High-performing team anyone ?

There are hundreds of books on how to develop a high-performing team. With matrices, and pyramids, and 5-7-9 steps processes. All guaranteed to lift your team to high performance. Have you ever googled “high-performance teams” ? When you look at the images that appear at the top, you don’t see a new product development team at an engineering firm, or a management team at a famous bank. You see pictures of an F1 team, or a rowing team in action. And some advertising for consultants who will transform your team with their magic formula !

Why is it that it is typically sports teams that get described as high-performance teams, while management teams only seem to aspire to reach that level ? In my experience, a key factor that sports teams apply without hesitation and in a very formal way, is … learning. After each competition, won or lost, the team will get together and analyze in very deep detail what went well, and what didn’t go well. Military teams coined the concept of the AAR, the after action review, often right on the battlefield when everybody’s recollection of the events is fresh. A boxer shared recently that after a win, his team goes right to watch the video to see the moments where the opponent, although beaten, managed to break through the defense. And they would adjust the training program to focus on that particular weakness.

In organizations, we use similar ‘tools’ like PDCA or six sigma control loops. But that seems to be applied most often to the front-line processes. When it comes to management teams, the step of reflecting, learning and planning for improvement is often watered down to a project closure report that is sent around asking to ‘rate’ and fill in comments. Or when all went well, there is a team celebration that is for sure fun but doesn’t really go in any depth, and doesn’t allow the team to learn. Teams are so busy they often consider they don’t have the time to reflect on what is behind them, because a mountain of new challenges lays ahead.

Yet dedicating some time to have an entire team review, in a facilitated setting, the key learnings and needs for improvement will go a long way to enhancing team collaboration – over time. A team might have issues, and sometimes we are stuck with “the deck we were dealt”. But if each time a team completes a project, challenge, customer account or major event, it can learn from this experience and do better the next time, it will develop a growth mindset that moves it up towards the level of high performance, whatever its starting point is. Learning is not something abstract that happens in people’s heads: it is a team activity as much as the actual project work.

Who's your god ?

Saraswati

No, I am not going off on a new tangent in my blog ... But I was recently in India for the Global Forum of the World Institute of Action Learning. A very dynamic and enjoyable 3 days of intense learning.

Fittingly, the event was kicked off by lighting the lamp of learning, and making reference to Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, creativity, education and eloquence. She endows human beings with the powers of speech, wisdom and learning. She has four hands, and these represent the four aspects of human personality in learning: mind, intellect, alertness and ego.

Who is your god ? I discovered in India that there are 33 million gods and mustis to chose from (although that number is challenged by some if you look for information on the topic) ! Some gods go well with others, but some don't mix. The gods in India represent more values and traits than purely religious aspects. So which ones are your gods ? What are your values in life ?

Mike Marquardt, assisted by
Sripriyaa V., lighting
the lamp of learning

Values are an often-discussed concept, yet people mostly don't spend the time to reflect on what is really important for them. I once came across a 'card game' with each card representing a value, with the target is to rank and sort and finally conclude which 3 or maximum 5 of the cards represent those values that are really critical for you. Not easy but it does trigger meaningful thinking. I really recommend you to do the exercise, or any form thereof. This is not something to be shared with anyone, but taking the effort to determine what are the important values in your life is a valuable exercise.

We often talk about company values, and how these are important when it comes to recruiting or engaging people. But company values are only meaningful if they can be compared to your personal values. There is no such thing as good or bad values. There is only those that are meaningful or less so, for each one of us.

So take the time to determine - if only for yourself - which of the 33 million gods are important to you !

When are you not building your team ?

I recently came across another blog describing all the fantastic things that happen in a team building setting. Some of what I read really disturbed me ... A few extracts about the benefits of a team building exercise:

" - on creativity: team building activities help your employees to have fun and relax. They forget about work pressure for some time. This improves creativity.
- on motivation: employees interact in a different setting outside the work environment and this helps them to loosen up a little and winning competitions boosts their confidence levels. It also helps employees to gain trust and work as a team.
- on communication: the communication capability of your employees improves a great deal as they participate in team building activities. When your employees experience improvements in all of the above areas, their productivity automatically increases.

"

Wow ... So work is full of pressure, trust is missing and communication is a disaster. But we'll all go out for a team building exercise (typically outsourced to HR or a third party 'professional') and then all this tension will disappear and your team comes back ready to rock and deliver stellar performance !

You do not build a team once or twice a year. You build a team every single time you interact with any or all of the team members. In the meetings you have. In the one-on-one discussions. Or the project work. If work is boring and people are not having fun, you'd better do something about that. Or if people stab each other in the back, and put spokes in each other's wheels, you'd better not wait for the annual team building retreat to address these issues. In fact, if anything, all the 'good stuff' that team building supposedly brings will be looked upon as fake and just some gold dust that management wants to spread around.

Be aware that there is no single moment that you do NOT build your team, by whatever you do or say, or what your team members do and say together.

Do you measure yourself ?

What gets measured gets done. Not very sure if it was Lord Kelvin or Peter Drucker. And although I have often reminded others about the importance of identifying a target and measuring progress against it, I recently realised I was not applying my own medicine ...

I am working on a PhD dissertation. It will for sure be great and exciting once it will all be finished. But for now, it is tedious, hard and to be honest ... quite boring. I have to listen to and analyze hours and hours of recordings that will allow me to confirm the main assumptions of my dissertation. I got started rather energetically some weeks ago. But that enthousiasm dwindled once I realized how much time all this was taking. Progress just seemed so terribly slow. I quite frankly though about whether I would ever get through all the listening and analyzing. Whenever I got back to work on my tedious never-ending list of tasks, I quickly gave up feeling that it wasn't really making a difference.

 And that's when I reminded myself about what I had applied to any type of performance goal for so many years: visualise and measure. So I created my only-to-myself meaningful visual of all the work ahead of me (and the little that was behind me), which ended up looking like little circles and bigger pizzas. Everytime I finished a new chunk I quickly colored in the corresponding space on the sheet. Doing this didn't make any of the actual work go faster, or even made it less boring ... ! But it created a level of motivation of 'seeing' the progress. And I am now capable of measuring my overall progress towards the goal of completion of all the work. As of this writing, I am at 76%. I am pretty sure measuring 'myself' in this way has helped to keep up the motivation.

We all know that what gets measured gets done. But think about applying this as well to personal goals and projects !

Skipping maintenance anyone ?

You can skip the maintenance of your car. Nothing major will probably happen. And you can do the annual program just the next year. Or maybe you could even skip next year as well !

Leadership programs seem to be the first to get cut when cuts need to be made. It is way easier than to do something about the inefficiencies, or to address the structural issues that have grown over the years. So it's the leadership program that is sacrificed to "help" the company.

An organization's leadership development program is very much like a car. If you skip the program for a year, nothing major will happen. People will not start to leave in droves. And you will most likely not be faced with an acute shortage of leaders. All seems well ... If you intend to come back to the original program the year after, doubt will have started to creep in ... Is this program really necessary ? Nobody seems to be able to identify any damage from skipping it last year ... And it did help us to save XYZ US$ ! The argument for restarting becomes even more harder. All of the sudden the investment in people becomes a new burden, since we managed without last year.

That's why a leadership program is like a car. You can skip for a year, but whatever you do further down the road, you can never recover what was lost in that year. The minor damage that occurred to your engine from using bad oil or a blocked filter can never be erased. In an organization, that damage can be at different levels. People who had been told they would be part of a specific program will start to doubt if the company is really serious about their development. In general, employees will feel that leadership development, for all the nice vision statements, is dispensable. And managers will feel they do not have the tools to fully develop their teams for the challenges of the future.

And then we sometimes wonder why our surveys show that employees are not engaged !

The tasteless sandwich

A few years ago, someone came up with a magical "sandwich" approach to give for-improvement-feedback to someone: say something nice, say what you really need to say, and finish up by saying something nice again. This became known as the feedback sandwich. And it became really popular.

The idea was that for the person receiving the message, it felt better to hear it smothered between two nice things, and the receiver would be more motivated to improve. But the sandwich did not become popular because it worked ! It became popular because it made the manager feel better about himself, and created the impression that "delivering" the feedback message was easier.

Giving someone straight feedback remains so difficult for so many managers. Someone recently admitted that he was not comfortable looking his subordinate in the eyes when giving feedback ! Others fall into the other extreme and pride themselves in being at ease telling anyone anything straight into their face ... whatever the consequences.

Giving feedback is not about delivering a message. We have email for that. The challenge with giving clear feedback - around needed improvements - is that for it to work, it needs to turn into a dialogue, into a real conversation. Not smothered in between layers of "positive" messages that have nothing to do with what needs to be addressed. You cannot prepare for or script out what will happen. You don't know what the other person will reply or argue or disagree with. It is exactly this unpredictability about how the discussion will turn out that you need to become comfortable with.

Creating a sandwich, or sugarcoating, or adding sweet topping does not make the feedback process more effective. It only destroys the taste, and the message. Practice dialogue instead.

Who inspires you ?

Are you inspired by the stream of "inspirational quotes" that seems to inundate Linkedin or Facebook every minute of the day ? Do you "like" these sources of inspiration ? From the sheer volume of inspiration that is around, one would believe we live in a very inspiring and inspired world. But the concept of inspiration seems to have lost part of its meaning. The definition of inspiration is ...

something that makes someone want to do something or that gives someone an idea about what to do or create

So what do you actually DO when you "like" an inspirational quote ? Or when you read the leadership quotes from Abraham Lincoln ? Or see the movie of Ghandi's life ? What do you DO with this apparent inspiration ? Most of the ACTIONS around inspiration seem limited to "likes" and "shares" on social media. Widely spreading the inspiration around ... ! But what about actually doing something from that inspiration ?

I am not inspired by Ghandi, Mandela, Richard Branson or Steve Jobs. All cool guys, without a doubt, but I never met them and never will. And reading books or quotes does not turn me into one of them. I am not inspired because although I do read about them, that does not translate into me taking any particular action.

I am inspired by people I know, and meet or work with regularly. I am inspired by the server in the hotel last week who remembered what my favorite dessert is. She inspired me to look out in more detail for the individual needs of the participants in my workshop. I am inspired by the colleague who gave a presentation and handled a tough question really well. He inspired me to prepare better my next presentation and try to imagine what the audience would think or ask. Or the motorcycle taxi driver who seemed like the happiest guy despite spending his day in heat and pollution. He inspired me to try and smile a bit more often !

Inspirational quote of the day: look for inspiration around you, it might just be easier to act on !

Questions to ... yourself !

I read a lot. I read all the time. Mostly books around leadership and management and approaches on how to make teams more effective. But I have to admit that very few books really stand out: it is very often a nice idea spread over 300 pages. And if I'm honest, I also have to admit that it is very rare that I read something that really stays with me, and that I apply going forward. The last time that happened was when I read "Time Management for Dummies" and became addicted to creating and re-updating "to-do lists". This was a long time ago, but it stuck and to-do lists are still very much a key element of how I remain organized.

So I was not expecting a lot when I recently started Marilyn Adam's book "Change Your Questions, Change Your Life". First of all, it's a management book written in novel style, and I really don't like that. As I started, I thought it would be another book about asking good questions and getting the best out of people.

But they key insight for me was not about what questions to ask to others, but what questions to ask to yourself ! In particular in tense or difficult situations, situations where we sometimes give priority to what to say rather than to thinking about the best answer. Asking a question to yourself creates a space for reflection. It is really different that "talking to yourself" because asking a question gives you the choice of answers, while talking to yourself is more descriptive.

And I have to say that this idea of asking a question to myself has for some reason really stuck. I find myself easily asking MYSELF a question, when faced with a particular challenge or difficult situation. This happens very quickly, it's just a second or so, but creating the mental "pause" under the form of a question allows to look at options. Rather than diving in with the first response or intuition that comes to mind, asking a question, thinking about options and then taking the next step is really powerful. I have found it extremely easy to actually apply that several times per day.

Next time you are faced with a challenge, a difficulty, a tense situation, ask yourself a question. "What could be another explanation ?", "What would really be the best next step here ?". No need to rack your brain for the perfect question: just creating the pause and scanning the few options before moving ahead has helped me take better next steps. I am happy I didn't put the book aside !

Digital feedback anyone ?

In a recent workshop to help managers provide feedback - both positive and negative - to help with their team members' development, I was taken aback by a question of one of the participants ...

"Can we also give feedback by email ?"

Managers in Asia struggle with giving feedback, in particular the feedback for improvement. The fear of "what the discussion will lead to" very often simply means that managers avoid addressing the issues, and the team members don't get the feedback that would allow them to do better. Issues remain unsaid for way too long until they reach crisis proportions, and then it becomes easily an end-of-employment discussion. Lose-lose for sure. 

So now it seems that (maybe) some have found a solution: feedback by email !! After all, they must be thinking it is better than avoiding giving feedback all together, and sending out a feedback email means they can 'tick' this off of their to-do list. "Oh yes, I did give him the feedback ...!". There is nothing so easy to ignore as an email. And sending an email tells a lot about the effort the manager is willing to put into this ... The medium IS the message.

So no, giving feedback for improvement does not happen by email. Muster the courage to have a face-to-face conversation. Get comfortable (before you start) with the fact that the conversation will probably not turn out exactly as you have in mind. And keep in mind, whichever way the conversation goes, that your target is a win-win solution. Finally, don't forget that this is a conversation, so catch yourself when you become aware you are the one doing all the talking: ask a question, shut it and listen.

Dreaming of an all-star team ?

The football/soccer world cup is just finished, the champions have been crowned and life is back to normal. Each of the participating teams have an excuse of why they did not become world champions, either one or a combination of the pitch, the weather, the referee, the ball or the opponents. If there is anything the pundits agree about, it is that the best team won. The best team. Not the team with the best players. It is clear the Germans played like a team, not just a star player with 10 others who circle around him.

And yet despite this consensus about the best team winning, the same armchair pundits immediately announce to the world their “dream team”, with the star players picked from several countries in each position. Messi, Neymar, Ronaldo, and 8 more big names. The dream team even has a “dream coach” ! Can you just for one minute imagine that this “dream team” actually plays a game together ? I think it would be rather fun, or maybe sad, to watch !

Something similar often happens in organizations. Managers often see the limits of their current employees, and imagine that "out there", there are star players that would turn around the whole organization's performance in a heart beat. If only I could get hold of these dream players who will set off sparks and turn dust into gold ! If only I could find the perfect purchasing/production/marketing/sales manager, then all would be great ! 

Well, working with a team in an organization might not be the same as a football team, when it comes to star players, the challenges are very similar. I have seen teams where nobody really stood out, but where everybody effectively worked together and moved forward. I have also seen "star players" joining a team, and the situation becoming much more complicated and tense than before.

Before hiring that superman/woman, think about what you have in your team, and what unexplored or non-optimized potential remains. I am quite sure that exploring - for real - the potential in your existing team will be a better approach to move your organization to the next level, than dreaming of the hero that will single-handedly deliver miracles.

Seeing the same elephant

In the Indian parable of the six blind men and the elephant, each is very convinced about what he is facing from the way he is interacting with it. Yet when they share with each other what each thinks the strange creature they are facing is, it is clear there is no cohesion in their views.

This often happens in organizations. A team is asked to deal with a challenge, but people are hesitant to ask questions for fear of looking incompetent or unsure. After all, we are paid to solve problems, so when we are given one, we need to deal with it. A few days or weeks or months later, gaps and cracks start to appear. The solutions are not really working. What HR thought is not really compatible with what the production or the finance team has in mind. A lot of bickering appears about whose solution is better and why this or that won't work. Very rarely does the team go back to the starting point: what is the problem we are dealing with ?

That is a critical phase we spend a lot of time on when we apply the Action Learning methodology with a team facing a challenge. In fact, we will not talk about or suggest solutions, until the team has reached a shared understanding of what the problem is, and has written it down. Only then will the team go into looking for appropriate solutions. Spending time to reach this key point has clear advantages, as was demonstrated again in a recent experience.

The team had already spent 2 sessions (1/2 day each time) to work on the challenge, to look at it from different angles. Asking questions and identifying actions each of them took after the session, to try and get a better understanding. A better understanding of the problem the organization is facing, not a better understanding of solutions. And when, during the 3rd session, the team came to a consensus about what the real root cause of the problem was (and wrote it out in full, see the picture), two things happened:

(1) there was a real sense of achievement and of having made progress ...
(2) with a clear agreement of the problem, the solutions became almost obvious - although maybe not easy to implement.

The first point about sense of achievement is really critical. After all, the team had "only" reached a shared agreement of the problem ! They hadn't even solved it yet !! However, the positive energy that had built up in the earlier sessions, and the clear consensus of where the root cause lay, ensured that the team could quickly come up with a very comprehensive list of proposals (in the 4th and final session) that was proposed to management. And it was a clear team effort, with everyone feeling 100% at ease with the solutions.

When you keep on dealing with the same problem year after year, ask yourself the question: is my team really seeing the same elephant ?

A Window on Your Self

The Johari window has been around since the middle of the last century. It is a tool to help people think about themselves, and how others see them. The term comes from the first names of the psychologists who developed it, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham.

The first quadrant is the "open" space, with the things others know about us, and we also know about ourselves. The "hidden" space is that which we keep private: we are aware of these elements but chose to keep them secret with certain people.

In the "blind" space are those aspects that others know about me, but I don't see myself. These are my blind spots. I may think of myself as a strong decision-maker, but others might agree I do not genuinely listen to inputs. You cannot become aware about your blind spots by yourself. Discovering blind spots is difficult because our first reaction to discovering something unknown about ourselves, from someone else, will be denial. Or justification ... "Well, I might be like that but that's because ...".

For the "hidden" space, the choice is with us whether to disclose information about ourselves to the people we work with. For the "blind" space, it is up to others to decide whether they want to help us discover our blind space. It happens all too often that "everyone" in the office agrees that the boss does this or that, and lots of stories go around between the team members. Yet when you ask if anyone has ever given the feedback about this particular behavior, the reply is often that people assume the boss probably knows but does not care to change.

The word Jahori is made up from the names Joseph and Harrington. But apparently it is also a name in Swahili and means "something of value". Self-awareness is a key value in developing yourself. Self-awareness also includes discovering your blind space. Whether you manage to become aware of your blind space depends on the relations you have created with your team members, and how you make them feel about giving you feedback.

Is your team brain-dead ?

It is commonly said that we use only 10% of our brain. Although the biological facts are a bit different, it remains pretty much accepted that there is much more potential for using this phenomenal tool to its full capability. Consultants and trainers will explain that they will unlock the remaining 90% of your team's brain power, and your performance will go through the roof.

Back to reality.

Working with a team on an organizational challenge, we arrived at the team debrief after the third working session. The three sessions had been intense but rich in discovery and learning. During this third session, the team had agreed on a shared understanding of the root cause of the challenge. The team was making good progress and had started to identify very interesting solutions to this problem (of which the sponsor had said "it exists since the company was founded 43 years ago !"). Towards the end of the session, I asked each member around the table to share "how they were feeling ?". Replies were varied. One member said ...

"I feel tired. I have never been doing so much thinking. In my normal working days, I get by doing this and that, some routine stuff, pretty much switching my brain off ... I feel tired from thinking." 

There was no stunned silence or gasps of shock around the table. It was more like mumbles and smiles ... Everyone recognized themselves in this description. This was not a group of assembly-line operators or laborers. These were so-called knowledge workers, supervisors and support staff whose job it is to solve problems, come up with solutions on a daily basis and who lead themselves teams. 

I don't think they are lazy. Or enjoy "switching their brains off". In fact, they had simply never been asked to switch their brains on !

Before attempting to tap into the 'unused' part of your team's brains with a fancy training session, ask yourself what you do to encourage your team to use their brain. For real. Giving them a problem and telling them it is their task to solve it. And then stick with this when they tell you they are stuck. 10% of brain power is in fact more than enough. If it is switched on at least once in a while.

Happy out of your comfort zone

At the end of a recent week-long leadership development program with a group of engineering managers in Singapore, the participants were asked to share one key thought or take-away for the intense week. One of the participants shared ...

"I have come to realize that, if you are pushed often enough out of your comfort zone, you can actually get used to it."

This is a thought that stuck with me. In several leadership development programs, I have seen participants who become very aware about themselves, and get a good understanding of what their own comfort zone is. Awareness is of course the necessary condition towards progress.

But while many understand the concept - and manage to apply it to themselves - pretty well ... the majority still struggle to do anything with this new awareness. As if they now have a good understanding of their own challenges, but remain stuck like a deer staring into the headlights.

So once you are aware of your own comfort zone, what's next ? My personal experience is that it helps to see the situations where you are moving out of your comfort zone, as ... learning opportunities. Not performance opportunities. Not opportunities to show to yourself, or someone else, what you can do (because you can't !). Just learning opportunities. If you can develop your mindset that these situations help you to learn, then the experience becomes far less stressful. And any of these experiences helps to learn more about yourself. Maybe learning that getting out of that comfort zone was easier, or harder, than you thought. It is not about doing it right. It is not about trying to copy what the others (the experts) do. I try to reflect out loud (in my head !) what I am learning, what is going better than thought, or what is not going really well and I would do differently next time. I try to keep myself in the learning mode.

Developing a mindset of learning, when faced with out-of-comfort-zone situations, goes a long way in becoming happy being out of your comfort zone.

Accelerating leadership development ?

Do you need to accelerate your leadership development ?

 

Not many business leaders would say they are not concerned about developing the teams that will lead their business in 5 or 10 years from now. There are plenty of business opportunities, but very often we are confronted by the question of who will take the lead of the company's growth. We know we cannot do everything ourselves. But we have doubts about our existing teams. We know their limits and think more about why they will NOT be able to deliver. We imagine that we will find that perfect pearl somewhere on the market. Someone that really has all the talents and qualities that will drive our business to the next level.

 

Yet leaders have come to realize that, although bringing in new talent is necessary, it is far from sufficient. When no explicit effort is in place to develop teams, those bright talents that joined will not stay around for long.

 

So what do you do to develop your teams ? Send them to more training programs ? Ask all of them to sign up for an MBA program ? Or make sure they all join the annual team building retreat ? All these are nice to have, and for sure appreciated by employees. They have almost become benefits. But after years of spending resources on these efforts, it is clear the impact is limited.

What works then ? A survey of 210 business leaders in Asia, organized by the Conference Board, looking for which approaches are most effective at accelerating leadership development, brought out Action Learning at the top of the list.

 

Action Learning is not as physical or fun as team building on the beach, or maybe not exciting as a training-session-with-games-and-role-plays. But it is for sure efficient in developing and growing talent.

There is no such thing as "the great question"

We all know the value of asking questions, rather than giving the answers (although the application of this principle may be more difficult). I am often asked "how do you ask a good question ?". There are blogs and even books that are written about "good questions" to ask. People make lists of the "top 10 questions" to ask in a coaching session.

This is pretty silly. There is no such thing as a good question, in absolute terms. My definition of a good question is a question that makes the other(s) think, and that this thinking leads to insights or breakthrough ideas. It is not about who asks the smartest question in the room. It is about what is the best question, for a particular context, at that particular time.

We recently ran an Action Learning session where one of the participants shared the concern she had about the motivation of her team members, given the fact that all of them had been working long hours for several months. She had brooded about this issue for quite some time and considered she was stuck.

If the participants in the session had read the books on asking good questions, they probably would have asked questions like "Why is this important for you ?" or "What would you do if there were no constraints ?". Great, open-ended and thought provoking questions ... in some circumstances. Instead, someone asked "Have you asked your team members what they think about this ?". "Of course" the problem presenter said "I don't know why I just think about this by myself without asking them what they think !". She explained that she had a very good relation with the team members, and that they often had lunch together and talked about everything ... except this issue. This was the end of the session ! The light bulb had gone off in the problem presenter's head. You might argue that it is rather basic to check with the other team members ... Well, maybe it is basic. For you. But that was not the case for her.

There are no rules for what makes a great question. The great question is the one that gets the light bulb going ... in the OTHER person's head, not in your's ! It depends on the other person, the context, and the particular moment in time. The next great question is not listed somewhere in a book ...

Not much new under the Sun (Tzu)

I recently re-read the Art of War by Sun Tzu. Not really the most modern thinker, knowing that his guidelines on effectively leading a war were written 2500 years ago. But his work on the Art of War goes beyond military environment and rings valuable for leaders and managers in these very different times.

Two of my favorite quotes ...

"If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame."
Pretty clear. Yet there are so many leaders who are convinced it is their teams, not themselves, that need help. "I have explained them different times, but they just don't get it !". Business leaders spend a lot of time explaining what their teams should do differently, and so little time on what they themselves can do differently.


"When you lay down a law, see that it is not disobeyed; if it is disobeyed, the offender must be put to death."
A powerful illustration is that of Ts'ao Ts'ao, a military leader who forbade his troops to destroy crops once they had conquered an enemy. After his own horse inadvertently trampled a field of corn, he condemned himself to death !

Now, cutting off people's heads has gotten out of fashion, but there so often seems to be a different set of (unwritten) rules for those in leadership positions than for the rest. "Do as I say ...". Yet leaders then wonder why levels of engagement of their teams are low ... !

I once in a while pick up a new book on leadership or management that promises 'breakthrough' methods. I have come to the conclusion that all there is to know, when it comes to management and leadership, is more or less known. It's the execution that is missing.

The #1 mistake managers make

I have to admit: stole this blog title from a blog I recently came across. Reading the title made me think (in fact, the title was more interesting than the content !) ... In my experience, what would count as the #1 mistake managers make ..? The answer I came up with is: the #1 mistake managers make is that they stop to ask ...

1. they stop to ask for feedback

Growing up in the organization, people get feedback all the time, unfortunately often limited to the once-a-year performance review. Once they become manager, they give feedback to the team members they work with, and they are asked for their feedback about some other individual in the organization. Once manager, feedback becomes that which our title gives us the right to hand out. Feedback is what others need. In many situations, managers themselves receive feedback ... when there is an issue around their leadership style.

Managers should themselves, and continuously, ask for feedback. From team members, peers and their superiors. Feedback about themselves as well as the team they lead. It could take a while as sometimes people are not comfortable to give feedback when asked. But persistence, and genuine intention to use the feedback to develop yourself, does pay. You can be your own coach, you can be your own mirror ... All that is needed is to ask for feedback.

2. they give the answers (because they know them)

When you become a manager, it's for a reason. You have performed, you have solved problems. You have found answers and implemented solutions successfully. So when people come to you with their issues or problems, you want to help them, let them benefit from your experience, and give them the answers. And they happily go away and implement your  solution. And very often, the problems are indeed solved. And when it doesn't work, they will come back and ask for better solutions. This creates a feeling of empowerment ... for the manager, and a team that is completely dependent on him or her. When the manager is ready to move to a new assignment a number of years later, the conclusion is often that "nobody in the team is ready to take on my role". Help your team to develop by making them think for themselves. Giving the answers doesn't do that.

3. they don't ask what they should be learning

Being a high performing manager creates a zone of comfort. You "know" how to do things around here. You created an image of yourself as a manager, for your team and your superior. You are in your "managerial element" (as Ken Robinson would say). And you repeat, repeat and repeat, because it works. But things around you change: technology, people's expectations, the business environment ... Everything changes and the approaches that worked in the past will one day become old school, and limit your performance. I have seen managers who were successful and five years later had to be demoted because they were too "stuck". Managers should continuously ask what new there is out there, how the world and the views on management are changing, and use this to update themselves.

Children develop by asking questions. "Why this ?", "Why that ?". Managers can use this simple in-born technique do continue to develop themselves.

Developing team trust ... for real (and safely)

When you Google for "team trust", you very likely come across this image or a variation on it. Of course, team trust is all about falling down blindfolded and having your "trusting team mates" catch you safely. Duh ... ?

Team trust is about challenging each other, building on others' ideas, clarifying disagreements, finding the best solutions. You kind of know when trust exists in a team, and you know (from the sidebar conversations and after-the-meeting discussions) when it doesn't. But how do you develop trust in a team ?

I ran an interesting experiment with a team in a manufacturing organization. 7 Thai professionals worked together to solve a cross-functional issue, by using the Action Learning principles of asking questions to deeply understand the issue before to come up with solutions. The team worked each time for nearly 3 hours, for 4 sessions each time with 2 weeks in between. Only asking questions. And listening to each other. And building on ideas. Before the first session, and after the last, I measured the level of "team psychological safety" (look up Amy Edmondson from Harvard University for more on this topic). Team psychological safety is similar to team trust, "a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking". Research has shown that this positively impacts how a team learns and performs.

The difference before and after was significant. There was a 20% positive jump in two areas that team psychological safety looks at: appreciation for each others' competencies and skills, and the absence of negative impact of making a mistake. This was after only 4 sessions. And in addition to the assessment, it was confirmed through a debriefing session with the team members. Definitely a solid foundation on which to continue to build trust.

Trust does not happen over night. But it can be accelerated by leaving your team to work together, and sticking to the Action Learning principles. And you can actually measure the change in trust levels.

What's in it for them ?

Khun Y had joined the manufacturing section of the organization 2 years ago. He was fresh out of university, but his management was impressed quickly by his ability to learn, to correctly analyse performance issues, and to carry out improvement plans.

One day Khun Y applied for an internal job at the engineering section. The company promotes internal mobility so all vacancies are circulated openly. The engineering manager was very excited, and convinced that Khun Y was the right person for this engineering job. The manufacturing manager saw this potential move as a loss for his department and tried to convince the engineering manager to change his mind. When that didn't work, the manufacturing manager offered a promotion with significant salary increase to Khun Y. Since the move to the engineering department entailed a promotion, the manufacturing manager reasoned that giving a promotion to stay would work. Khun Y decided to stay in the manufacturing department.


Situation: win (manufacturing) and win (Khun Y) versus lose (engineering).

Three months later, Khun Y resigned from the company and joined an equipment design and construction company. He received a salary even higher than his just-increased salary in the manufacturing department. His exit interview form stated as reason for leaving "found another job" (like nearly all exit interview forms).

Situation: double win (Khun Y with 2 salary increases in 3 months) versus double lose (manufacturing and engineering).

The organization will never know the real reason for Khun Y's departure ... Was it because he wanted more money (that is what they actually think) ? Or because he in fact looking for another manager after 2 years with the manufacturing manager ? Or because he was looking for a job with more variation (engineering versus production) ?

Morale of the (real) story: if you don't know your people and what they are looking for, you will - now or in the near future - end up losing them.

Whose development is it anyway ?

Who owns the people or talent development (or whatever it is called) in your organization ?

Many will point to the HR department or one of their activities such as OD or training. I often see participants in a seminar or training session who explain they are there because "HR told them to participate in this program". This ticking-off-the-list mindset is great for the corporate balanced scorecard indicator ("number of training hours per employee per year") but most often counter-productive when it comes to motivating someone to change. That is not to say that training sessions are not popular: a new environment and a sumptuous lunch buffet are appreciated by all !

If not the HR department, then it most likely is the direct manager. After all, it is him or her who will evaluate you and identify your "growth opportunities". These will then be discussed and prioritized and at the end of the performance review, your manager will add your name to the list of the people who need to be trained in this or that. And that is in the best case. Quite often the "growth opportunities" are pushed down the list or urgencies or priorities once the review fever has subsided.

But what if each of us took ownership of our own development ? Do you have your development target or priority for this year ? Have you identified the steps you can take (with or without help from the manager or organization) to make progress towards your goal ? There are so many resources around these days that you can find very high-level knowledge information about any development topic. But this is the easy part ... Just as a training session or workshop is meaningless without follow up, learning about a new topic without taking action and implementing is also a waste of time. And definitely not "developing" you.

My advice - to all - is to own your own development, and not outsource it to your manager or your organization. Fix your own development targets, and use the resources around you to contribute to that development. And take action. The greatest satisfaction comes from setting your targets and making progress towards them (I can testify on that !).

Explore the ideas from your team, for real !

Dear boss

We are writing this letter to ask you why you don’t ask us to solve problems by ourselves. When is the last time you really asked us to solve a company problem other than the company travel day destination or the theme for the New Year’s party ?

We love this company as much as you do. Yes, you have a lot of experience all over the world, more than we do. And it is true that the consultants are smarter than we are, and they explain things more clearly. And they have fantastic Powerpoint slides that we don’t know how to make (and frankly, even if we did, we don’t have the time). These consultants have experience in other industries, and they know about state-of-the-art and best practices.

But we really have ideas.

You tell us you want our input, but very quickly you explain why our ideas won’t work. You explain that you have tried them before, in a previous assignment. Or you just know that this won’t work. In a culture where hierarchy is respected, it is a challenge for us to express our thoughts. And when the person in authority then explains us , with reasons and facts and figures, that this is not really such a good idea, how do you think we feel about speaking up in the future (not to say losing our face and self-confidence) ? Have you  gained your experience by executing the ideas of others, with your own being squashed ?

Give us a chance. Give us a problem. Really give it to us. And let us implement our solutions, make some mistakes, and learn from that experience. Isn’t that what the leadership books write about ? Maybe this can be applied to real business problems and not just the company entertainment activities.

Best regards
Your team in Asia

Focus anybody ?

Daniel Goleman's (emotional intelligence) recent book is titled "Focus, the hidden driver of excellence". There are different levels of focus, but what I am interested in is the focus that exists (or is missing !) in a team.


Have you recently addressed your team (either those reporting to you, or a team of your peers), making a presentation about last year's results or this year's priorities ? Of course, when you make your presentation, you are concentrating on what you are saying, ensuring your message is clear and well understood. But have you ever tried - not easy, as you are presenting at the same time - to observe who is really listening ? Very often, some start to peek at their cell phone for the latest emails. And yet more often, distraction is not noticeable ... People can be nodding or staring at you and yet they think about something completely different. In larger groups, the challenge is even more important. A one-hour presentation by the CEO to the entire workforce is often the opportunity for some unnoticed Facebook time (for the audience that is, not for the CEO !).

More and more knowledge workers spend their working hours on a computer. As one of my Linkedin contacts recently admitted "I was looking for a piece of information on the Internet and ended up spending one hour watching Youtube videos !" Judging from the postings and likes on Facebook, many people I know spend a good portion of their day making sure they have not missed any important update on their social network ! Distractions are abound, and in my view have become a major challenge for productivity in organizations. A few years ago, blocking access to social media sites was a partial solution. But smart phones and fast networks make for a very good alternative !


How can you ensure that your people are working to solve your organization's challenges ? How can you ensure their minds don't wander off all the time ?

The most simple way is to ... stop talking. Ask someone a question, and wait for their reply. And then follow up their reply with another question, not your thoughts on what they just said. And then another question. When you ask someone a question, a very simple yet powerful thing happens: people think (because you are waiting for an answer). When people think and are actively engaged in the exchange with you, they will not wander off and get distracted. They are actually using their brains to think and solve the challenge you offer them. Action Learning allows you to apply this principle to a group setting. I have observed groups addressing an important business problem, for nearly 3 hours. There was no Powerpoint presentation, and nobody told the others what the solution was. People only asked questions to one another. The level of concentration and focus is very powerful. When you have a group of people engaging with each other, building on each other's ideas, intensely for 3 hours, the output of the session is so different from any regular meeting. One of the most frequent comments from a group that has experienced their first Action Learning session is "If only all our meetings could be run like this !"

Don't try to fight Facebook distractions: you'll lose ! Instead, engage your team, give them a challenge and ensure they ask questions to each other. Minds don't wander off when questions are being asked ... ! And the brain is still a pretty powerful tool to look for solutions.

When was the last time you asked your team to reflect ?

In a recent McKinsey article on the challenges around leadership development, the authors write that one issue is that reflection (learning) is often disconnected from the 'real work'. Learning and reflection happens in the training room, or in the off-site development program, or in the MBA program. In the office, we ... work ! And there are so many important priorities to deal with that we do not really have much time to go for training sessions. And we all know that, for all the reflection and thinking that goes on in a training room, very few can actually apply their new learning in their working environment. The challenge is combining this learning and reflection, with 'real work'.

Any leader would agree that learning is important. Organizations and teams need to learn to better deal with the more and more complex business challenges of our time. Most often we assume that people learn by doing stuff, like new assignments or projects. Trying out new things is important, but a key variable in how humans learn is the way they reflect about what they have been doing. Is this similar to what I know ? What is different ? Where else is this new experience applicable ? Learning really only happens when reflection is added to the experience. Otherwise we are stuck in the treadmill-like cycle of doing things and then doing some more things.

How and where does reflection happen ? We often assume that it happens somewhere "in people's heads", more or less automatically, like breathing. Either while they work or when they drive home. In some cases, this might be true, but for sure leaving it up to each individual to 'think' about their learning is limited. Reflection is sometimes associated with 'doing nothing' or daydreaming, because indeed, it does involve silence.

Action Learning does assume that reflection happens by itself. In an Action Learning setting, reflecting on what each individual, as well as the group, has experienced is made explicit. It is each time very powerful to go around the group and ask each member what they have learned, how they see this experience, or how it changes their view on things.

When is the last time you asked your team to reflect on something, and asked them to share what they had learned ? Try it - allow for some silence - and you might be surprised about the quality of what they share.