Team Boosters

Last week we looked at setting teams up for success. We noted that every team needs the right captain and, usually, that’s not the pushiest person in the room. At the outset, the team needs to be helped to visualise a successful outcome and identify who will benefit. And they need to work in a mental and emotional space that suspends judgement - especially if they are trying to rectify a problem.

But once the team is aligned and has stepped out on the road to success, how can you help them to maintain momentum and give them the occasional boost? Sustaining the effort is particularly important when teams are asked to work on special initiatives - something they have to do in addition to their daily work. It’s very easy for them to become distracted and demotivated, or barred from active participation by an unsympathetic manager.

First and foremost, team tasks need to be broken down into achievable steps. There’s an old saying: ‘If you want to eat an elephant, do it one slice at a time.’ Not wishing to visit harm on pachyderms, it is true that big tasks are best tackled through a ripple of small actions. That is certainly the case in organisational culture change, where twenty small changes can have much more impact than one huge, stalled visionary project. Incremental change also has the benefit of being evolutionary rather than revolutionary, so it's easier for employees and customers to adjust to it. I’ve lost count of the times the various banks I use have completely dislocated my customer experience through huge and non-intuitive changes to their technology.

Secondly, no great idea ever came out of a darkened meeting room. So, encourage the team to get out and about. Believe it or not, a 40-minute walk-and-talk session outside will produce very different thinking. The brain seems to work better when you are moving at 4 mph. Also try holding some meetings in the environment where change needs to happen - at the airport check-in, in the banking hall or at the sales counter. This helps the team to connect with their visualisation of success.

Thirdly, the best way to encourage commitment is to recognise every success and applaud the people who made it happen. Make sure that team members know that turning words into action is a behaviour that everyone respects. Ask them to reflect on the other helpful behaviours they can see in the team: resilience, bravery, imagination and even a sense of fun. We are all emotional beings, and we tend to get more done when we combine intellectual rigour with empathy.

Chris Harrison leads The Brand Inside

www.thebrandinsideafrica.com