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Seven Keys to More Effectively Leading Teams
Maybe you find yourself in a new team environment and leading a team for the first time, or maybe you have been working with and leading teams forever. Either way, the keys in this article – whether as new information or a fresh reminder – can make a world of difference in morale, productivity and results from teams.
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on Communication...
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Help the team identify its purpose. People work more effectively when they understand the goals they are trying to achieve. As a leader it is your job to help the team see the desired outcome of their efforts and help them set specific goals and milestones along the way.
Set the scope and boundaries. Teams need to know what they should tackle and what is “too big” or not their responsibility. By helping teams manage the scope of their work you will keep them more focused and help them reach their goals more quickly.
Show your belief. If you don’t believe in the team concept, you won’t effectively lead teams. If you do believe both in the concept and in a particular team’s potential, you need to tell them. Show through both your words and actions that you believe in them. Once they have purpose, goals, and your belief; they are on their way to success.
Define your role. Your role is to lead, not to do the work or make all of the decisions. Let the team know what your role is and isn’t. Help them see how you are relying on their experience, knowledge and intellect in the completion of the team’s work.
Be a supporter. Support the team with your actions. Don’t just delegate the work to the team and be gone. Teams will experience obstacles and roadblocks. It is your job to remove those roadblocks, find additional resources, and generally provide support. It is like a hike. If you are in front of a group on a hike, you will do your best to remove impediments that might slow down or injure those that follow. Your role on a business team of any sort is just the same.
Be a facilitator. Help the team succeed. Provide guidance when needed. Keep your hands off as much as you can. By giving the team a chance to succeed on their own, you are developing them towards greater future achievement at the same time. To facilitate means “to make easier” and that is your role. Remember that you chose to use a team to accomplish the task, so let them do it.
Keep your mouth shut. Teams often look to leaders to make the final decisions or assume that the leader has veto power on any decision in the end. If you really buy the team approach - that you want and need everyone’s input – you have to keep quiet. If you are the first person to talk on a subject, the overall amount of discussion and idea flow will drop. Team members will subconsciously assume that your word is golden – whether they agree or not. Because of your position, you must abstain from the early part of a dialogue on any issue, and share your thoughts nearer the close of the conversation.
Each of these things alone will help you build and lead more effective teams. But when taken together, significant progress can be made.
Look at the list above while you think both about your skills and behaviors and the needs of your current teams. Then, put a check mark (mental or literal) next to the one item you will work on today.
By getting started NOW you can become a significantly more effective team leader right away!
Yours in Learning,
p.s. To learn more about how we can assist your teams or team leaders through training or coaching, go to: http://kevineikenberry.com/training/team_building.asp.
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“Hi Kevin, I just stepped out of college and in to the working world. My major was Technical Education and Training, well my degree is not being exercised right now, but my supervisor is giving me many opportunities to do some training. I really want to become, as some books say, the master trainer. One of the problems I have found myself doing is reading from the screen and I know that’s a no no. Can you give me some advice?”
- Kenston Henderson, Data Entry Coordinator |
Congratulations on receiving your degree, and for finding a supervisor who is willing to help you develop in the direction of your goals!
Your observation about reading from your slides being a “no no” is a good one. Remember that PowerPoint (or an overhead or a flipchart) is a visual aid. It is meant to aid or support the presentation, not be the presentation!
Too often presenters forget that and spend their time reading their slides to us. If all a presenter is going to do is read the slides, they could have just sent us an email attachment with the file in it.
The best way to reduce your propensity to read the slides is to reduce the number of words on the slide. Don’t write sentences; use key words as your bullets. It is your job as a presenter to expand and expound on those bullets to make the presentation alive and relevant to the audience. Focus on sharing examples and ideas that go beyond the words on the slides.
By reducing the number of words on the slide, you will have designed more effective visual aids and kept yourself from reading, because there won’t be much to read!
p.s. If you design your PowerPoint slides to have all the information on them in case you have to mail the presentation to others who couldn’t attend, put the detail in the notes section of PowerPoint. That way you have the best possible visual aid, but still have the detail if the file needs to stand alone.
If you have question you want Kevin to answer in a future issue, email us.
In my article above I talk about the importance of team leaders being facilitators. This role or skill set is a very powerful one to develop – with it you can help groups make decisions, solve problems and more. While all leaders and professionals can (and should) get better at these skills, there are also many professionals who make these skills their career and livelihood.
Whether you are a professional facilitator or a team leader wanting to be a better facilitator, I recommend the site of the Internal Association of Facilitators. Among the many features of the site, there are some great articles about facilitation and the facilitation process.
You can also visit our web site for some articles to help you facilitate greater creativity with your teams. Check them out at: http://www.kevineikenberry.com/training/training_tools.asp.
TV's Survivor: Out-Sneak, Out-Greed, Out Team?
By Dave Blum
Hello. My name is Dave. I'm a Survivor junkie. For seven seasons (and three years) I've sat glued to the tube every Thursday evening, eager to see what will happen next to the current group of 16 TV castaways, whether they're sweltering on a desert island, baking in an African desert or starving in the Australian Outback. For the entirety of its run, CBS' Survivor has been an enormous ratings hit - easily the king of the reality shows - and it's still going strong this season with the current "all-star" installment (of prior castaways). Survivor's appeal is simple: beautiful locales, attractive contestants (often in bathing suits), unusual challenges, crisp editing, conflict galore, and a million-dollar prize at the end for the "sole survivor". Think National Geographic combined with Who Wants to Be A Millionaire combined with a daytime soap opera.
Survivor, brainchild of Aussie Mark Burnett, is also the closest network television has ever come to presenting a weekly program about team building. So close…and yet so very far.
For those of you who have somehow avoided the show and its ever-present TV trailers, here's the set up: Sixteen Americans are dropped off in an exotic locale (most often a tropical island) with little more than the clothes on their backs and some rudimentary supplies. Divided into two "tribes", contestants must work as a team to "outwit," "outplay," and "outlast" their competition for 39 days, with the final survivor taking home the million-dollar prize. As entertainment goes, Survivor is quite an enjoyable and, for some of us, addicting piece of fluff. But the question (at least for business trainers like me) remains: Is Survivor team building.? My answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a big YES…but with qualifications. The show provides a rather effective blueprint for how businesses should, and should not go about putting teams together.
To explain why I judge Survivor half a "team building." program, I must first clarify my terms and define what a team is. In The Wisdom of Teams (1993, Harper Business, pg. 45), Katzenbach and Smith offer a useful description:
"A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable."
Simply put, a well-constructed team is small, diverse and purposeful. Everyone on the team has the same goals; everyone holds up his or her own end. Leaders building teams must guide their group from the early formation stage all the way up to a high-performance level, nurturing trust, a common vision, and high standards. And, in the end, the team must deliver results.
For its initial eight (or so) episodes each season, Survivor (I would argue) is the best team building. program television has ever seen. Here you have two groups of strangers, thrown together in a barren (albeit photogenic) setting. For survival's sake, each "tribe" must quickly build a shelter, haul water, make fire, and locate food. Their "common purpose," at least at the beginning, is merely to stay alive. Once they've got their basic needs stabilized, teams must now turn their attention to keeping everyone's strength up for the tests soon to begin. And this is where it gets interesting. Every week the two tribes compete against each other in a pair of strenuous and often ingenious challenges, usually involving swimming, climbing, puzzle-solving or the shooting of weapons. The first test is always for a "reward," often blankets, fishing hooks, or some sort of foodstuff. The second, however, is the key one. The losers of each week's "immunity challenge" go to "tribal Council," where they must vote one of their teammates off the island (and hence off the show).
The stakes, then, are high indeed. Pull it together as a team or you'll a) go hungry and thirsty and/or b) lose challenges and risk an early departure. The "performance goals" couldn't be clearer.
And pull it together the tribes do…for the most part, anyway.
In each group, "complementary skills" are quickly identified and implemented, in service of the team. The most capable cook tends to step forward to take charge of the food preparation. The best architect emerges to head up the shelter construction. The best hunters go out and hunt; the best gatherers go off and gather. Likewise in the challenges, the best athletes contribute their particular talents for specific tasks. The strongest person might, for example, play anchor in a tug-of-war. The best swimmer, given the choice, might take an extra lap for a tired teammate. Watching the tribes assess their skills & abilities and divvy up the tasks is quite a pleasure to behold!
And what are the high standards for which these tribe-mates hold themselves "mutually accountable"? They are, quite simply:
1. Be industrious in your chores.
2. Compete in the challenges at the top of your ability.
3. Abide by common decisions.
4. Be agreeable and get along with others.
Tribemates failing to display any of these values can pay a dire price - both immediate and final. If you're fellow team members see you as being either lazy or unpleasant, "accountability" is sudden and swift. One second you're on the island, angling for the million-dollar prize, the next second you've got a target on your back, and a likely ejection at tribal council.
If all this sounds a bit like "Lord of the Flies", there's certainly some of that in the early weeks of the show, although things don't really descend to that level until the final half of the season. For the first eight weeks or so, Survivor adheres fairly effectively to Katzenbach & Smith's team model.
Tribes:
1. Are relatively small in number (eight members at the beginning, less as it goes along).
2. Possess adequate levels of complementary skills.
3. Agree on a common purpose (stay healthy, stay strong, win challenges).
4. Adhere to a group approach (work hard, compete hard, get along).
5. Commit to achieving performance goals
6. Enforce a sense of mutual, enforceable accountability (mess up and you're out).
Sounds great, right? Cooperation, collaboration, and communication, on national television!
Alas, teamwork and mutual support just aren't "sexy" enough for the American public, at least according to the producers of Survivor. Viewers demand conflict in their primetime television shows, and Burnett and company are more than happy to oblige.
Thus, sometime around week nine - just when you and the contestants have gotten used to the team building. theme - the game changes, irreversibly. Teams suddenly receive notice that they're now to be merged into one big tribe. Gone are the group reward and immunity challenges that characterized (and motivated) weeks one through eight. Henceforth it's all to be dog-eat-dog. Challenges are now for individual rewards and individual immunity. No more teamwork. No more common goals. From here on, everyone is on their own. Only one person, the winner of that episode's immunity challenge, is safe at the periodic tribal councils; everyone else is vulnerable. In the end, only two castaways will remain, with the winner selected by a "final council" consisting of the seven last-voted-out tribemates.
The "big shift," of course, alters nothing, and everything. Survivors still need to provide, food, water and shelter. They still need to work hard at chores, and they must certainly continue to be at least somewhat agreeable. What's changed is the ethic surrounding group performance. In short, there is no longer a common enemy to rally against. Now, everyone is the enemy; everyone is an obstacle to you reaching your own individual goals.
Within this new, internally competitive environment, new ethics and tactics emerge. Unlike before, when physical talents were prized, even celebrated, the vital skills to develop in Survivor- Stage 2 are:
1. The art of persuasion
2. The skill of alliance building
3. The ability to adapt to frequent change.
Keeping a low profile becomes particularly essential. If you're too strong and win too many challenges, you'll be perceived as a threat and voted out. If you're too obvious in your string-pulling and alliance-building, you'll be seen as a danger and risk ejection. Conversely, if you're too nice or too likeable, you may be seen as too likely to win votes in the final council, and out you go. The second half of each Survivor season is thus an exercise in behind-the-scenes scheming and manipulation, with the prize going to the most Machiavellian. Adhering to team values actually works to your disadvantage in the second half, since there is no loyalty, no trust, and no common "team" purpose. In a world where everyone is out for themselves, a team just slows you down.
I would love to make Survivor required viewing for all new and existing business teams. The first eight weeks of the program showcase many of the necessary steps in proper team formation, while the final eight weeks demonstrate some of the key temptations that tear teams apart. At the start of the show, people get to know each other. They build trust. They identify their strengths and weaknesses. They rally around a common goal. And they hold each other accountable to high standards. By the end, it's something of a free-for-all of ego-driven behavior and separate, conflicting agendas. And isn't this just what happens to many business teams, especially in times of high stress and low vigilance? People begin to think, "How is my continuing membership on this team going to affect my career objectives?" Individual goals diverge from the group's goals, and the team comes tumbling down. The only "survivors" are the best game-players, the shrewdest "politicians".
Do all teams, then, bow to entropy and eventual dissolution? Perhaps. Nothing lasts forever, and teams by their very nature are created for quick mobilization and easy dismantling. Still, I believe teams can have long and successful lives. What's needed is leadership and team members that stay committed to high team standards and are vigilant against the forces that pull teams apart, such as egoism and career-ism. Management must bear as much responsibility. Like Survivor's producers, management, too, has a choice. It can structure the "game" to reward individual effort and internal competition. Or it can reward collective product and team results. Most importantly, it can give teams thoughtful, meaningful, and relevant work to do, and the means to accomplish it.
Survivor has just begun its eighth season. I urge you to give it a try, but beware: you just might become a Survivor addict yourself.
Dave Blum is the founder of Dr. Clue, the premier creator of team building. treasure hunts all across the country. Get your FREE monthly newsletter of team building. and treasure hunt tips at http://www.drclue.com.
"Dr. Clue: Solving the Puzzles of Teamwork."
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