The TEAM Approach

The Hidden Cost of Involvement

Organization #1

A team member notices an inefficient step in the production process and asks their supervisor if they can discuss this. Together, they plan to do a study of this process to gather data that can be taken to management.  They complete their analysis, prepare a proposal for a solution with input from the entire team and present the findings and recommendations to top management, who implements their ideas and reports the process saves the company over $100,000 per year.

Organization #2

An employee notices a step in the production cycle that has some obvious inefficiencies. After considering taking this discovery to the supervisor, the employee decides to keep quiet remembering the result the last time they made a suggestion. As the employee ponders the situation, they begin to feel frustration, which they voice to team members who happily add their own concerns. The employee decides to be sick on Friday to try to lift their spirits with a long weekend. Two other employees must have had the same idea. The company pays for temps to keep things going. Having such a high ratio of temps on this particular team leads to a bit of confusion around key work processes and results in some significant customer errors. When the team leader is held responsible, the relationship between the team and the leader deteriorates further…

The Lesson:

The impact of involving employees and seeing them a valued part of your team can be huge! Often, managers complain that employees do as little as possible and don't take responsibily or initiative. While there certainly are employees that have personal issues with motivation (why DO you hire and then keep these employees in the first place!?!) often the answer to this challange is the relationship with the manager. How does the manager value and involve the employees in decision making, goal setting and problem solving? The final skill taught in the Essential Skills of Leadership is just that, to involve your employees in these critical team functions as often as possible. It is good for them, it is good for the company and it is good for your customers. Check with your team today: what do they see that you do not? What opportunities, problems and ideas do they have that you can use to improve and grow your business?

Whales and Humans in Distress

I was mesmerized by a story in our newspaper today of a great whale swimming down the River Thames. This was quite a spectacle I am sure, drawing huge crowds of onlookers to view an enormous Bottle Nose whale normally only found in the deep Northern Atlantic ocean, and difficult to spot event there. The story then went on to explain that the whale was likely in distress causing it to exhibit this bizarre behavior with it’s surprising visit to London.

As you would hope and expect, elaborate plans were in the making to save this great creature. A whale in distress is something that touches our hearts and we want to do all that we possibly can.  But are not we humans, also magnificent creatures? How often do we see humans on the job exhibiting somewhat bizarre behavior only to be greeted with negative feedback, reprimands or worse yet, to be completely avoided and ignored?  How often do we take the time to try and see these employees as potentially “in distress” and try to rally around them to help them return to the safe waters again?

Seeing unusual behavior as a sign of distress rather than orneriness or incompetence is a first step in helping employees through what ever the crises may be and bringing them back to the team as a fully contributing member.  But, whatever we believe may the causing the behavior we need to remind out selves that this is only our opinion and all we really know for sure is the behavior we are observing. What we must focus our discussions on, as suggested in a course called the Essential Skills of Leadership published by Vital Learning, is the observed behavior, not the attitudes that we believe may be at the root of the problem. Attitudes are difficult to change, and even more difficult to identify because we can never really know what is happening inside another person, In fact most discussions about attitudes will usually result in defensiveness and bad feelings and not positive change.  In reaching out to engage your team members who may be in some kind of distress, highlight the behavior in question in a concerned and caring way and ask the employee for their opinion. Involve them in generating solutions and watch their commitment grow. Reel them back into the team and they will pay the team back with tremendous loyalty and quality efforts.

An Open Letter to Weis Markets

I have discovered that there are many little things that make moving to a new home a rich experience. Simple changes such as finding a new place to get your groceries can be an amazing journey of discovery. This was the case for me when we moved just far enough away from my favorite grocer to require a back up store closer to my new home. Welcome to Weis Markets.

My welcome to Weis was an unforgettable experience. As I stepped out of my car for that first visit and my foot touched the parking lot it landed in chewing gum. Gum in a parking lot can really happen to any business, but this lot looked grimy. I guess with 157 stores though, that is a “lot” of parking lots to keep up with, and I am sure that Weis is too busy to care about one customer with gum on their shoes.

On my first and subsequent visits, I was amazed to find that all but one of the cashiers were bagging or teaching customers how to use the self-service scanning devices at every register forcing any customers not willing to wait for the one and only human cashier to check out their groceries themselves. I even asked a manager about this, but was told they could not find enough employees. I was really curious about the ones that were already working there, but this did not seem to go anywhere with the manager who seemed to have more important things to do than talk to customers. Perhaps I am old fashioned, but having a human at a register is one of the last few services left that I am ready to give up.

So, I wait in the long line with the one human who is paid to run the register. Opps, Can you help me?  I forgot my “Weis Store Card.” What? You can’t ring it on a generic store card like my favorite old store use to do for me? I have to wait in line at customer service so they can look it up? You can’t even call them on your phone for me? Oh, you don’t have a phone at your register, do you? Gee that makes it a bit hard to help customers doesn’t it?

As I wait for ten minutes in the “Customer Service line” staffed by one frazzled employee, who is providing a whole host of services, I realize that 9000 employees is far too many to train and besides they won’t work for Weis long enough to make the investment in training worthwhile. What does it matter if you loose customers like me who drop an average of $120 per weekly visit into the one register staffed by a human. Who cares if I refuse, even in an emergency, to go to Weis and instead drive 12-15 minutes to the Oregon Dairy, where there are always humans who will ring me up on the “store card” and go out of their way to help me. Once they even sent me home with several bags of groceries and an IOU when I forgot to make a deposit and my bank card came up insufficient funds!! How does the Oregon Dairy do it anyway? They are a single store operation but charge the same prices as Weis and can actually afford to staff all those registers with humans? And where do they find all those employees just 15 minutes away? Something sure is fishy here. It must be the shrimp sale at the Oregon Dairy. I think I will stop by seafood and pick up a few pounds.

Self Esteem and Beethoven

According to Vital Learning's Essential Skills of Leadership program, a foundational skill in leadership is to always be building and maintaining the self-esteem of one's team members. In fact, this skill may very well be the cornerstone of good leadership. Often times, however, leaders move too quickly to take the care needed to do this effectively when providing feedback and both the loss of loyalty and talent can result.

To illustrate the fragile nature of self-esteem, consider for a moment one of the worlds most competent musicians to ever have lived: Beethoven. The film, “Immortal Beloved,” is about the life of Beethoven and while it has a fictional story line, it also offers many true scenes from this great masters life.

In one such scene, Beethoven is conducting his own composition (imagine that for a moment) but he is completely deaf and this fact has not yet been discovered by his audience or the populations at large. The orchestra becomes completely frustrated with Beethoven and literally stops playing. The audience is quite entertained and begins laughing due to their perception of his lack of competence. It is a powerful example of the fragility of self-esteem, and how easy it is for us to jump to conclusions about someone’s behavior and be totally off the mark.

When confronted with performance that falls short of the expectation, ask the team member for their opinion first and try to understand the situation from their perspective before providing your own observations. You may learn new information that builds both the relationship and the performance of your employee.