Five years ago we started Banyan with an eye for helping companies improve their performance, and we have sat in on numerous goal-setting sessions. Goals can make people be sick to their stomachs, and goals can be used as a weapon, but isn’t that kind of missing the whole point? Today, we offer you a new way to look at goals and hope you might consider giving it a try in one area of your life. It starts with a mindset that focuses on goal attainment and uses the concept of school grades to dole out the rewards. If you reach 90% of the goal you get an A, 80% you get a B and so forth. C’s get degrees in school and historically is considered the average. Yes, we can hear you thinking, that may be good for school, but this is the real world. If you don’t hit your goal, you might get fired! Here is why you might want to take a closer look at this mindset if you are a leader. When you give your team a goal, you have 'goaled' them. This rhymes with scold. We think you should keep.....
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One of the major headwinds to a great summer is if you are only 50% of the way to your annual goal by now, you are actually behind the number. This is because you will lose ground in Q3, and may not have the time to catch up in Q4. Being below goal is not a happy place, and could even be considered mediocre. If you are the leader it is easy to blame your people, but in a recent article by Joseph Grenny he articulates why it might be the leader's fault, and he shares a couple of ways to bring the big middle of your team up a few notches. Grenny is the co-author of one of our favorite books “Crucial Conversations, tools for talking when the stakes are high”. In this article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review he shares several ways to help the team visualize what their indifference could cause. We think this hits the spot when it comes to larger group activities. The big middle is too.... Having a trusted friendship with some person years older or younger than you is a true gift. We often refer to these non-familial connections as mentors or mentees. The roots of the word go back to ancient Greece when Mentor who was a friend of Odysseus was entrusted with the education of Odysseus' son Telemachus. Relationships that are strong have certain elements that help them build. Affinity, time, and shared experiences are all ingredients. One of the outcomes from a strong cross generational relationship is that it can allow the subtle gift of wisdom to present itself. When wisdom arrives, it means the mentor has built up enough trust with the younger party to share their best insights and perspective. Often times this can be life changing for the mentee. Yet for all its benefits, great mentors are in short supply. Why is this? It may have something to do with the all-important shared experiences. The generations don’t always do things together, and thus it is... What framework or structure have you set up for thinking? Where do you think best? Many people don’t know off hand, but after a minute or two might share that they think best when alone. We recently stumbled across a book on leading yourself, and have been enthralled from the very beginning. “Lead Yourself First” by Ray Kethledge and Mike Erwin is a qualitative study of how past leaders have used productive solitude to make key decisions. We are now 10 years into the era of having a super computer that is in your pocket. 1.2 billion Apple iPhones have been purchased, and our new behaviors around them are only just becoming understood. It could be stated that one of the outcomes we all feel is some sort of attachment to the devices. Just as the washing machine replaced the scrub board and freed up hours of our week, so has the super computer in our pocket made our lives easier. Amidst the ease might be...... Most will know the Beach Boys song from 1963 as “Be True to Your School,” yet research done by Adam Grant on Facebook has started to show that pride in your company can have a large impact on the amount of work the average employee will produce in a day. It can graphically be represented on an axis of belonging and autonomy.
People love to have choice, and they also love to belong. When they feel their company's purpose aligns with their own values they take more initiative. The new haunting question for leaders may become: are you proud of our team? What a powerful yet challenging question for many work environments. I can just see several of my earlier bosses falling out of their chairs in laughter. Does this mean we need plenty of circle time and not challenge each other? Is the chain of command completely broken and the inmates are running the asylum? Not necessarily. Optimism and pride in your company are part of the fascinating discussion in this article from the May edition of Fast Company. Consider now reading Is Your Culture a Wow or a Whatever? It may not be a welcome point of view, but a haunting reality started to appear to us about what happens when a leader laments or complains. It guts the commitment of almost everyone on your team. We identified three of these culture killers and share them in the hopes that you may check yourself in your efforts to improve. The first lament comes in the form of getting off focus. This occurs when you take different courses of action that are in your head and start to leak them to your task-oriented team. Your team wants to know what you need and what is the plan? If you are winging it or juggling multiple strategies and thinking it doesn’t matter because they don’t tell you about it, think again. They are not going to tell you, almost instinctively they will cut their commitment by 30% immediately. The second lament comes in a moment of frustration when small items are brought back to you by the team. The questions are low level, off topic, and drive you nuts. Your response appears to be a clarifying statement, but it also stops your team in their tracks. “I Don’t Care” about this or that the leader says...
Several years ago our work led us to draw the Tree of Performance as a way to illustrate the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for a group of managers who were struggling to hit their goals. The idea of the image is to give the person in charge an idea of how many more levers they have to work with inside an individual, as opposed to the obvious "carrot and stick" behavioral outcome options. Recently, we began to return to this image as a way to suggest to business owners and executives that when it comes to power and influence the same could be true. Power typically only extends to the end of where the holder has the ability to monitor, and therefore control, outcomes (think US Military in a foreign country like Korea.) Influence, however, moves freely around and under borders, and trades on a completely different exchange: that of human emotion. It is our “ism” that flies around the world confounding leaders, and this greatly adds.... One of the benefits of helping companies work on turning groups of people into teams is that you get to visit a wide variety of settings and environments. A recent trip to a professional college had us buzzing and prompted the above title. This team of 125 teachers, administrators, and service staff were on fire from the very beginning of the two-day long all-hands meeting all the way until the end. Every member of the team was making a sacrifice to be present, and the business itself was closed the entire time. Thinking of the total cost to the enterprise would make most owners blink twice, yet like clockwork for years these days are reserved to fill up the tanks of the people that make the company tick. If your current culture is more of a Whatever these days than a Wow, see if implementing a few of these tips we gleaned will help. An initial idea to consider is having a common way to signal the end of a situation or event. Most companies will have gatherings, and even with the best clock management they can run long. With attention spans waning you increase the chances of having the end of your meeting being a dud, which sends your people scattering and potentially lacking vigor. Consider having something.....
Do you have a team member that is killing your "Swing?"
The book “The Weekly Coaching Conversation” by Brian Souza touched on this very issue. Business schools such as Harvard have shown a real focus in the area of career development and the term “coach” is evolving within corporations. Souza recommends a regular check-in session with your direct report to asses not only their performance, but also review softer metrics as well. We would like to add to this article with some of our own findings and offer a few tools for you to use with your team. Whether your check-in meeting is quarterly, monthly, or weekly, having a template to work with as you are getting started can be a big in facilitating dialog. It will also allow the direct report to be speaking more than the boss, which is of particular importance if the boss is an extrovert and the direct report is not. Our experiences have shown that a regular check-in on areas such as your team members Soul, Fuel, Work, Fun, and Community Service will quickly identify the area that is distracting them. A simple listening exercise along with a specific question on what steps they will take to remedy the concern can go a long way. We have been amazed at how well these templates work when it comes to getting what is in a person’s head out in the open, proving once again that “your head is a horrible place for a discussion”. Here is one of our templates from our book The Next Gen Almanac. Let us know how it goes. You might like next our post "Does Competition Fuel You or Drain You?" The Golden State Warriors haven’t just taken the NBA by surprise, they’ve knocked it completely on its side. From our vantage point it is another example of highly adaptable Bay Area executive talent deploying a winning strategy, and we would like to share one element that you can use with your team. The NBA’s history of success had been Jordan as the star with a Pippen on the side, or Larry Bird as the star with DJ or McHale on the side, or LeBron with a strong second in Wade even won a title. Yet, coming out of San Antonio over the past ten years is a different model. It is less about the one star and more about a fully functioning team of 9 to 10 players getting meaningful minutes throughout the entire season. There may not be a “Money Ball” book out yet on the this strategy, but the ownership of the Warriors brought Steve Kerr in to run a system similar to the Spurs, and it works on many levels. The correlation to your business that we would like to highlight is that you should be taking more people out on sales and service calls. Nothing is more painful than watching a loyal bench warmer thrust out on the court and struggle at crunch time because they haven’t seen the light of day for months. The ball is moving differently than in practice. The heat of the moment melts them on the spot. Have you not seen this on your work teams? The back office person left stammering because the prime time player is out on vacation or is sick. We view this as a mistake by leadership to not develop all members of the team to be able to “leave the building” and go see a client or customer. It doesn't have to be an everyday occurrence, but having a system in place to keep all team members on the court will do wonders for your company. We hope the Warriors go all the way this year. Just remember, get the ball in as many people’s hands as you can during the regular season so they won’t drop it in the playoffs! Try out our blog post next titled "Designing Your Team From Scratch" Everywhere you look companies and teams are looking for speed: foot speed, communication speed, and speed of delivery of goods and services. We started to notice a correlation between teamwork challenges and the duration of the team itself. In youth sports the average season is 16 weeks long, an eternity for the player, but a blip on the screen for an adult. In work environments temporary workers are the standard for most Global 1000 companies and they even have different color badges for all to see. The need for speed has created an environment where leaders can fill the room with people, but one layer down all parties are looking around the room to gauge the commitment to the group, and the duration and type of contract. Regardless of your position on one of these new “iTeams”, factoring in the length of the time the team is to be together should help you work well with all parties. If you are the leader, missing this key dynamic can be costly to your performance especially with the lowest power participants. Often times the lower power groups will never communicate their frustration, rather they will find a way to hit a personal “release” valve that subtly kills the team culture. It can show up in their engagement level. They are present, but not clicked into the team's goal. Often times they vote with their feet, by not showing up at all. Dr. Suess’s “Yertle the Turtle" comes to mind here. As you build your teams, keep a special eye out for your different groups. Don’t overlook the short duration participants. They often have long duration commitments elsewhere (spouses and children), that if tended to correctly can make a big impact on how they perform on your team. If you don’t, one named “Mack" may burp and like Yertle your team may end up flat on its back. Susan Fowler has a book, “Why Motivating People Doesn't Work…and What Does” in which she smartly addresses the challenges with using extrinsic motivational systems within groups. We shared a bit about this with our “Tree of Performance” (photo below) and believe all leaders should be well versed in the six levers they can pull to guide a team in this area. Publicly many leaders joke that they expect all members of their team to be “self-motivated”, but privately they understand how to create a culture where people's need for Autonomy, Relatedness, and Competency are being met. Digging Deeper: A client assignment had us diving further into this topic and how the topics of “Productivity” and “Engagement” can come into play. Engagement is something that does not.... In 1999 Peter Drucker wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review titled “Managing Oneself.” We use it with almost all our clients, regardless of engagement. In 'John Wooden' speak it is at the base of our Pyramid of Success. Drucker asks a series of questions of the reader related to feedback analysis such as: "What are my strengths and values? Where do I belong? How do I work? What can I contribute?" One would expect that the motivated worker would be compelled to implement what they have learned and share with others their answer. Drucker’s logical explanation is sound, well written, and his authority as a leading thinker is beyond reproach. So why doesn't it work? Because it doesn't feel good, and it might not be safe… Drucker’s logical argument sits right in your teammate’s brain and waits. it waits for an emotion to kick it into gear. This emotion accounts for up to 60% of the missing engagement reserves that plague our workplace today. Managers are responsible for creating the secret sauce, for having insight into what makes their people tick, and then making it safe for the worker to implement Drucker’s insights to strive and reach. In looking to study this on a first hand basis and because we have the right age children we have volunteered as a youth sport coach for over 250 hours this year. In both recreational and.... The Leader's Compass: What do you use to navigate the storms and the seas that come with organizing and working with others? Our research is showing it is part head, part gut, part eyes, and part heart. In looking for an image that we thought would convey all of these the compass came to mind, that little device that helps you stay on track when visibility is low and the future uncertain. You can add more detail to the action phrases associated with the different directional points as it fits your needs and thoughts, and we welcome your feedback on how you Coach, Teach, Manage, and Lead. Of note is that half of the compass requires silence from the leader. This maybe your strength or your greatest challenge. Regardless, make sure you have a trusted colleague who can give you “true” perspective on whether you need to speak up, or be silent. |
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Drew Sanders BlogSome of our awesome posts are from our newsletter Branches & Roots, an 8x a year publication. For full annual volumes see our buttons below! Even better sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss out. Archives
November 2023
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