In today’s world, many leaders need to address complex, multi-boundary challenges at scale. To meet this need, you’ll have to develop your leadership mindset and skills, especially your ability to lead ‘extreme’ teams into uncharted territory (as the image suggests).
Much of the content of this month’s article was inspired by the book: Extreme Teaming: Lessons in complex cross-sector leadership by Amy C Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey.
When you face a challenge in your organisation, you shouldn’t always stick with the same peer group, or even the same peer group + direct reports, to address it.
It’s best to use a diverse pool of people from across the organisation, and maybe from outside the organisation. This will help challenge the prevailing understanding, mindset and beliefs, and is likely to result in increased creativity.
What’s your experience of Team Charters? Is it a document that’s rarely or never referred to? Or is it a useful guide to improve team spirit and work efficiency?
In today’s work environment, teams are often more fluid than before, maybe forming for a shorter time and with team members coming and going. Creating a Team Charter might therefore seem old-fashioned, overly bureaucratic and a waste of time. However, in my view, Team Charters are worthwhile because they create clarity so that people know what’s expected – that’s still important today.
When I meet teams who skip this step because of their more temporary nature (or because the Team Leader thinks it’s not necessary), team members tell me they are confused. They don’t want to ‘tread on people’s toes’, they don’t know what their accountability is, and they are frustrated because people work in silos and/or decisions aren’t made.
This article explores best practice around Team Charters, whether you’re a more recognisable, stable team or one that is more fluid – both have moving cogs that need to work together smoothly to create value.
A 2015 study found that a ‘superstar’ employee (defined as the top 1% in productivity terms) adds about $5,000 per year to the bottom-line but a single toxic team member loses the business about $12,000 per year.
So one ‘bad apple’ costs you more than two superstars, especially when you include the potential spread of toxicity, lower morale, upset customers and even legal fees.
The research* was done by Dylan Minor (assistant professor at Harvard Business School) and Michael Housman (Chief Analytics Officer at Cornerstone OnDemand). They studied nearly 60,000 workers in 11 firms across various industries.
* Download PDF: Toxic Workers (Harvard Business School, 2015)
This article looks at the definition of a toxic employee, and suggests what you can do about it.
Agility is a key theme in business at the moment. Last month, I wrote about How (and why) to be an agile organisation. This time, we look at the components of an effective agile team, and the role of the leader in enabling agile teams.
Agile teams come together to work on something special, and stay together for a reasonable period of time. They might go on to work on another problem, or develop the idea they’ve come up with. Don’t confuse this with scrum teams. As I explained in my recent article How to get a scrum team up and running, these get in, do the work and disband, so they only stay together for a short time.
In the agile project management framework, a ‘scrum’ is where a cross-functional team comes together for a short time, to plan and build (iterating as they go) until the project is finished. The name is based on the rugby scrum where teammates huddle together to talk tactics and plan their moves, and connects to my recent article How to design an agile organisation.
The advice below refers to project management in its broadest sense – you could apply it to a traditional project, or when a team comes together to look at potential business opportunities or to take a deep dive into another topic.
It’s best used when a small team (say, up to seven people) works on a project full-time. The scrum team would probably be in place for up to six months, so they can go in, blitz it, and get out. Any longer, and a more typical day-to-day operational team approach would apply.
“You can’t be agile when you’re knee-deep in mud.”
Martin Fowler
When there’s a need to discuss important and complex issues, most people try to meet face to face. Especially with a global team, it’s a really important part of maintaining relationships and commitment to the team and your objectives.
Face-to-face meetings typically get better results, especially when you need to work on something complicated, build commitment to an outcome or to each other, or co-create something such as a vision or mission statement. This is because we’re social creatures – we’re human beings, not human doings! It’s much easier to pick up on each other’s cues and get into the flow when we’re face to face.
However, it’s not always practical for everyone to get together in the same place at the same time. Thanks to technological advances, it is now possible to use video for team meetings, with group conference calls as the next best thing. On those occasions, you might turn to virtual facilitation instead.
Back in 2012, Google conducted some interesting research into team effectiveness. The initiative was named ‘Project Aristotle’ in honour of his famous quote: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts“. This article summarises Google’s findings, and explains some of the simple, clear and practical things you can do with your own teams.
Google’s researchers looked at academic research on team effectiveness, and studied 180 of their own teams. They concluded that understanding and influencing group norms is key to improving team performance – that is, rituals and rules about ‘how things are done in this team’. This was more important, they found, than who was on the team and the team mix (e.g. gender balance, personality type and skill-set).
Companies are becoming interested in using improvisation as a way to unleash creativity, and to help people become comfortable working in a more fluid environment. In this issue, we explore the main principles and show how you can apply them in the workplace. This links to last month’s article on managing disruptive change, because you can’t always plan, or depend on the past, to build your future.
“We can’t solve problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein
Change can be difficult because it is often being done TO us rather than WITH us, which drains our energy. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a way to involve as many people as possible in the change process, collaboratively, and in a way that develops the future based on what is already working. This article explores the principles of AI and provides you with some practical tips.