4 Steps to Amping Up Your Team's Performance

Business literature is full of stories of organizations and people who learn from their failures to go on to do great things.  Although most of us aren’t expecting miracles to arise from missteps, we are looking to raise our team’s performance.  To this end, we hold debriefs when things go wrong, but are disappointed when participation is half-hearted and that little comes of it.  How do you raise your team’s commitment to improvement?

1. Make detailed performance debriefs a standard practice.  Going through an event step by step, understanding why decisions were made at each step along the way will uncover things that will enable the team to raise its performance.  When such debriefs are expected and required, they won’t be seen as personal and won’t feel like public beatings. 
2. Create a culture where it’s safe to admit to mistakes.  Admitting to mistakes and/or weakness is difficult, even under the best of conditions.  It is even tougher at work because such admissions leave one vulnerable to a scolding or worse. Your team needs to know that debriefs aren’t covers for witch hunts.  
3. Tie team performance to something that matters. People also need to feel that candor in assessing performance is tied to mission. Hospitals have been particularly successful in linking debriefs to saving lives.
4. Model the behavior.  It is powerful if leaders model their commitment to improvement.  Professor Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania shares feedback he receives with his students and tells them how he plans to address their comments.  It’s tough as a manager to solicit feedback from your team.  I’ve done it, and it is sobering.  Nonetheless, we all have blindspots and asking for anonymous feedback from your team is one way to learn.

We all want to have high performing teams, and learning from our successes and our failures.  Creating an environment and culture where sharing feels safe is critical to making that happen.

QUESTION: How do you create an environment where your team is willing to talk about its mistakes?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi is a certified Hogan provider.  She works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.

3 Steps To Increasing Your Team’s Engagement

More than two-thirds of American workers are disengaged at work.  If you’re like me, you may be patting yourself on the back for thinking how fortunate you are to have a team that is in the one-third of employees that are engaged.

Before you click to another article, ask yourself, “Do most members of my team exhibit the following behaviors?”

•   Taking all opportunities to expand knowledge, or learn new skills,

•   Willing to help others, including the boss,

•   Accepting responsibility when things that don’t go well,

•   Showing a professional and positive demeanor at all times,

•   Anticipating problems and taking initiative,

•   Focusing on work for 90% of the day,

•   Engaging constructively in conversations about solving problems.

If you look at these behaviors and see room for improvement on your team, there are things that you can do to improve things.

1.     Infuse your team with purpose.  Every one of us wants for our lives to have meaning.  I will never forget the janitor/school crossing guard who worked the corner next to my home when I was in high school.  He was so cheerful every morning and I once asked him why he was so happy, and he said, “I am blessed to have the mission of keeping you kids safe.”

Your company has a purpose and every one of your team is a part of that mission whether it’s keeping people safe, fed, healthy or meeting some other important need.  Help your team to connect to that.  Field trips, customer contact, and stories can help.

2.     Know what your team’s personal goals and dreams are and help them to get there.  We all have odd things that we need to get done.  Knowing who would find these assignments to be helpful to their personal development is key to job satisfaction. (It also assures the task will be done by someone who wants to do it.)  Telling your team that you are looking for them to develop themselves can be very motivating.

3.    Expect great things but not perfection.  Give your team members the autonomy and the space to do what they know how to do well and to grow, without micromanaging them.  It’s true that they won’t do things the way you do, but isn’t having someone mentally and emotionally invested in their job worth it?

Helping your team feel that they’re getting more from their job than a paycheck is the key to better engagement.

QUESTION: How do you engage your team?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi is a certified Hogan provider.  She works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.

3 Steps to Improving Your Team’s Productivity

As leaders, we prize ourselves on having responsive teams.  After all, organizational agility in light of changing business conditions can be critical to survival.  With current technology, we can contact our teams around the clock.  In this distracted age, how much instant communication is too much?

I once worked for an executive who insisted that his team be set their devices to ring an audible alarm when he sent them an email so that they’d get back to him right away.  This created stress for some, and led to behaviors like that in the above photo.

A major company studied email distractions and found that when workers were distracted from their tasks by responding to an urgent email, they didn’t get back to their original tasks for 10 to 25 minutes, and sometimes longer, since the break in concentration sometimes led to other diversions.

If one of your team members needs to respond to three urgent messages each day, they are conservatively losing at least 30 minutes of productivity a day.  If the work requires creativity, concentration, or has safety concerns, an interruption can best even more costly.

If you don’t communicates expectations around response time to your emails, many people will assume that a quicker response is always better.  They aren’t thinking about their productivity in the way you might be as the team’s leader.

What can you do about it?  1) Establish response expectations within your team so that they know that when they receive an email from you, they don’t need to drop everything to respond immediately (you can text them if something urgent comes up), and set expectations around responding that includes emails you might send off hours, 2) Have a conversation with your team and the people they do business with to establish email response expectations that will balance productivity and communication concerns, 3) Support your team by respecting these rules and communicating them to people your team does business with.

Not only will these changes enhance your team’s productivity, you may find that it will make them feel a greater sense of satisfaction in their jobs.  

QUESTION: How quickly do you expect your team to respond to your emails?

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The Surprising Secret to Increasing Your Influence

Have you ever made a suggestion at a meeting and people ignored it? Have you ever made a suggestion to a team member to improve their performance and they don’t seem to get it?  To make matters even worse, someone else makes the same suggestion and that team member tells you how brilliant the other person is!! 

This has happened to me a number of times. The most memorable was when I counseled a member of my staff on time management.  I made the suggestion for several years running, including on his performance appraisal, and he never seemed to hear it. I finally sent him to a course. The instructor suggested the same action that I had been suggesting for several years. I was stunned when he came back raving about his amazing instructor and talking about his great idea.

On another occasion, working as a Purchasing Director with significant IT experience, I made a suggestion about resolving an IT issue on a joint project. It was ignored. Someone from IT made the same suggestion and everyone thought it was a great idea.

I don’t know about you, but I am primarily interested in results.  My big aha from these incidents,  was that some messages can best be delivered by other people. Surprisingly, I realized that I could have more influence by letting others do some of the talking for me. I had to learn what messages were best for me to bring to the table, and which messages were best delivered by someone else. 

When you want to direct a person or a meeting, recognize that you may not be the best person to deliver every message. Just ask the parent of any teenager. 

When you have an important meeting, plan what arguments are likely to support the outcome you desire. Then consider each and determine whether you are the best person to deliver each message or suggestion.  If you are not the right person to be saying something, talk to thosepeople before the meeting. Win them over and ask them to help you to make the case at the meeting. 

You will find that by letting go of the need to be the one to articulate the best solution and most persuasive arguments, you are more likely to be able to steer events your way.

QUESTION: What strategies do you have for increasing your influence on the discussion?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi is a certified Hogan provider.  She works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.

4 Secrets to Attracting Top Talent to Your Team

We’ve all heard that as the economy has recovered, there’s a shortage of good talent.  That’s not great news for those of us who expect to be filling positions on our teams because we all know how critical our teams are to our success.

My daughter just changed positions, and had three offers.  The three positions were about the same in terms of work and pay.  She chose one position because of the leader (the boss of the people she’d be reporting to on a day to day basis).  What did he do to win her over?

1)   He shared his passion for his team’s mission in terms that made her excited without sugar-coating the tough work that they do,

2)   He explained how he develops members of his team to improve their capabilities as professionals,

3)   He talked about what differentiated his team from those of his competitors,

4)   He made it clear that he thought that she’d be a welcome addition to the team and explained why.

The other thing that won her over was the enthusiasm that members of his team showed for their work and how the leader respected their contributions and input.  In other words, the leader’s vision for his team was consistent with what she picked up from her interactions with the team.

So what can you do? You can look at the four things this leader did and ask yourself if you are able to do what he did.  If you can, then it may be helpful to script out your “spiel” for each one of these items except the last, which will depend on the candidate in question.

If you can’t do any one of the first three items, it may be time to look in the mirror to determine if you are the leader that you want to be.  After all, if you can’t attract quality talent to your team, how well will you be able to retain the quality talent that you have?  Research shows that most people who change jobs are driven to change because of frustration with their bosses.

QUESTION: How do you attract the best talent to your team?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.

5 Tips for Creating a Collaborative Team

As leaders many of us want to create a collaborative environment for our teams. Recently I was speaking to a very capable woman who expressed dismay that despite her efforts to get members of her team to speak up, when she asked her team for input, they responded with silence.

Most of us were promoted because we are very capable.  We get things done. The challenge when we become leaders is to make space for others to step forward and do the same thing that we did so that we have a high performing team.

The key to remember is that our teams are made up of people.  People need to have more than the contractual relationship (i.e. they work and they get a paycheck in return) to be engaged. People have feelings and they need to feel as though they are an important part of something greater. Our jobs as leaders is to foster that engagement so that our teams do their best work.

Here are five steps that you can take to create an environment to make your team step forward.

1. Share information. You are your team’s primary conduit to the company. Be sure to share information about what is going on, even if you are not sure that it affects them. Transparency is key. 
2. Think about a time when you were empowered to do your best and you delivered fantastic results.  How much freedom did your boss give you on that project to make decisions about how things should be done?  What decisions did he or she make and what decisions were up to you? How and how often did your boss get progress reports? Use this as a guideline when assigning projects. Remember that there are times when you need to get out of the way.
3. Define what success looks like up front, when you assign work.  There is nothing more demoralizing than getting what you think is a finished product back from your boss that is full of edits and corrections. Set your expectations clearly up front and when you review the final product, make sure that any changes you make are absolutely necessary. 
4. Create a supportive environment. Model respect for all members of your team, and make sure that everyone has an opportunity to speak and be heard. When you and a team member disagree, take it off line. When you have that offline conversation, be sure to remember that your objective is to communicate while preserving that relationship. 
5. If you want to hear your team’s opinion, offer yours last.  Frame the situation by giving the background, constraints and desired results and then ask for input.  If possible, let staff know that they will be asked for their opinion on the topic ahead of time, so that all have time to think about what they want to say. If you give your opinion before seeking the advice of the team, they will conclude that you have made up your mind and that there is no point in risking disagreement.

Your success as a leader depends on how well you engage your team, and you may be surprised how much more engaged people will be if you learn when to step back.

Question: What have you done to better engage your team?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.

4 Steps to Improving a Bad Work Relationship

We all have work relationships that aren’t as good as they could be. Some of them may not be a big deal, and talking about your bad relationship with a colleague can be a bonding experience with your other peers who also have a bad relationship with this person. One downside to this is that the bonding is at the expense of your professionalism.

In addition, if the bad relationship is with your boss or a critical business partner, it can have a negative impact on your results and/or your future with the company.  Is that what you want? Here are four steps for moving forward.

1. Resist the temptation to assign blame for the bad relationship.  It’s easy to blame the other person.  Blaming the other person can make you feel good because it removes the responsibility from you.  However by blaming the other person, you have effectively ceded power over the relationship to them, and that makes you a victim.  Since you’ve decided that you are not going to be the victim, let go of the need to assign blame.
2. Accept that if you want for the relationship to change, the next step is up to you.  A relationship is by definition a connection between two people.   As the party who is seeking change, you need to take the first step.  Setting up the meeting on their terms or on their turf is a good way to increase their receptivity to you.
3. Prepare yourself for the interaction.  You need to release negative emotions around the relationship so that you can approach the person from a place of calm and openness.  Recognize that you want to come across as interested in their needs and prepared to be understanding. 
4. Meet with the person.  It’s critical to remember that a good relationship is a collaborative dance.  In order for the dance to happen, both of you need to be calm and focused on finding a win-win solution (or on-going relationship).  Your first step in this interaction is to help that person to get to the place of calm connection that you are.  This typically involves a great deal of listening, and willingness to see things from their point of view.  Once they are receptive, you must be open and share your perspective.

You might read this and be skeptical or even outraged.  How can you forget all of the negativity that this person may have caused you and perhaps many others?  The bottom line is that it is your career and your reputation at stake.  Do you want to be the victim of someone else, or do you want to be the leader in your life?

Leadership sometimes entails setting aside your own ego and tapping into your desire to do the right thing for yourself and your organization. Sometimes you need to be the bigger person and extend yourself to make the collaborative dance of a relationship work. 

QUESTION: What’s your advice for letting go of negativity around a relationship?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.

3 Reasons Why a Paycheck Isn’t Thanks Enough

I once worked for a CEO who never said, “Thank you.”  No matter no matter what employees accomplished or how much they went above and beyond, he didn't thank the people who worked for him.  He believed that their pay was all the thanks that people needed. So praise for a job well done wasn’t something that one came to expect either.

Any time we had a meeting with him, we would all prepare ourselves for an onslaught of questioning - preparing ourselves for not only the likely questions, but the unlikely ones as well.  We would consider meetings a success if all of the participants walked out with all of their anatomy intact.  Thisbehavior was not confined to the CEO.  Many other executives and managers emulated his style.

Although none of these people were inherently mean or nasty, when employees could only expect criticism or worse at a meeting, the organization became driven by fear.  This style of management was unpleasant and there are three reasons that it was bad for business:

1. Fear doesn’t bring out the best in people.  Instinctively, in any interpersonal interaction the human brain determines if they’re dealing with a friend or foe.  If the brain believes itself to be dealing with a foe, a fear response is triggered, which makes accessing the creative and analytical portions of the brain less accessible.  How many times have you walked out of a meeting where your fear response was triggered and come up with better ideas than you had at that meeting?

2. Fear inhibits personal connection.  Because people are social creatures, personal connection is important. I have always performed at my best for bosses with whom I felt some kind of personal connection.  I would extend myself to go above and beyond for people. While project deadlines and key performance indicators were important, they weren’t the same as working to strengthen the relationship.  

What has always motivated me to share information with my boss, both good but especially bad, has been the strength of my connection with that person.  To effectively lead an organization, a leader must be in touch with the team.  Fear makes that difficult, if not impossible.

3. Turnover is expensive.  Most people who change jobs are leaving their bosses.  What is the tone of meetings with your team?

If you are one of those bosses who has believed that your job doesn’t involve thanking your team or providing positive feedback, think about your interactions with your team and whether the lack of positive feedback from you has unwittingly created a climate of fear.  You won’t be able to change things overnight, but consciousness is the first step.  The next step might be saying, “Thank you.”

QUESTION: How do you build a connection to your team?

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Leadership/Career Coach Kris Ishibashi works with leaders to bring together their skills, their authentic selves, and their intentions to inspire their organizations to superior performance. Click here to set up a complimentary consultation.