4 Ways to Improve Your Team

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I am reading a very good book from John C. Maxwell titled “The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork”. In this book, John Maxwell emphasizes the fact that as a team leader, you must ensure that your team meets the highest performance standards possible. Your team must perform or it is bound to fail. You do not want your team to be caught underperforming because at that point, you will lose control over your team. Someone above you is likely to overtake your team and do what is necessary to correct the situation. At that point, it usually requires some serious actions that could even mean lay-offs of team members or even the elimination of the entire team. You really want to notice that situation before someone else detects it so that you keep control and do what you decide to do to correct the performance problem yourself.

To help you with improving your team, Maxwell suggests 4 ways to improve your team’s performance. I’ll share them with you here.

• Improve the performance of your team members – If you see that your team does not perform as well as it should, the first thing that you need to check is whether the team members can be trained to perform better. You must always look for ways to train and improve the people forming your teams. Note that you also must not forget to improve yourself in the process!
• Add competent people to your team – Sometimes, your team members are performing well, but you discover that you will not succeed with the current team as it stands. Maybe you lack some specific competences. Maybe it is just the sheer number of people that is insufficient to do everything that needs to be done. In those cases, you will find that you need to adjoin more competent people to help you achieve what you need to achieve. You need to grow your team!
• Change the leader – When a team is composed of the right people but still does not progress, maybe it is time to look for a new leader! Or maybe some people on your team would be better suited to lead certain aspects of the project. This is tougher to do when you are the team leader yourself. You have to look at your delegation skills and see how you can use some better suited people to help you with leadership. You can keep the control of the overall project, but delegate the leadership responsibilities of certain parts to someone else if you feel it will be better for the project.
• Remove inefficient members – Finally, sometimes you need to remove inefficient members from a non-performing team. A single member can change a winning team into a losing team! In that case, you have to put the interests of the team first and remove that person from your team. For you as the leader, the team is what counts. You need to compose the best possible team and this should be your focus.

Those are the four elements that Maxwell suggests in his book. I would add things around processes and relationship myself. We might look at those in some future posts!

What about you dear leaders? Do you always focus on your team’s interests first? Do you have your own suggestions as to how team performance can be improved? Please add your comments below. I’m always happy to see them coming!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

The Leadership Cycle

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I feel starting a company, even the smallest solo company, is pure leadership. You need to create and clarify your vision, define your mission, set clear objectives, plan for action, and then take action. This can be a very stressful situation if you try to do everything at once. It can be overwhelming at times, since you feel responsible for everything. Observing myself as I start my solo company, I came up with a crude, back-to-basics description of the leadership process to help me focus on the right things. It can be summarized as follows:

• Set your objectives
• Plan for actions
• Advance according to your plan for a while
• Assess where you are
• Correct course
• Advance according to your new plan for a while
• Assess where you are
• Correct course
• Advance a bit more
• ...

As you can see, this process is a cycle that repeats itself until you reach your objectives. As you assess where you are, you also need to evaluate whether the objectives you are pursuing are still valid. Things change rapidly and you must have an open mind towards changing your destination.

The time between the planning phase and the assessment can vary greatly from one individual to the next, between one methodology and another. For instance, the Agile software development methodology says that this “action time” must be very short. Other software development methodologies are not asking the same pace for assessing projects. I personally favour short action time periods because it is more forgiving. It allows you to correct course before the deadline is reached!

To assess where you are, you need to be able to measure where you are. Qualitative objectives must be turned into measurable goals to ensure that you know when you reach the objectives or when you go astray. This is essential to the success of any enterprise. If you cannot measure when you meet your objectives, when will you be able to celebrate your successes?

The one thing that this leadership cycle breaks is the illusion that everything must always be perfect for you to succeed. You can always correct course and repair your mistakes as you advance in your project. Of course, some mistakes will be tougher to correct than others, but until the deadline, you still stand a chance to succeed. Your success will be better measured by your resilience than by the amount of mistakes and problems that you encountered in your journey. I would even say that mistakes are not that important; how you, as a leader, respond to the challenges encountered is what really counts. I personally feel that this thought is reassuring and allows me to take action despite my fear of doing something wrong.

What about you dear leaders? Have you ever noticed this leadership cycle in your practice? Are you accepting mistakes and correcting course as you go? Let us know what you think by adding your comments below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Authenticity

Dear Managers and Leaders!

As a leader, you are asked to get in front of the pack, to distinguish yourself by your ideas, actions, and energy. This has the potential to impact your current life and change yourself in many ways. Tackling a leadership position also means that you are responsible for the work and life of a number of people. So you cannot only think about yourself anymore. Other people are now part of your life. It is somewhat similar to raising kids. You are responsible for the people you lead just like you are responsible for the kids you raise.

Because of this high impact on you and others, the decision to tackle a leadership role should not be taken lightly. It needs to be done for good reasons. It should not be done simply to get a promotion or to get a higher pay check. Neither should it be done to impress your family or your friends. Those types of motives based on image and social standing will likely lead you and your team to disappointment, loss of purpose, failure, or even burn out! People would also see through those motives and would not really be ready to follow you in your endeavours. As Kevin Cashman is writing in his book “Leadership from the Inside Out”, the question is “Do you want to look good or do you want to make a difference?”

Genuine, authentic motivations are essential to succeed in leadership. Leadership must come from inside yourself and be authentic. It should not be guided by external desire. Leadership for leadership leads to nothing. To be effective, leadership must be grounded in reality and needs to originate from an internal movement towards an external change.

What about you dear leaders? Why are you leading? Why are you putting yourself in a riskier position? Is it to get more recognition or because you have a profound desire to make a difference? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools: Being Asked Questions

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last four posts, I classified questions into the two broad categories of open and closed questions and then looked at a list of open questions to clarify a vision. I also looked at implicit and explicit questions to say that implicit questions can be dangerous for leaders and urged you to be as explicit as possible with your requests. I then talked about constructive questions. Today I conclude my journey into the world of questions as leadership tools by looking at questions from a different angle: people asking you questions!

So far in our analysis of questions as leadership tools, we have only looked at one side of the coin. We only looked at the leader asking questions to various people, in various formats. But is the questioning supposed to go in a single direction? Should it always be the leader asking questions? I personally feel that it is crucial for a leader to be constantly questioned, challenged. A good leader should be open to comments because being questioned and challenged means that the resulting ideas or plans will be stronger, better thought out.

A good leader is not there to win an argument or to crush his opponents. A good leader exists to achieve his purpose in the best way possible. He welcomes, even invites, constructive feedback, critiques, and challenges from everyone to reinforce his ideas, to fine-tune his plans.

Some leaders feel threatened when being questioned by their teams. However, I feel that it is quite re-assuring when your ideas are questioned by your team or others. Having multiple people discussing the best way to attack a problem always leads to a better solution, one that encompasses a broader spectrum of possibilities. A team questioning what is happening also shows a lot of interest and concerns. This is huge for a leader! You should be grateful when it happens.

What about you dear leader, do you feel good when being questioned by your teams and others? Is your commitment to your purpose and mission so strong that you openly accept input from everyone? Please question my thoughts by adding comments below.

This concludes our series on questions as powerful leadership tools. I hope you enjoyed the last five posts on that topic. Thanks for following!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools: Constructive Questions

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last three posts, I classified questions into the two broad categories of open and closed questions and then looked at a list of open questions to clarify a vision. I also looked at implicit and explicit questions to say that implicit questions can be dangerous for leaders and urged you to be as explicit as possible with your requests. Today I continue my journey into the world of questions as leadership tools by providing an analysis of constructive questions to help you find the right questions to move your team forward.

For a team to move forward and go beyond what they are usually producing, it needs to be able to get out of their normal ways of thinking about problems and shift their paradigm. As a leader of the group, you need to lead your people into doing this. You need to move them along the way of innovation.

Telling people exactly where you think they should go, or exactly how you think about a given situation may help, but it will generally not produce lasting effects or allow the team to actualize the thinking. A far more powerful leadership technique is to bring people to find their own solutions or shift their paradigm by themselves. Asking the right open questions allows a leader to do just that. It stirs the group in the right direction, but the group still finds its own answers, its own solutions.

According to the book “Savoir innover en équipe” from Sébastien Beaulieu and Luc-Antoine Malo that I already discussed here in a previous post, there are three aspects that can be used to create constructive questions that will bring a team further:

• Situation logical levels
• Time
• Perceptual positions or the position of the observer

There are 6 logical levels that can be used to look at all facets of a situation:

• Environment – where and when, what is the context
• Behaviour – what, which actions
• Strategies – how, in which way, with which tools
• Values and beliefs – why, according to which values
• Identity – Who am I, how do I perceive myself
• Purpose – For who, for what

Time means past, present, and future. You can play with time as you ask questions to your team to place them in different context and to make them understand and focus on the timeline of events. To move people on timeline, simply change the verb tense.

The perceptual positions are more subtle. The first position is what I see, how I look at the world. The second position is how you see me. The third position is how an observer would see us while we discuss. The forth position is how someone would look at me, you, and the observer. As you can see, there are different ways to look at a situation depending on who looks at it. There is what I see, what the other see, what the other thinks I see, what I think the other sees, what an observer thinks of our relationship, etc. There are multiple ways of looking into a problem depending on where you put the observer.

Now let’s look at a how you can use these three elements to create constructive questions that will move your team along. The first thing you can do is to mix and match time and the logical levels in the first position to ask your team things like the following:

• What belief led me to think that way? - (past, values and beliefs)
• For what, for whom do I act this way? What purpose does it serve? – (present, purpose)
• What will I do to achieve that goal? - (future, strategies)
• In which context will I make this presentation? Who will be part of the audience? - (future, environment)
• What did I do to make that person cry? – (past – behaviour)
• How will I feel if I took this leadership role? – (future, identity)

As you can see, there are multiple ways to mix time and the 6 logical levels in the first position.

Let’s now look at a few examples in the second position to give an idea of what this looks like.

• Why did you do that? What was the purpose of this action? – (past, purpose)
• What role do you think you will have in this situation? – (future, identity)

You can also place yourself in the second position to explore the impact you have on others.

• Why does he think I’m doing that? What values does he think drive me in that direction? – (present, values and beliefs)

If you place yourself in position 3, then your question forces people to take a look at the entire system at play, but you are still part of the system. It is not about you or I in our relationship, but rather about our relationship itself. Here are two examples:

• Why are we always fighting? – (present, behaviour)
• What will be the essence of our team in five years? – (future, purpose)

In position 4, you observe the system and you are external to it. You look at it from a bird’s eye.

• What position should that team have in the context of the entire enterprise? – (present, identity)
• Why are they still fighting? – (present, behaviour)

As you can see, helping your team analyze their situation using constructive questions built around time, position of the observer, and the logical levels can help them advance to the next level of understanding. It can clarify their vision of the present and help them create a better future. Have you used similar questions in the past? Were they successful at engaging people in a constructive dialog and at looking into the future with clarity?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools 3: Implicit Questions

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last two posts, I classified questions into the two broad categories of open and closed questions and then looked at a list of open questions to clarify a vision. Today I continue my journey into the world of questions as leadership tools by exploring a different classification of questions: implicit and explicit questions.

According to the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition), explicit means

“Fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity.”

Explicit questions are thus questions we ask directly to people. For instance, we meet with someone and we ask him or her how that project is going, or when that product will be delivered to a customer. Or we send someone an email asking if she wants to go for lunch at noon today. Explicit questions can be open or closed, but explicit questions are directly asked to your interlocutor. They can be live during a face-to-face meeting or written in an email you send to someone.

On the other hand, implicit questions are just implied. They are never expressed, never clearly stated. `For instance, you may want to know as soon as possible when a task gets delayed in a project you manage. However, you take for granted that people know about that requirement and never said it clearly to your team. This becomes an implicit question for your team, a behaviour you expect people to have even though you never explicitly required it from your team. How will you react when a task is delayed but no one tells you about it? Who would really be to blame in this situation?

As you can see, implicit questions are tough for leadership. If a leader’s requirements or expectations are not clearly expressed to the team, it inevitably leads to disappointment and hardened relationships. The leader expects something implicitly but never explicitly formulated his requirement. When the requirement is not met, the leader might get upset although he has no real right to be. It can then be quite disconcerting for the followers who did not know they had to meet an expectation they never heard about.

Leaders should be as explicit as possible!

To avoid problems with implicit questions, Thomas Kolditz in his excellent book “In Extremis Leadership” urges leaders to be as explicit as they can with their communication expectations. He tells leaders to make it crystal clear what needs to be communicated to them, especially for critical situations. As an example, he gives a list used in the US army called “the commander’s critical information requirements”. Here is the list he provides:

• Death or hospitalization of an organization member or immediate family member
• A life-threatening, lost time accident occurring within the organization
• Major theft or felony crime committed in the organization
• Significant threat to the organization’s core mission
• Legal action or credible exposure to legal action, such as damages caused by an employee in the conduct of duties
• Organizational exposure in the media, such as a positive or negative newspaper story mentioning the organization, or a visit to the organization by a journalist

The list is a bit biased towards a military setting. However, it has the benefit of making clear what some leaders would have taken for granted and left as implicit questions for their team.

I invite you to take a look at this list and to build your own list. What events in your organization should trigger immediate communication to you? Are you sure that your team is clear about those events? Do you need to make it clearer so that no one will ever wonder whether such and such information should be communicated to you? How often do you repeat this message to your team? Are you sure that people still remember your questions? Are you sure they have not turned implicit?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions Analysis: Vision Clarification

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my last post, I classified questions into two broad categories: open and closed questions. I also promised that the next few posts will also discuss questions as tools for leaders. So, today, I continue our exploration of the world of questions, but looking at a very practical issue this time. You have a vision of something you want to accomplish. I will present a list of open questions that you can ask to clarify that vision.

Note that this set of questions is taken from the book “Savoir innover en équipe” (Know how to Lead your Team to Innovation – my translation) by Sébastien Beaulieu and Luc-Antoine Malo. It is an excellent little book, full of practical advices, that explores the concept of generative collaboration of Robert Dilts. Unfortunately, I do not think it has been translated into English yet.

OK, so you have a vision of something that you want to accomplish. What would be good open questions to ask to make sure that the vision is clear and that you stand a chance to succeed? Here is the list:

1. What do you want to accomplish? – The answer to this question represents where you want to go. It describes the final future state you want to accomplish.
2. What will tell you that you successfully accomplished your vision? – This will provide you with a way to clearly establish objective criterion for success. Often times, we start an enterprise without knowing how to define success. This can lead to never ending projects, ill-defined goals, and lack of motivation towards accomplishing the goals. If you want to know when you’ll arrive at destination, you need to draw the finish line first.
3. What resources will you need to accomplish your vision? – This is the list of things you need to bring with you for the journey. What do you need to be able to accomplish your vision? What are the people, the material, the knowledge that you need to successfully reach your destination?
4. What are the advantages and downsides for your team members, your team, and other actors of the system? – What will be the impact of this vision on the people you lead, on your team, and on other people important to your organization?
5. What will happen if you do not accomplish your vision? – Answering this question should bring you a sense of urgency and gauge the importance your vision has for you. This question should help you bring purpose into your project of accomplishing your vision. Without a clear understanding of the purpose of your mission, it could be quite difficult to keep your motivation and the motivation of your team up in face of adversity.
6. What are the steps to accomplish your vision? – This is the project planning per say. The fact that you understand the steps required will allow you to define clear milestones along the way and secure early wins. This is important for motivation and control.
7. What minuscule change can you do today towards your vision? – This ensures that you turn your plan into action as quickly as possible. It ensures that you will not postpone until tomorrow what you can do today. It also enhances your accountability and checks that you really want to implement your vision now.

What about you dear leader, are you asking these types of questions before you jump into a new endeavour? Do you make sure that you put everything in place and thus ensure success before you commit yourself to a project? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Questions as Leadership Tools

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Asking good questions is crucial for a leader for many reasons:

• It allows the leader to monitor the various actions that are under his control and ensure that everything gets done on time and meets expectations.
• Good questions also direct people in the right direction, ensuring that everyone works towards the leader’s vision.
• It allows a leader to correct course and highlight mistakes on the fly, but by making the people realizing their mistakes themselves which is less confronting.
• Questions also constitute a powerful tool to show team members that a leader cares deeply about what they are doing and wants to understand where they are, what they are doing, how they are doing it, and where they want to go.
• By asking questions instead of giving all the answers, a leader gives his team a lot of autonomy and respect. The team members must come up with their own answers instead of waiting to be told what to do.

Since questions are so central to a leader's life, I think it is important for the Manager's Corner to spend some time studying the question (punt intended). So, this and the next few posts will explore the world of questions as leadership tools. This first post of the series is a quite simplistic view of questions. We will dig deeper in subsequent posts.

I think questions can be divided into two broad categories: closed questions and open questions. Closed questions are used to check or monitor. They are often about facts finding. They can be yes/no questions. They are more related to the world of management. The following questions are examples of closed questions:

• Have you completed this assignment?

• Is it going to be ready on time?

• When will you arrive at the meeting?

Open questions, on the opposite, don’t have a right or wrong answer. They are used for investigating opinions or exploring the mind of the person in front of you. Open questions are more related to the world of leadership. For instance, the following questions are open questions:

• What do you think of this process?

• How can we improve this situation?

• What do you think would be needed to achieve this?

It is important to note that both types of questions are very important but they cannot be used interchangeably. Some situations ask for closed questions and some ask for open questions. As a leader, you must be careful not to mix up the two types of questions. When you want facts or a yes/no answer, don’t ask an open question because you will not get what you want as an answer.

It is also important to note that your attitude when receiving the answer has to be different whether you asked an open or a closed question. For a closed question, you need to get all the facts you need or a yes/no answer. You can be strict about it, and you should be. If a question demands a yes/no answer, do not accept anything else. It is your right and your duty.

On the other hand, if you asked an open question, you need to listen carefully to what the person will answer and analyse the answer, possibly asking further questions. You need to respect the answer given to you. For instance, if you ask someone his opinion about a process you are using, you need to respect the answer even if it does not go in the direction you wanted!

What about you dear leader, are you asking a lot of questions to your team? When being led, do you prefer being asked questions or getting all the answers from your leader? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Finding Your Purpose

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I’m back from vacation today. It was good to be out for more than a week, but I’m now really happy to be back to the grind! I’m rested and full of ideas and energy for the year to come! It is great to be with you again!

I think the way you feel when coming back from vacation tells a lot about how you feel about your job. This year feels so great in comparison to the past couple of years. Back then, coming back from vacation was less than exciting for me! All the energy gained back during vacation was gone the minute I entered the office. All the positive thoughts and good intentions I had about work while on vacation suddenly vanished when faced with the barrage of emails and the meetings I faced the first morning. I think this attitude clearly shows the number one problem I had back then: lack of purpose.

When working is “just a job”, when you do not feel energized to go to work in the morning, you should question your purpose. Do you know WHY you do all that work? Are you able to link your actions to some higher level mission or intention? What are you trying to achieve? If you cannot answer these simple (actually tough) questions, you will likely not be really motivated by your work. If, on top of that, you work really hard and are under a lot of stress, then you will face burn out soon.

As a leader, I think it is your own responsibility to find your purpose and then communicate it to your followers. Without purpose, you will not be able to create a vision for yourself and for your group. Without that clear vision, it will be very difficult to motivate yourself and your followers, and drive you all in a good direction. It is essential to have a strong purpose and clear vision to be able to prioritize your tasks and be able to say no in a positive way. Your purpose should always drive your actions. Without purpose, people will drive your agenda and you will lose ownership of your life.

So, how do you find your own purpose? I am reading a book called “In Extremis Leadership” written by T.A. Kolditz and I find one of his ideas really interesting. He says that to find purpose in what you do, think about how your business impacts people’s lives, how you change the life of others by your actions, by the work you do. So, when asking yourself why you are doing the job you do, look for answers in the way your job or you impact the lives of others. You will likely find a powerful purpose and regain motivation. This purpose is what will fuel your energy and secure your focus in tough times.

What about you dear leader, do you feel energized when coming into work in the morning? Do you have a strong sense of purpose for the work you and your team are doing? Do you know how your work impacts other people’s lives? Please share your thoughts with the other readers by adding a comment below.

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, please visit www.innovachron.com or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.