Best-Practices Leadership - Team Management Tips.pdf

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Best-Practices Leadership:
Team management tips and
fun team-building activities to boost
team performance, collaboration and morale
Special Report from
www.BusinessManagementDaily.com
E
DITOR
Kathy A. Shipp
E
DITORIAL
D
IRECTOR
Patrick DiDomenico
A
SSOCIATE
P
UBLISHER
Adam Goldstein
P
UBLISHER
Phillip A. Ash
___________________________________________________________________________________
© 2012 Business Management Daily, a division of Capitol Information Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
Substantial duplication of this report is prohibited. However, we encourage you to excerpt from this report as
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This content is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information regarding the subject matter
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you require legal advice, please seek the services of an attorney.
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Leadership: Team Management Tips
Best-Practices Leadership:
Team management tips and fun team-building activities to boost team
performance, collaboration and morale
B
est-Practices Leadership: Team Management Tips
examines key ways to re-
invigorate teams and improve their performance, along with fun team-building
activities to reward and motivate all your team players.
Read how businesses of all sizes are getting creative with team icebreakers and
fun team-building exercises—everything from scavenger hunts, “cruises to
nowhere” and community walk/runs to building models of team projects out of
Legos. And, while you’re learning new ways to pump up your team’s
performance, now might be a good time to undertake our Leadership Assessment
Exercise to gauge your
own
performance as a team manager.
Leadership: Team Management Tips
‘Hot’ tactics for heating up your team
#1
“Hot teams” improvise, do more work with less supervision and make the extra
effort to follow through.
Management consultant Laurence Haughton offers this advice for turning ordinary
groups into hot teams:
1. Don’t become rule-bound.
Rules, intended to streamline and safeguard work,
can hamstring your operation when common sense calls for exceptions. Before
setting rules, ask if they’re really needed.
2. Don’t criticize in public.
Embarrassing employees in front of the team will
only come back to bite you. Mean bosses think that they’re holding people
accountable, but what they’re really doing is inciting payback.
3. Show you care.
If you like your people and show it, they’ll enjoy helping you
when crunch time comes.
4. Listen.
Make it one on one, as well as in groups. Listening helps you correct
misinformation, relax barriers, increase trust and let people feel good about what
they do for a living.
5. Make it their mission.
Even when a project is not terribly exciting, you can
make the work more engaging. Creating roles for each person, for example, gives
people a sense of being special.
© 2012 Business Management Daily
www.BusinessManagementDaily.com
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Leadership: Team Management Tips
6. Let them decide.
Allowing people to devise their own processes boosts morale.
Just make sure those processes keep improving.
Adapted from “Creating Hot Teams,” Laurence Haughton,
Leader to Leader
Leadership: Team Management Tips
#2
Bring off-site energy of team-building exercises back to the office
The typical off-site meeting is chock-full of PowerPoint presentations, flip charts
and team-building exercises. But back at work months later, what actually
changes?
Lead an off-site event that leaves your team energized and focused:
1. Know what victory looks like. How will you know if you’ve achieved it?
When Timberland Co. needed to revamp and add new products, they held an
off-site event to jump-start things. They invited designers, engineers and
marketers from the company to spend one week hashing it out, a process that
normally takes years.
Result:
They met their goals. “Having that concrete goal
allowed us to walk the line between exploring creative flights of fancy and
remaining results driven,” VP Doug Clark said.
2. Make sure team-building exercises relate to solving a real problem.
During Ford’s off-site event, Carolyn Lantz, executive director of brand
imaging, gave executives $50 each and put them on a bus to an Old Navy
store. “I told them, ‘You have 20 minutes to find and purchase an outfit that
you have to wear tomorrow. You are busy people looking for great design at a
great price. Those are Ford’s customers.’” The exercise made a point: Ford’s
products need to be well designed, but democratically priced.
—Adapted from “Can This Off-Site Be Saved?” Cheryl Dahle, Fast Company,
www.FastCompany.com
Leadership: Team Management Tips
Fight off team complacency: 5 strategies
#3
Soon after a team forms, the excitement often peaks. Teammates dream of big
accomplishments, set grandiose goals and promise to collaborate.
But when the initial enthusiasm dies down, the spirited atmosphere fades and a
more solemn routine emerges. Senior executives who attended the first few team
© 2012 Business Management Daily
www.BusinessManagementDaily.com
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Leadership: Team Management Tips
meetings no longer show up. New developments (or crises!) within the
organization redirect management’s focus away from the group’s activities. Some
team members start slacking off or immersing themselves in other projects,
leaving less time to devote to the group.
If this pattern unfolds at your workplace, step in and breathe new life into your
team. Here’s how:
Inject new blood.
Invite a few high-energy types to join the team. Don’t
put them in charge or they’ll threaten the team leader and the informal
hierarchy that’s already formed. Instead, just ask them to lend their talents
and revitalize the group.
Tape the team.
When a lethargic public speaker needs to liven up, a smart
speech coach will videotape the individual’s presentation and play it back.
By raising the speaker’s self-awareness, the tape serves as a training tool.
The same goes when you want to jolt a team to rise to a higher level.
Lecturing a team to improve might fall upon deaf ears, but a videotape of
their meetings can show them just how listless they’ve become.
Turn your team into trainers.
Form a new team, and ask your current
group to serve as an “advisory board” to it. Arrange for the veterans to
coach the rookies. Encourage them to share their experiences about
teamwork and isolate the kind of behaviors that facilitate more effective
collaboration. You may want to create a buddy system, whereby each
seasoned team member mentors someone in the new group.
Strip away routine.
Study how a tired team got that way. Disrupt
predictable patterns by having the group meet in new places (a nearby park,
a client’s facility, your home) and work together in new ways. Instead of
having them break into the same small cliques, for instance, juggle the mix
so that team members who normally don’t work closely together will get a
chance to know each other better. Or, instead of having them sit in the same
places, rearrange the seating configuration so that everyone’s in a circle.
Host an outing.
Invite the team to join you on a weekend hike or family
picnic. Schedule fun activities so that participants get to know each other
with their guard down. Even if you already tried this early on, do it again
now that the team has been together for a while. When the group returns to
work, they’ll have a newfound camaraderie, which will translate into more
trust and teamwork.
© 2012 Business Management Daily
www.BusinessManagementDaily.com
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