?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

How should a Team Leader in a poor company culture improve team member motivation?

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?

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Teams That Matter Webinar Recording

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.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Improve your listening by enhancing the quality of your conversations

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.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Why low risk projects are a smart leadership tool

As a People Leader/Manager do you have more ideas than you can implement? Are you frustrated by not achieving as much as you would like?

My experience shows that one of the Top Ten motivators for employees is ‘opportunities for improvement’. Imagine if you joined these twofactors together; your frustration with not getting as much done as you know needs to get done, with your team members desire for opportunities for improvement.

Below is a four step process for creating low risk successes from this situation.

Step 1
List all your ideas/actions for things that you believe need to be done.

Step 2
‘Chunk’ these ideas/actions into groups – these groups of ideas/actions form the basis of possible projects.

Step 3

Using the attached matrix, identify whether or not your projects are:

  1. High Risk – Hard Implementation
  2. Low Risk – Hard Implementation
  3. High Risk – Easy Implementation
  4. Low Risk – Easy Implementation

High Risk means that if the project fails there will be a significant and negative impact on the organisation.

Low Risk means that if the project fails there will be no major negative impact on the organisation.

Hard Implementation means that the resources required to implement the project involve both a lot of people and a lot of money/assets to successfully complete the project.

Easy Implementation means that existing resources with minimal budgetary impact can be used to successfully complete the project.

Step 4
Low Risk – Easy Implementation projects are your gold. These are the projects that you can easily provide to your team members. Should the project be a success then the organisations benefits (because it gets something useful that otherwise may not have existed), the staff member benefits (because they have implemented something that didn’t previously exist) and you benefit because a number of the ideas/actions that you had on your original list will now have been implemented.

The beauty of creating low risk projects is that they generate opportunities for people to shine. If you have never tried a system like this before, try it out and please let us know how you go.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Aker saga highlights the challenges of the ‘Specialist’ team role

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.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

Free Group-Work Course for University Students

Many university students have recently re-commenced their studies. In this context this short online course (that includes no homework!) is perfect timing to ensure that you make the most of this semester.

Students report that university group-work is one of their most dreaded experiences at university. Yet employers highly value university group-work because it is where students have to learn how to work with different people, just like in the ‘real world’.

This free two week introductory course will ensure that you give your university groups the best chance to achieve the success you desire. You will also learn how to ask some critical questions that will help your team to be successful. These questions are not unique to student groups – which is why they are so useful to master while you are a student!

Click here for more information.

Please share your experiences of putting the lessons from the course into practice.

This course includes access to a free ebook titled Teamwork For University Students.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com

How ‘little ideas’ can make a BIG difference when times are tough

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Recently I had the good fortune to perform an assessment on a division of a large financial organisation for the Customer Service Institute of Australia (CSIA). As both a Senior Assessor with CSIA and through our our own OTM Service Strategy I have had the opportunity to observe many organisations who are striving to deliver great service to their customers.

More and more organisations have recognised the importance of treating their staff as their Number 1 customers (see the blog Providing Great Service Means That Your Staff Come First, Not Your Customersposted on http://studentsthatmatter.ning.com) and there is a strong link between that approach to employees and the provision of great service. I also observed a number of terrific little practices that have produced significant cost savings and efficiencies for the organisation’s with whom I have been working.

The team from the financial organisation that I assessed last week shared a couple of significant results from implementing ‘little ideas’. Last year the staff in the call centre were required to complete eight weeks of overtime leading up to the end of financial year. With 120 staff in the Call Centre that creates a significant salary overhead. This year only one weekend of overtime was required to complete the same amount of work with the same number of staff.

A serious question is, “How did they create such a remarkable efficiency improvement?”.

There were two ‘little ideas’ that drive the response to this question. The first was that over the past year they have created a work allocation system that more evenly distributes work, including ensuring that the work performed by the more senior staff in ‘coaching’ other staff is recorded as ‘real work’ for the coaches. In the past this work was not recorded as ‘real work’ for the more experienced staff so their system included a dis-incentive for experienced staff to share their knowledge. As part of a continuous improvement program where staff submit suggestions, a simple idea to change the system so that the ‘coaches’ were recognised for their ‘coaching’ significantly changed the behaviour of those people. The resultant behavioural change also meant that less experienced staff started to access knowledge far more quickly than they had previously been able to access existing knowledge. The result was that new staff were more quickly gaining the right knowledge at the right time which enabled them to become more efficient in their work.

The second ‘little idea’ that has caused a major efficiency improvement for the team was as simple as pressing a button. Through the continuous improvement program that the Call Centre has created for its staff, one of the team members noticed that each of the 120 computers in the Call Centre took five minutes to ‘boot up’ at the start of each day. There are a number of security firewalls that cause the slow boot-up time but these are considered necessary by the institution for security purposes. One of the staff who arrived early every morning decided that while her computer was ‘booting up’ she would spend the five minutes walking around and pressing buttons until all the computers were activated, rather than staring blankly at her screen.

This meant that when the other staff arrived all they had to do was log in and they could commence work immediately. If you do the math and multiply 119 computers by 5 minutes, by 5 days by 50 weeks you will discover that it adds up to over 14.3 days of extra productivity over the course of a year. Two little ideas, one big saving.

The key factor in these examples is that the organisation has created a culture where submitting ideas is considered normal. I was also shown a number of ideas that have ‘not grown legs and won’t be implemented’ and management is happy about that. From their perspective if two little ideas each year can produce such a significant benefit, then the system is working above expectations!

Another interesting perspective on this story is the way that a downturn creates innovation, if you let it. While I wasn’t provided a statistic from this organisation to support what I am about to say, my suspicion is that there a number of people still working in the call centre who might not have their jobs if the efficiency improvements had not occured. When you consider the human impact that losing your job in a downturn can create, that is a significant benefit not only for the organisation but the staff as well.

Gary Ryan enables individuals, teams and organisations to matter.
Visit Gary at http://garyryans.com