Team
management tips and fun team-building activities to boost team performance,
collaboration and morale
Best-Practices Leadership: Team
Management Tips examines key ways
to reinvigorate teams and improve their performance, along with fun
team-building activities to reward and motivate all your team players.
Read how businesses of all sizes are getting
creative with team icebreakers and fun team-building exercises—everything from
scavenger hunts, “cruises to nowhere” and community walk/runs to building
models of team projects out of Legos. And, while you’re learning new ways to
pump up your team’s performance, now might be a good time to undertake our
Leadership Assessment Exercise to gauge your own performance as a team manager.
BEST-PRACTICES LEADERSHIP: TEAM MANAGEMENT TIP #1
‘HOT’ TACTICS FOR HEATING UP YOUR TEAM
“Hot teams” improvise, do more work with less
supervision and make the extra effort to follow through.
Management consultant Laurence Haughton offers
this advice for turning ordinary groups into hot teams:
1. Don’t become rule-bound. Rules, intended to streamline and
safeguard work, can hamstring your operation when common sense calls for
exceptions. Before setting rules, ask if they’re really needed.
2. Don’t criticize in public. Embarrassing employees in front of the team
will only come back to bite you. Mean bosses think that they’re holding people
accountable, but what they’re really doing is inciting payback.
3. Show you care. If you like your people and show it,
they’ll enjoy helping you when crunch time comes.
4. Listen. Make it one on one, as well as in groups.
Listening helps you correct misinformation, relax barriers, increase trust and
let people feel good about what they do for a living.
5. Make it their mission. Even when a project is not terribly exciting,
you can make the work more engaging. Creating roles for each person, for
example, gives people a sense of being special.
6. Let them decide. Allowing people to devise their own
processes boosts morale. Just make sure those processes keep improving.
·
Adapted from “Creating
Hot Teams,” Laurence Haughton, Leader to Leader
BEST-PRACTICES LEADERSHIP: TEAM MANAGEMENT TIP #2
BRING THE OFF-SITE ENERGY OF
TEAM-BUILDING EXERCISES BACK TO THE OFFICE
The typical off-site meeting is chock-full of
PowerPoint presentations, flip charts and team-building exercises. But back at
work months later, what actually changes?
Lead an off-site event that leaves your team
energized and focused:
1.
Know what victory looks like. How will you know if you’ve achieved
it? When Timberland
Co. needed to revamp and add new products, they held an off-site event to
jump-start things. They invited designers, engineers and marketers from the
company to spend one week hashing it out, a process that normally takes years.
Result: They met their goals. “Having that concrete goal allowed us to walk the
line between exploring creative flights of fancy and remaining results driven,”
VP Doug Clark said.
2.
Make sure team-building exercises relate to solving a real
problem. During Ford’s
off-site event, Carolyn Lantz, executive director of brand imaging, gave
executives $50 each and put them on a bus to an Old Navy store. “I told them,
‘You have 20 minutes to find and purchase an outfit that you have to wear
tomorrow. You are busy people looking for great design at a great price. Those
are Ford’s customers.’” The exercise made a point: Ford’s products need to be
well designed, but democratically priced.
—Adapted from “Can This Off-Site Be Saved?”
Cheryl Dahle, Fast Company, www.FastCompany.com
BEST-PRACTICES LEADERSHIP: TEAM MANAGEMENT TIP #3
FIGHT OFF TEAM COMPLACENCY: 5 STRATEGIES
FOR MAKING TEAM-BUILDING EXERCISES PART OF YOUR DAILY ROUTINE
Soon after a team forms, the excitement often
peaks. Teammates dream of big accomplishments, set grandiose goals and promise
to collaborate.
But when the initial enthusiasm dies down, the
spirited atmosphere fades and a more solemn routine emerges. Senior executives
who attended the first few team meetings no longer show up. New developments
(or crises!) within the organization redirect management’s focus away from the
group’s activities. Some team members start slacking off or immersing
themselves in other projects, leaving less time to devote to the group.
If this pattern unfolds at your workplace, step
in and breathe new life into your team. Here’s how:
·
Inject new blood. Invite
a few high-energy types to join the team. Don’t put them in charge or they’ll
threaten the team leader and the informal hierarchy that’s already formed.
Instead, just ask them to lend their talents and revitalize the group.
·
Tape the team. When a
lethargic public speaker needs to liven up, a smart speech coach will videotape
the individual’s presentation and play it back. By raising the speaker’s
self-awareness, the tape serves as a training tool. The same goes when you want
to jolt a team to rise to a higher level. Lecturing a team to improve might
fall upon deaf ears, but a videotape of their meetings can show them just how
listless they’ve become.
·
Turn your team into
trainers. Form a new team, and ask your current group to serve as an “advisory
board” to it. Arrange for the veterans to coach the rookies. Encourage them to
share their experiences about teamwork and isolate the kind of behaviors that
facilitate more effective collaboration. You may want to create a buddy system,
whereby each seasoned team member mentors someone in the new group.
·
Strip away routine.
Study how a tired team got that way. Disrupt predictable patterns by having the
group meet in new places (a nearby park, a client’s facility, your home) and
work together in new ways. Instead of having them break into the same small
cliques, for instance, juggle the mix so that team members who normally don’t
work closely together will get a chance to know each other better. Or, instead
of having them sit in the same places, rearrange the seating configuration so
that everyone’s in a circle.
·
Host an outing. Invite
the team to join you on a weekend hike or family picnic. Schedule fun
activities so that participants get to know each other with their guard down.
Even if you already tried this early on, do it again now that the team has been
together for a while. When the group returns to work, they’ll have a newfound
camaraderie, which will translate into more trust and teamwork.
BEST-PRACTICES LEADERSHIP: TEAM MANAGEMENT TIP #4
IS YOUR TEAM STUCK? GET THEM UNSTUCK
The Wisdom of Teams: Creating
the High-Performance Organization by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, one of the first
books to define the team phenomenon, still offers some of the best advice for
managing them. Here’s how to get a stalled team unstuck:
·
Revisit the basics. Ask
the team to rethink its purpose, approach and goals.
·
Achieve some small wins.
Even noncritical short-term wins can get a team moving forward again.
·
Introduce fresh new
approaches, ideas and information. Simply providing new customer case studies
or front-line work measures can end the stalemate.
·
Set up fresh training
for the team. It could center on key skills, teamwork or goal-setting.
·
Juggle the team’s
membership or change its leadership. Leaders who were appointed by upper management
can seem irreplaceable to other team members. Don’t be afraid to intervene and
mandate a change.
It’s great when the team applies some of these
energizing tactics from within, without being asked. But if that doesn’t
happen, your job as a leader is to intervene and shake things up.
·
Adapted from the classic
1993 book, The Wisdom of Teams, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, HarperCollins
BEST-PRACTICES LEADERSHIP: TEAM MANAGEMENT TIP #5
JOE TORRE’S RULES FOR LEADING A TEAM
Baseball manager Joe Torre has led far more
diverse and ego-driven teams than most of us ever will. Yet, Torre’s teams have
won repeatedly, thanks to these four “rules of straight communication” he has
developed over the years:
1.
Remember that every
player has a special need for one of these things: motivation, reassurance or
technical help. Determine what that need is and meet it.
2.
Deliver tightly focused,
positive messages, such as a quick word of praise for a good play. Simple words
of appreciation are more powerful motivators than many leaders expect.
3.
Work hard to establish
rapport with team members from backgrounds that are different from your own. It
does take extra work, but the results can be extraordinary.
4.
Let team members know
that you accept the full range of their emotions, including fear and
uncertainty. Unless people admit their fear, they will never be able to
confront obstacles and grow.
Adapted from Joe Torre’s Ground Rules for
Winners, Joe Torre and Henry
Dreher, Hyperion
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