This week Aleen Bayard talks about Teamwork.

Have you ever been on a team or leading a team and things just weren’t quite right?  You couldn’t really put your finger on what was missing, or what was wrong.

Author Patrick Lencioni’s written a great book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team that helps all managers better understand and diagnose what might be not quite right about their team.  Here are the five dysfunctions that often occur.

1.     Lack of trust  - Teams with an absence of trust don’t know each other well and they’re unwilling to ask for help or say I don’t know.  This is really important particularly with complex projects or engagements or if you have got new members coming on to a team.  The ability to say “I’m not sure” about something and ask for clarification is very important. So the first thing you want to see is what’s the level of trust among your team members.

2.     Lack of conflict  - We’re talking about the ability to talk about an issue or have an honest dialogue if you’re not agreeing with someone’s position or to ask for more information.

3.     Lack of commitment – Often we agree with each other in public, then we go after the meeting and start gossiping.  If you are unable to have conflict in a team, then you are obviously not going to get to a strong level of commitment and alignment.  One way to do this is to make sure that at the end of each meeting or conversation say “Do I have everybody’s buy-in”, and if not let that person air their grievance or concern.

4.     Lack of accountability – Too often we rely on the leader to be accountable, and to hold us accountable.  We need to hold each other accountable.  That’s something you should be encouraging on your teams.  

5.     Lack of results – We don’t often have a sense of collective win.  We look at individual departments, individual agendas, or individual budgets.  Try and foster a sense of collective win on your team.

These are five elements or steps you can take to ensure a more productive working team that not only get along better and have a better rapport, but most importantly do a better job for the organisation.

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to sign up to the Every Tuesday Club with MBE (Management & Business Education), then do so today by going to www.buseducation.com.

This week in the every Tuesday Club I discuss how most of us would all like a bit of extra time in our working day.  But as you can’t buy more time, we need to do something else.

I talk about how to work smarter not harder.

1.     You need to know what your goals are to make sensible prioritising decisions to manage your time.

2.     Identify what your time wasters are.  Work out if its emails, phone calls or visitors, and put in place strategies to overcome them.

3.     Manage your work relationships.  Most of us find that the biggest thing that takes up our time is relying and waiting on others.  It’s important that others, your boss, team and other key relationships understand what your priorities and objectives are and make sure you agree on these so that you can work effectively together.

It’s worth spending some time doing this as it will save you time in the long run.

 

Let me know what you have done this week to work smarter not harder.

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to sign up to the Every Tuesday Club with MBE (Management & Business Education), then do so today by going to www.buseducation.com.

 

This week in the every Tuesday Club Steven and Carol show you how to conduct a Performance Appraisal Interview.

 

Performance Review interviews -  both managers and employees tell us they are nervous about them.  Why is that?  Perhaps it’s because they have had a poor experience previously. 

Whatever the case, as a manager you need to make sure that’s it’s effective and worthwhile for both you and the employee. 

Here’s some tips that can help :

·           Make sure that you recognise the outcome of a performance review interview should be a learning and development plan for the employee for the next 6 to 12 months. 

·           Remember, a review interview is not about a remuneration review or an opportunity to talk about really poor performance and corrective action.  It should be about developing a learning and developing plan for the employee. 

·           Therefore to make it work best, remember that you should do some preparation and make sure you give the employee a few days notice before the interview so they have a chance to prepare as well. 

·           Use documentation, with a few questions that each of you can consider in preparation for the interview. 

·           And when you are in the interview make sure you try and focus on talking about what you like as a manager going forward, rather than a history lesson on what has or hasn’t worked previously. 

 

To demonstrate some of the key points of the interview process, our HR expert Carol Shepherd will act as the Manager and Steven will act as the employee.  As we pick up the action you will see that Carol is opening the discussion with some key points.

 

Carol   “Steven just before we go into the appraisal this afternoon I just wanted to go through with you the process that we are going to use.  So what I’d like to do is to ask you how you think you’ve performed in each one of the key performance areas that are on your appraisal form, so I can get your feedback.  Then we can have a discussion around that.”

 

Carol will now show us how to give some feedback on good performance.

 

Carol   “I really want to congratulate you on the effort that you’ve put in to bring in those four big key accounts, and especially in the last quarter.  You’ve made a significant contribution to the organisation.  So whatever you’ve been doing there, is working really well obviously for you, and for the organisation.  So, great work there.”

Now Carol will demonstrate how to give some feedback on not so good performance.

 

Carol   “One of the areas that I am concerned about is the issue that we talked about a few weeks ago with perceived conflict between Jane and Mary, which has now kind of spilled over into the other team members and I know that we agreed that you would deal with that, as their manager.  I just wanted to know how you are progressing with that, and what else we need to do.”

 

Carol   “OK, so you’ve mentioned that maybe you’re a bit uncomfortable in dealing with that situation.  Would you be interested in some assistance either from myself or perhaps some training.  A conflict management workshop might give you a bit more confidence to deal with that.” 

Steven “Yes, I’d like that.”

Carol   “Have you got any ideas of your preferred way of doing that?  …….Great, I’m pleased that you are willing to go along and get some skills because managing your people is a really critical success factor for the future.” 

A critical part is to sum up and close the meeting well.  Carol is going to show us how.

 

Carol  “Steven you should be very proud of the year that you have had.  You’ve made a significant contribution to our results and exceeded the budget.  So well done for that.  The other area that we are concerned about is the people management side.  That is perhaps, maybe not your most favourite side, but let’s see if we can work on that.  As we mentioned, you are keen to have some conflict management training.  Let’s meet next Friday and look at the courses that you’ve outlined that you might be interested in attending.” 

Steven “That sounds really good.”

Carol   “Steven what we’d like to do now is, I will make sure that you have got a copy of the documentation on all the points that we have agreed on, so that we can work on the action plan for the next planning period.  I will make sure that you get a copy of that for yourself, and the other copy will go on your personnel file.  Thank you for a great year.”

 

Steven “Thank you very much, thanks Carol.”

 

I hope those tips were helpful.  Did you notice that Carol, at each stage, asked for Steven’s input as the employee, as well as having her say as manager. 

If you would like some further assistance on this topic, a ‘how to do effective performance appraisals’ workshop is being help on 25 March (Tauranga) and 29 June (Gisborne).

 

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to sign up to the Every Tuesday Club with MBE (Management & Business Education), then do so today by going to www.buseducation.com.

 

This week in the every Tuesday Club, Aleen Bayard discusses social media marketing for your business.

Many of us are wondering why we need to be so conscious of on-line media and social networks.  It’s no longer just a place for kids to meet on Facebook.    Here are some things you should be thinking about in terms of how to leverage your business on-line.

 

1.     First of all do you have a Facebook account?

Businesses today are using Facebook as a way of creating Fans to learn more about their business and to connect their customers together to create even more advocacy for their products and services.

2.     Secondly, Twitter can be an excellent way to get out immediate notification about products. Let’s say you are putting something on sale or you’re introducing a new product.  Twitter would be an excellent way to get that out to your market place.

Blogging is important, even if you don’t have a blog yourself.  You want to be checking what other bloggers are saying about your product, your staff, or your services. 

3.     And the third thing you want to think about is Linkedin.  It’s the fastest growing site for professionals. 

 

So well beyond your website you want to think about how you can use social networking to increase your reputation and your presence. 

One of the most important phenomenon here is that the organisation doesn’t only go to its customers through the website, but you are actually having your customers talk about you and become advocates for your business.  These are really important reasons why you want to think about social media.

 

Finally, are you effectively using your email?

Think about client alerts, newsletters, even eBooks.  Other things you might be able to put onto a podcast or even  on www.youtube.com     For example your CEO doing an important speech. 

 

Take a look at some recent research conducted by the Neilsen Company. 

·           Social networks and blogs are the fourth most popular online activity, ahead of personal email. 

·           And over two-thirds of the overall global online community now visit these sites.

 

That’s why it’s so important for you to have a handle on your online presence and to have an online strategy.   

 

You can see what MBE is doing on Facebook by going to  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Management-Business-Education/409875285647?ref=ts

 

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to sign up to the Every Tuesday Club with MBE (Management & Business Education), then do so today by going to www.buseducation.com.

 

 

Welcome back to the Every Tuesday Club. 

One of the biggest constants in today’s business world is dealing with change.  And no doubt, at some level you’re dealing with change right now in your organisation. 

There are three very important things you want to think about as you’re managing change:

1.         What is the level of change readiness of your department, your team or your organisation?  You can check that by figuring out how much resistance you have and how flexible or agile you are as an organisation.

2.        Do you have a change plan in place?

John Kotter is probably the guru of change management – take a look at his 8 step plan.

We found in working with clients that they often miss two or three of these critical steps.  Which ones might you be missing?

1.         Establish a sense of urgency

2.         Create a guiding coalition

3.         Develop a vision and strategy

4.         Communicate the change vision

5.         Empower employees for broad-base action

6.         Generate short term wins

7.         Consolidate change and produce more change

8.         Anchor new approaches in the culture

Most notably -is not doing a good enough job and creating a case for change.  What’s often called the burning platform.  If you haven’t communicated the rationale for a change plan, no doubt your employees will have a much more difficult job embracing it.

3.         And finally, have you built in a good transition plan?  Transition has three phases

1.         Loss

2.         Being in limbo

3.         The new beginning

 

Even if your change is overall positive, it will require some change and loss on behalf of your organisation.  For example, let’s say you are moving to a new office building, and it’s got much better equipment, and facilities.  Your employees are losing the comfort and familiarity of their old office space.  You may think there is no issue.  Why are they resisting?  But again, there is a loss involved.

So as a manager, there are three important things again that you can do:

1.         Test for change readiness

2.         Develop a thorough change management plan

3.         Properly account for loss and limbo that you will be dealing with in transition.

If you do those things, you’re guaranteed a much better success rate of any change you undertake.

 

Good luck with that and let us know how you get on.

 If you haven’t taken the opportunity to sign up to the Every Tuesday Club with MBE (Management & Business Education), then do so today by going to www.buseducation.com.