In all the organisations I've worked in, I've noticed that there are only two things that need to be done, and that doing those two things involves meeting with other team members and getting agreement.

If your experience of meetings is like mine, you'll be groaning already!

From my studies of facilitation techniques and my experience working with managers and teams in organsations, it's become clear that there are six keys we can use to unlock the potential that hides behind the bickering, the backstabbing and the circular debates that dominate so many teams.

Ask your team members this week (at the party if you like, their guard will be down):

"If someone you know asked you what this team is for, what would you say?"

It's a question we all think we know the answer to. When challenged we may not find so easy to put into words. Seriously, try asking people to write down their answers and then compare. There will be considerable umming and ahing followed by consternation at how different their answers are.

Then you can discuss why your answers are different and how you can all get to the same answer in future.

Meaning, purpose, mission, whatever you want to call it - we all know it's vital but how often do we check that people actually know it?

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Laughter: The Best Medicine...

...was the title of one of the regular humour columns in the Readers' Digest my mother used to read. I remember as a 10-year-old boy skipping past boring stuff about how brave people climbed Everest with no legs using only three plastic toothpicks they salvaged from a plane crash or about how to spice up your married heterosexual right-wing bourgeious life to read the three or four humour slots in that magazine.

Which is NOT the point of this posting. Have a look at our friend Dan's latest post to find out what he thinks about the effect of laughter.

More seriously, real laughter in the workplace is a great thing and can be beneficial for your team.  there is a world of difference between real laughter and the "I was only joking, what's the matter with you?" culture.


All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Creating and Sustaining Momentum

Someone congratulated me recently on "keeping up the momentum" with this blog!

This got me thinking about momentum in management teams and in helping teams change and grow.

We all want our teams to be effective, to make good decisions and to implement the decisions they make in an effective way. The danger is that one-hit solutions and quick fixes generate a lot of enthusiasm that doesn't last once the team get back to the workplace.

When people ask me if I can facilitate a 3-day event with their team, I will often ask them to consider 6 half-days instead. When I can work with a team once a month over 6 months, they get so much more benefit. They develop as a team more by being given the opportunity to reflect on and share their experiences between sessions of applying what was agreed; I get to see the change in their behaviour and confidence over the period; and the company are able to assess and evaluate the benefit of my work with their team. This enables me to offer the money-back guarantee of the work I do.

Little and often is usually a better way to build and sustain momentum than one big splash. What can you set up with your team to ensure that you sustain those "little and often" improvements in they way they work?

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Problems with Belbin's Team Roles

I met a business lecturer the other who told me they didn't "believe in" Belbin. I've out it in quotes because I'd had a couple of glasses of Red and can't be entirely sure of the exact words...

This got me to thinking about the potential limitations of his research and the way some people use it, which include:

* the subjects were all middle managers selected for "grooming" for senior management
* the environment was within a management development programme at a business school
* the behaviour was observed during business simulation games
* Belbin himself confirms his model is NOT a typology, yet people use it that way

I have written some of these thoughts into the Wikipedia page I started on Belbin.

The biggest danger as always lies not in the model but in the mis-use of it to pigeon-hole people. Belbin himself argues against this pointing out that his subject teams adapted to fill "empty" roles.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

The maverick boss came to town

Last week I had the fantastic opportunity to attend a one-hour presentation by Ricardo Semler. Semler is very popular with management gurus (people like Charles Handy - one of my heroes) as the man who took a traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control business and turned it into a textbook team-based, democratic, fully devolved organisation while seeing profits grow healthily through national recession. Semler has written two books about his experience, tours the world giving lectures, and teaches at leading business schools around the world.

Semco's website contains a nice flash presentation of their corporate principles - check it out.

Semler said that hierarchy and systems are designed to restrict employee choice. A general does not want to ask the left flank if they want to be sacrificed in order to win the battle - managers have simply taken on the paradigms of military management without asking whether they are the best for the workplace.

At Semco, all top-down rules are questioned - unless there is a demonstrable need for a rule, it is scrapped. So over the last 25 years, Semco has ditched:

uniforms,
fixed working hours,
5-day weeks,
management authority by right,
titles,

and set itself up around project-based teams who

write their own budgets,
allocate their own wages,
and - get this - interview, appoint and appraise (anonymously) their own managers, up to and including Semler himself.

25% of profits are paid into a fund which is distrbuted by a committee elected by the workers.

If this model is so good, how come so few companies are doing it? (Handy says "no-one else is doing it")

1 Few medium and large companies are owned by their CEO. Semler had total authority to make these changes happen.

2 Semler suggested that managers in traditional companies would not have the skills to survive the worker review process. Imagine a certain entrepreneur's entire workforce turning around and saying "You're Fired!"

3 Semco makes pumps for marine applications and other large, expensive, bespoke, complex, technical items. Is there so much scope for workers in a call centre, or a biscuit factory, to work in six-month project teams, choosing a new team and new manager every time they reform around a new customer order?

While the Semco model may not be easy to apply to our own businesses, there are principles of transparency, trust, delegation and fair reward that we can all apply to some extent with our teams. What can you change this week to sweep away an unnecessary rule?

Some other blog entries on Ricardo Semler:
Quote: Keep asking "Why?"
Review of Semler's book Maverick

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

"How can you tell when a team needs some teambuilding?"

Someone asked me that question this week at a networking event. Sometimes as consultants there is danger that we can get so wrapped up in our service that we lose sight of the real world business problems that mean clients could really benefit from our services. So here - with lttle explanation now, I may expand on some of these in future - are just the first 25 behaviours that indicate your management team could benefit from team building or facilitation:

1 a few people within the team dominate all discussions
2 work is duplicated and wheels a re-invented
3 "agreed" points are re-opened for discussion later
4 everyone thought someone else was going to do it
5 "Humour" is used to mask differences of viewpoint
6 people do not regard team meetings as valuable
7 few new ideas are generated
8 criticism is aimed at people instead of their ideas
9 people won't raise their concerns until after the meeting
10 team members' departments compete with each other
11 differences of opinion on who is the leader
12 discussions focus on blame rather than solution
13 meetings blindly stick to the same agenda every time
14 meetings are cancelled if the manager can't be there
15 meetings consist of tedious presentations of data
16 people can't explain how their work fits into the whole
17 people can't explain how others' work fits into the whole
18 managers aren't inspired to share meeting news with their own teams
19 nobody reads the reports before the meeting
20 members do not meet outside formal meetings
21 no-one can state the mission of the team of the purpose of its meetings
22 meetings are held even though none is needed
23 different departments are told different stores about what happened
24 high turnover of team members
25 reluctance to allow outsiders into meetings

I have avoided the higher level stuff like "atmosphere" and tried to stick to the actual behaviours. Feel free to add more in comment, if you think I have missed something!

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd

Democratically Elected Leaders

It's not just fashionable these days to support the concept of democracy, it's virtually unthinkable in many parts to even question its status as " the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried" (Churchill in characteristically tongue-in-cheek mode, see here)

Recent news stories attacked GW Bush for his decision against allowing embryonic stem cell research. There are two main apparent discrepancies: the papers focused mainly on Bush's emphasis in saving children's lives contrasted with the widespread death in Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon; I'm interested here in thinking about Bush's many speeches about promoting "democracy" in other countries while he takes an executive decision that goes against the majority public opinion in his own country.

I think Bush had no choice other than to veto the legislation, and I think that it is the workings of democracy itself that gave him no choice. Having said that, you'll be glad to hear that I agree with Winston that democracy is better than "all those other forms that have been tried"!

When we look at team leadership, is democracy the best system? Is it better for the team leader to be elected by members, someone liked and popular, someone with the popular support fo the team?

As you know from previous posts, I've been reading Belbin's seminal book Management Teams. His research at Henley Managment College seems to suggest that teams with democratically elected team leaders don't perform as well as those where the leader is appointed from outside for having appropriate skills and characteristics.

I wonder whether to some extent the elected team leader is hamstrung by their own popularity in the same way that Bush is hamstrung by the party machine that backs his campaigns?

I also wonder how many of us have ever worked in a team where we got to vote for the leader?

That's enough politics. Good night, everyone!

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

What NOT to do with Belbin's Team Roles

In the 80s, I was involved with a campaign group trying to get an arts centre set up in Newport. One of our publicity stunts was to organise a festival drawing together many of the artistic organisations within the borough (as it then was).

We had a fantastic and effective Chair. She facilitated discussions, gave her own views no greater weight than anyone else's and ensured that everyone was both able to contribute and understood what they were commiting to.

Chairman is one of the team roles described by Dr R Meredith Belbin in his 1980 book, Management Teams; many of you will already be familliar with the rest of that roll-call: Shaper, Plant, etc. etc. etc. (Going a bit Yul, there!)

I was surprised to find out yesterday that Wikipedia had no article on Dr Belbin and his model. Wikipedia being what it is, I was able there and then to start to correct this oversight. Please do have a look at the article and of course, feel free to add to it in the spirit of true Wiki.

What I was not able to put in the article of course was my personal opinions. That's what blogs are for! Here's my ten pence worth:

1) Do not treat team roles like personality types. There are similarities: shapers and resource investigators are more likely to be extraverts; team workers and completer finishers are more likely to be introverts. But tools like MBTI and Insights describe our Jungian psychological preferences, while team roles describe jobs that have to be done within a team in order for it to manage its processes effectively.

2) Do not photocopy the Belbin questionnaire you were given last time you did a half-day course on Team Building for £50 funded by your local Business Link. The questionnaire is a) Copyright; and b) 26 years out of date - his website says there's a new one which has been "fully normed". (Any statisticians out there can plain-English-ify that for us?)

3) Do not deselect an otherwise qualified team member simply on the basis that they do not fit your preconception of the "roles" that will be needed in the team. Rather, ensure that the team understands what these roles are and let them allocate them accordingly. These are jobs to be done, not personality types.

Of course, you could hire a talented facilitator to make sure your team did this and did it effectively...

Anyway, enough gratuitous self-publicity, back to Lindsay. She was a highly effective Chair. Clearly naturally introverted but with a great interest in process and balance. You might think. Nope. Lindsay was a passionate and determined campaigner for the things she believed in, just not while she was in our committee meetings. Her personality type fitted Shaper to a T, but she knew her role as Chair, and she stuck to it and did it well.

Don't treat roles as pigeon-holes.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Four Keys For Groups

A team I was working with last week came up with four key ground rules for their team building session. As their facilitator, I was impressed at how the four keys matched up with the Insights Discovery model. The keys were:

Say What You Think
They all agreed that it was important that if someone had an idea, or an issue, they should raise it and not bottle it up.

Watch What Happens
We all tend to live a lot of our lives on "autopilot". To get the most from teambuilding we have to raise our awareness of ourselves and others and what is happening.

Support Each Other
This is the caveat to "Say What You Think"! Disagreements can be expressed in a constructive way; don't let things get personal.

Have Fun
Some people had come to the session straight from an overnight shift, with just a packet of biscuits for breakfast! Their ability to dive in and be as enthusiastic as everyone else really impressed me.

How you you use these four keys to make sure you get the most out of working with others this week?

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

Encouraging Mutual Support

I attended a networking event with a difference this morning. Paul Cornish of CW Concepts facilitated the meeting, where each individual was asked for one challenge they were currently facing. Other attendees then asked questions, gave suggestions and provided encouragement. I personally came away with some very useful and practicable ideas and so did many of the others, I'm sure.

How can we use this idea to make our teams more effective? The fact is that for any one person in your team with a problem, there are often at least two with potential answers. If you've created an atmosphere where people feel comfortable to speak up about challenges, it's an easy step to open each one to the whole group to provide suggestions and advice.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com

The Power of Self Awareness

I did some work recently with the national sales team of an international manfuacturing company. I called the manager yesterday to get some feedback on how the team are doing, and what they are applying, and was just overwhelmed by her enthusiasm for the changes she's seen in her team.

One of the things she mentioned was their changed behaviour in team meetings; previously only "the usual suspects" ever spoke up, conversations tended to be circular, the manager's requests for ideas and contributions were met with embarrasing silence. (Think wind and tumbleweeds!)

During the sessions we used a personality model http://www.insights.com to raise their self-awareness and give them a non-judgmental language to describe behaviour.

Now she's seeing enthusiastic, creative discussions, everyone contributing, team members not flinching when confronted with their "difficult" customers, and a significant increase in sales figures.

The team building effect of raising people's self awareness through an accredited personality theory such as Insights Discovery or MBTI is amazing. People seem naturally fascinated with this stuff - which makes it easier to teach - and can actually apply the model to themselves, to colleagues, to customers, the moment they walk out of the seminar room.

Getting a new team working together effectively doesn't need to be black magic - it could easily be Blue, Green, Yellow and Red magic! (Go the the Insights website if you don't know what I mean!)

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd
http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com