Culture to Engage

Focus

Denver used to host an extensive street fair, BuskerFest, every summer. This street carnival featured scores of performers: contortionists, magicians, jugglers, fire-swallowers, memory experts, and more. It was a good place to learn about and witness true engagement.

In 2001, one performer captured my attention. He sat atop a seven-foot unicycle. He balanced one end of a three-foot pole on his chin and a spinning plate balanced on the pole's other end. As he pedaled the unicycle and balanced the spinning plate, he began to juggle three flaming torches. He never missed a pedal. He kept that plate spinning atop the pole. He juggled the torches with seeming ease. An amazing act. An engaging act. An amazing act of engagement.

When he finished, I complimented him for his masterful focus on every detail of his performance. He grinned through his grease paint and said, “Well, there's so much going on up there, that's how I keep tuned in. I guess you're right, it is focus."

Staying engaged in one's individual work demands a high level of focus, but, I'd say that working on a successful team requires focus on functions and tasks, as well. Enhanced employee engagement is one result that focus achieves. The more successfully team members share focus on issues, the more successfully they will become engaged in the cause and purpose of their team.

Here are three specific benefits to a team’s sharing focus:

1. Shared focus on team identity generates a simple perspective of team purpose, objectives, and procedures. Shared identity creates harmony and unity within the team. That team works more smoothly and successfully.
2. Shared focus on objectives and direction enhances team awareness of “what we’re all about.” That focus streamlines actions and interactions.
3. Shared focus on actions and performance gives a team synergistic energy. Team members accomplish “greater than the sum” of their energies and abilities. That conserves and generates energy.

Here are 5 ways  managers can encourage team members to enhance their common, shared focus:

1. Sloganize. Create a team slogan or motto for shared focus. Use it as the attention-getter, memory-jogger, focus-maintainer on e-mail signatures, team meeting agendas, and in the byline for newsletter articles about team projects.  The team will more likely gravitate to a slogan members generate themselves.
2. Break the Ice. Start team meetings with icebreakers that target team focus. Simple start-up questions can be answered around the table: “How fast can we create an F.O.C.U.S. acronym?” “What one word best names our focus?” “Can we create an acronym with that word?”
3. Seek to Clarify. Build the team habit of talking about how clear the team’s focus is and how it can be made clearer. The more common these conversations, the more the team is attuned to an ever-sharper focus.
4. Focus on Focus. Make focus a part of every evaluation of team progress. (It is assumed that such evaluation is ongoing and not just at the completion of a/the team project.) These questions may be, “Did these results come from our (lack of) common focus?” “If we ensure that every member of the team is ‘on the same page,’ how can we improve our performance going forward?”
5. Question the Focus. Call the focus into question at regular intervals. Make it a point to ask if the team is looking in the right direction, if it is time to refocus, if there are factors that require change in the team’s focus.

Source Notes:

Photo of busker is by Lachezar

5 Ways to Up Your Team's Trust Quotient

The thoughts that hung with me following yesterday's posting, left me feeling guilty.

Guilty that I didn't offer more tips on ways to stimulate trust among your team members. I hope the 5 that follow take away some of my guilt.

Talk the Talk. Take responsibility for role modeling Open Expression. Don’t be afraid to share information about yourself. Encourage others to do the same. Keep at it.  BONUS TIP:  Right now write down 5 ways you are willing to initiate conversation about positive trust .

Build the Pattern. At team meetings and water-cooler chats, establish the tell-and-ask pattern. The pattern of frequently/regularly inviting informal discussion of trust (positively) This is the repetition required to anchor the pattern. It’s worth it. BONUS TIP: Right now write 3 questions that are informal AND stimulate comfortable discussion of trust, what creates trust, what supports trust, what trust benefits.

Distribute to Discuss. Make it a Team Belief that a key reason for distributing information to everyone is so that it can be discussed. BONUS TIP: Without creating "reading overload" create one way to stimulate attention to and discussion of some portion of the information constantly being distributed.

Make Good News. Usually people want to complete work rather than fulfill roles. Not much to say about one’s role. Much to share about one’s work. Create opportunities to comfortably share good news about the work performed. BONUS TIP: Consider two types of Good News Sharing opportunities: one in person, the other in writing

Use a Constructive Question. Have your team adopt a specific question that does two things: directs attention to the team’s purpose and stimulates communication. The question can be an icebreaker at team meetings, an add-on to “Hi! How are you?” and a regular element in team reports.  BONUS TIP: How might you encourage/involve your team in the creation and construction of the Constructive Question?

Enough Trust to Get Engaged?

Teams and teamwork contribute to a company's success.       

( ) True?         ( ) False?

The answer is obvious. No matter how large a team--small group, unit, department, or entire company--how well every member of the team engages in the team's  efforts contributes directly to how successful the team can be.

And how actively an entire team engages in "teamship," the greater the team's contribution to company success.

So, what's instrumental to engagement by each team member and by the team itself?

Trust: Critical to a Successful Team’s Foundation
A team that builds its harmony on trust works with the ease and enthusiasm that bring success. Trust and team are almost synonymous, but it's wrong to assume trust happens as soon as the team is created. Bringing trust to the top of every team member’s mind is a giant step toward team members becoming more fully engaged.

It's up to the manager to take that giant step.

Here are 3 benefits that might make the step seem a bit easier.  These are  "engagement benefits" from increased trust. 

1. Increased Efficiency -- Team members trust that every one will carry out her responsibility. Each member engages in her specific functions with more complete attention, energy, and involvement. As distractions decrease, efficiency increases.
2. Enhanced Unity -- Greater trust among team members removes doubts, cracks, flaws in the team personality. The greater strength increases team’s commitment to its purpose.  Commitment  reinforces engagement; engagement reinforces commitment.
3. Mutual Motivation -- Team members trust one another in a more inclusive way. Each member then consciously and subconsciously strives to uphold his teammate's trust. That motivation stimulates the desire for peak performance.  That's the raw material of engagement.

Key Question: How do you build trust as a fundamental team possession and achieve these benefits?

Short Answer: Provide specific trust-building tools and tactics that make it easier for team members to build that trust. Team members want to trust one another from the outset. 

I elaborate on that answer with 3 traits you can apply to establish a foundation for trust among your team members.

1. Open Expression: Bring trust to the forefront of everyone’s mind as a common, everyday discussion item. Make it a constant agenda item. Use the word "trust" in slogans and e-mail signatures. Ask informal questions about trust. Not in the negative, rather in the positive. (CORE: the process is Communication, the event/situation is Opportunity.)
2. Information Equity: Ensure that everyone has access to similar information. Only on a strict need-to-know basis is that not the case. Construct processes that ensure simultaneous distribution of same information. (CORE: information is Resource.)
3. Performance Reliability: A high level of team trust creates a “victorious circle.” This reinforces team members’ desire to hold up their end of the bargain by performing as expected, if not better. This reliability, in turn, upholds the trust from other team members and other teams. Construct events in which trust is recognized, appreciated, celebrated. (CORE: Communication, Opportunity and Encouragement combine in situations in which this trust-generates-more-trust phenomenon is expressed and celebrated.)

These are traits of the management style used. They are elements of the culture of engagement. Their reality is up to the manager.

NOTE: If you've not been reading Culture to Engage, here's a catch-up on the CORE concept.

Manager's efforts to develop a culture of engagement I have segmented into 4 categories:

• Communication: making clear and repeated employees' expectations...
• Opportunity: creating situations that attract employee involvement and engagement...
• Resources: providing the tools, information, coaching, etc., to ease engagement...
• Encouragement: offering enthusiasm and compliments for engagement evidenced...

OK, Gimme a Break

Lately I've come across a few "just miss" statements.

Ironically, a Just Miss can teach a lesson all its own.

• All wet areas will close 15 minutes before closing. That sign above the men's jacuzzi at my health club makes closing somewhat anticlimactic.

• Season Two of Bizarre Foods is our best season ever. That can make Season Two seem very good...or indicate that Season One was awfully bad.

• Assistant Director of Human Capacity Development. What is the objective of this position? To develop more room for people, in people, or by people?

• ...the modern western education system is destroying something of incredible value to the businesses of the future (imginiation and curiosity)...I'm now very curious about alternative meanings for imginiation. And wondering if it's really the fault of western education.

• Ever wanted to know if a famous person was dead or alive? This website will help you find out. I'm pretty sure the website helps you find out NOT whether you ever wanted to know...but whether the celeb is still among the living.

My first intention was to tie the above into the Communication component of my CORE of employee engagement information. Then I decided, "Hey, just enjoy. Let everyone deduce what they wish, what they will from those Just Misses."

Have a great Thursday!

Opportunity Knox

Employee engagement comes from within the individual. Opportunities to focus thinking and feeling about engagement can come from management. Provide sufficient, valuable opportunities and enjoy a Ft. Knox-worth of engagement.

What would happen if you

• offered a monthly forum for your employees
• that was totally voluntary,
• lasted no more than an hour during the workday
• to let employees share with one another what they do well?

How would it look if this forum

• featured up to 5 employees
• who each spent 10 minutes
• sharing what they do,
• including difficulties they encounter
• and pleasures they receive from doing it?

Would it increase the "engagement value" if

• employees spoke of specific functions, specific projects,
• cited strengths they call on to do their jobs, and
• spoke from feelings about how (well) they perform?

What might be the value-add if you

• gave the forum a name, a theme, a banner title, a personality,
• made it fun and festive, perhaps with refreshments, and
• tied on some informal, post-forum recognition and appreciation of those who share?

Such a forum is a plain and simple Opportunity for you and your employees to talk about, to know, and to appreciate one another's engagement in what you do.

PS...Who is to say

• managers and supervisors cannot take part and share their engagement as well?