Leadership Fundamentals

Great teams don’t just happen. It takes work on the part of the Leader/Manager, as well as the individual members of the team. We can make it easier for it to happen by not creating an environment which allows office politics to interfere with cooperation, and pits one employee against another. Each member of the team will have different strengths and approaches, and that is not a bad thing. You don’t want your team to think exactly alike. Cookie-cutter team members make for a boring and less creative environment anyway.

Skills Sharing
The different natural strengths of employees are not a negative thing. In an open, sharing environment, team members will be eager to share their own skills and happy to enjoy the reward of appreciation from their other team members. In a back-biting, one-upsmanship environment, this is fairly impossible due to a lack of trust.

When people are afraid to show their weaknesses, they’re in a constant state of anxiety about being “found out”. Employees who are anxious just don’t perform as well. They spend too much time measuring themselves against other members of the team and coming up short. They may think, why did it take me more time than (choose a team member) to complete my part of the project? What kind of light does that put me in? In fact, there could be any number of valid reasons why any particular member of a team might take longer to complete their own individual assignment. Perhaps certain information was not immediately accessible, or their part of the assignment was dependent on someone else’s input.

R-e-s-p-e-c-t
It’s more than a song. If you can generate an environment of mutual respect between team members, and give them your own respect, you’ve already taken a giant step. You see, it’s not really much different from a family. Each individual is respected for their uniqueness.

If you’ve started out by hiring the best team members you can find, members that respect each other’s ideas and experience, and then you have prepared an environment where growth can take place, you’ve done a good job.

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On the right side of this blog page, you will see a link to Who Trusts You, which I encourage you to use. You choose the people to whom you want to send the rating requests, and they receive an email request to rate you and a link to the rate sheet. You will be notified by email to tell you where you can see the results. You will not see who did the ratings, but you will get some excellent input on how much you are trusted. If you haven’t done it yet, give it a whirl.

Good Luck,

Barbara

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Even in today’s economy, companies need to focus on getting and keeping good employees. In fact, with the workforce getting smaller, it is more important than ever to retain the most productive, team-oriented, creative employees.

Key Factors in Creating Job Satisfaction in Key Employees

• Eliminate boredom. Many people move on simply because they have lost interest in doing the same thing every single day. Involve them in new and interesting projects. Ask for their input on improving processes. Send them for training in new software or other work-related practices.
• Communicate! Don’t leave them guessing about what you’re thinking and doing, as well as what the company’s plans are, its financial status, and any projects under consideration.
• Reward special efforts. If you respond the same way to special and intense effort as you do to day-to-day work habits, you will take away their self-satisfaction at going above and beyond the norm.
• Compensate according to skills and creativity, so they’ll know the company is fair and recognizes excellence. You’ll end up with excellence.
• Talk to them. Be involved with them and the parts of their lives that have nothing to do with their jobs. Are they having difficulties? Did they enjoy their weekend? What do they like to do in their free time?
• Does the team work well together? If not, uncover the reasons behind this so you can eliminate them. Nothing kills job satisfaction like a team that doesn’t “fit”. Nothing does more to guarantee successful project development than an enthusiastic and well-integrated team.

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There is something extraordinary about creatives. They want to share their knowledge [which may have taken a very long time to acquire]. They can’t help themselves. I’ve been pondering this for years, trying to figure out why this is so. Since I feel the same way myself, I’ll try to explain it.

There is a certain type of person who loves knowledge for itself — not for where it can get them — and they cannot resist sharing that information with other people. They actually take a delight in giving it out freely. It makes them almost giddy.

Life can be frustrating at times for these kinds of people. They get distracted. They go off in directions they hadn’t even thought about. They pick up a piece of information, which leads to a question, which leads to more investigating, which leads to other questions — you get the picture. Yet, they digest each morsel with gusto, and continue looking for more. Along the way, they pass along what they’ve come across — because they can’t help themselves. They get excited, caught up in the joy of discovering.

They could hoard the information, making it theirs exclusively — that is, unless someone else wanted to spend hours or even days seeking the same data. It’s impossible for them to do that, though.

I wish there were a name or a classification for these people. Why? Because if you can find one, you have truly uncovered a treasure for your company. I’ve been lucky enough to have known and worked with a few. I am truly thankful for that.

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Job descriptions can be a burden. If they are too heavily detailed, it leaves little room for growth or learning new skills. They can be frighteningly specific, detail piled upon detail. A job applicant may be turned off or turned away purely by the weight of the job description. I once was handed a job description to give to HR for an open position. The itemized list of requirements were so daunting, I was taken aback. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack to find an applicant with the skill set so exactly outlined in that classified ad. Sure enough, we received NO enquiries and no resumes in the 2 weeks it was posted in the various papers (this was before internet job posting became the standard).

I asked if I could rework the ad, separating skills and experience that were absolutely required from those that would be a plus, but could be acquired easily enough on the job. The new ad was placed and we immediately began being contacted by applicants, one of which was a quite good fit and was hired.

Recently, I was doing a lot of reading about Leadership and Management excellence and I came across a sentence that has stuck in my mind – “You don’t hire the best talent – you grow it.” The book was First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, and it agreed with how I feel about job descriptions. It is just as important to find someone with drive, creativity, the ability to work as a team member, and the desire to grow. Someone with this profile will easily acquire many skills along the way, and will be appreciative of the opportunity to do so. And they’ll want to share their acquired skills with others, so now you’ve widened the group of people who work for you into a team that shares information for the good of the company. You haven’t just hired an applicant, you’ve built a foundation for excellence and the creation of a good team.

Do the members of your existing team know what’s expected of them?
Try this exercise: Ask each employee to write their own job description, based upon what they believe they should be achieving and go a step further and ask them to write what they believe is the percentage of time they need to spend on each activity and its degree of importance to the job. You may be surprised to see that their assessment of their activities do not agree with your own. They may perceive different priorities. This means that in a given day, there may be time spent on non-consequential activities which prevent them from doing the work you rate high in importance. Don’t get mad at them. This is a unique opportunity to really communicate with them. Let them know the actions they are performing that are really important to you. It always comes back to communication.

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Don’t go any further on a project until you have all that you need to in order to begin!
I consider this an important topic, because if you receive an assignment without sufficient information, it means you will be floundering, wasting time searching for data that really is not relevant to your project. Understanding the goals and the scope of the project allows you to concentrate on what needs to be done.

You must be told the expected outcome, when it is to be delivered, the budgeting for the project (if any), and what resources will be available to you in order to complete it. If you are not given this information, be sure to ask for it. Be sure the scope is specified exactly, because there is always a tendency for the scope to drift and get redefined as the project gets under way. People tend to pile on more and more requirements while leaving the delivery date the same. Of course, the delivery date gets extended again and again, the bells and whistles grow into a long list — many times with items the customer will not even care about — and the central goal of the project is now unrecognizable, late in delivery, and patched together in a shoddy way. In short, the project has failed.

Take a look at this excellent description of scope creep from Wikipedia:

“Scope creep (also called focus creep, requirement creep, feature creep, function creep) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes in a project’s scope. This phenomenon can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered a negative occurrence that is to be avoided.

Scope creep is a risk in most projects. Most megaprojects fall victim to scope creep (see Megaprojects and risk).[citation needed] Scope creep often results in cost overrun. A value for free strategy is difficult to counteract and remains a difficult challenge for even the most experienced project managers.”

I will be back with more on Agile Software Development later.

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