Welcome to the August 2008 newsletter!

This month an article about team building. If you look into any championship team you will see similarities. Mutual accountability, open and honest communication and a focus on being the best.  So how do these teams get created? In this issue I have written some pointers for building your own championship team.
Article of the Month: Rules For Productive Teams
 
Teams do not need formal leaders as much as they need rules of engagement, so they can cooperate effectively in today’s world.
 
If we don’t have rules of engagement or principles on how the group will operate then all we have is a collection of people doing their own thing. Perhaps pushing their own interests, and an avoidance in dealing with each other when performance is lagging behind.
 
Examples of this might be people being regularly 20 minutes late to meetings. Or deferring to the group leader and not contributing.
 
But how do we maintain autonomy while being part of the group? How do groups get around this and have a high degree of decision-making performance, participation and morale?
 
All championship teams have 3 things in common:
 
  1. Mutual Accountability for team & individual results. The group leader must ensure people are accountable to each other not just the group leader. Everyone must contribute to the degree to which they are capable.
  2. Shared Contribution. Everyone has an opportunity and an obligation to contribute.
  3. Shared Values. Values that are established by the group.
 
This facilitates constructive peer pressure whereby discipline is by the group and not the micro managing group leader. The group must have permission to challenge each other when the group rules have been broken. The ground rules serve as a group conscience.
 
Examples of what rules could cover include:   
 
  • Mutual respect & cooperation          
  • Interpersonal communications and expression of ideas.    
  • How you’re going to make decisions and resolve conflicts.
  • Support for personal risk taking.      
  • Frequency & format of group meetings.      
  • Rules on meeting attendance & punctuality 
  • Participation in group business development efforts and sharing of clients
  • Completion of projects signed up for.          
  • Client service standards and handling of complaints.         
  • Expectation about learning and sharing knowledge
  • Standards on supervision, staffing of engagements
  • Constructive feedback & evaluation
  • Role of group leader 
 
Examples of Rules Reached by Groups Are:
 
  • Attendance and promptness at group meetings are top priority - unless a client emergency   
  • Must honor client commitments; if you say you are going to do something you must do it. If a problems arises that will prevent you from keeping this, let us know in advance.     
  • Be receptive to all new ideas. Don't be a nay-sayer, unless you can talk about how it could work and what the consequences are.
  • Don’t point fingers or assign blame. 
  • Every success will be a group success and every failure is an opportunity to self-correct, to learn something new and constantly improve.        
  • Maintain confidentiality. The group’s processes are for the group. Don't bad mouth or discuss contentious issues outside of our group.
 
The questions to ask are:
 
  • How are we going to play together?
  • What are our standards?     
  • We will be performing our best when?         
  • What would really screw it up?        
 
 
Share these points & questions with your team and agree to how you will run your group, and by what ground rules. Work out a process on how you will review and monitor the ground rules. How will you enforce the rules, and how will you keep them visible. Get clear on what each rule, or value actually means.
 
A world that the team helped to create they will happily work with in. You must adopt rules and behaviors that you truly believe in and not ones that you think you should.
 
There is a lot of work in setting up codes of conduct like this and then in implementing and monitoring. But it will save enormous amounts of time managing poor behavior against ill-defined standards.
 

Thanks for reading... till next time.
 
Warmly,
 
Daniel Lock