Archive for the ‘Teams’ Category

I am a big football (soccer) fan and follow a team that plays in the Scottish Second Division Albion Rovers

Now for those who don’t know about life in the lower ranks of Scottish football, all of the players are part-time and hold down often fairly demanding full-time jobs. Just like the top professionals they have to make a huge amount of personal sacrifice and commit a huge amount of their time to fitness.

While none of the clubs have huge wage budgets, Albion Rovers probably have one of the lowest in their division and possibly in the whole of Scottish senior football. In fact it is rumoured that the budget for the entire team of players is little more than £1,000 a week. As there is a squad of about 18 players you can see just how little they earn.

Despite all of these constraints, the players have done something remarkable as a team. They managed to stay in the Scottish Second Division following promotion last season for the first time in over 80 years.

So what is it that might have contributed to this?

Without doubt team working has played a huge part.

The players appear to genuinely give their best in the interests of the team rather than focusing on their own personal interests.

Players have their own strengths and weaknesses and the manager adopts a style that plays to the strengths of the players.

Full use is made of all the resources at their disposal. A good example of this was recalling players back from loan deals to play their part in the play-offs. The fans that also follow them through thick and thin are another example.

There is a huge amount of camaraderie among the players and they even refer to themselves as the crazy gang at times.

Self belief plays a huge part too. When they ended up in the play offs I honestly felt as if it was going to be a real struggle to stay in the division. However, the players kept belief in themselves when all seemed lost.

The Bottom Line: The reality is that when you have a team of people committed to achieving a common goal you achieve what on the face of it seemed impossible.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps organisations and individuals achieve more success. He invites you to sign up for his free audio masterclass here

How To Foster Collaboration On Teams

To be successful teams must adopt a www.com (we will win) mindset and not an imm.com (I, me, myself) mindset.

These words were said by Lily Cheng, PACE Learning and Consultancy, Singapore.

Wise words and no doubt these are words that you have heard or you have heard something similar in the past.

Despite all of this conceptual understanding, we still find many examples of people believing that being the ‘lone ranger’ is the only way to go.

Yes, it might feel like the safe option, but the reality is that safe does not always mean the best or most successful option. Playing it safe might well be okay once in a while when you just want to bob along. At the same time, treading water is unlikely to be a great long-term success strategy for any leader.

So how can you start to foster collaboration on a team and start to achieve real success?

Start To Relinquish Control

No leader can expect a team to deliver great performance if they micro manage everything.

Make It Okay To Make Mistakes

People will not take a chance if they don’t feel like they will be supported if it does not work out.

Make Time To Listen To Others’ Contributions

Sometimes the desire of the leader to look smart means they don’t spend enough time listening.

Give Ownership To People

Whether that is of projects or tasks, allow them to find the best way of delivering what is required.

Acknowledge Others’ Expertise

You need to do what you do best and have others doing what they do best. Avoid trying to be jack of all trades and master of none.

Create A Climate Of Trust

This is at the heart of collaboration on teams.

Be The First To Trust

In other words, take the lead in trusting others.

Don’t Hog Information……

……in the false belief that the more power you have the more successful you will be.

Create Shared Goals

These are goals that can only be achieved through collaborating.

Structure Projects To Promote Joint Effort……

……rather than having people working in their silos without regard to the bigger picture.

The Bottom Line: Collaboration will always result in bigger and better results than competition.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements has helped hundred of accountants and health professionals improve team working. Take a positive step and take advantage of his free audio masterclass Team Leadership.

How often do you hear managers complain that the team is de-motivated and that is the reason why results are not being achieved? Probably more frequently than most would like to admit. At the same time, part of the role of the manager and leader is to bring out the best in others and achieve results.

So how can you keep your team motivated and delivering results consistently?

Tip 1: Find Out Their Motivators

One of the things that continually surprises me is that many team managers and leaders really don’t know what motivates the people they manage or lead. I have asked a number of groups that I have been training when was the last time they asked the people they lead or manage what motivates them. The results are surprising. If I am lucky I get 5-10% who have asked them in the last week or month. The reality is that most have only considered this 12 months ago or longer. Yet this seems to be an almost standard interview question for a new recruit. Make a commitment to ask your team and individuals on the team this question periodically.

Tip 2: Try To Match Work With Motivators

You would not employ a plumber to build a cabinet for you. Yet in the workplace we often get people doing things they are not very good at or simply hate doing. While it might not always be possible, try whenever you can to match work allocated to what motivates people.

Tip 3: Let Them Know You Appreciate Their Contributions

People often spend more of their life in work than anything else. Think about it, if you are never getting feedback or thanks for your efforts or time investment, how motivated are you going to be? Very little or not at all would be my guess. Saying “thank you”, “well done” or pointing out what people have contributed takes minutes but has a huge motivational impact.

Tip 4: Find Out About their Aspirations

On any team there are going to be people who want to progress in their career or get a specific type of experience. If you take time to get to know people’s aspirations and then help them to achieve them, it will come back in bucket loads in terms of motivation.

Tip 5: Involve Them

If you are managing or leading a team, it is easy to simply dish out instructions. This might seem like the easy way and take less time. The downside is that if people are never involved in key decisions, they become detached and de-motivated. You also lose potentially great ideas.

The Bottom Line: Human beings are complex individuals and sometimes the easiest way to find out what motivates people is to ask them.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio masterclass Leading and Managing Highly Productive and Highly Positive Teams – click here to get it

We all know that teams have great potential to deliver great results. Sadly, despite this conceptual understanding, realising that potential is much more of a challenge. So if you are on or leading a team, here are 14 ways in which you might boost performance.

1. Make sure the team has clarity around the result or outcome to be achieved. Vaguely specified outcomes mean that the team wastes potentially productive time trying to figure out what they are doing.
2. Get everyone heading in the same direction. Team performance, and particularly higher level performance, relies on a strong degree of alignment.
3. Make sure that your decision making process is clear and transparent. People might prefer their ideas to be taken on board all of the time and at the same time they are realistic. By the same token, if decision processes are transparent, people are more likely to support them
4. Make sure that they have the resources that are needed to get the result you want. By resources I mean three things: manpower, materials and money.
5. Provide good leadership. The team leader makes a huge difference and sets the tone for the team, so choose wisely.
6. Encourage proactiveness on the team, rather than creating a dependency culture where nothing happens until 10 decisions are taken that go through 50 committees.
7. Focus on effective communication and in particular exceptional listening.
8. Give everyone the opportunity to be heard. Some people love the sound of their own voice and you don’t want to lose that enthusiasm. At the same time you want to be sure that the quieter, more introverted, get their air time too.
9. Encourage constructive interactions. No teams are conflict free. At the same time a team that is destructive in its interactions is never going to be a success.
10. Focus on building and maintaining trust. It takes time, energy and effort and is key on any team.
11. Respect each other and don’t assume that everyone needs to be like you. Diversity of experience, knowledge, skills and personalities are key components in success.
12. Create camaraderie by getting people to know each other and being ready and willing to pull together in the good and not so good times.
13. Play to strengths rather than seniority. You want people to be doing what they do best most of the time.
14. Create an environment where you reward collaboration rather than competition. Don’t have a disconnect between the results that you want and how you reward performance.

The truth is that getting the right levels of team performance requires effort. It does not happen by chance.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

It is fair to say that we are in challenging times right now. If you are leading and managing in these challenging times it can be difficult to maintain morale, especially if jobs are at risk. So what can you do maintain morale in challenging times?

1. Remind everyone regularly about the direction of the department and organisation in the longer term and the potential opportunities that will be created.
2. Take the time during staff appraisals and one to one meetings to find out about areas of experience that individuals are keen to get and then aim to get them that additional experience.
3. Continue to support learning and development of all staff, not just those undertaking professional exams. While budgets might be tight, there are still plenty of low or no cost opportunities for CPD.
4. Make a point of letting people know when you are particularly impressed with a piece of work that they have done or a challenging situation that they have handled well.
5. Be positive as a leader of the team as you set the tone. Pay particular attention to how you interact with people in the early part of the day.
6. Be visible and avoiding locking yourself behind a closed door for large parts of the week.
7. Consider setting up open meetings where staff have the opportunity to raise concerns, issues and get some responses.
8. You probably recognise that several heads are better than one. If your stakeholders are looking for more from your function, get people involved in generating ideas and making suggestions to maximise the value that is delivered.

Remember that is often the simple, low or no cost things that have the greatest impact on maintaining morale.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

Trust is vital to achieving results as a leader. After all, if you don’t have trust, it is difficult to get the support for your vision, plans or ideas.

So if you are a leader, how can you build trust as a leader?

Don’t Fall Into The Seniority Trap
• There may have been a time in the distant past where people would tend to trust you just because you were the most senior person. The reality is that those days are long gone so it is pointless to rely on this. Being a leader and having followers is nothing to do with the job title that you have.

Set The Tone

• As a leader you set the tone for the whole department. By that I mean you set the expectations in terms of things like the way people behave, the way people interact with each other, resolve differences of opinions and solve problems to name just a few.

Find Out What Matters To Others

• Ever notice that in every job interview you go to you are asked what motivates and de-motivates you? The trouble is that interviews are often the only time this question gets asked. Think about it; if you know what matters to people you can start to do things and behave in ways that focus on the things that matter to people.

Give Regular Feedback

• Most people in the workplace crave feedback yet study after study shows that it is sadly lacking. Giving regular quality feedback to people gives a really powerful message that you care about them and their success.

Start Small

• It can be really tempting to try and be too ambitious at the start. It is much better to break the overall goal into smaller steps. As each step or stage is progressed, it builds confidence and trust.

Be Honest With People

• When leading a team or department there will be times when some difficult choices will need to be made. It can often be tempting to either avoid communicating or to make promises that cannot be kept. Broken promises will end up destroying trust.By contrast people may not always like the news that you are giving them but will respect your honesty.

Be Supportive

• Allowing people to move out of the comfort zone with the assurance that they will be supported is a huge step to giving them a message that you trust them.

Don’t Blame

• We have all if we are totally honest fallen into the trap of blaming others when things don’t go to plan. While it might offer in your own mind some sort of short term cover it will demolish trust, stifle creativity and dilute the results.

Hold People To Account

• When it comes to managing or leading people, it is important to have accountability in place. This is not some sort of heavy handed approach but simply involves agreeing with people what they are going to deliver and then asking them to keep you informed (or to account) for what they have done and what they still have to do.Doing this consistently with the team and individually creates trust.

Listen A Lot

• All of the best people that I worked with were brilliant listeners. When you focus your attention as a leader or manager on listening to others you get some real insights. People want to contribute and have the opportunity to do so. Listening does not mean that you have to act on every idea, concern or suggestion. At the same time people will respect you more. If you encourage and teach your people to listen effectively to others’ points of view you will build great team work and trust.

Do What You Promise

• If you say that you are going to do or deliver something then make sure that you do it. People will use this as an indicator as to whether you can be trusted or whether it is all just talk.

Empower and Delegate

• Delegating work to others not only provides opportunities for growth, development and challenge, it also sends a strong signal that you really trust your people.Empowering, where you give experienced people an outline of the result that you want, step back and let them get on with it is another great way of creating trust.

Stand Up For Your Team

• There will be times when privately you are disappointed with your team. Maybe they have done a poor job on a project or in dealing with a disgruntled client. In these situations it is vital to make sure that you deal with the issues privately but still stand up for your team publicly.

Take Responsibility For Results

• If you are running a department you will be well rewarded for taking on that role. At the same time, responsibility for the results ultimately is down to you. Maybe this might not seem fair but that’s the way it is. If you want to build trust, take responsibility for the results, whatever they are.

Give Recognition To Others

• Good leaders and managers look to give recognition for the successes that are achieved. See yourself more as a facilitator of delivering great results and give recognition to others when things go well.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to  sign up for his free team leadership audio masterclass here

Teams, as we know, have the potential to contribute significantly to organisational performance. On the other hand they often fail to deliver to optimal performance levels.

While there may be whole host of barriers to success, I have found that some of the real barriers include the following:

• A Lack Of Listening

  So often people say that the problem is a lack of communication. Yes, communication matters but what I have found is the real barrier is the inability to listen to each other. When we stop listening, we close our mind to insights and ideas that could make a big difference.

• The Know It All

  You might have met this person: the individual who has the answer to every possible challenge that the team could have or face. The trouble is, they tend to steam roll through their ideas and end up alienating people.

• Pessimism

  Achieving anything of significance is tough and let’s not pretend otherwise. At the same time, if you are overly pessimistic you never do anything because you worry as to if you are doing the right thing.

• Promising A Lot, Delivering Little

  The people who used to frustrate me were the people who promised to do a lot of things but just let the team down time and time again. If you are the leader, you need to hold these individuals to account.

• A Lack Of Trust

  Trust takes time to build and can be destroyed in minutes. Delivering what you say and going out of your way to help others builds and maintains trust.

I would love to hear your experiences of what gets in the way of team success and, if you have a moment, I invite you to leave a comment.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. He invites you to take advantage of his free audio e-course Leadership Success at www.goalsandachievements.co.uk

A team that is focussed, has the right skills and the right resources has the potential to deliver exceptional results.

At the same time, one of the biggest barriers to team success is silo thinking.

What do I mean by silo thinking?

Essentially it is when team members take decisions or give support based on the impact on:

• Them personally.
• The team or function to which they belong.

When you have a whole group of people thinking in their own interests, the interests of the whole organisation get lost and sub optimal performance arises.

So if you want to get more results from teams, get people thinking more in the bigger picture and less in silos.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

1. People have lost sight of the outcome.
2. People are pursuing their own personal agendas.
3. The team is cruising rather than being proactive.
4. There is an unhealthy level of conflict and pessimism.
5. The task or result that it was established to deliver is done.

What else would you add?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

1. A clear outcome or goal to be achieved.
2. Everyone pointing and heading in the same direction.
3. A “can do” attitude.
4. A lot of trust.
5. A willingness to do what’s needed.
6. Mutual respect for each other.
7. Complementary skills and experience.
8. A bias for action.
9. A lot of fun.
10. True dependency in each other.

What else would you add to the list?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here