All work is done by teams. Your ability to assemble and manage a high-performance team of motivated individuals is one of the keys to your value and effectiveness as an executive at every stage of your career.
Team dynamics and group processes involving thousands of people have been studied extensively at a cost of millions of dollars. Today, we know more about how you can assemble a winning team than ever before.
Just as you use a recipe to prepare a dish in the kitchen, a specific recipe has been proven to work in building a high-performance, self-directed work team. When you apply this recipe these ideas and principles-on a regular basis, until they become habitual and automatic, you will get far greater results from your people than you ever imagined possible.
Room for Improvement
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the average employee works at only 50 percent of capacity. According to studies and observation, people spend much of their time in idle chit-chat with co-workers, surfing the internet, going for coffee, taking long lunches, reading the newspaper, taking care of personal business, and both arriving late and leaving early.
Staff costs represent 60 to 80 percent of the total cost of op-eating your business. Your job is to get your highest return possible on your investment in human assets.
Today, all work is done by teams. Unless you run a shoe shine stand, you are dependant upon many other people for the quality and quantity of your work, and many other people are depending upon you.
The manager’s output is the output of the team, and the output of the team is the manager’s output. You do not perform alone; you perform with others.
Because of this, you must have a total commitment to peak performance from every single team member if you are going to “win games.” Gaining that commitment is your responsibility.
Competence and Commitment
There are two dimensions upon which you can measure and analyze each employee: competence and commitment. These two dimensions allow you to categorize your staff into four quadrant.
Imagine a box divided into four squares. The upper-left-hand square encompasses those people who are both competent and committed. These are the outperformers, who accomplish 80 percent of the results- your most valuable people. These are the 20 percent of people that you build your business around.
The second quadrant, the upper right, contains people who are competent but not committed to you, your company, or the values that you stand for. They do a good job, but they do not
“buy in” to your business. These employees turn out to be the major source of internal and external problems. These are the people who complain, play politics, resist your authority, and often demoralize the other people around them. Your strategy with these people is to sell them on becoming good team players, as described in the next section.
The third quadrant, the lower left, represents the people who are committed but not competent. They are nice people, but they are not excellent at their work. These people can be trained. Your goal should be to give them the training and experience necessary to move them up into the “competent and committed” quadrant.
The worst employees of all are those in the lower-right-hand quadrant, the people who are neither competent nor committed.
Once you have identified these people, you must get rid of them as quickly as possible before they drag down the rest of your organization.
Four Motivation Factors
To help people become happy, productive members of the team, you must understand their motivations. People at work are most motivated by four factors.
The first is challenging, interesting work. Most people want to be busy and happy at work, doing things that keep them active and force them to stretch, to move out of their comfort zones, to continually learn and grow. People won’t buy into the goals and objectives of a team if they are given only the most mundane task.
Second, people are highly motivate by working in a high rust environment. This is create a le aware of people in the know. When people feel that they are aware of everything that affects their work and their position, they have higher levels of trust and motivation to perform than if they feel that they are being kept in the dark.
Perhaps the best way to keep people in the know, as I have emphasized throughout this book, is to have regular weekly staff meetings, where everyone gets a chance to talk about what they are doing in front of everyone else. This is one of the most powerful team building exercises of all.
Third, people are motivated by being made personally responsible for results. This is one of the most powerful tools of all to build competence and confidence in people. Give them important, challenging work to do and then support them while they do that work. The more responsibility a person takes on, the more he or she grows as a decision maker and leader and the more valuable he or she will be to your company.
Fourth, people are motivated by opportunities for personal growth and promotion. Many people will take or stay at a job that pays less than they can earn somewhere else if they feel that they are becoming better skilled and more competent as a result of the work they do. They know inherently that these additional skills and experiences will make them more valuable in the future.
Much to the surprise of most managers, money and working at work conditions are fifth and sixth on the list of what motivates people at work.
The Dynamics of Top Teams
The dynamics of top teams and the reasons for their outstanding performance have been studied for many years, all over the world. The teams in these studies had all achieved remarkable business successes.
They had reduced costs dramatically in short periods of time in order to stay competitive in tough markets. They had often reduced product development time from three years to six months. Some had created brand new products and industries in the face of vigorous competition and gone on to world domination.
