Aligning Purposes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

The other day, I participated in a webinar about personal leadership given by David Bernard-Stevens (another member of the Leaders’ Cafe Foundation). One of the central messages of the webinar was that at the core of personal leadership lies your dream or purpose. You cannot lead your life, lead yourself, without first having a vision of where you want to go. To truly feel alive and important to this world, you need to find your purpose and direct your actions and energy towards it. According to David, without alignment between your life and the purpose found within yourself, you will never feel satisfied with your accomplishments.

After the webinar, I started to think about David’s purpose-life alignment message in relation to team leadership. It soon became clear to me that if misalignment between life and inner purpose brings frustration, then misalignment between team’s purpose and team member’s purpose must also brings problems. If purposes are not aligned, then the team will drive its members in a direction that will take them away from their dreams, from their purpose. The team will ask its members to spend time and energy away from their purpose which will inevitably lead to frustration and lower performance levels.

To achieve maximum team performance, team members’ purposes must somehow align with the team’s purpose. Purposes will differ slightly between team members and these differences should direct the distribution of roles within the team. It is the team leader’s role to discover team members’ purpose and align roles with purposes. The team leader also needs to align everyone’s purpose to the purpose of the team. Only then can he achieve great team performance! The best team leaders will always find a way to get to this alignment between team’s purpose and team members’ purposes. It is vital to team performance.

As a team leader, make sure that you hire people who have purposes aligned to your team’s purpose. If you don’t pay attention to this criterion as you hire people, then you will constantly have to fight an uphill battle. The “misaligned” employees will never feel motivated to work, will hardly endure setbacks, and will rarely come up with innovative ideas. The performance of the team will suffer greatly.

On the other end, if all your employees are well aligned with the team’s purpose, you will find them highly motivated, resilient, and innovative. They will help you lead the team in collaboration. You will feel comfortable delegating important tasks to your team members because you know they also have an interest in succeeding.

I believe that defining the purpose of a team and ensuring that everyone on the team aligns with that purpose is one of the most crucial tasks of every team leader. It is a fantastic motivator and insurance to success!

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.

Your Vision in 7 Quotes

Dear Managers and Leaders!

We already discussed a few times the importance for a team leader to have a clear vision and to share that vision with his entire team. Today, I want to share a few quotes about vision with you. Some of these quotes are taken from the book "The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork" written by John C. Maxwell.

I hope these quotes will inspire you to define a clear and articulated vision, to broadcast it around you, and to live it fully.

"To have a vision gives motivation and assurance to team members."

- John Maxwell

"Every soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole."

- Bernard Montgomery

"Leaders do not need to be visionaries themselves. The vision can come from anyone."

- Ezra Earl Jones

"I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

- Michelangelo

"The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs."

- Vance Havner

"You must have long-range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures."

- Charles C. Noble

I hope you enjoyed reading these quotes and found some wisdom in them.

I also want to invite you to a free webinar I'll give on 09/09/09 from 7pm until 9pm EDT. This is part of a larger event hosted by the Leaders Cafe Foundation for the World Day of Interconnectedness. I will present two different topics:

• 3 Complementary Models of a Team
• Symptoms Leaders Cannot Overlook

But the event is a 21-hour leadership presentation marathon If you want to join me or learn more about the other sessions, send me an email at remi@innovachron.com and I'll send you all the details.

Remi Cote

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.

Give the Gift of Time

“If there is no time for reflection, there is almost no chance for improvement.”-- Fred Harburg, senior VP of leadership and management development, Fidelity Investments Company

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I was talking to someone this morning about the necessity for a leader and his team to work on important things that are not necessarily urgent. The important but not urgent things are the ones that will bring a lot of return to you and your team, not necessarily today, but down the road. As a leader, the best and most important gift you can give your team and yourself is the gift of time, time to reflect and work on important but not urgent things that matter to your team.

What are those important things that you should be working on? Well, I cannot list everything here and some items would be very specific to your situation. But let me list a few generic things that, I hope, will get you thinking some more about what is the important elements that you should spend time on. If you feel like it, please add more elements in your comments. This will help everyone with this “important” topic!

• Improve processes used by your team
• Refine your team’s sense of purpose
• Refine your team’s and team members’ specific objectives
• Better planning for your projects that includes risk analysis and mitigation
• Ensure you develop a culture for your team
• Ensure that workload is well balanced within your team
• Social bonding within the team
• Learn new skills or perfect ones that you possess
• Listen more to your team members
• Think about the next few brick walls that your team will have to face in the near future and define strategies to work around them or to tear them down before your team gets to them (that means less fire fighting!)

Now let’s face it, most leaders already have their hands full just dealing with what is urgent. Extinguishing fires every day takes up a lot of time! How can they even think about working on things that are not urgent, just important? Well, the paradox lies in the fact that, without spending time working on what is not urgent, a leader will always be stuck in fire fighting mode.

So, how can you get out of the fire fighting spiral? The first advice that I can give you is to make a conscious decision to work on important things that are not urgent. This is the first event that must occur before anything else can happen. Then, you must reserve some time every week in your agenda to work on important aspects of your work that are not urgent. Label these reserved time slots “IMPORTANT MEETING” and write them down in your agenda. Make the commitment to never remove them. My advice here would be to start small. You will see improvement even if you have a single one-hour IMPORTANT MEETING with yourself every week. This would probably be a good place to start.

Once you have the IMPORTANT MEETINGs reserved, I’d say that the next step is to come up with a plan as to what to attack first. However, don’t be too structured during those sessions. Give yourself time to brainstorm and think without too much structure. Dreaming about the future is also an important aspect of leadership...

Note that I’m definitely not the first to discuss this topic. Stephen Covey is covering this in great details in "Habit 3" of his excellent book “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”.

What about you dear leader, are you spending time working on important but not urgent elements of your work? Have you ever come to realize that this was an essential part of your work and changed your ways to “make it happen”? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn how to best approach this problem!

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 Power of Teams!

Dear Managers and Leaders!

I wanted to share something I found last night. It is, in my opinion, one of the jewels you do not find often on YouTube. Of course, it struck me from a highly emotional perspective because it reminded me of things I did in the past and team experiences I had in the past.

When you will follow the link at the end of this post, you will see a video of a jazz choir that simply does amazing things together. They sing the song Africa from Toto, without a single instrument, and they use their hands and body to simulate a storm (close your eyes at the beginning for a stunning effect). Go watch it after you’ve read this post as I’m sure you will be impressed!

So what does it have to do with leadership, management, and the power of teams, you’ll ask? Well, a choir is a team, and a very good example of a team. It has a leader (the conductor); it has team members; and the group shares a clear common objective and challenge: to perform a music piece that will impress their public.

As I was watching the video, I felt that group was a very good example of a team. So please be attentive to the following details as you will watch the video:

First, look at the singers:

• It is clear that they like what they are doing
• They have fun
• They are highly focused
• They had a tough challenge and they did it - together!
• They are proud of what they have produced (look at their faces at the end!)

Then look at the conductor

• He does not sing, but he let his people do it
• He coordinates the various movements of his team – but he does not over do it
• At times he dances at the front, more like someone who wants to raise the emotion level in his people than someone who is worried of the result
• He shows he is confident in his people. He trusts they will succeed.

I firmly believe that teams can do great things, a lot more than what individuals can perform alone. I think this choir is a great example of a team doing great things together and I wanted to share that moment with you!

What about you dear leader, have you ever led one of these super teams, the ones that truly exceed expectations? Please share your experience with us here so we can all learn about what it takes to assemble such a team!

Here is the link. Enjoy, it is Summer after all :-)!

Africa By Perpetuum Jazzile

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.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (5)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my five previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first four symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", and "Team is operating from fear". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the fift symptom: No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now.

As you lead your team, you really want to have all your team members on the same page. You want them to build the same ship, to march to the same drum beat; you want them all to be aligned with your vision. This is what you want. However, reality can be quite different from what you want! Leadership deals with human beings and human beings are diverse, understand different things even when listening to the same source, have their own agenda, and sometimes forget. To succeed in having everyone on your team focused on the same end goal requires your constant effort and attention.

That means that you must always be aware of where your people are really going, not where you think they are going. You must also constantly re-enforce communication of your vision, of where you want them to go.

Signals

So, what are the first few signals that should alert you about an alignment problem within your team? I would say the following should compel you to re-state your vision and priorities to your team:

• Bad priority call by one of your team members – If one of your team members makes a priority call that goes against what you would have made yourself, you should be alerted and try to understand why it happened and align the team member right away.

• Lack of focus, or the focus is not important to attain the vision – When you see people on your team going in all sorts of directions that are not important to the achievement of the vision, you should definitely have a talk with them and re-focus their efforts.

• Team’s ideas are going in wrong direction - In team discussions, ideas brought up by your team members are not going in the right direction. You can see that if you followed them, they would not lead the team in the direction set by the vision.

It is probably impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of signals, but you should understand the general pattern and apply it to your particular situation.

Causes

Causes of this lack of alignment in your group can be multiple. Here are a few possibilities to help you sort out what is happening in your team.

• Lack of vision from the leader – if the leader himself does not know where the team is going, then the team will have problems following the leader. As soon as the vision becomes blurry, you will see the team members actually creating their own vision, consciously or not, and follow this vision.

• Lack of communication of the leader’s vision – if the leader has a clear vision of where the team is going but if that vision is not communicated clearly to the team, then it is equivalent to not having a vision at all.

• Team does not share or embrace the leader’s vision – here we are in a situation where the leader has a good vision of where the team is going and he has communicated that vision clearly to the team. Now, if the team does not share that vision, if the team members never bought into the direction where the leader wants them to go, then the leader will always have to fight with the team to make them go where he wants.

• Vision is clear but the plan is ill-defined – everyone agrees here on a clear, well-communicated vision. However, that vision is far and away and the path to get to the vision has not been clearly established. That means that the goal is defined but has never been actualized. People see the goal but no one knows how to get there. In this case, you are not facing misalignment but rather confusion as to how to make the vision real.

• Leader did not set priorities clearly – if the team is not clear as to what the priorities are, or if everything has equal importance, then it is really difficult for the team members to make the right calls by themselves when faced with a difficult situation.

Solutions

As you can see above, your team will lose its sense of direction when a vision for the team is not clearly established and shared by your team. When team members do not know what the collective vision for the team is, they will define their own vision and act upon it. This might not be conscious, but this is what will happen because a certain vision needs to be created before action can take place. You cannot really hammer a nail if the shape of the house to build is not well defined in your mind. The problems come when people building the house together do not have the same vision of the shape of the house. The house will likely never be finished if everyone working on it had a different vision of the completed house.

Leading a team is like building a house. The team needs to share the same vision of their end product or destination otherwise nothing will be achieved despite all the effort put into it. The team needs to share a collective vision. As the leader of the team, you own that collective vision. You are responsible to make sure that the collective vision is created, shared, communicated, and acted upon.

Note that I’m not saying that you need to define that collective vision on your own. Please do not get me wrong here. It is OK, even preferable, for the leader not to create everything himself. Have your team help elaborate the vision! Have your team find solutions to their own problems as a team. This is actually extremely powerful! If you have your team participate in defining the collective vision of your team, you will see that people are suddenly engaged and the vision will be automatically shared by everyone on the team. On top of that, your team’s vision will then be anchored in reality because your team members are on the floor every day. They are connected with reality.

What about you dear leader, does your team have a clear collective vision? Do you have all your team members acting in concert and going in the same direction? Also, if you see other causes, other signals, or other solutions, please share them with this group so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, or improve their performance. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: 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 InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (2)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my two previous posts, I listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and analyzed the first symptom: A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting. Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the second symptom: Team members are not coming up with new ideas.

For a leader, getting a lot of fresh ideas from his team members is crucial. Without a good flow of new ideas coming from team members about the team’s portfolio, about the positioning of the team in the larger organization, about processes, or about the way the team is run, the leader is left alone with all the creativity. In this situation, the leader himself will have to diagnose the problems and find the solution. This is a big task for a single person. It is also likely to fail because the leader cannot know his team enough to understand every aspect of it as well as his team members do.

I believe it is natural for people to diagnose problems that are happening to them and find their own solutions to these problems. It is also natural for human beings to find ways to improve their situation. It is probably a trademark of the human race to always want to do better and always want to feel better. What that means is that the ideas are probably there in your team members’ mind even if they are not bringing them up to you.

Culture

So, how do you go about finding what is causing the problem? The first thing that I would question is the culture of the company. In some cultures, the leader has absolute power and it is not well seen for an employee to speak up, or help. If you have been leading your team for some time and your team members never came up with a complaint or an idea, then it is possible that you are in this situation. Are you bringing up issues and ideas to your boss yourself? If you do not feel comfortable to do so, it can tell you that the company culture does not allow for that at the moment.

Changing a culture is not easy, but at least this is something you can talk about openly with your team members. You can mention to them what you have observed and tell them that you would like things to change. Note that you are part of the culture and you will have to be ready to change and value the ideas that people will start to bring forth. Your reaction to the first comment that people will make will be extremely important. You will have to be open and treat this first idea with a lot of respect. You should probably publicly recognize the person who brought up this first idea to reinforce the importance of the action. Also, be patient. Cultures take a long time to change.

Bad Past Experience

The second thing that I would investigate is history. Is it possible that people brought a number of issues and ideas in the past and you did not take them seriously, ignore them, or did not take action? Is it possible that your vision is so strong that you are not open to suggestions that question its validity? You need to create an atmosphere where bringing ideas or issues is valued and show that you care and will take action when people bring up ideas.

To turn this situation around, I think you should talk to your team openly. Tell them that you recognize what happened in the past and mention that you will make sure that every idea will be treated with lots of respect from now on. Create a framework where ideas are recognized and welcome. For instance, you can keep an open list of ideas on your team’s web page with a list of actions, decision, and ROI for each of them. You can then have a contest where you recognize the best idea every quarter.

Lack of Responsibility

The third thing that I would measure is whether my team members feel responsible for the success of the team. Sometimes, team members do their job OK but don’t really value the success of their team. It is also possible that you, the leader, do not involve your team members in the team’s decision making and solution finding, not allowing your team members to take ownership of the team's success.

It is your role to make your team members feel responsible for the success of their own team. You need to give them a vision that they buy into for the future of the team and start involving them in the solution finding and decision making for the team. You need to create a sense of urgency around the success of the team and ensure that people feel their team is important and real. Challenge them to improve products or the team itself and then put the people in a context where they have to find problems and solutions. Open the door to getting help from people and you will see your team members unite to help you.

What about you dear leader, do you see other reasons why people would not bring up issues or propose ideas? Do you have other suggestions to stimulate team members to bring more ideas to the table?

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that create a great framework to involve your employees and get their ideas. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

Six Symptoms Leaders Should Take Seriously

Editor’s note: This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: LinkedIn Forum Specific Discussion. The author would like to thank everyone who participated in the lively discussion for their knowledge and generosity.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

Most people are aware that there are some health symptoms that should be taken very seriously. For instance, if you start sweating badly and if you feel intense pain in your left harm and having chest pain, then you will likely run to the hospital because you know those are symptoms of a heart attack. Similarly, if you eat nuts and you start to have problems breathing and feel pain in your throat, then you will also run to the hospital because you know that you are probably allergic to nuts!

Similarly, there are some symptoms that leaders should be aware of. I will list six of these symptoms here today and will elaborate on them in subsequent posts. I hope you will find them useful. This is not an exhaustive list and I invite you to add more items to this list by posting comments below. Leaders, like human beings, must be aware of a lot of these symptoms to keep their teams healthy! Sharing your ideas here will help everyone.

• A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting.
• Team members are not coming up with new ideas.
• Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries - Mediocrity is the norm, lack of motivation to move beyond their comfort zone.
• Team is operating from fear - Lack of transparency, sharing of knowledge, or voicing of opinions. People start saying "yes" instead of questioning your decisions.
• No one seems to know what’s urgent and what’s crucial, or at which point we are right now.
• Resistance to change.

What about you dear leader? Are you attentive to other symptoms? Do you have other events or feelings lighting up that light that tells you that something is not right and you need to do something about it? Please share your thoughts by posting a comment to this blog!

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.