“First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” – Aristotle

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan

1. Introduction

Remember January 1, 2016? Just like yesterday, right? Well, in December 2015 I wrote a blog post about “Get Ready to Succeed in 2016”. (Here it is – http://bit.ly/1Rblohk). Now it’s April, I thought it might be a good idea to check in and see how the year is unfolding.

I suggested that we try a three-step approach:

1. Know the score by creating and using a dashboard.
2. Take stock with your team.
3. Enroll others in the journey by making the making really clear what success will and why it’s important.

I also suggested the use of 90-day planning as a mechanism to hold the score and the actions that you intended to take between January and April.

In this blog, I suggest some simple questions that help focus on what you’ve accomplished in the last 90 days, some thoughts on your Improvement Journey and a challenge for the next 90 days.

Ready? Let’s go…

2. The Last 90-days

The quotations at the beginning of this post sum up how I feel about my last 90 days. On the one hand, I had all the goals identified and the resources allocated. I felt good about what lay ahead of us:

• Complete an important client assignment.
• Produce a marketing video with the help of the Draw Shop: https://vimeo.com/155042176
• Secure three new pieces of work.
• Commit to improving the efficiency of how we manage our consulting practice.

Aristotle would have been impressed, I’m sure.

Well, like most things in life, I accomplished part of what I set out to do, did some things I didn’t plan, and undershot on some activities. This is where Michael Jordan’s words ring true – it’s only by trying, over and over again that I can make progress against my plans.

Here are some key questions to think about as you look back over the last three months. I suggest you write down the question and your answers:

1. What did I plan to do? What worked well? What wasn’t so great? Why?
2. What did I plan to learn? How did I do? Why?
3. How did my team do in working together? What worked well? What wasn’t so great? Why?
4. How did my team do against their objectives? What could we do better?

3. The Improvement Journey

If you’re like me, you probably have noticed a couple of items that need improvement, which raises the idea of the improvement journey. The field of Continuous Improvement revolves around this notion and it fits well in our 90-day check-in process.

The central question of the Improvement Journey: What do I need to improve and how do I do so?

Your 90-day planning debrief should remind you about what you are working on – as you describe your priorities for the next 90 days, plan to use the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDAC) cycle. This is also sometimes known as the Plan, Implement, Evaluate, Improve cycle and derives from the work of Dr. Edward Deming (http://bit.ly/UqRCLf).

Plan

Are you and your team ready to move to the next phase of your work? What have you learned so far? What should you do next? What skills and knowledge will you and the team need?

Do

Implement some early next steps and be open to failing before committing to full implementation. Think of this as a pilot, keep it contained and be prepared to learn from what you have tested.

Check

Reflect together on your pilot efforts. Identify where you can improve and what additional resources, skills and support you will need to be successful over the the next 90 days.

Act

Integrate the learning from your pilot into your 90 day plans and get going.

4. The Next 90-days

Build a plan for the next 90 days that includes a period for the PDCA ‘pilot’. Keep it short and to the point and use it as a communication and engagement tool with your team.

Individual plan

• What is the short list (less than five) of items you personally plan to work on in the next three months?
• What measures will you use to determine if you are successful?

Team plan – in dialogue with your team answer these questions:

• What is the short list (less than five) of items should your team work on in the next three months?
• What measures will the team use to determine if it is successful?
• Who will carry out the tasks?
• How will you all track progress?

Using the discipline of 90-day planning and milestone reporting, you can build up momentum both for yourself and for the team. Like any habit, the more you do it, the more it will become reinforced and the more you can be like both Aristotle and Michael Jordan.

By Bill Sedgwick

“Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” Attributed to Winston Churchill

“I’m not good at future planning. I don’t plan at all. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. I don’t have a day planner and I don’t have a diary. I completely live in the now, not in the past, not in the future.” Heath Ledger

“Luck. That’s where preparation and opportunity meet.” Pierre Trudeau

Sometimes, it seems the world is made up of two sets of people, those who plan and those who claim not to. To some degree, we all wander between the two poles – live in the moment and plan for the future, which makes sense. Over-plan, and you drive out spontaneity; live in the moment, and anything might happen and probably will.

So here we are, with a new year in sight. We will see a rash of advice about resolutions, lists of intentions and advice about sticking to those good intentions.

In this blog post, we’re going to join in.

As leaders, we have a responsibility to our teams to make clear where we’re going and how we’re doing on the journey. Try a simple three step approach as you think about your good intentions for 2016:

1. Know the score with a dashboard.
2. Take stock.
3. Enroll others in the journey.

Know the score

Life’s a game, the sunny optimists say. If they’re right, you better know the score to know if you’re making progress.

Dedicate some time in December to put together a dashboard for yourself and your team. Keep it simple and clean.

The purpose of a dashboard, like the instrument array in an aircraft cockpit, is to keep the critical information we need to be effective in our line of sight, without overwhelming ourselves. To be effective, your dashboard must tell a story and provide a tool for keeping focused.

To tell the story of what you plan for 2016, design your dashboard with three elements: short-term objectives to be accomplished in 90 days; medium term goals for 3-6 months; and longer term objectives for the entire year.

Next, spend some quiet time working on the three elements. Develop the most detail in the short term bucket, the first 90 days. While working on the other two buckets, only put in enough detail to indicate direction and measures of success.

A tool that is very useful for creating a dashboard is a mind map. We use Mind Manager from Mindjet.com, but there are many others available. A mind map has flexibility and allows you to move information around easily.

Take stock

You and your team have had a busy year. You’ve probably been very focused on getting the work of the team done – have you spent time thinking about the health of the team?

To prepare your dashboard, sit down with the team and ask them:

• What have we accomplished this year?
• What have we learned?
• How do we feel about what we’ve done?

Use the opportunity to celebrate the successes you’ve had. An interesting article from Psychology Today (http://bit.ly/1lOzngB) highlights the importance of celebration in a team’s life.

If you want to understand how your team is doing, try out our online team assessment tool: http://bit.ly/1XwwIEb

Enroll others

At the beginning of 2016, make sure you have a clear story to tell your team about what success will look like. Seek to do a kick-ass job of painting the emotional destination and the meaning of the work.

Elmer Wheeler (b. 1904) was a pioneer in the psychology of selling and taught that to engage others it is more effective to appeal to the outcome than the process. It was Wheeler who coined the phrase “Sell the sizzle not the steak.”

At the beginning of the year you have an opportunity to re-ignite the excitement your team has for its work. Remind them about the purpose that they are working towards. Focus on the ‘why’ of what you’re doing. There will be more than enough time to work out all the details of the ‘how’, which is where most of spend most of time.

Success goes to the prepared, so prepare by reflecting, planning and enrolling others.

“Entropy is the natural tendency of a system to degrade over time”.  

 

Ever noticed how if you don’t use a piece of equipment for a while that it needs maintenance before it’ll work properly? This happened to me recently when I was using my bandsaw – turns out that the blade had begun rusting from disuse. As my father, a farmer, said to me: “Preventative maintenance beats fixing things”.

What’s Entropy Got to do With It?

Many teams bump along – team members work on their individual responsibilities and the overriding belief is that if everyone does their piece, the team will be successful. Our work with really successful teams shows that leaving success to chance is a poor strategy. Sometimes it can be striking how basic the preventative maintenance actions are to lift a team’s performance.

Here are some maintenance tips for you and your team:

1. Be uneasy

Complacency is easy to fall into. Successful teams know this and challenge the status quo, often. Teams that are students of themselves don’t accept that their current performance is predetermined; they engage in open dialogue about what is holding them back and what they should do to be more successful. Then they change something.

Hint: Assemble your team and ask a simple question such as “How can we improve as a team?”

2. Be compelled

A few years ago, we worked with a project team that was determined to improve its performance. We found that the most fundamental challenge they faced was that the team had multiple plans, while they all believed that there was only one plan. Once they consolidated all these plans a lot of their problems evaporated.

A team works in sync when it has a compelling reason to do so and a plan that everyone understands. The problem is that we often rely on our memory about the plan and don’t use it as a day-to-day tool to ensure continued alignment.

Hint: Conduct regular reviews of the plan. We recommend formal 90-day check-ins that combine a look back and a look forward where new elements are introduced to be worked on in the next three months.

3. Engage the right leadership gear

Leadership in a team is not about the team leader telling people what to do, or at least not all the time. Often, effective leadership is about standing back, coaching and encouraging team members to think situations through and determine what the best course of action is. It’s also often about encouraging team members to step up and be leaders themselves.

Hint: If you’re the team leader, hold back and challenge the team to find the answers to a problem. Let them plan a solution. Let them decide who will lead and who will help. Then support them to success.

4. Get better every day

We’ve observed many times that ideas from away seem more credible than the ones made at home. This often plays out when a team ignores a suggestion from a team member who might say: “In a previous life we had a problem like this and this is what we did…” The team has two options at that point – either gloss over the experience of the team member or stop and do a deep dive to really understand what can be learned from that story.

Hint: Mine the knowledge and experience on your team. Encourage team members to tell stories from their past that are relevant to the situation at hand – then look for the wisdom in the anecdote and see if it can be used in your team.

5. Build a trust wall

Nothing erodes performance more than a lack of trust. Why would I exert myself and take a risk to offer an idea or insight if I don’t trust that my contribution will be listened to and treated with respect? Why would I volunteer my energy and time if I didn’t trust that others will join me in changing something important to us as a team? A team with a strong wall of trust has the basis for building other elements of its success.

Hint: Build a habit in your team of carrying through on commitments to each other. Acknowledge success. Reinforce actions that demonstrate trust in the team. Put team members together so that they can build a track record of doing what they say they will. By being trustworthy, we become trusted.

Entropy is inevitable but not irreversible in a team. Keep working on the health of the team and performance will improve.

One good way to increase your team’s performance is to know where you’re starting from. Take our no-obligation team assessment and find out how best to start on the road to a high performing team. click here to get started.

“It’s as simple as this. When people don’t …feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.”

―Patrick Lencioni,
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

Do people on your board really listen to each other? And does everyone feel listened to or is there anyone on your board that doesn’t really get heard? Boards have some of the same needs as teams as you will see in this example.

Assessing The Team

We were asked to work with a board of a health charity. It was the time in the planning cycle for the board to think about risks, assess the size and probability of things going wrong and to propose mitigation strategies.

In terms of teamwork, in this board, they had two issues: the first issue was that they had an experienced board member whose style was like a steam-roller, and the second issue was that they had no organized way to integrate a new board member, nor any awareness of its importance.  They had Susan (the steam-roller), who thought that she really knew all of what was going on and who spoke up the most often in the board meetings. She argued with anyone who disagreed with her and many on the board got into the habit of just letting her have her way because it took so much energy to tangle with her.

Janet was the new member of the board. She had come to the board role with really good experience in another sector and was feeling her way in this one. Consequently she hung back trying to get a handle on the board’s work. She hadn’t really sufficiently developed her relationships and knowledge of the health sector to feel comfortable voicing her unease with Susan’s solution.

The Problem

One day, a problem arose. A client had come forward to complain about one of the doctors who had been volunteering in the charity’s medical clinic. This client had accused the doctor of malpractice. The doctor has been associated with the charity for fifteen years and was someone Susan admired very much. Susan was proposing that the board didn’t have to think do anything about this. She vouched for the doctor.

Janet wasn’t at all sure that Susan’s approach was the right approach. What if the client was right? What if it turned out this was just the first of many complaints that surfaced and it becamse known that the board had decided to do nothing? She was convinced that Susan was overlooking a real risk to the organization. She asked questions about the review process undertaken when complaints like this were received. Who was involved? A team of medical staff from the clinic? Human Resources? The board’s errors and omissions insurance advisor? She shared some of her experience from a different board on which she had served. None of the board members seemed to want to go against Susan however and the board voted to do nothing. Janet informed the board that this meant that she would have to step down.

The Outcome

It appeared later, that Janet had been right. This was the first of a number of complaints and the doctor, ultimately, was forced to resign. When this came to the courts, the judge was very critical of the charity’s board when it became clear that the board had no normal process of review of complaints and that it did not live up to its duty of care to the charity’s clients.

An ideal situation for a board should have active participation, not passive support for decisions it takes.

Common Board Situations

What about your board? Have you had a similar situation? Do board members listen to each other? Do they draw out and encourage the quieter team members to contribute their ideas? Do you as chair of the board, defer to your louder board members? Do you have a process of review of complaints that come to you about staff and volunteers?

Five quick tips to help alleviate this sort of situation:

1. Devil’s Advocate: When you have someone who is strongly advocating and not listening, invite someone else to play devil’s advocate. It will get another perspective to be represented in the room.
2. The Power of Fresh Thinking: Never discard a new board member’s ideas without exploring them thoroughly in a non-judgemental fashion. Inquire into the basis for their point of view. They may in fact be seeing things that you are not because they are new.
3. Control the Air Time: A good chair insists that all board members have equal voice time and not give a steam-roller free reign.
4. Encourage the Quiet Ones: If you haven’t heard from someone in the meeting for a while, ask them explicitly for their point of view.
5. Consider Stepping Down from the Chair:If the chair is passionate about the issue under debate, a smart chair might consider appointing someone else to chair the meeting for this item.