Six Secrets of Powerful Teams: A Practical Guide to the Magic of Motivating and Influencing Teams (2 page)

The ongoing challenges of creating the magical bond between team members in small and big endeavors can be elusive. What’s more, in the last few decades it has become increasingly challenging with the advent of modern matrix organizations.

As
a result the lore concerning the magic of teams has been lost.

When I’m facilitating workshops for business professionals, project managers in software development, seminars for finance and IT professionals, consulting with marketing and supply chain experts, I am surprised, to witness their low propensity for soft skills literacy. They know
the hard aspects of what needs to be done, however they remain clueless when required to lead the teams
that help them accomplish the required objectives.

As most of these teams are cross functional in a matrix organization, it is likely that the leaders and managers of these teams do not have direct hierarchical control over the team members. Requesting deliverables from the team members becomes challenging.

Even when the managers do have hierarchical power, the contemporary concepts of empowerment and motivation prevail, making direct commands unpopular to say the least.

Yet again requesting fulfillment of the objectives and deliverables becomes tricky. It is quite remarkable that simple concepts for creating positive interactions outside the business world are hardly ever used within business and project teams.

What are you going to find in this exciting, expert-based book?

Initially the challenge of managing and leading teams is outlined. We explore two scenarios of teams, no doubt you’ll find yourself identifying with at least one of the scenarios.

We then discuss valuable proven concepts about teams and provide practical guidelines on how to use them in your teams.

The next chapter is exciting and quite revolutionary; we introduce simple Gestalt psychological concepts and their application in project teams. We then highlight specific authentic behaviors that can be found in teams and provide advice on how to handle them as they occur. The third element in this chapter is the powerful, yet fundamental neurolinguistic programming (NLP) set of concepts and its relevance to team interactions.

All of the amazing ideas presented in this chapter are a surefire way to make a remarkable impact on you and your team’s performance. These ideas increase your portfolio of handling different situations, reducing conflict, solving conflict, increasing motivation, enabling breakthrough in performance and are all valuable for team growth.

It is my pleasure to provide you with these tested concepts that immediately increase your team performance and ultimately make your life much easier. Thanks again for buying this book and striving to learn and better yourself. 

This book emphasizes the soft elements of the team, additional concepts are discussed in the many other books I have published.

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CHAPTER

ONE

In the spotlight – the challenge

Since ancient history the challenges and advantages of leading and managing a team have been recognized. One can imagine that successful human endeavors, based on collaborative efforts were in effect founded on well performing teams.

That is not to say that management by coercion did not have its debut from time to time, however teams that were based on mutual respect, empowerment, motivation, trust, and collaboration tended to outperform, even in history, teams that were based on coercion, fear, and punishment. 

The better performance of these teams was usually expressed in military and social victories. For example the Roman army, the U.S. Army in the war of independence, the British Army in World War II, the Greek at the battle of Salamis, and the developed Italian city states of the Renaissance era.

In the first chapter we introduce two scenarios of non-functioning teams, indeed you might find yourself identifying with the scenarios, very good, it will make the experience all the more potent.

The dimensions in which we analyze these scenarios are based on the next two chapters in this book.

Ashley is a team leader in a pharmaceutical company. She manages the introduction and integration of new products into operations. She reports to the portfolio manager of new products. Her background is engineering; in the past she worked in supply chain and product marketing.

Her current team is co-located in a factory situated in Northern California. Her team consists of eight members from: manufacturing engineering, research and development, finance, operations, quality, supply chain, customer support, configuration management, and planning. The development projects duration is 6 to 9 months. Integrating the product into operations is most often difficult, time-consuming and full of errors.

The team which Ashley leads is ad hoc. They have been working together for only one month.  There is lot of friction concerning responsibilities. There are many action-items too, and the workload is staggering.

Let’s join a project review meeting, the fifth so far. Ashley starts the meeting; it is seven minutes late and only half of the participants are seated around the table. They commence with reviewing the action item list on which half of the action items are late.

John from quality assurance mentions he cannot continue his work unless he receives the configuration details from research and development.

As no member from the research and development team is present, the task is postponed for another week.

Julie from supply chain presents the department’s analysis for required inventory levels; Peter from operations looking at the projector screen remarks: “but your estimates are all wrong! we have another analysis showing that actually these levels are too low”. Alejandro from customer support interjects saying: “Peter we know that your calculations are always off the mark”. At this point Jennifer from finance cracks a joke about how customer support is not really about customer support but more about the customer nightmare.

Tina from planning, who has been around the company for more than eight years, is now taking control of the meeting and projects her rolling three-month forecast for production levels of the new product. Ashley tries to gain control back and asks Tina: “why do you think this is
now
relevant for our meeting? Let’s try to get back on our planned agenda!”  Tina answers: “we should focus on production levels as this is what is driving the transfer to production, trust me I’ve been here and have seen these projects many times”.

Jennifer mentions cynically that it is true that Tina has been around for quite some time but going through the rolling plan has never actually helped in making a smooth transfer from development to operation. Tina replies: “I think we should try to keep to our areas of expertise, which is why I’m not sure what finance is doing in the meeting”. Jennifer retorts: “Don’t be naïve, we all know what I am doing here, since we’ve missed all our previous product quota calculations I was required to join this meeting so there won’t be any more screw ups”.

To the other team members the discord between Tina and Jennifer is upsetting and they shuffle uncomfortably in their seats. Alejandro from customer support is working on his laptop, and when Tina asks him to confirm the forecast planning quotas, he answers: “but I thought this is not my role, and therefore I am unsure concerning the calculations and I would like Ashley to confirm the numbers later and commit to them”. Ashley answers: “but I thought that we discussed this before the meeting and you said you’ll try to provide estimates – I am not sure why you didn’t”.

And so it continues for ten more minutes when Ashley says: “I think that the team can use a break now”.

The meeting is almost over, most of the time was dedicated to going over Tina’s plan, and the action item list hasn’t been covered.

Can you identify with the scenario depicted above, have you lead a team or been a part of a team that behaves in such a way?

Concerning the above scenario, we’ll focus on the challenges within the team interaction, the nonverbal and dynamic difficulties, specifically:

1. There is an atmosphere of blaming, members are not taking responsibility and holding others at fault;
   
2. A competition on the position and role of the leader is apparent;
   
3. The discussion is mostly critical and deconstructive;
   
4. The words that are being used are negative, creating a rift among team members;
   
5. Team members are speaking on behalf of everybody instead of just on behalf of themselves;
   
6. Nobody’s taking the risk of putting the discussion back on a productive track;
   
7. The appointed leader of the team hasn’t identified the maturity and the maturity needs of the team.
   

What would you do to transform this team? Think for a moment, collect your thought and write them down – then compare them with the ideas presented later on in this book.

Ed is a team member in an IT development company. He manages application development for customer-facing products. He reports to a team leader in the IT business unit.

His background is software and he has an MBA in finance and marketing. His team is virtual; fellow members of his team are located in the US, India, South Africa and the United Kingdom.  It is positioned in an office not far from Slough UK. His team leader, Mark, is located in IT development in South Africa.

The team is quite mature and has been working together for more than three years. Most of the projects are quite short, their duration is up to six months.

Ed communicates mostly by emails on a weekly basis; otherwise on a daily basis he uses the company’s instant messaging tool. He is reviewing the project report that was emailed by his team leader last Thursday. This report is showing erroneous information regarding completion of several tasks. He is quite upset with the information and the way it is presented, and he decides to send a formal email to Beverly - a colleague in the Santa Clara US office. He adds a CC to other team members; let’s have a look at his email:

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“Hello Beverly,

I’ve just read the summary report from last week’s project progress and to be completely honest I was a bit surprised with the information that was presented by you, regarding our status of the few tasks we’ve been working on during the last months.

We should definitely work harder on producing the deliverables and maybe we haven’t put enough effort, but that is just because of other pressing matters the team had to deal with in the last few weeks. Shaj from India,
(his real name is Sudhirada-Shawaj but as is the case with many cross functional virtual teams, people of Indian origin prefer to choose Western names or shorten their Indian name in order to make it easier for the team members who aren’t of Indian origin to pronounce them - which is definitely a topic for another book – Michael Nir),
already mentioned how it is important that we report our actuals according to the way that we accumulate them.

Shaj was also the one who was saying how it is important that we follow our defined way of work. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the way that you reported information that was detailed in the mentioned status report, but we should though make sure that we are consistent with how we communicate our actuals.

Can I ask you that next time we try to be consistent with how we decided to do that.

Thank you so kindly,

Ed.”

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A few hours pass and Beverly, who is on a different time zone, is on her way with the company’s bus to the office reading Ed’s email on her mobile.

She quickly types a response. Let’s view her email:

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“Hi there Ed,

Thanks for sharing your concerns with me. I am a bit surprised with the comments in your email. We have indeed defined a way of work, but we also defined a process for completion of tasks, that we should try to stick to.

Don’t get me wrong here, I totally appreciate the amount of effort we have been investing as a team, but do you remember our last project and the problems that we had when we decided that we should not follow the processes we put in place.

Remember what happened then?

Thanks for dropping me these lines,

Cheers

Beverly”

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Mark, the team leader, sees this exchange and decides to hop in and give some clarification:

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“Hello team,

we should really try to stick to our defined way of work because this is what helps us, but sometimes I see that it’s better to err on the safe side in terms of task completion.

You don’t want to make mistakes while reporting, that is understood. We should as a team work together.

Mark”

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Does this email exchange look familiar? Have you read emails such as these in your workplace?

Concerning this email exchange we will focus on the issues that are apparent, specifically:

1. There is an atmosphere of blaming, members are not taking responsibility and instead holding others at fault;
   
2. The usage and selection of words is problematic, many powerful negative words are used;
   
3. The discussions in the emails are not direct, it is difficult to see what the problem is;
   
4. Team members are speaking on behalf of everybody instead of just on behalf of themselves;
   
5. Team members forget that emails are forever kept and thus it is important to think before writing and reread before sending;
   
6. The appointed leader of the team hasn’t identified the specific context of the requirements stemming from this email interaction, regarding support and guidance to the team members.
   

What would you do to handle this email situation before it deteriorates into a global virtual conflict? Think for a moment, collect your thought and write them down – then compare them with the ideas presented later on in this book.

CHAPTER

TWO

Unlocking team dynamics