Reserve what matters for what really matters—When you're balancing on a single rope 50 feet from the ground, trussed in a cat's cradle of very intimate straps, and wearing a dumb-looking helmet, with all eyes on you from the ground, that rope matters a lot. But a week later, the only thing that remains is the humiliation. That's not helpful the next time you're presenting a $70 million merger proposal and you just know that those two snickering in the back of the room are saying, "Hey, you remember the time Bob peed his chinos on the ropewalk?" It's distracting, to say the least.
At work, image is an essential component of our confidence kit. We like to keep our fears and any incompetence to ourselves.
Some people just have different ideas of what fun is—Shared memories of pleasure are lovely bonding moments. The best ones, though, come from within the group, not from a menu of prepackaged themed events that a consultant tells you will bring the most return on your investment. Casino nights can be fun, except for someone who needs to stay away from gaming tables—and doesn't particularly want you to know about that. Margarita nights can be a blast, with potential for some great pictures afterward, except for the person who needs to stay away from tequila—and doesn't want you know about that either. Forget about barbeques; you might have a stealth vegetarian onboard. Karaoke nights can be fun, except for the person who doesn't particularly want to look like an idiot. Anything after work can be a laugh riot, except for the people who have to get their kids from day care.
Business results are what really matter.
See the problem here?
Any group experience should be toward reinforcing the pride, joy, trust, and respect among the team members so everyone can move forward with the confidence that his dignity is intact. There are plenty of bonding moments and chances for a good laugh as everyone pulls together on a shared vision of success. Ultimately, business results are what really matter.
The best team-building experiences in the world are the ones that allow passionate, dedicated, and talented people to get the chance to give their best toward a common goal.
The best team-building experiences in the world are the ones that allow passionate, dedicated, and talented people to get the chance to give their best toward a common goal. If you don't have that as part of your daily workplace culture, no expensive, high-risk experiential event is going to make that happen. If you do have that as part of your workplace culture, save your money.
The workplace world is rife with opportunities to experience fear and exhibit ridiculous behavior. Why pay for it?
The fun will come naturally.
Truth 47
Answers build teams
While it may be true that companies are built one hire at a time, teams within those companies are built by answers—answers that come via chunks of experience that demonstrate to employees in real-life terms that their efforts are well invested with their company. As we've already established, balancing on a telephone pole doesn't guarantee the formation of a team. But the day-to-day pulling together toward a common goal will. It just takes more time. And a whole lot of answers to core questions that drive trust and performance standards will build quality teams over time.
Answers to core questions that drive trust and performance standards will build quality teams over time.
These are the questions that really influence your team-building exercise. It's not a matter of answering them "once and for all"—it's a matter of answering them over time through the decisions and choices you make as the team leader.
Will we be working on challenging assignments that are meaningful to us, both personally and professionally?
Will we agree with each other most of the time about what excellence looks like in our goals and our behaviors?
Can I trust my teammates to have my best interests at heart?
Will I consistently care about my teammates to make the necessary sacrifices and exert the extra effort toward our shared goal?
Can we trust our manager to add only new hires to our team who share our standards of trustworthy, high-quality behaviors, and performance accountability?
Can I depend on my teammates to be accountable for their job responsibilities and actions?
Will my teammates inspire me to perform at my very best levels—and hold me accountable for strong performance standards?
Can I trust my teammates to be tolerant and supportive if I fall short of a commitment or standard of behavior?
Can we trust our manager to provide us with everything we need to do our best work?
Can I count on being able to keep learning and continuing my professional development?
Real team building is an emotional journey that you can't buy in a box or farm out to a consultant. It comes from a history of consistently kept commitments, shared goals met, standards enforced, and visions reignited with fresh passion and energy.
You're only human, and you're learning, too.
You have the power to build engaged teams motivated by trust and dedication to your mutual mission. No one is expecting you to have all the answers all the time. You're only human, and you're learning, too. But, as the engaged manager, you hold in your hands most of the right answers over time. And those answers will build the team of your dreams.
Truth 48
Your team can lead you to greatness
Probably one of the most enduring models of preengagement business cultures is the idea that leadership flows downward only. The longer you stick with this form of gravity-bound management, the longer you'll be enjoying only partial engagement. Engaged employees ready to take the lead on projects they own will chaff under old leadership styles. Let your people take the lead, and you'll be amazed at how far they'll take you on the strength of their own vision.
Let your people take the lead, and you'll be amazed at how far they'll take you on the strength of their own vision.
Let them know you want to intentionally pass on some of the power—Get their buy-in on this plan. But don't expect a unanimous approval. Some employees—no matter how self-directed they are, in fact—may be uncomfortable with the idea that the power will be disseminated throughout the team rather than concentrated with just you.
Brainstorm with your entire group on what shared leadership will look like in your team—Will they have the latitude to tell each other what to do? Will they be individually responsible for making important presentations up the managerial food chain? Will you be comfortable letting your direct reports speak one-on-one with your boss and boss's boss without your being there?
Find out what their personal hidden beliefs are about leadership and management—Do they think of being the boss as a positive role? Or as a policing job? Or do they prefer leaders to be merely facilitators? Can they devise a set of values and expectations of what they want from someone who has the leadership role within the group? Can all members find a new, comfortable role for themselves in this new context—including those who prefer to simply report to you?
Identify what behaviors of your own you're going to have to change. As you transform your employees into leaders, you may have to get used to being a follower again. Can you tolerate that? You may have to get in the habit of giving them more information more quickly than you used to. They may expect you to explain yourself more now when before the phrase "because I said so," was all you needed to say.
You may have to get used to being a follower again.
Work with your team members to discover what additional training they need to exercise their new leadership responsibilities well—Can you create a budget for courses on presentation techniques, having difficult conversations, using time effectively, and so on? Some courses, such as presentation skills, should be taught by experts. But you can also create a self-study program, such as a book club to help your staff members build their competencies and understanding of what it takes to become true leaders as a journey of personal growth. Brown-bag lunch discussions of books they read as a group can help them see how th
is journey challenges their coworkers as well as themselves.
Learn to consider your team members as an advisory board—Keep in mind that they are probably more expert in their particular field than you are. While they may still have more tactical-level responsibilities in your department, they can also lend their expertise to you and the group as a whole. This added perspective will give you the chance to see issues and concerns in fresh new ways—which will then ultimately help you make better decisions.
They are probably more expert in their particular field than you are.
The German author and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they're capable of being." In the same light, treat people as if they are already the leaders they're capable of being, and they'll help you become the manager of a team of inspired change makers.
Truth 49
You're still the boss
Take a moment, if you will, to imagine the perfect day at work. By the time you arrive, everyone is already there. Everyone works brilliantly together. All your employees completely understand the many layers and values of pulling together as a team toward a common goal. They work long hours when necessary, without being told to. They support each other's efforts and celebrate each other's successes. They trust each other implicitly because they themselves are trustworthy.
All except one. And that's the one person who makes you doubt the entire construct of employee engagement and the power of intrinsic motivation. This is the person who challenges you every day to remember that you're still the boss.
It's one thing to consider the fine, most-elevated points of leadership and high-performance management in the safe confines of ideal-world thinking. But it's quite another thing to look at employee engagement from the battlefield perspective. And sometimes it is a battlefield. If it's been a rough quarter so far, you might be looking at a landscape pocked with the craters and smoking heaps of projects gone bad and rivers running red with the ink of failed, expensive initiatives. It could be one bad employee who has caused such devastation or the whole team that has set back the entire cause.
Consider how you can realign your actions to reflect your company's values and use them to assert your authority to drive performance to higher standards.
If you've been leading your department with the perfect-world ideals of engagement, you will have to make some tough decisions—and soon. Take a fresh look at your company's published, formal set of values. Consider how you can realign your own actions to both reflect those values and to use them as the leverage you need to assert your authority to drive performance to higher standards.
How can you use your company's culture of trust, caring, inspiration, belonging, and tradition of excellence to influence your people to perform at an elevated level?
How can you use your own behaviors as a way to model the standards you want all your people to aspire to?
However self-directed your team may be, you are still the leader.
Who can you reach up to in your organization for coaching and leadership support that will help you keep your team dedicated to achieving the goals you've set for yourselves but also the culture in which you want to achieve those goals?
Do you need to be recommitted to the ideals behind your organization's mission?
What training do you need to strengthen your ability to lead with both inspiration and authority?
However self-directed your team may be, you are still the leader. It's up to you to establish and model the ideals and principles of your organization in the way you run your group. Remember the principles of engagement that we established in the beginning of this book.
Engaged employees believe in the mission of their organization.
Engaged employees love what they do and understand how their jobs serve the bigger picture.
Engaged employees don't need discipline; they need clarity, communication, and consistency.
Engaged employees augment their skill sets with positive attitudes, focus, will, enthusiasm, creativity, and endurance.
Engaged employees can be trusted, and they trust each other.
Engaged employees respect their managers.
Engaged employees know that their managers respect them.
Engaged employees are a constant source of great new ideas.
Engaged employees will give you their best.
There's one more: Engaged employees know who's boss. That's you. And you owe it to your people to exercise your mandate to get results by tapping into their most dedicated passions and efforts.
Engaged employees know who's boss. That's you.
It's your job to get the best from your people. When you do it well, your people get the best from you.
References
Truth 12
"Cultivating Positive Emotions to Optimize Health and Well-Being," by Barbara Fredrickson, Prevention & Treatment, Volume 3.
Truth 16
"Why It's So Hard to Be Fair," by Joel Brockner, Harvard Business Review, March 2006.
Truth 21
"It's Not a Fair Fight If You're the CEO," by Marshall Goldsmith, Fast Company, December 2004.
Truth 23
The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change, by Diana Whitney and Amanda Trosten-Bloom, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 2003.
Truth 25
"Let's Hear It for B Players," by Thomas J. DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan, Harvard Business Review, June 2003.
Truth 32
"Sparking Creativity at Ferrari," by Gardiner Morse, Harvard Business Review, April 2006.
"The Six Myths of Creativity," by Bill Breen, Fast Company, December 2004.
The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, Tarcher, New York, 1992.
Truth 33
"Organizational Creativity," by Wendy M. Williams and Lana T. Young, in Handbook of Creativity, edited by Robert J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1999.
Truth 35
"The Six Myths of Creativity," by Bill Breen, Fast Company, December 2004.
Truth 36
"The Six Myths of Creativity," by Theresa Amabile, Fast Company, December 2004.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Harper Collins, New York, 1996.
Truth 38
"Managing Your Boss," by John J. Gabarro and John P. Kotter. Harvard Business Review Onpoint, Executive Edition, Winter 2006.
Truth 48
Leadership from the Inside Out: Becoming a Leader for Life, by Kevin Cashman, Executive Excellence Publishing, Provo, Utah, 2000.
About the Author
Martha I. Finney is a leadership consultant, and President and CEO of Engagement Journeys, LLC, which helps companies create a culture of employee engagement in their organizations. She has written or coauthored more than 10 books, including HR from the Heart: Inspiring Stories and Strategies for Building the People Side of Great Business, with Libby Sartain, Chief People Officer, Yahoo. She has appeared on CNN, NPR's Morning Edition and in major newspapers around the country. Her clients and interviewees include executives from Intuit, the Central Intelligence Agency, Knight Ridder, Hewlett-Packard, AOL, Newell Rubbermaid, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Caterpillar, Inc., and Kenexa. She also speaks and gives workshops on creating and leading passion-driven workplaces.
Martha divides her time between Silicon Valley and Santa Fe, NM. She can be reached at [email protected].
ass="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
The Truth About Getting the Best From People Page 12