Are you focused ?

It is pretty amazing what you can do when you are focused and concentrated on what you are doing. This street artist, amidst the bustle of 1000s of people walking buy, creates T-shirts by drawing simple straight lines in different colors without any ruler or guide. Just his very steady hand. In a handful of minutes, he creates a unique T-shirt that is almost impossible to copy. If he would just lay them out for sale, there wouldn't be much interest. But by showing his skill, these commodity T-shirts become hot designer products. He is definitely enjoying "flow" (Csíkszentmihályi). In very little time, he is creating real value.

Let's take this story and reflect on how we typically do when we are working in a team. At the end of the very busy day, how much value have you really created for yourself, the team you work in or your organization ? How much of your working time have you been in "flow": focused on the things you need to do ? And how distracted have you been by what is surrounding you ?

There is the magic pull of the electronic gadgets in our hands. When they buzz or beep, we feel important, wanted and eager to contribute. We like to think something "urgent" is wanting us to take care of. In reality there are very few urgencies that need to be addressed in the minute that follows. And what urgencies get dealt with by shooting off an email ?

More fundamentally, when we are in a team discussion, we are often just waiting for the other to stop talking to get our point in. A typical way to start is "Yes but ..." which means pretty much "I haven't heard what you just said but listen to me !". Active listening is called like that because it requires effort. Staying focused and asking yourself W.A.I.T (Why Am I Talking?) is what brings real value to the team, not the amount of airtime each gets.

Remind yourself about your level of focus a few times during the day ... Ask yourself "For the last hour, how focused have I been ?". And re-calibrate !

Learning meetings ... ?

I just read an article of one of my favorite authors in the latest issue of HBR. Michael Watkins is a very good resource when you are interested in career transitions and he is pretty much the expert in this little-researched area. In this article however, something caught my eye ... and makes me react.

Watkins explains that as a leader of a team, you should have three types of meetings. Strategic meetings to make the big decisions on business models, vision, strategy or organizational evolutions. Operational meetings to review forecasts, short term performance and adjusting plans. And finally, you should have "learning meetings". These meetings are "scheduled on an as-needed basis, often after crises or in response to emerging issues. They can also focus on team building."

Wow ... what a let-down ! Learning meetings ?!

So let me get this straight. There are meetings where we "do" stuff like operational things and strategy things. These are the doing meetings. And then when we do not do anything, and if we have some time on our hands, we can have a "learning" meeting to think and learn ... I strongly disagree with this view of what learning means and how it should be integrated in the way people work. My other favorite author and thinker - and father of Action Learning - Reg Revans says

"There is no learning without action and there is no action without learning"

and from what I seen in my experience, this is the only way to make learning a continuous and integral part of how to grow a team and a business.

If learning is something that is distinct from the "real" work that is being done ... it means you are relegating it to the back seat. The only way to really learn is to make learning part of every meeting, project, and activity.

Meetings that work !

I was lucky to be able to deliver the first public workshop on Action Learning in Vietnam last week. At the end of the session, all participants confirmed they really saw the value of the approach and they would apply it in their organizations. As a facilitator, it feels good to get this kind of feedback but I am also aware that very often, reality (with deadlines, emails, presentations to do ...) sucks us up very quickly.

So I was really excited to receive an email from one of the participants of the Vietnam branch of a global FMCG company sharing his very first - and innovative - application of the principles of Action Learning !

His sales team had scheduled the annual Joint Business Meeting with a key customer the day after the workshop. In the past, this Business Meeting was a full day of Powerpoints where each team shared their views, their objectives, results and challenges. And the hours were spent in discussing, explaining, debating, resulting in some agreements and some disagreements. Pretty much a long day for everybody involved, with hours of time spent up front to create the Powerpoint slides.

So my participant, in charge of the sales team for the global FMCG in Vietnam, decided to try and apply the principles of Action Learning in this annual Joint Business Meeting. Out with the laptops, and out with the Powerpoints. The sales manager adapted the standard WIAL Action Learning script to fit his need for this meeting, maintaining the core ground rule of "Statements are only made in response to questions". Participants asked questions to one another to dive into the challenges their respective businesses were facing. Quite a difference from stating your point and trying to convince the other side yours is the right view. Both teams followed the Action Learning approach and achieved a high level of consensus on the key challenges they faced. At the end of the meeting, next steps were jointly identified to work towards and solve the challenges. Participants rated the session 8.5 out of 10 !

Next step: do the same with 2 other major customer teams.

Now that's what I call Action Learning ... in action !

Learning ... one KISS at a time

KISS Keep It Simple Stupid was originally coined by the US Navy to emphasize the importance of keeping things as simple as possible. The target the navy commander had given to his mechanical design team was to ensure that a ship's engine system could be repaired by a mechanic with limited experience or specific training. The idea was never to refer to that mechanic as stupid. In fact, the original KISS was written without a comma, meaning that things needs to be kept simple AND stupid (without writing the 'and'). Since then, many have changed the original meaning and added a comma to read Keep It Simple, Stupid ... Written that way, the 'stupid' becomes an insult to whoever the message is addressed to.

I recently came across another meaning of KISS I had never heard before. A business leader told me his team always ended their meetings and working sessions with a "KISS" ! KISS in this context stands for:

Keep: what did we do well in this meeting that we should keep doing ?
Improve: what did we do that was so-so and we should think about improving next time ?
Stop: what did we do that didn't work and we should commit to not doing again ?
Start: what was missing and we should add or start doing for our next meeting ?

A simple way to remind yourself and your team that learning happens all the time. There is no need to make things complicated. The only requirement is to spend a very small amount of time to reflect together on a key number of questions and create a shared commitment on making sure the next meeting, project, session or retreat is better than the last one.

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.

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.

Managing your team: the basics

I often come across entrepreneurs who successfully grew their idea into a real business, and they realize their one-man organization has grown to 20,  50 or even more people. They can no longer do everything themselves. They have grown their team but they cannot afford to hire managers whose only job it is to manage others, as they are still very much relying on each individual’s contribution to help grow the top line and keep the bottom line in check. They need to start to act as managers themselves.  But where to start … ?

Based on my experience and what I have seen some entrepreneurs struggle with, here are the basics to put in place. These are the basics only, but they are often incomplete.

1. A few basic indicators visible to everyone

No need to have walls full of charts. A few indicators (start with one !), critical to the business, that employees get to see regularly and understand. And for which it is clear their effort contributes to the indicator moving in the right direction. Ideally, the indicator shows both company performance and the direction of their variable compensation.

2. A regular one-on-one meeting with each key player

This can be informal, over breakfast or lunch, but it must be clear it is a working meeting, and it takes place every 2 weeks at a minimum. This is the opportunity to clarify what is going well and what is not going well, to be clear and explicit when there are performance issues that need to get addressed (or else …). No need for an agenda or minutes, but do come prepared knowing what needs to be discussed or what needs to be followed up from the previous meeting. This is also where the personal relationship between the entrepreneur and the key players are developed and maintained.

3. A regular team review

This is where everyone is together, and the priorities of the company – including the indicators described earlier – are reviewed. This is the team working together, helping each other out. Individuals who are lagging are not put on the chopping block in front of everyone, that’s one of those things that doesn’t go down well in Asia. Those issues are addressed in the one-on-one meetings (by you !). The team meeting focuses on the team effort and synergies to be found.

This is not a list in which to pick one or two … These 3 elements are linked and need to exist together. You can’t have only individual meetings (where talk often moves to whining about the people that are not in the room) or only indicators on the wall (without a team review of the progress).

These are rather simple steps, that don’t take up too much of time, and they go a long way in giving direction, basic structure and follow up to your management team.

Talking with meaning

I have been in numerous meetings. When there’s a majority of non-Asians in the room, it often comes down to who talks the most. Those that do most of the talking are seen as the most knowledgeable, or the most assertive, and the rest either struggle to keep up or switch off. I used to do this for quite a while,  making sure my voice was heard. But as I moved up in the organization, I realized that when I did all the talking, I was not getting a lot from the team that works with me. So what’s the solution ? Say nothing at all ? No, the solution is to consider the quality of your interventions, rather than the quantity. I have two tips I picked up along the way worth sharing. The first I heard from someone somewhere, I don’t remember where. The second is something that grew as an awareness over the years.

Tip #1 When in a discussion or debate, think before you are about to say something, and answer the question: is what I am about going to say making a contribution in bringing this discussion closer to a solution or outcome, or is it helping the team forward ? If not, don’t say anything and continue to listen to the others. If you are sure that what you are about to say is helping the team, go ahead and say what you have to say. If you apply this rule, you will find out that you will be speaking much less often. This is because we often speak because we want to show others what we know about the issue at hand. Or we repeat what someone else has said, but in our words and with a slight twist. Or we disagree with someone and elaborate on why that person is wrong. We speak up to be heard, to be listened to, and we think that this is how we contribute. But what we are saying is quite often just filling the space, and not helping to solve the issue that is being discussed.

Tip #2 Listen for what is not being said, and fill that gap. In a team discussion or meeting, ideas and opinions fly left and right. Someone says something and the topic is taken up, twisted, reshaped or attacked. Somebody else will continue in the same direction or move the discussion in a different one. Very often a discussion builds on what is the last thing that was said. While all this is going on, try to become, for a few seconds, an observer to the meeting, and ask yourself the question: what is not being discussed ? What is the team not talking about ? A powerful question like “Have you guys thought about this or that ?” can change the course of a discussion and speed up the resolution.  

When in meetings or team discussion, think about the quality of your contributions and not of the quantity. When you speak less frequently, but with something meaningful to say, it carries weight and is seen as more positive than just filling the empty space. It is one of the qualities of becoming a leader.

More meetings please !

It is very trendy to be against meetings. At least once a week I read some blog that makes anyone who participates in, let alone organizes, meetings feel like a managerial dinosaur. Meetings are bad. They are a waste of time and they don’t do anything good. I once bought a book, “Death by meeting”, by Patrick Lencioni, just because of its title. Cool title but a complete waste of paper.

In my recent experiences, I found that the key ingredient missing for teams to work efficiently together, was the lack of … meetings. Meaningful meetings that is. Meetings where people actually talk. It seems that the only meetings that exist are like the old-fashioned (and out-dated) university lectures, where The One Who Knows All stands in front and teaches to the scribbling (these days iPad-ing) masses.

But what about the meeting where people sit around a table (or better still, stand up where the issue occurs) and talk intently and in a focused way about the organization’s problems, what to do about them, and who will do what to move forward. Meetings where opinions are exchanged, views are challenged and people work together to improve the way the organization functions. Meetings where people talk to each other (not about each other), look each other in the eyes and commit to actions. Meetings where problems and issues (the things the entire organization is gossiping about, but remain unaddressed) are tackled and ways are found – even by trial and error – to move forward. Meetings where a follow up is organized to evaluate the progress and readjust if needed.

What are the alternatives ? Emails ? Please, no more. Emails seem to have become a substitute for  people talking to each other. We now need apps to deal with the continuous useless flood of emails (the best app is called DEL). Coffee-machine or water-cooler conversations ? These are good for the “what’s-new-in-your-world” chatter but they often reinforce the gossip, are clique and not team-based, and rarely lead to action. Outside retreats ? Fun to do but you don’t generate team cohesion by working on a team twice a year.

If anything, I see too few meetings. Too few meetings like the ones described above. Meetings where people work in a focused way, make decisions and hold each other accountable for results and commitments. Something to think about before shooting off another email to ten people.