Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

leaders

Is Your Team Costing the Company Money?

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Is Your Team Costing the Company Money?
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Three Trust Indicators

You can talk all you want about time management tactics, learning how to facilitate critical conversations, and mastering conflict resolution.

But unless your team enjoys a high level of trust among its team members, none of these wonderful skills will help your team’s performance.

In fact, your team may be costing your company a lot of money.

Signs of an Unhealthy Trust Quotient

Here are some signs your team may have an unhealthy (and therefore costly) trust quotient.

  • Everything takes longer and seems harder for team members.
  • People don’t do their best work.
  • They easily become disengaged and withdrawn.
  • Their confidence in themselves and others on the team diminishes.
  • They have feelings of complacency or even fatigue.
  • They are not as prone to connecting with each other or sharing information.
  • Grousing about the company may be a common theme.
  • Some might even question if the enterprise is a right fit for them.

What It Is Not

These signs are not to be confused with team overload, where a company over-commits, and its results are felt throughout the organization with inappropriate workloads and deadlines. No, this is not overload.

What It Is

This is a falling away from former collaboration. It’s an unwillingness to participate by speaking up. It’s a reticence to take risks together, and an uncomfortable commitment to the status quo. You may see things like escalated emotions, turf issues, abdication of responsibility or micromanaging, and certainly some hidden agendas.

As you consider what comes with low trust, you can easily deduce what this means to the company.

What do you do when you detect signs that your team needs to build more trust?

You need to determine the source of this lack of trust so that you can rectify it.

According to researchers Dennis Reina, PhD; Michelle Reina, PhD, and David Hudnut, MIA, renewing trust can result in greater accountability, effectiveness, innovation, respect, performance, profitability (need I go on?). The researchers have developed a Team Trust Scale that measures three areas: trust of character, trust of capability, and trust of communication.

How does your team rate?

I have taken the researchers’ indices of a high level of trust in these areas and paraphrased statements with which you and your team members can rate yourselves.

Using a scale of 1-5, with 5 being highest. How do you rate?

Trust of Character

  • I manage expectations
  • I establish boundaries
  • I delegate appropriately
  • I encourage mutually-serving intentions
  • I keep agreements
  • I am consistent

Trust of Capability

  • I acknowledge people’s abilities and skills
  • I allow people to make decisions
  • I involve others and seek their input
  • I help people learn skills

Trust of Communication:

  • I share information
  • I tell the truth
  • I admit mistakes
  • I give and receive constructive feedback
  • I maintain confidentiality
  • I speak with good purpose

How did you do? And where do you need to shore up first, in order to make biggest impact in up-leveling team trust?

Four Types of Leadership Behaviors You Can’t Do Without

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Four Types of Leadership Behaviors You Can’t Do Without
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How many leadership behaviors have you read about? Ten? Twenty? Another number?

Pretty mind-boggling, isn’t it? And if you are like many, such a sea of varying information can cause you to simply put the latest article aside and go back to doing things the way you know how.

In the world of leadership development, schools of thought are just as varied, and this means that I, as executive coach, can choose to use an assessment that evaluates 10 areas, or 26 areas.

So, now what?

If you are seeking to fast-track your leadership in this new year, I advise that you focus on enhancing just a small subset of four leadership behaviors.

Just four areas.

New research reveals that these four types of leadership behaviors account for 89% of leadership effectiveness, especially for front-line leaders. (Source: McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index https://www.mckinsey.com/)

McKinsey & Company surveyed 81 organizations, diverse in industry and geography (agriculture, consulting, energy, government, insurance, mining, and real estate in North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe).

The results showed the following four areas of leadership to be most important, explaining 89% of the variance between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness.

  1. Supporting others.
  2. Solving problems effectively.
  3. Operating to follow through for results.
  4. Seeking different perspectives.

What does this mean for you?

Well, what it doesn’t mean is that you just need these four and then you can sit back and relax. But what it does mean is that, as you review your leadership commission and where to start, it may well be with these four.

Rating yourself on a scale of 1-5, how do you feel you measure up?

I’ve included some reflective questions to help you begin your assessment:

Supporting others.

Do you operate with authenticity, and show a sincere interest in those around you? Do you seek to inspire and build trust? Are you adopting the approach “tough on issues, tender on people”?

Solving problems effectively.

Are you thoughtful as you analyze and consider best options for action? Do you seek to be proactive in identifying and anticipating challenges, and to come up with solutions, rather than to react too quickly without the information you need, risking a poor decision?

Operating to follow through for results.

Do you marry vision and supporting strategy to action? Have you mastered the behaviors required to meet your goals and objectives, and can you manage people, products, and process effectively so that outcomes are a reflection of your best work?

Seeking different perspectives.

As esoteric as it sounds, do you “seek first to understand, then to be understood?” (Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People). Do you ask your team members to contribute ideas for performance improvement? Are you keeping the pulse on changes in the environment that are likely to influence your company and your work?

Developing any one of these four is a game-changer, and I will tell you frankly that you probably won’t do this alone. Why? It is one thing to be self-aware about the changes one needs to make, and it’s quite another to be able to effectuate those shifts and make them part of who you truly are. You will need to tap into some kind of expert support to step into more of this potential.

This said, the first step to change is to identify the needed change. So, where will you start? What will give you the greatest ROI in your own leadership?

And secondly, who might help you get there?

Three-Direction Checklist for Leadership Effectiveness

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Three-Direction Checklist for Leadership Effectiveness
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Your role requires that you lead. You may be in charge of a team, a greater area of responsibility, or even an enterprise.

Yet, if you think your job is to simply lead those who report to you, think again.

You need to manage up, down, and sideways.

Why?

Because strong team leadership is not enough to support the enterprise effectively. Research continues to prove this as we examine what works – and what doesn’t – to align culture, increase business impact, and frankly, to ensure your career success.

Effective leadership means that you need to be able to develop trust, forge shared accountability, and strengthen your influence at every level in the organization.

How do you do this? By managing this up, down, and across.

Here’s a quick checklist – can you identify where you need to strengthen your leadership in managing?

Managing Up

Are you aligned with your leader’s agenda? As you work with your CEO, your board, or other leader, are you focusing on strategic issues and demonstrating financial results? Or does your own agenda distract from these key areas, wasting time, energy, money, and brainpower?

Many a seasoned leader has fallen into complacency with what works for their particular team. In doing so, their ability to see the larger picture diminishes. If you find yourself in the latter situation, you will want to acquire or revive your company-wide lens to connect your role and your team’s charge to the organizational agenda.

Managing Down

Have you aligned your reports’ work to the agenda of the company? Or have the growing demands placed on your area strayed from the larger agenda? When I first begin work with a company in growth mode, I frequently discover that teams may be working on things that have little to do with the current company agenda.

Shifting priorities at the top means close communication at all levels to share this so that all are supporting the enterprise in their focus, responsibilities, and assigned work. When was the last time you re-examined your reports’ roles, assigned projects, and accompanying goals and deadlines, to make sure these align with the company’s direction and focus?

Managing Across

Have you aligned with your colleagues, both intra- and inter-team, so that you support shared accountability and success? Or are you shooting virtual arrows at your colleagues and their teams because they are holding you back or interfering with your ability to deliver?

The lion’s share of productivity problems in an organization result from a lack of commitment and ability to solve problems between teams. Forging strong ties and agreeing to keep communication channels open for this are key to keeping employees engaged and motivated, and your customer’s journey an excellent one.

Where do you stand as you review these three areas? What is the one thing you can do now to move forward in this area so that you can capture greater success?

Three Shifts to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions

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Three Shifts to Help Your Team Make Better Decisions
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Do you ever feel as though your team has the potential for better decision-making power, but it’s just not happening?

Are you and your team stuck in autopilot and missing out on sharpening your creative edge?

What can you do when you need to help your team make better decisions?

Help them to up their game through shifting their mental, emotional, and physical space.

Shifting Mental Space

You will need to pull your team members out of auto mode. Decisions are made two ways: the first is automatic, instinctive and emotional; and the second is deliberate, slow, and logical. Teams, like individuals, can hit a comfort level in their performance and slide into autopilot when making decisions. This is dangerous, because sliding into autopilot does not require our full attention and this means drifting into limited, biased thinking and missing some pretty important stuff.

When I work with teams to sharpen their competitive edge, I often find that they are stuck because of biased thinking. This is not unusual – we all have biases. These biases are formed by making sense of our world so that we can navigate with a feeling of safety and security. But these biases also get in the way of our best thinking – our out-of-the-box, creative, innovative thinking – that allows us to develop a competitive edge.

What is a tip-off that your team suffers from biased thinking? Language.

Statements like, “That won’t work because…” or “We’ve always done it that way…” “We just don’t have the workforce/budget/green light/(fill in the blank with your own) to be able to do that…”

A simple shift in language may be all you need begin stepping into better thinking. Instead of asking the question, “What should we do?” ask the question, “What could we do?”

What if the limiter did not exist? What if the budget problem was not there? Step outside the box for a moment and start brainstorming. Then, only when you have come up with the “what,” do you back into the “how.” Ask the question, “How might we accomplish this with a limited workforce? Other?” Get creative.

Shifting Emotional Space

Personal agendas and turf issues may interfere with best team thinking. However, once your team is in “brainstorming mode,” its members will be less likely to call themselves out on any personal agendas they have which are holding the team back from its best decisions. A case in point is with a recent client’s top executive team that could not seem to arrive at a decision regarding how to proceed with plant expansion. Arguments for over-extension, no budget, and other deterrents kept coming up in conversation.

Finally, I asked the following question: “If these things were not an issue, what would you need in order to feel comfortable about expanding?”

Mumbling somewhat, two of the executives questioned who would be overseeing the process and the new plant. Then one finally said, “Well, it doesn’t feel good knowing that this might pare down my area of responsibility. If that happens, my career track will slow down tremendously.” The other executive nodded in agreement. And there it was – the real issue. The fear of losing political ground and potential for greater leadership was getting in the way.

I’m happy to say that we figured out that situation to everyone’s ultimate satisfaction. But how do you get in front of this kind of scenario so that it doesn’t slow down or interfere with the group’s best decision-making?

Ask the following at the beginning of the process: “What are the concerns each of you has that we will need to take into account as we explore options?” And give time for each of them to explore their thoughts with the rest of the group. This will uncover limiters that even they didn’t know they had until given the opportunity to reflect. Once you have everyone’s feedback, you’ll want to let them know that if they will just face into some out-of-the-box thinking with you, you’ll then make every effort to make the decision a win-win for everyone.

Shifting Physical Space

Take your team out of the office. Get them into a different physical environment.

Let’s face it – it’s tough to change ways of thinking overnight, and you will need to incorporate the approaches I’ve outlined above over time to realize greatest gains. Meanwhile, work calls and decisions must be made now. To get your team members to begin thinking more creatively and with greater attention, get them out of the office and their work attire.

Book a space at the beach, mountains, or other location that removes them from “office think.” Start your time by asking each of them how life is right now, whether they are renovating a home, planning a vacation… In other words, connect on a personal level before business. Then, frame the meeting with a fun exercise to foreshadow creative decision-making before you get into the meat of the meeting.

One exercise for this that I like a lot is Karl Duncker’s Candle Problem exercise. Duncker was a psychologist who developed this exercise in the first part of the 20th century to test functional fixedness and cognitive bias.

Subjects are given a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a box of matches, and asked to fix the lit candle to the wall so that it will not drip wax onto the table below. Because the objects are so familiar, this makes it difficult for the subjects to think past using them in abnormal ways.

If you would like to learn more, and discover the solution, see this YouTube video or this short Wikipedia write-up that explains it.

The next time you and your team have some important decision-making at hand, try these three shifts, and let me know how this worked for you.

Five Questions to Make a Fulfilling Transition to Your Next Chapter

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Five Questions to Make a Fulfilling Transition to Your Next Chapter
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Since life is not static, your situation is also full of change. You may be seeking to change careers or retirement. Some of you have just sent your child to college for the first time. Your marital status or your role with an elderly parent may be in question. But, no matter what shift in life is occurring for you, most certainly you are asking yourself what’s next.

Many of us plan with new activities in mind. We see empty space ahead, and the natural human thing to do is to quickly fill this so that we have a navigable course for our days. As human beings, we don’t like not knowing what to do with ourselves.

Then, some of you are in a contemplative stage in your life where you question whether you’ve made the contributions you wanted to make. You ask yourself if you can truly make this next chapter count, making sure that it is meaningful and fulfilling.

If you are finding yourself in a position of change and you are drawing up a bucket list for your next chapter, take the time to ask yourself the following five questions in order to make your future story most meaningful.

Five Questions to Make a Fulfilling Transition

1. How do I ensure that this next chapter is most meaningful?

It’s natural to seek meaning in our lives. It answers questions such as, “How do I navigate the world?” and “Why am I here?” Human beings seek purpose to understand how they fit in, and as you shape your immediate future, it will be more fulfilling if you can relate what you do to a purpose.

For example, if you choose to shift careers, how will doing this bring more meaning into your life? If you decide you will climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, what meaning might you draw from this experience? At many levels, these two examples will provide new opportunities to learn and grow.

2. How can I make sure that whatever I choose makes a difference to others?

This question becomes even more important as we age. At a certain point in life, we begin to question what difference or legacy we have truly created. This harks back to meaning and purpose, and links it to how we have been able to positively affect others.

It answers the question, “Has my life been of worth?”

This query can be answered by identifying how we have contributed by bringing value to the world. We need not take on Mother Teresa’s commission in order to feel confirmed in this way. One of the greatest human beings who contributed to my life was a high school teacher who simply cared enough about his students to show them that he did.

3. Where in my life do I need to play bigger?

It may be that in your current situation, you have ignored some personal growth opportunities. Some of you may have something in your personal life that needs adjusting. Others may have identified a specific dynamic in your professional life that holds you back. Are you comfortable confronting conflict? Confident in presenting? Where in your life might you decide to finally tackle that one thing that keeps you in a compromising comfort zone? One of the greatest satisfactions we can find is that sense of overcoming and stepping into the success that new growth brings.

4. How shall I make this next chapter fun?

A lot of executives and business owners I coach are intent on meeting goals and getting ahead. They should be – this is their commission – to support a healthy enterprise and their own careers.

I see the same in others, whether stay-at-home parents or retirees. It can become somewhat of a dry checklist with little enjoyment, unless we ask ourselves how we can approach our work so that it is fun. When you are in a serious situation such as caretaking, this question may seem odd, but it is even more important. Levity feeds attitude, and attitude feeds soul. How can you infuse fun into your next chapter?

5. Is it possible to “have it all” in this next chapter?

What does “all” mean to you? When most ask this question, they are usually addressing that long list of activities. But if you will take a moment to step back and ask yourself what is most important to you in the coming story, what outcomes you would like to celebrate at the end of that chapter, I think you will find that your list becomes smaller, but more meaningful and full of the essential.

The greatest reward comes not from a full calendar, but from fewer, but deeper and more enjoyable experiences.

Here’s to making an amazing next chapter for yourself! Have fun with these questions, and make sure that your new story counts.