People, people, people

Successful/winning teams start with the right people, it is essential to have the right people.  Often managers tackle a project or try to deliver great results with the wrong people.  Paying great salaries will not ensure success, if you have the wrong people money will not fix that.

Great people don’t always make a great team, you have to have the right mix

Once you have identified the right people you need to be sure you have the right mix of people, leaders often forget that personalities are an important part of success, you need to ensure diversity.  The more  varied your group in skills, outlook, views and experiences the better chance you have at success.   Diversity brings with it a greater variety  of solutions to problems, a better mix of ideas and view points, winning teams  are able to debate different ideas until the best and match  winning solution is found

Unity, an essential ingredient of success with people.

Your job as a leader is to ensure that your team remain focused, their are lots of different ways of doing this, many of which are detailed on this site.  One of your essential tasks will be to make sure you have a clearly defined goal (vision) that everybody understands and feels part of and knows their role in achieving.

Diversity brings fantastic energy, but this needs to be channeled, the differences need to be focused on one goal.  If you  are not able to  manage this diverse energy you will have your team going around in circles achieving nothing.  Unity is  best achieved in the common pursuit  of a shared goal, a vision.  Shared vision is what binds all the differences styles, ideas, and options into one focused source of energy.

Unity = Knowing where you fit in.

Very often teams have great people, who all get on really well but who do not know how best to fit in with one another and this often results in very low productivity.  This often happens as teams begin to establish themselves.  As a leader be sure you do not waste the talent at your disposal by not clearly defining where everybody fits in.  Your role is to ensure everybody understands theirs.

Relationships are crucial to success,

As a team develops the relationships between team members evolves and the relationship with the leader changes.  As each phase of development appears the team leader  must be aware of the changing dynamic in the team and thus the changing relationship. The leader must be prepared to adjust their relationship with the team as they develop.

Interactions between team members and the team leader shape the success of the team.

All to often managers/team leaders maintain the same style of management or same nature of relationship and the team  never moves onto the next phase of development.  Teams go through 4 essential phases of development, each with distinctly different requirements and results.

For a team to achieve a winning position they need to go through the phases of development to ensure that they reach maturity.  As a team leader it is essential you are aware of the phases of development and how to facilitate the progression to the next one.

Knowledge of your individual team members is essential; often companies or groups make casual attempts to get together and get to know each other. It is important to know a little about what makes your team members “tick”, their currency and priorities.

Problems arise in teams when members don’t  know anything about each other.  By getting to know each other you are better able to understand actions and behaviours that might otherwise result in  irritations or misunderstandings; so making your team stronger and more resilient.

Teams who know each other as individuals are better able to understand  why we behave in certain ways under certain conditions.  These teams are better at withstanding the stresses and pressures of performance delivery.

A good manager will make sure that members of the team know the right and important details about one another and build this  process into daily conversations with their team members.  This ensures the relevant  information is shared by team  members, so they understand each other and all that is going on.

Good managers understand the importance of knowing their team well and will detect changes in their individual member’s behavoiur; so picking up on subtle clues before they develop into issues.  We must never under-estimate the effects of our personal lives in our work performance and behaviour.  Our ‘hidden’ selves, that  we don’t know  but which others recognise is an important part of healthy team functioning.

An essential part of creativity is enjoyment; your team needs to have fun while they are working, happy and relaxed people are  more likely to be creative.  Managers are largely responsibile for the level of fun and enjoyment; you need to  ensure that  the working environment allows  staff to relax, enjoy themselves and have fun.

Fun needs to be recognised as a formal part of the working day/week/month/year.  An inspirational leader/manager will ensure that fun is a recognisable  part of the working day.  Choose the most free spirited person in the team and charge them with ensuring a daily/weekly fun theme that encourages everybody to get involved.

Even when under pressure you as a leader need to know that fun is an important part of managing stress;  ensuring that the team remains motivated and determined to meet the challenge.   The way in which you lead is the way your team will follow you;  the way you show them how to behave under pressure is the way they will respond when you put them under pressure.

And…

Who is the most free spirited person in your team?

What activities should you build into your working day/week to make fun an important part of work

All too often we try to build a team with the wrong people, most stories of business success are built around  having the right people to  do the job.

Without them you spend too much time and energy managing people who are either not able to do the job you  need them to, or cannot fit into the team and are disruptive.  Business success and team performance is difficult enough if you have the right team working with you, achieving the goals you have set without the right people in place is almost impossible.

It is a common mistake managers make, believing that although the person they have hired is not 100% right, we can train and

develop them and they will learn, not so.

Investing time and money in training somebody to do a job you have hired them for, reduces your team efficiency  and performance. Added to this is the fact t hat often performing team members become demoralized by non  performance in others and the amount of time and energy a team leader invests in them.

Instead of concentrating on the performers, a mistake most managers make, they concentrate 80% of their time energy and resources on 20% of their team, the 20% that isn’t performing.

As management, you should always concentrate on the performers in your team, build performance ethic and team spirit and ensure that the growth of the team is driven by these individuals.  It seldom works to focus the bulk of our energy on those who are not performing.  This distracts the team from their task, it often demoralizes other team members and reduces the momentum and performance with which a team pursues a goal.

The momentum is slow but the direction is immense.

The pitch has shifted subtly from what products and services can do for you and your family;  how they can insulate you from the madness of the wonderful life we have created, but now find ourselves trapped in.

Loyalty cards,  air-miles and e-bucks came first  but they no longer fully satisfy consumers.  Analysts have identified the EQ of commerce and there is a growing trend among consumers to buy products and services that affirm their increasing demand for social, environmental and communal commitment as well as corporate accountability.  People want to know that their money buys them more than just a product and that a ‘fair trade’ practice will satisfy their social conscience.

Those able to read these signs will stay ahead with ease.

This sudden, radical change in consumption has been visible for a while but  few businesses have paid it proper attention. Some have adapted their products and marketing but  failed to make the necessary adjustments to staff training at the same time.   Very few businesses have analysed the way their staff interact with customers or ensured that the changes in their products has been mirrored in the service to clientele.

This change has been slow because the mindset is radically different and this often means undoing much of what was done in the past

Those few who have successfully managed the change are well ahead and will stay ahead.  Those who haven’t will struggle to catch up.

An age of change.

We are usually unaware of an ’age changes’ because they are gradual developments,  invisible to us as we cope with the demands of our lives.  In recent decades we have had the ‘space age’, the ‘digital age’, the’ information age’, and the ‘new age’.  Over the last few months, we have witnessed another ‘age change’;  the ‘age of awareness’.

At last we are taking serious things seriously.

Suddenly people have become aware of the realities of their world and there is a growing concern for the planet. Consumers are demanding more for their money than simply a product. This means that companies have to be sure that their commitment to important aspects of our social fabric receive proper attention and that this new commitment is then communicated to their target market.   The playing fields of business are undergoing constant change.

Are they tricking us again?

Consumer trends have turned 180 degrees  in the last few decades; for many years the primary focus was the product whereas today it seems to be mostly about service.  With many almost identical products on offer and newer ones available immediately after your’s, it is the service component which makes the difference and this is where it is all happening today.  The latest business buzzword is service;  for you, your family and friends.  Although, they never actually  commit to it they way they should, they certainly  get consumers to flirt with the idea.

This radical shift started long ago.

The world has changed immensely since mid 2008;  the economic downturn is one of the most demanding periods most of us have ever lived through.  However, there were telltale signs of the impending  crisis  at least 3 or 4 years earlier; some would argue in 2002, with the collapse of Enron and other corporate pillars in the world’s  largest economy.

The world has also experienced significant growth and development over the last few years. Businesses have flourished and the rate of change is  faster now than ever before; some believe this increasing rate of change may even have a significant effect on the evolution of our species in times to come.

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We have been fighting it for as long as is possible.

The day to day reality is that we have had to become radically dynamic overnight.  Information acquisition, processing and use across all spheres of life are essential to keeping pace with the world.

Access to current even cutting-edge information is a key feature of business today. So, is a sound understanding of the globalisation of all aspects of our world,  private and commercial.

The rapidity of  change has left many businesses,  big and small floundering; not knowing how to train or equip their work force with those very skills that ‘new age’ consumers demand.   Those businesses who were able to read the signs and sailed with the tide, have reaped  rewards beyond their expectations.  However, those who were too slow to respond are unlikely to ever fully catch up because of the exponential rate of change.

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We must use our size to our advantage.

Understanding consumer trends and equipping staff with relevent skills is a daunting challenge for any commercial enterprise nowdays.  Small businesses without  the training and staff development budgets of their larger counterparts are severely disadvantaged.  But it is small and medium businesses which are the very cornerstone of future economic growth so they must be able to transform their disadvantage to an advantage.

It is to their advantage that access to quality and current information has never before been as cheap or as easily available as today.  It has never before been as simple to keep abreast of what competitors are doing or of  how current trends are influencing business practice.  However, many small businesses have been slow in their response, not recognising the opportunity and failing to use them to their advantage.

Key Ideas

Leaders need to personify performance.

Performance needs to be defined.

Show your team what performance is, and they will give it to you.

Leaders need to personify performance.

Everybody wants to succeed; to make a success of what they do but not everyone is a natural leader.  Nor is everybody  able to be successful off their own bat; there can only be leaders if there are followers.

To be a successful manager/leader you need to be able to extract the best from your team and in order  to give their best, they need to know what the best  is.  So performance needs to be defined.

Performance needs to be defined.

In many companies performance has never been defined; team members do not know what actually needs to be done, nor do they understand the difference between just getting a job done and performance excellence.

In accordance with the idea that the way you lead, is the way your team will follow, apply  the same principle to performance. Your staff will look to you to define performance and will measure their standards against the ones you establish.

Performance expectations need to be defined; often as leaders we are so busy meeting our own performance demands, that we forget to ensure that others know exactly what we expect of them.

Show your team what performance is and they will give it to you.

When we leave our staff guessing as to what we expect, they often pursue ‘safe options’;  tasks that they know are well within their skill range.

To create a high performance team, a leader must ensure that staff go beyond the ordinary; that they feel confident and supported when trying to achieve higher levels of performance.  However, to do this, they need to know exactly what those higher levels of performance are.

POOR LEADERSHIP = POOR PERFORMANCE = POOR BUSINESS RESULTS

The way you interact with your staff is the way they will interact with one another and ultimately, with your customers.  You can tell everything about the manager of a business by the way the staff treat you, their customer.

Key Ideas

Overcoming challenges is mostly about attitude.

Managers need to ensure the right approach to problems is always maintained.

Failure breeds failure – Success breeds success.

Failure always occurs,  it is how we handle it that is important.

Every team and its members are going to fail at some or other time;  this is part of the learning process.  We learn through our mistakes.  As a team leader, failure is an important part of ensuring long term success; how you handle the mistakes can be key to ensuring success.

In pursuing goals set by you as leader, a team faces challenges, some of which they will overcome with relative ease.  Others, will test them to the limit.  It is key that as their leader, you ensure that they maintain a high degree of hope and inspiration when they fail at certain challenges.  Optimism and inspiration are what keep us on track, allowing us to meet  the challenges we face and so accomplish our goals.

The key to overcoming problems is the belief that you can

If optimism in a team drops and failure becomes prevalent, team members  become stressed about the challenges they face.  When this happens staff  see problems as potential hurdles that WILL trip them up; that they are bound to fail at and this results in declining performance.  Teams and individual staff members start to believe not that they can succeed but  that they are more likely to fail.  This makes your goal of success unobtainable.

Leaders must monitor team morale and ensure a positive outlook.

When mistakes and failures start to creep into your team’s performance, you need to monitor them closely; scepticism can quickly reduce the chance of success and can turn a talented team into poor performers.  As a leader it is essential that you ensure your team believes that they can succeed.  When a team has a positive outlook, they are more likely to overcome obstacles because they genuinely believe in their own ability.

Teams need to have a high degree of optimism if they are to succeed; without optimism they will see each challenge as a stumbling block and failure as proof  that they are not up to the task at hand.

Confidence ensures success.

If optimism is high, they will view failures as temporary setbacks in their learning experience and as an opportunity to try harder.

As a leader it is essential you maintain high levels of hope, inspiration and optimism in your team.  This will ensure that the inevitable failures and mistakes are seen merely as lessons learned during your team’s journey to success.