Last week, as I plugged into my computer and logged into my video conferencing software, I found myself asking this exact question. It was the end of a long week, and I was meeting with some industry colleagues to discuss a potential upcoming project. While the work was exciting and I was happy to connect with my colleagues, I found myself dreading this particular phone meeting. Why, you ask?
Raise your hand if this scenario sounds familiar: you’re 55 minutes into your one-hour team meeting to introduce a new change, you wanted your team to weigh in, and now you’re heading down a rabbit hole that you don’t think you can get out of. You know that one of two scenarios are inevitable: you risk running over and making people late for their next appointments, or someone is bound to leave feeling thoroughly unsatisfied. As managers, how do we get in front of this phenomenon while still giving people a voice?
One of our favorite ways to gauge buy-in is with an incredibly simple but effective tool: Fist to Five. If you’ve never heard of this, it’s based on a 0-5 scale, with the idea that you can take the temperature of the room simply by having people hold up one hand to display where they stand. Here is the scale that we recommend using:
Think back to the last time you suggested a new idea to someone else. It could have been as simple as a new recipe for dinner at home, or as involved as suggesting a new way to solve a complex problem at work. How was that information received? Did people go along with your suggestion, or were you met with resistance that surprised you?
In our Change Leadership and Change Readiness workshops, we often begin by polling the room and asking who thinks that they respond well to change. Here is what normally happens: a handful of hands go up immediately (maybe 1/3 of the room), some people admit that they’re not too fond of change, and most people will say that it depends. People are open to change when it directly benefits them, or better yet, when it was their suggestion. So what is a leader to do when a change coming from the organizational leadership is met with resistance?
As 2016, kicks into full gear, I find myself trying to better understand the barriers that challenge me the most in achieving a wholehearted lifestyle. So I cycled back to the wisdom of Brene Brown and her virally-sensational TedTalk of 2010. It resonates as much today as it did then and I hope you'll take a minute to consider my favorite quotes and how they might apply to you (below) or even revisit the video yourself. http://bit.ly/202oJ4E (Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability | TED Talk | TED.com)
I recently found myself having one coaching session after another with front line managers and team leaders on the virtues of being more vulnerable with their team and colleagues. It seems that this is one of the leadership qualities we miss in our supervisory onboarding efforts. They get stuck trying to be more authoritative and show everyone why they are now the manager. Some feel compelled to know everything and cover up mistakes with justifications. In their efforts, many end up alienating the very people who once believed they would make a good manager.
Listening to customers and delivering truly “mind-blowing” service can be a very effective way to engage your team . The following anecdote has been relayed countless times as a story of great customer service, but the untold story is the one of how a phenomenal team mobilized to make it happen.
Over the 20 years that we've worked with both dysfunctional and highly functional teams, my colleagues and I have seen a key behavior surface as a difference-maker consistently. Accountability.
Unfortunately, it has become another buzzword, overused and with so many different interpretations that it has lost much of its meaning. According to Patrick Lencioni, author of the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, “When it comes to teamwork, accountability means the willingness of members to remind one another when they’re not living up to performance standards and results.”