It’s an important question that often gets overlooked in the midst of all the bad news about the impacts of the recent recession. After all, the business media is dominated with stories about failing financial markets, bank bailouts, high employment, large numbers of layoffs, employees dissatisfied with their work, and companies calling it quits.
Most businesses, however, are surviving the recession. They might be doing so with lesser revenues, modest layoffs, hiring or pay freezes, or any other coping strategy for down times. Others are doing quite well, but may be in a holding pattern rather than expansion mode.
For those businesses clearly intending to survive the weak economy now is the time to prepare for the better times ahead. How? By building and improving your work teams so the company is ready for business expansion when the economy inevitably makes the turn upward.
The first step in team improvement is to do an honest analysis of what is working and not working today.
* Determine where the holes are in the current team culture.
* Identify if there are breakdowns in communication among team members, leaders, customers and vendors.
* Determine if your current team culture an authentic team culture or simply one by name only and if this impacts employee engagement and morale.
* Identify if your teams are already highly functioning, what can be done to maintain that valuable asset when business growth occurs?
Such an analysis is so important to moving forward that it must be done in a professional manner with employee inclusion and willingness by leaders to actually hear and understand what employees are saying.
According to team culture consultant and author of TIGERS Among Us – Winning Business Team Cultures And Why They Thrive (Three Creeks Publishers, 2010, TigersAmongUs.com), Dianne Crampton, “Most of us know about businesses that struggle to keep a team together. They are beset with unmotivated employees and experience high turnover. Too often, the best employees, seeking a more satisfying work environment, look for a way out once the economy turns around or not long after being hired.” Crampton adds, “Aligning team improvements with consciously choosing a business personality, or way of being, that allows a team to thrive is one of the most important decisions a business leader can make, and business leaders looking to expand their sales and growth often overlook it. That was why it was important to include a good team effectiveness evaluation in our book. It gives leaders a simple way to evaluate how to start a sound team improvement effort.”
Next, teams primed to move forward in a climate of company and economic growth must be true to the company’s core values and, if authentically team-based, encourage collaborative values. Indeed, having in place an authentic team-based culture ensures that in times of rapid growth the company and its teams will remain true to these core values, such as integrity, superior customer service, and a commitment to quality. Instilling collaborative values in the team culture ensures decision-making will be guided by the company’s core values. TIGERS Among Us identifies six collaborative values – Trust, Interdependence, Genuineness, Empathy, Risk, Success – that form the foundation of successful collaborations and improve a company’s core values, employee relationships and customer service.
According to Crampton, “Leaders who understand the importance of collaborative team improvements will not only find teams aligning with the company’s core values, but will also save themselves turmoil and cost inefficiencies when it is time to expand.”
Taking your team to the next level also requires a commitment to a process that ensures a teams’ “action plan” stays on track.
Therefore, a commitment to implementation, and results, requires that team leaders must take responsibility and accountability for an action plan. Team managers must ensure that notes are taken at meetings and distributed soon after to all participants. Key responsibilities should be assigned with clarity and an expectation of accountability. Deadlines should be real. Regular team meetings need to include thorough updates on progress with items in the action plan. Most important, leaders must make clear to team members responsible for implementing aspects of the action plan that managers at the highest levels of the organization support the change initiatives.
Finally, there is the issue of communication. It will be impossible to take your team to the next level without making sure clear and free communication is taking place among team members, between team leaders and team members, among company managers and team leaders, among company managers and employees, and among project managers, clients and stakeholder.
Mary McNally, president of Project Training Plus at ProjectTrainingPlus.com notes that for project managers good communication is key because “they must be skilled at taking a group of often disparate skilled individuals and quickly forming them into an effective, productive, and cohesive work team focused on accomplishing project objectives.”
“The beauty of Crampton’s book, TIGERS Among Us,” McNally adds, “is that it doesn’t merely provide a review of the basic concepts of team building, but offers us the tools and techniques essential to create teams with the six key values necessary for achieving corporate success. This book has been added to a “must-read” resource list I share with my project management students and corporate customers.”
McNally, a leading authority on PMP certification and a popular project management speaker and coach, and PMP certification exam prep instructor, stresses that “project managers spend about 90 percent of each day communicating – planning, organizing, and controlling project activities, and motivating and managing their project teams”. A project manager must foster an environment where trust, integrity, and respect are core team values to ensure project success. A project manager is capable of influencing the direction and success of a project through open and honest communication regarding project results.
“TIGERS Among Us,” she says, “supplies a framework any project manager can easily follow to build a successful project team.”
Economic forecasters say the business climate is expected to improve during the next two years. Therefore, the time is now for team-oriented businesses to prepare for expansion and revenue growth. Take steps to ensure you have an authentic team-based culture that will unleash your employees’ true human resource potential to better solve problems, create more innovation, and improve customer/stakeholder service. The reward will be increased market share over competitors who choose to hold back on taking their teams to the next level.
Claudia Craven is a TIGERS Success Series business and leadership writer at http://www.corevalues.com. For a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that predictably tear them down or to read more of Claudia’s articles in the Free TIGERS Success Series monthly e-Newsletter, visit http://www.corevalues.com.
You must log in to post a comment.