Wear One Hat
Team leaders often confuse their team mates by not making their role clear. Are you participating as a team member? Or as the team leader? To alleviate the confusion, let your team mates know which hat you are wearing and when you change your role.
Focus on the Deliverable
Teams can get off-track pretty quickly without a purpose, agenda or defined outcome. When gathering together, get a clear picture of the meeting deliverable by asking, “What do we want to walk away with today?” All your efforts should support the development of the deliverable.
Do Collective Work
Teams are great for collaborative work such as planning, coordinating, decision-making, evaluation, brainstorming and sharing information. So use teams where appropriate and farm out tasks more suitable for individual work to one (or two) people to do.
Share the Wealth
There is so much to do and so little time. So make sure you share the tasks fairly among your team mates. Leverage their talents and strengths, provide developmental opportunities, coach them into accepting responsibility so that all members of the team can share the work and the resulting rewards.
Encourage Robust Dialogue
Discussions within teams should be candid and straightforward, bringing out the positive and the negative. It’s a Socratic dialogue where team members ask the right questions, debating them and finding realistic solutions… Larry Bossidy, in his book Execution, insists that “debating the assumptions and making trade-offs openly in a group is an important part of the social software…As they construct and share a common comprehensive picture of what’s happening on the outside and inside, they hone their ability to synchronize efforts for execution. And they publicly make their commitments to execute.”
Suffer the Silence
The currency of teamwork is airtime and no one likes to see time being wasted. So when we pose a question or ask for a volunteer, it’s easy to rush in to fill the void and continue talking. We need to “suffer the silence” to allow our team mates to think through the question, evaluate the options and then to raise their voices.
Get Naked
One of the cornerstones of cohesive teamwork is trust. To build trust, Patrick Lencioni
encourages team members to “get naked” - a process of getting to know your team mates at a deeper level. You can get naked through behavioral preference and conative profiles such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Kolbe Indexes, reading professional books, sharing personal histories, conducting team activities and experiential exercises, using feedback instruments and frequently communicating with each other.
Take a Straw Poll
For really important decisions, it is worth taking a moment to poll your team mates on where they stand on the issue. Provide an opportunity for any objections to be raised…and then discussed to create an even better solution. It’s better than having the objections raised much later…out in the parking lot or in the middle of a sabotaged implementation.
Follow Through
The enemy of accountability is ambiguity. So never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow-through will be, who will do it, when and how they will do it, and how and when the next review will take place. Follow through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do, according to the agreed upon timetable.
Celebrate Success
Look for ways to celebrate even the smallest of victories (even though you may have mentally moved onto the next task or project!) Your team mates need to know that their efforts are recognized and appreciated…so they are willing to continue their labors!
posted by AcrosticGuy @ 11:34 AM
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