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Team building without time wasting. Now, I love this
process, team building without time wasting. What I love about
it is the title: team building without time wasting.
The cost of my clients hiring me is their time.
Every CEO I've worked with loves this process--why? It
is incredibly quick, it's efficient, and it works. What are
the steps in team building without time wasting? First, get
up in front of the team, everybody has two separate
pieces of paper. One, people are going to evaluate how
well is the team doing on a 1-to-10 scale on two
questions. Question Number 1 is: How well are we doing in
terms of working together as a team? I want to say
that that doesn't mean, how much money we make, are
we efficient--how effective is our
team process, interaction, dialogue, communication with
each other? And question Number 2: How well do we need
to be doing? How important is teamwork for this team? Well,
I've asked thousands of teams around the world this question.
The average answer is, we are about a 5.8, we
wish we were about an 8.7. Most of us don't
feel our teams are working together as well as we hoped
they would be. Well let's assume that you're doing this
with your team and the team says we are a
5.8, we wish for an 8.7, simple. You say, Great,
let's close the gap. How do we close that gap between
5.8 and 8.7? The next step in the process
is: every team member, you say, Write down two behaviors
that if everybody on this team got better on
these two things, it would improve the quality of teamwork--and
they write down two behaviors. And these are typically
common sense behaviors like listening,
recognition, common goals--good things. They
write down the behaviors. Then what happens next is
you have everybody share the behaviors, but you don't discuss
people, you only discuss behaviors. And when you share those
behaviors, the next step in the process is you say,
Okay, team, let's prioritize. Work with the team to help
the team come up with the one most important behavior
that if everybody on the team got better at this
one thing, it would improve the quality of teamwork. For
example, let's say the team says listen, we all need
to listen better. Fine. Now you practice feedforward. Every team member
has a very brief one-on-one dialogue with every other team
member that sounds like this. I'd say, Mr. Team Member,
we are at 5.8 8 in terms of working together
as team, we want to get to an 8.7. Everybody's
working on listening. Other than listening, please give me one
or two quick ideas that if I did these things
better, it would really help improve the quality of teamwork.
What are the rules? Ideas for the future, no feedback
about the past. Second rule: when you get the idea,
you have to shut up, listen, take notes, and say
thank you. You can't judge or critique. Positive, simple, focused, and fast.
Positive, simple, focused, fast. What happens next? After
about ten minutes every team member has talked to every
other team member. You look at the team members, say,
Now you have a list of things for you--pick one.
Each team member picks one key behavior for himself or herself.
Now, let's say in my case I'm a team member,
I pick recognition. Now we have a very simple three-question follow-up
process that occurs about once a month. Every team member talks
to every other team member about once a month in a
process that sounds like this: Miss Team Member, we're all trying
to improve teamwork. We've all committed to be better listeners. Give
me one idea based on last month to help me be
a great listener next month. Two, my own area for improvement
is recognition--give me one idea based on last month to
help me do a great job of recognition this month. And
three, I just want to be a great team player--give me
one idea to help me be a great team player. Three
ideas, thank you, thank you, thank you. Return the favor--three ideas,
thank you, thank you, thank you, follow up, follow up, follow
up, follow up, follow up, follow up--and then a measurement at
the end. As you can see what the measurement looks like,
simple mini-survey measure. You will get more long-term
improvement and team building doing what I just
described than you'll get shipping people off to
the woods for a week, where they can hold
hands, and climb trees, and sing songs. Nothing
really changes--why? This process has follow-up, measurement, discipline,
follow-up, measurement, discipline. One, it works. Two, it's
incredibly efficient. Why? It does not waste time and
it does get results.
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