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PERFORMANCE
Forge a Results-Oriented Team

In today’s sped-up business environment, style is less likely than ever to triumph over substance. Results—not just staying busy—define productivity, while acting as a benchmark for new efforts. And producing results is at the heart of what it means to be efficient and effective.

The best workplace teams are so close-knit and results-oriented that productivity is a given. Such cohesion depends on trust and mutual respect, factors that naturally boost productivity. Everyone on the team must act as integral and active parts of that team; you can’t allow cubicle hermits and slackers. Move forward with positive energy, developing the talents of your team members so you’ll inevitably enhance performance.

Oddly enough, a few rough edges can help you generate the creativity and innovation that boost productivity to even higher levels. But be careful to manage any disagreements between team members that result, so they don’t spiral out of control.

There may be times when you’ll have to be ruthless to revitalize your team, clearing out true “deadwood”—specifically, negative attitudes and unprofitable processes—rather than people. This might require a shot of SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), focusing on the big picture of team productivity. So gear up for success through a commitment to excellence, focused effort, and intelligent planning.

CONSISTENT RESULTS: SUBSTANCE OVER STYLE

Perception creates reality in most people’s minds, but this tendency can lead you astray. You might think a person with feet up on the desk and eyes closed is wasting company time, as did one efficiency expert hired by Henry Ford. Ford informed the expert that the man had once had an idea that saved Ford millions of dollars, and he noted, “At the time, I believe his feet were planted right where they are now.”²³

A Modest Proposal

You set the tone for your team, so make a commitment to put substance over style. Refuse to lock your team into rigid ways of thinking and doing, in which the company line matters more than the bottom line. Within ethical, moral, and legal limits, do what benefits your organization most and gets you closer to its goals. To wit:

1 BREAK FREE FROM BUREAUCRACY. Many organizations settle on what they consider “best practices” and stay there indefinitely. But “best” changes with technology and culture. Don’t become so hardened that you refuse to take advantage of new “bests” as they become available and the old bests become outdated.

2 STOP CONFUSING “BUSY” WITH “PRODUCTIVE.” Who cares how many items you cross off your list if you accomplish nothing worthwhile? Put your priority items at the top of your list and do those first, even if they take hours. If you and your team get only three items done in a day but earn the company $100,000, you’ve beaten the pants off the drones who rushed around doing thirty minor items and never managed to get to their most important tasks, thus earning nothing.

3 WORK ON YOUR BUSINESS, NOT IN IT. You’re an executive, so your actions should make your team’s work easier, improve the workflow, build profitable bridges with other teams and organizations, intercept red tape, and accomplish other substantial tasks. Leave the day-to-day tasks where they belong—with your team. It doesn’t matter how busy you look. Trying to wear all the hats and working in your business, rather than working on it, gets nothing done that others couldn’t accomplish at a lower salary.

4 STOP TRYING TO IMPRESS PEOPLE WITH YOUR PERSONAL STYLE. This applies to your fashion sense or how you approach your job. Impress them instead with your acumen and productivity. Apple’s Steve Jobs often wore casual clothing, even to meetings with important shareholders. Did his fashion sense make him any less impressive? Of course not. His ability to turn vision into reality, choose inventive people to create products the public wanted, and infect others with his sense of productivity mattered—not his clothing choices.

5 DON’T LET STYLE BLIND YOU TO ABILITY. Make sure you aren’t judging books by their covers when you size up your employees’ abilities. Just because someone looks like an alpha geek doesn’t mean he’s your best choice as a programmer, any more than another person’s odd working schedule automatically makes him a slacker. Business professor Alex Taylor tells the story of a hiring manager who realized that the irregular hours of an otherwise exemplary employee were due to her being a single mother struggling to fit her child’s needs around a traditional schedule. When he put her in a position with a schedule that specifically matched her needs, she became one of the best employees he’d ever managed.²⁴

Beyond the Superficial

It’s human nature to accept that “what we see is what we get.” That’s a relic of the caveman days. But in the modern era, people usually have time to think before they react. So don’t let what’s on the surface blind you; look through it to see what lies beneath, acting on that instead.

The True Measure of Productivity

No amount of planning matters if you fail to couple it with firm, decisive action. It doesn’t matter how many tiger team meetings you attend, whether or not you’re ISO compliant, or that you got an enthusiastic thumbs-up on your trust exercises during that last retreat.

What matters is this: can you and your team consistently produce at a high level, meeting or exceeding your goals before reaching out for new ones? If not, something’s broken in your workflow process, and you must repair it immediately. Without productivity, and the dollars it brings in, your organization won’t survive.

Recoupling Performance and Reality

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred times: what you can’t measure, you can’t improve. Set up some way to measure not only team performance but each team member’s individual performance as well. You have many potential ways to go about it. Here are some suggestions:

• Balanced scorecards are standardized reports generated by software tools that track individual and group performance. While the reports can prove useful, they depend on team members accurately reporting time spent on each task, and on you paying close attention to reality as opposed to what the reports are telling you.

• Scoreboards and dashboards are automated software tools that provide aggregate data for key performance indicators specific to the organization or task. For example, a company that makes cotton candy may want to know how many pounds each employee produces per hour, either precisely or on average. Monitoring other factors, such as sugar usage, tons shipped, and packaging used may also help generate ideas to improve productivity.

• Periodic performance reviews work well for individual employees, helping both you and them understand how well they’re doing on the productivity front, and what they need to improve upon. Most organizations focus on yearly reviews associated with performance raises or bonuses, but twice-yearly or quarterly reviews may be more effective for boosting productivity, along with monthly informal coaching sessions.

• Business performance management includes a series of activities intended to manage teams as they work toward achieving specific goals. It consists primarily of selection of goals, consolidation of relevant management information, and intervention intended to improve future performance.

• Team dynamics reviews help you clarify how your team members work together. In addition to personal observation and coaching, tools such as Myers-Briggs personality tests and 360-degree feedback provide valuable clues on how to interact with team members. They can help you forestall any potential problems.

Talk Is Cheap

Actions speak louder than words. Performance and productivity always matter more than talking a good game, so all efforts toward enhancing results should be rewarded and encouraged.

If your team focus has fallen short, help your employees get back on the ball by challenging them, inspiring them, and affirming their worth. Know when to step in and be a true leader—someone who won’t let them fail. To paraphrase Vince Lombardi’s famous line, “Performance isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Once you’ve gotten your team’s buy-in and engaged their belief, try one of the measurement methods I’ve suggested to gauge, maintain, and control their performance.

ENCOURAGING TEAM UNITY

Cohesive teams are more productive than those with internal problems or those that simply aren’t on the same page at all times. It’s up to you to enhance your team’s performance by holding them together in every way possible.

The Leader as Teammate

Most people respect authority, responding positively and productively to it. However, the modern concept of teamwork requires you not only to captain the ship but to be an active part of the crew as well.

Open Door or Closed?

Traditionally, leaders have kept themselves separate from their subordinates to ensure fairness. Yet distancing yourself from your team can damage cohesion and team unity. Some management experts have advocated an “open door” policy for years because of this.

So the question is, how do you remain accessible to your team while remaining fair and maintaining privacy? Where should you strike the balance? Here are three general guidelines that work well for me and my clients:

1 KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AVAILABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY. Being completely available ties you down and makes you a less effective leader. If you’re always available, then you always have to stay where someone can find you. That also means you’ll be interrupted all day long and will have to do your “real work” after everyone else leaves.

Instead, be accessible, not fully available. Don’t keep your door open all day. Encourage team members to schedule appointments, not just “pop in.” Let them know when you’re available for coaching. Schedule regular meetings with key players, so they don’t feel the need to interrupt you with questions. Work team members in around your schedule when they need you. Remember, being accessible for your team is part of your job, not an inconvenience; defining boundaries will help you treat it that way.

2 FILTER YOUR PERSONAL ACCESS. If you get too many requests for your time, you may need to adopt a filtering system to limit access to you. This could take the form of what I call “a dragon at the gate”—a tough executive assistant who handles most requests and passes the remainder on to you directly. If you’ve reached the C-Suite, you may need several people to fill this role.

3 SET OFFICE HOURS. Establish hours during the week when anyone can approach you with questions or problems, for example, Tuesday through Thursday, 1 to 3 P.M. This limits your need to stay in one place while still making you available. You can also leverage the concept of reverse office hours—times when you never make yourself available so you can get work done.

He Said, She Said—A Simple Mediation Process

In any group, you’ll have conflict. In most cases, you can all sit down and reach a reasonable agreement after a give-and-take discussion—assuming everyone wants to work it out. If the disagreement seems petty, make a quick decision and get everyone back to work fast. But some conflicts are too deep-rooted or antagonistic to dismiss so readily. In those situations, turn to a set of mediation tools you can pick up and put to work on the issue. These tools don’t work in every situation, but I find the following tips help me clear up most conflicts between others, in business and in life:

1 RESEARCH THE ISSUE. Don’t go into the situation blind. Know the background and have some idea of how you can clear the roadblock, based on how others have handled similar situations. If you don’t have much mediation experience, brush up on the basics before you get started.

2 MEET WITH THE CONFLICTING PARTIES. Some mediation experts tell you never to meet with the conflicting parties separately, because it generates mistrust. Others insist it’s necessary to do this first to get each person’s side of the story—a strategy I agree with. But if this step makes you uncomfortable, skip it and meet with the conflicting parties together.

While you’re meeting, ask each party, one at a time, to present their side of the issue, assuring them they can do so uninterrupted. Enforce that promise, even if one of them tries to break in. Once both have presented their cases, summarize the situation as you understand it. Ask what each person specifically wants from the other(s) to resolve the conflict.

3 INVESTIGATE THE RELIABILITY OF THE PARTIES. Double-check the information you’ve received. Research the incidents mentioned by the parties, check into their allegations, and, if necessary, ask other coworkers about the incident. Consider the reputations of those involved, taking previous actions and conflicts into account. All this may give you a handle on the situation that will let you resolve it more quickly. But if it doesn’t, think deeply about what your investigations and interviews with the conflicting parties have revealed. Give yourself long enough for the information to percolate through your subconscious. You might find a way to render a decision at that point.

4 FORGE AN AGREEMENT. If you can hammer out a solution at this point, great. If not, at least try to get the parties to agree to further negotiation, so you can put the situation behind you as cleanly and as quickly as possible. Repeat as necessary.

You can handle relatively minor situations quickly and fairly with this process, especially when dealing with issues that boil down to personality clashes or spats over resources. If it doesn’t produce results, though, call in human resources or a mediation expert. You can’t referee employee disputes full-time.

Regardless of how you decide to handle a dispute, act immediately. Never let the problem fester. If you do, it may affect your entire team, dragging others in and forcing them to take sides. The longer you wait, the more work it will take to fix the problem. So when coworker friction starts emitting smoke, step in and deal with it right away—before it ignites a fire you can’t handle.

Speaking of Fires …

Sometimes setting a motivational fire within the team can be useful if it jolts people out of complacency—or sheer laziness—and gets them back to work. Since teamwork rules in the business environment, having team members who don’t shoulder their share of the load can jam the work process gears, bringing productivity to a halt. Slackers slow team efficiency, and they infect others with their bad attitudes as well. Once you recognize poor behavior, you’ll need to get things moving again.

Springing into Action

Now, when you identify slackers, don’t automatically assume they realize what’s happening. Their poor work may not be deliberate. They may be so worried about something at home they can’t do a good job at work. Possibly, they lack the right training to do as well as they should. Perhaps they’re overwhelmed, not a good fit for their jobs, or bored. Maybe they don’t recognize their own incompetence. So before lowering the boom, start with these corrective actions:

1 BE HONEST WITH THEM. Call them into your office and alert them to your concerns, pointing out specific examples. Ask, “Is there something going on I should know about?” This might be all you need to do to snap them out of whatever’s been holding them back. It may be a difficult conversation to have, especially if you haven’t already made an effort to get to know the team member. They might not be willing to open up to you, but try anyway.

Once you’ve pinpointed the problem, work on it. If they don’t understand the requirements of the workplace, teach them what they need to know about the organization, the team, and the goals everyone needs to achieve. Provide the training they need. Pair them with a mentor.

Be prepared for slackers who know exactly what they’re doing. They may have deliberately pushed the edges of the envelope to see what they could get away with or be actively hostile. If so, move to the next step.

2 PUT THEM ON NOTICE. How you put an underperformer on notice depends on the cause of the problem. If something in their life is distracting them, offer poor performers potential solutions. But unless it’s a matter of life and death, also insist they find a way to work it out so they can do the minimum requirements of their job. If they can’t, or it does involve a matter of life and death, suggest they take time off to deal with it. You can replace them with temp workers until they feel ready to return. Human resources may need to be involved here to navigate any issues of employee and employer rights.

If the unproductive employees behave in hostile, demanding, misguided, or lazy ways, don’t play the game. Appraise them carefully, document the corrective action, and give them milestones they have to meet to get back on track and off probation.

3 MOTIVATE THEM. Once you’ve put underperformers on notice, don’t disappear until reassessment time. Keep an eye on them and find ways to motivate them to do a better job. Perhaps provide an outside coach. Make sure they understand what their job entails and why it’s important in both team and organizational contexts. Try small rewards for successful completion of milestone tasks. It could even be something as minor as a certificate of achievement or a Starbucks gift card with a handwritten note—whatever’s in your power to give. If nothing else works, it’s time for:

4 THE NUCLEAR OPTION. If it’s not working out, invite underperformers to explore their talents elsewhere. Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, famously fired the bottom 10 percent of performers in his company every year. He received a lot of criticism for it, but no one can deny that GE thrived under his guidance.

Enough’s Enough

Slackers are productivity vampires, slowly draining your team of life. The worst of them blame others for their faults, express a toxic attitude, and deliberately stir up trouble.

Immediately respond to them by putting them on notice. Find ways to engage and motivate them where possible—and the sooner the better. If things don’t clear up relatively quickly, show them the door for your team’s sake.

SUCCESS BASED ON BUILDING STRENGTHS AND REDUCING WEAKNESSES

Even if you’re not part of a problem, you have to make a sincere effort to be part of the solution. No matter how well you run your own team, you’ll have weaknesses that can undermine your strengths if you’re not careful. I believe in maximizing strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses, but at the same time, you should know your weaknesses so you can work around them—and root them out whenever possible. I recommend the following process:

1 CONDUCT A CLASSIC SWOT ANALYSIS. Pretend you’re back in Business Analysis 101 and list your team’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It needn’t take long, but do put sincere effort into it. Dig deeper than the obvious, and consider your options thoroughly.

2 CONSULT YOUR TEAM. As a leader, you may have different ideas of what constitutes a weakness than your team does, so ask your people to contribute their ideas. Sometimes this works wonders. During experiments in 2005 and 2006, Best Buy Vice President Jeff Severts discovered that delegating sales forecasts to Best Buy employees produced better results than consulting a team of professional experts, on an order of up to 4.5 to 7 percent. Why? Probably because of the diversity of staff forecasters and because the employees actually used the products the company sold.²⁵

3 AUDIT THE BIG PICTURE. Do you have happy customers? How’s your productivity rate? Is there black or red ink on the bottom line? Do your processes flow smoothly, or do they hinder productivity? Does your team structure work? How can you be more effective? Don’t ignore the big picture in favor of minor issues, or get caught up in the daily minutiae, even briefly. Look around often. Make sure an unexpected change or threat doesn’t run you down.

4 RESPOND WELL TO FEEDBACK. Don’t blow off criticisms, constructive or otherwise, especially when they come from within. Rather, invite them. When I was the president of the National Speakers Association in 2011, a couple of board members privately pulled me aside and gave me tips on how to run meetings more efficiently, which I really appreciated. When you know where the holes are, you can plug them before your ship sinks.

5 LOOK AT EVERYTHING. Weaknesses are not necessarily obvious; they might not even look like weaknesses at first. Suppose you pride yourself on putting out a great monthly newsletter for your clients. Are they reading it and receiving value from it? What would happen if you stopped producing it? The case study here is me. After an illness a couple of years ago, I didn’t put out my monthly newsletter one month, and only three people noticed. A little investigation revealed that my clients thought my newsletter was informative but too long. All they wanted was a brief tip weekly. Suddenly, I found a previously unknown weakness and was able to replace it with something more impactful and less time-consuming.

Most of all, remain objective. Once you’ve conducted your SWOT exercise and examined team performance, you may find you have little or nothing to worry about. Great! But that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels. Note not only where you are and where you’ve been, but where you want to be in the near future. Complacency can kill as quickly as incompetence.

Engineer a Quantum Leap in Productivity

In physics, the term “quantum leap” refers to an electron’s sudden jump to a higher energy state without passing through the distance in between. It’s such an attractive notion that people have taken to using the term “quantum leap” when referring to any spectacular feat.

Quantum effects can’t really manifest at human scales, but this is great shorthand for a sudden improvement in performance or productivity. However, unlike an electron’s quantum leap, the human productivity equivalent leaves a trail.

Put the Situation under a Microscope

Take a close look at every aspect of your team and workplace setting you can think of: the players, your projects, what’s coming over the horizon, your productivity level, your processes and workflow system, your tools and applications, the other groups you interact with, the environment. Given these factors, how would you rate your condition: average, below average, or above average?

What Would a Quantum Leap Look Like?

A quantum leap wouldn’t be a simple improvement—it would be a massive overhaul in how you do something, maybe even a new technology or process. Determine what big productivity step you would take if you could. Paint a picture of the ideal productive workforce of the future.

Partner on the Mission

Get your team together and share this vision of the future. Explain your ideas and request assistance from your teammates. Ask them what would need to happen to make it a reality. Brainstorm with them about how you could magically jump to that place. Explain that you see this meeting as a springboard for bigger and better things, and get them caught up in the mission.

Create the Roadmap

Begin by documenting the specific goals you have to meet by drawing a “treasure map.” The goals should be big enough to see from a great distance and far enough away that everyone has to stretch to reach them. Agree on where you are now with a big X, and then agree on the changes that have to occur.

Back in the 1970s, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs set out to change the world of computing by making its power available to everyday people—a quantum leap in technology. In the personas of their companies, Microsoft and Apple, both of them could see the future. They had a good idea of how to get there, and their teams helped achieve it, point by point.

Remember to SWOT the challenges. Use the SWOT method outlined in the previous section to pencil in on your treasure map the “mountain ranges” and “rivers” (threats) that will block your progress. Should you go around them or power straight through? Can you power through? Why not? Who or what will stop you? This is a team exercise, so keep your people involved with every step. Some may surprise you with their suggestions.

Start the Bulldozer

Your role makes you a visionary and a facilitator—noble responsibilities no matter how you slice them. As a facilitator, you have the honor of making it easier for people to follow your lead and do their jobs. In a way, you’re like a bulldozer, smoothing the way, filling in potholes, and clearing out trees and stumps that might slow your team down. This may mean acquiring training for everyone who needs it or providing new phones or upgraded software—whatever it takes to make their lives easier and their work more profitable.

Remember: there’s no such thing as the perfect time for anything. And if you wait for that nonexistent perfect time, you may never begin. This process will help your team take a quantum leap toward productivity stardom.