Teams need goals. Ideally, those goals mesh with the personal goals of the individual team members. But if you start a team – or try to regenerate an existing one – with a goal-setting exercise, you’re missing a vital step, says best-selling author Jon Gordon. You need each team member first to make seven commitments that will help the team be effective, so you can achieve those goals.
“Your goals will not take you to where you want to go but your commitments will. Your commitments are greater than your goals,” he writes in The 7 Commitments of a Great Team.
Those commitments are:
- Commit to the vision and mission of the team: It’s easy for teams to become divided, as members head in different directions. You need to agree on a common mission and all stay committed to rowing in the same direction.
- Commit to staying positive together: In the book’s fable where he outlines his approach, Mr. Gordon has a college football coach tell his players, “I’ve seen too many teams lose their way and their seasons because of negativity. Too many allow fear, frustration, adversity, complaining and energy vampires to sabotage their team.” There will be times when you or your colleagues feel frustrated and downbeat thoughts and doubts will crop up. Commit to staying positive together.
- Commit to giving your best: That leads us to think immediately about hard effort but is actually only part of the commitment. You must be consistent and disciplined with your actions, habits and routines. And, he argues, the driving force behind that comes from devotion to the team and the mission. “Devotion gives you power. It causes you to care more,” he says.
- Commit to getting better: He warns that complacency and arrogance are the enemies of teams. What made you – and the team – good in the past will not make you great in the future. You have to continually improve and get better.
- Commit to Connect: A team should be cohesive and unified. “The more connected we are the more we are one. The more we become one, the more commitment, power and grit we have together,” the football coach advises his team – and your team.
- Commit to each other: Team members must commit to serve and sacrifice for each other. That doesn’t mean, however, becoming docile, swallowed up by the group. He stresses team members should be willing to challenge each other to be better, not quietly and meekly sit back. Some questions for you to answer: What will you do to be a great teammate? How will you sacrifice for your team? What will you give up? What will you give?
- Commit to valuing each other: He wraps his message here around the letters in the word Value: Validate, appreciate, listen, understand and empathize.
Harvard Business School emeritus professor Michael Beer echoes many of those ideas when he addresses how to make an organization’s top leadership team effective. He points out that sometimes such teams are a group of strong players but not a team – rarely meeting and not sharing the same viewpoints. They work at cross-purposes rather than acting out of shared purpose.
“Meetings are often too short and scheduled too infrequently to discuss ways of keeping up with changing circumstances. Top teams should meet at least once a week to communicate changes in the organization’s strategy and keep the team on the same page,” he writes in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge.
He offers these tips:
- Come to meetings ready to be a part of a cohesive team: Exchanging ideas is critical for a top team to be effective. It’s not enough to simply show up. Team members must actively engage in conversations and contribute their perspectives for the greater good of the organization.
- Remain open to learning: “Team members must be eager to resolve differences and agree to the best solutions based on facts. It’s important to listen with an open mind, appreciate the value of diverse viewpoints and create an environment where every member feels heard and valued,” he says.
- Assess your team members’ interdependence: The top team members must actively work together and so must the departments and functions they head. Are the folks within them co-ordinating their decisions with each other? If a new product is being launched, is the required tight co-ordination evident between sales, marketing, research and development and manufacturing?
- Invest the time and resources necessary to develop the team: The executive team must actively work at building and being a team, as Mr. Gordon stresses with his seven commitments. Prof. Beer says one reason so many top teams are ineffective is that CEOs and general managers of business units do not invest sufficiently in the process of creating the right teams with the right players to begin with. “They let a sense of urgency in getting daily tasks in the organization done drive out this important task. Instead, CEOs should allocate time for teams to examine, discuss and deal with concerns they have about their team,” he writes.
Teams can be magical. But they don’t magically become effective, even if we often assume creating one and giving it our best wishes will be sufficient for success. It takes thought, attention, and ongoing commitment.
Cannonballs
- You ignite a fire when you admire, says leadership coach Dan Rockwell. List the people you regularly interact with and complete this sentence: “I admire…” Before each one-on-one, think of three things you respect about the individual. “Admiration sees a future that could be – but isn’t yet,” he says.
- Korn Ferry consulting notes we’re in the middle of a Boomerang Binge. In the United States, so-called boomerang employees, returning to a company where they had worked previously, accounted for 35 per cent of new hires in March. “They’re going with a known commodity,” says Tamara Rodman, a Korn Ferry senior client partner in the firm’s Culture, Change and Communications practice.
- When you have to make a quick decision, leadership coaches Karin Hurt and David Dye say you should still reach out to the few people who truly matter before deciding. Tell them what your inclination is and ask them what you might not be seeing or properly weighting. Ask: “What would you watch out for?” Or: What’s one thing you would do differently?” They stress: “When time is tight, you’re not asking for approval. You’re asking for insight.”
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.