Teaming Up: Are You Committed?
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
Your team needs you!
We are in our third week of exploring what the most successful engagement teams do consistently to achieve team success and deliver on their defined purpose.
A team can define its purpose, exhibit all the right team behaviors and have complete organizational support, but if any one or more of the team members are not fully committed to contributing to the team’s efforts it is this lack of commitment that is a major contributing factor for teams not achieving team the goals and success they have defined.
In working with engagement teams over the last 4-5 years we have found a number of key areas where individual and team commitment enables and accelerates team success.
Each team member must be committed to:
Consistently attending scheduled meetings and events.
Preparing for each team meeting.
Commit to and deliver on all agreed upon next step actions.
Providing thoughts and ideas and challenging the status quo.
Learning and developing both as an individual and as a team (engagement team training).
Encouraging peers and those in their sphere of influence to actively engage.
Coach and mentor other newly formed engagement teams.
Staying committed to engagement team success is difficult. Each year we work with dozens of engagement teams from their initiation to completion and with each one of them team and individual commitment is tested in some way. Day to day functional job pressures and the pace of change in business adds pressure and challenges that commitment. But, stay the course and, if necessary, reach out to the engagement team sponsor to assist in prioritizing both the importance to the organization and the time commitment required of you and your team to deliver on your team purpose.
Stay committed, your team and organization need you.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Teaming Up: Exemplifying the Right Behaviors
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
As we continue our efforts to leverage our experience in enabling engagement team success we want to turn our attention to establishing the right team environment by identifying and exemplifying the right team behaviors.
The team can have a clear team purpose, each team member can be committed, and the team can have all the organizational support it can garner, but if the team doesn’t define and consistently show the behaviors that will enable success, as well as identify and acknowledge behaviors that, if shown, will derail the teams efforts, the team stands a chance of not reaching the its full potential and not delivering on its stated purpose and team charter.
A critical team best practice is in the initial phase of team formation: Openly brainstorming and documenting team behaviors that will enable success and those that could potential derail the team. Here are a few behaviors from other engagement teams brainstorming lists to jump start the discussion if you need them.
Enabling behaviors for success:
Active engagement by ALL members.
Model personal and team leadership.
Provide insight, NOT barriers.
Use influence, NOT power.
Act with urgency.
Disruptive thinking, NOT disruptive actions.
Always seek clarity and alignment.
Reward and recognize milestones.
Dis-enabling behaviors to avoid:
Inflexibility
Dominate the team discussion.
Settling for status quo.
Blame and justification
Failing to show, both physically and mentally.
Defaulting to “No” or “Can’t be done.”
Being self-centered or self-serving.
Lack of individual and team preparation.
Once the enabling and dis-enabling lists are agreed upon by all team members, it is an engagement team best practice to review the lists periodically at the start of team meetings just to reinforce how important the focus on exhibiting the right team behaviors are to achieving team success.
The results an engagement team delivers are important, but how those results are achieved along the way are equally as important. Don’t assume good team behavior, cultivate it!
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Teaming Up: What's Your Purpose?
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
In our last blog, the future of organizational performance are in these “network of teams” working seamlessly, promoting enhanced employee engagement, real-time communication, rapid information flow, and agile collaboration.
Our experience over the last 5 years cultivating and enabling these teams has shown it takes more than just getting people together and calling them an “engagement team.” There is a time-tested formula that sets the right foundation for team success.
Let’s focus on purpose. The foundation for any engagement team is establishing a clear purpose that every team member is aligned to. Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Every team struggles with this, and often, most teams skip over this important step and go right to resources and activities.
This step is NOT just creating a purpose statement, this is a defining action in the formation of the team that provides:
An anchor point for the team.
The “what” for the team.
A definition of both success for the team and the desired impact of the team.
The answer to “why” this team and its work are important.
A team can have all the right behaviors with all team members committed and tremendous organizational support but without a clearly defined and aligned purpose, the team will have little to no direction and rarely achieve its full potential and desired outcomes.
So, what’s your purpose?
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Teaming Up: Moving From Siloed to a Network of Teams
Listen to the Destination: Success Podcast.
The age of the hierarchical organization is quickly coming to an end. Businesses are reinventing themselves to compete in this complex and unpredictable world of change and opportunity, and this change applies to any and all industries, both small and large organizations. Organizations are decentralizing decision making, moving toward product and customer-centric performance models, and forming an agile network of highly engaged teams that communicate and deliver results in powerful ways.
This “network of teams” performance model which promotes high employee engagement, strong, real-time communication, and rapid information flow is transforming organizations and providing for a very powerful organizational competitive advantage. These teams are purpose-focused, consistently exhibit the right team behaviors, are committed and supported at the very highest level of the organization.
But, as easy and enticing as it sounds to move to this team model the initial transition and the ability to actually enable and sustain long term success is difficult. Breaking down entrenched silos, cultivating true “shared responsibility”, ensuring transparency, and mastering the art of agile collaboration can become frustrating and very easy to abandon at the first sign of resistance. We know because we assist organizations in enabling this highly effective engagement team performance model on a day to day basis.
Over the next several weeks, we will share with you the struggles and the successes many organizations encounter in this transition and provide an effective path forward for your organization.
So why now? According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trend study, 92 percent of companies believe that redesigning the organization is imperative, making it No. 1 in ranked importance among their respondents.
So the question becomes: Is your organization moving to become more fluid and agile through greater employee and team engagement? If not, you are about to be competing against those that are.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Does Your Organization CARE to Engage Your Employees?
If you want better employee engagement, it can’t just be delegated to managers or HR. Our clients with 90+% employee engagement scores enable that success using a simple C.A.R.E engagement model.
Clarity
Creating and maintaining clarity throughout any organization is crucial to achieving and sustaining measurable top-tier performance and engagement. Clarity in two ways; developing, cultivating and leveraging the organization’s “people” advantage and then maintaining a finger on the pulse of people’s engagement is critical.
People want a “reason to believe” in the organization they work for and they want to know that what they do matters and that their contributions are valued. This is the organization providing clarity so people, no matter where they are in the organization, feel connected and valued. What is your organizations “reason to believe”?
Alignment
Aligning performance environment, culture, people, process and behaviors with purpose, vision, mission and values is a critical key to achieving sustained performance and employee engagement.
Resources
To continually cultivate and enable an organization where everyone is leading where they are and where leaders are supporting the growth and development of their people (and in turn driving results and engagement) requires the organization to invest in resources that both support and advance those efforts.
Enable
It’s time to enable!
Create and cultivate a culture and organizational performance environment that enables and accelerates success, not impedes or becomes a barrier to success. Form engagement teams, provide all employee engagement training and cultivate an organization that is employee engaged, leader supported, and organizational enabled.
Start by:
Ensuring that executive and senior leaders are aligned on purpose, vision, mission and values and are providing clarity and continually reinforcing the reason to believe for every employee.
Developing an effective onboarding process that provides leadership training and support for all new hires.
Providing coaching and mentoring to formal leaders so they in turn can more effectively coach and mentor their people.
Establishing a process that continually assesses organizational effectiveness and employee engagement and turns that feedback into rapid change.
Provide ongoing training and support that develops the leader in everyone.
So how much does your organization truly CARE about your employee’s engagement?
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.
Want Better Employee Engagement? Become a CEO (Chief Engagement Officer) for Your People.
If you want better employee engagement, leaders need to cultivate and support an environment of engagement, not compliance. If you are a formal leader of people, add the duties of the CEO (Chief Engagement Officer) to your role.
Our clients that have seen double digit improvement in overall employee engagement have leaders that cultivate employee-led engagement. They stop managing their people and begin developing environments of personal performance, accountability, change, and connecting people to a purpose, not a task. They enable so many more decisions then they could ever personally make in the past. Now that is true empowerment!
Engaged leaders look beyond titles, roles, and position descriptions of their people. They match talent to opportunity. We had one of our clients take a product manager, tap them on the shoulder to lead the effort to build a brand-new multimillion-dollar headquarters location. That building came four weeks ahead of schedule and right on budget…..they matched talent to opportunity and success happened.
As a leader, are you:
Now is the time to make the leadershift and take on the role of CEO (Chief Engagement Officer). You and your organization will be glad you did.
For more information on how to more actively engage in your organization join our DESTINATION: SUCCESS page, or contact us!
Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in enabling success by developing a dynamic and customized pathway to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.