Targeting Teamwork: How Bosses and Other Performance Managers Can Build and Sustain Team and Organizational Excellence

Targeting Teamwork:

How Bosses and Other Performance Managers Can Build and Sustain Team and Organizational Excellence

by Michael Dinius, MS, MA

Copyright 2013 Michael Dinius

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical without written permission from the author.

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Published by Performance Management Consulting, LLC

p-m-consult.com

Email: diniusmichael@yahoo.com

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this ebook may be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Who This Book is for and How to Use It

Help for Bosses and Team Leaders * What This Book Does -- and Doesn’t Do * Overview of Target Performance Management * Target Performance Management Drivers

Chapter 2. About Teamwork and Team Types

Types of Teams * Benefits and Challenges of Teamwork * Just What is Teamwork? * Required vs. Desired Performance * Teambuilding Definitions * Respect and Benefit Others * Trust and Caring * Importance of Requiring Respect and Benefit Others * Involving Employees in Building Teams * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employees

Chapter 3. How Teamwork Develops . . . or Doesn't

The Four Team Stages * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employees * Considering Target Performance for the Four Team Stages

Chapter 4. Successful Team Attributes

Three Areas of Team Attributes (PIP) * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employees

Chapter 5. Your Teamwork Goals and Expectations (Target Performance)

Team Planning Questions * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employees * Organizational Mission, Vision, and Values

Chapter 6. Driver: Pinpointing, Communicating, and Modeling Teamwork Expectations

Involving Employees in Implementing the Performance Drivers * Performance Standards * Pinpointing Team Target Performance * Methods of Pinpointing * Pinpointing Respect and Benefit Others * Professionalism * Communicating Team Target Performance * Modeling Team Target Performance * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employees

Chapter 7. Driver: Selecting for Teamwork

Informal or Formal Selection Process * Behavioral Selection * Sample Interview Questions * Target Performance: Respecting Others * Target Performance: Benefiting Others * Other Sample Interview Questions * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employers

Chapter 8. Driver: Providing Resources for Teamwork

Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employers

Chapter 9. Driver: Assessing Team Performance

What is Assessment? * Employee Concerns about Assessment * Assessment Methods * Judgment Calls * Everyone’s Performance is Great * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employers

Chapter 10. Driver: Responding to Team Performance

Responding with Feedback * Responding with Coaching * A Coaching Method * Responding with Motivation (and Demotivation) * What Motivates Employees? * Common Individual and Team Motivators * Common Motivation Mistakes * Personal Reinforcement * Effective Celebrations * Responding with Corrective Action * Performance Problems * Team Involvement: Sample Questions for Employees

Chapter 11. Achieving and Sustaining Teamwork Excellence

Strategic Overview of Teams * Summary of Key Points * The Siren Lure of Fads and New Programs * What Are You Going to Do?

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I am not a professional writer, but I greatly admire those that are. I wish I’d paid more attention in English Composition class. Still, I had all of these ideas bubbling around within me. I didn’t know if I could adequately express them, or how much people might be interested in them, but I decided to write this book. It exists because of the following people. If you don’t like it, you can blame them (as though I’m an innocent victim). If you do like it, it would not have happened, as it has, without their influences.

Al Bernstein, PhD., was my manager at the mental health clinic where I was a staff therapist. I have thought of him numerous times in the intervening thirty-plus years as I confronted challenges, often thinking What would Al do? After many years, I contacted him (now a best-selling author and successful psychologist) for advice about writing a book. He has been his usual gracious, ironic, and very direct self. As in times before, he saved me from my initial raw inclinations. Thank you, Al, for cutting through the B.S.

Burns Mixon was my manager in a different job. He asked me tough questions, expected a lot from me, and formally introduced me to the worlds of management training and organizational development. He’s the most knowledgeable, creative OD person I know, and it was privilege working with and for him. He’s also a good friend.

Lynne Pagel was another of my managers. From her I learned so much administratively and about Human Resources. She, her husband Jerry, and I have remained friends for many years and occasionally get on one another’s nerves, as best friends do. It’s nice knowing I can be a bit of a butt-head and still be welcomed.

Barbara Brabec is an author, editor, author’s consultant, and independent book publisher. I had all sorts of wrong-headed ideas about being an author and publishing a book. She set me straight in no uncertain terms and provided the personal and professional support any author needs and desires. She and the others mentioned above would like each other and enjoy laughing together at my expense. It would be worth it. Thank you, Barbara, for your patience and persistence and invaluable guidance in the unnerving, frustrating, stimulating, gratifying world of writing and publishing. (P.S. I made changes after Barbara’s final editing; any errors are my doing.)

Melodee Buxbaum is the lady in my life. She has tolerated me for almost twenty years, which is cause for acknowledgement in itself. She was the first person to see my first drafts (you don’t want to know). Because of her education, vocation, and probably genetic endowment, she has an eye for debugging, massaging, and polishing text to be more effective and efficient. She’s also special for other reasons.

At this point, I haven’t accomplished anything other than what millions of others have done, which is to write a book. I have no idea if it will flop or be even mildly successful, but I want to thank many people for their influence. At least I expunged all of those pesky ideas.

If this book is somehow helpful to you in building and sustaining better teams, I’ve accomplished my goal. Thank you.

Chapter 1

Who This Book is for and How to Use It

"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishment toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results."

- Andrew Carnegie, American industrialist and philanthropist

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SO, YOU WANT TO BUILD a successful team. Welcome to my book.

To start, what is your idea of a successful team? I’ll regularly ask, in so many words, What do you want from your team? Employees (team members) must have a clear view of their performance targets -- behavior, results, and goals -- before they can hit them. Among other things, this book will help you refine, communicate, and realize your vision of a successful team.

This is a short, practical guide -- the steps and components -- to building and sustaining exceptional teams. It is not a rigid checklist. It is an adaptable recipe with many possible ingredients and with you as the chef. Let’s start cooking.

Help for Bosses and Team Leaders

This will not boost my book sales, but this book is not for everyone. It is for bosses and team leaders who take the long view, those who aren’t satisfied with the fastest, easiest ways out of leadership, but who are willing and able do what it takes to apply proven concepts, convictions, and tools for immediate value while building the necessary foundation for sustained team and organizational excellence. These bosses have the courage of their convictions. They not only articulate what they believe, but also stand by and support their beliefs in difficult and challenging times.

Unfortunately, many bosses and team leaders don’t do these things. They select and manage team members for various reasons (often technical skills, politics, or whatever is most convenient), then offer insufficient or just good-enough guidance, assessment, and response -- and hope for the best. But that is not earning success. Building teams for sustained excellence requires knowledge of self and others, plus preparation and commitment. You get out of it only what you put into it.

This book is for bosses who want to build a team that requires respecting and benefiting others, that encourages trust in and caring for others; a team where people want to show their best performance and are committed (loyal, dependable, willing to sacrifice) to the team and the organization. These bosses recognize that this is a most effective and efficient way to lead a team to success. And, it is intrinsically satisfying and deeply, personally rewarding.

The best bosses (business owners, managers, supervisors, team leaders) have specific values, standards, tactics, and strategies. These coalesce into a plan and vision to manage people and teams for sustained excellence. The same applies to other performance managers, such as in Human Resources, Training, Safety and Compliance. Unless noted, to avoid awkward sentences, the term boss will also refer to performance manager. Also, team member and employee will be used interchangeably depending upon the situation being described.

I wrote this book as a performance management primer with small and medium business owners and management in mind, especially leaders of start-ups and individuals gaining supervisory responsibilities. These folks have probably not attended extensive team training or seminars, but they want to understand successful management. They want to quickly get to what is most useful to them for team success. For them, psychological leadership theories, interpersonal relations hypotheses, and abstract organizational concepts are not of much interest or use. Though focused on business teams, this book is also applicable to social/civic, educational, government, sports, and other types of teams.

I’d like to help you avoid common and not-so-common mistakes, and optimize opportunities that might be unseen at the time. There is a quote, something like, Experience can be a cruel teacher, giving the exam first and then the lesson. Experience is the best teacher, but it’s better if you have enough knowledge to avoid the cruel teachings.

What This Book Does—and Doesn’t Do

This book is not about management retreats, interventions such as trust exercises or ropes courses, or group games such as scavenger hunts. Such things may