Can't you improve your team's performance?

This is a VERY simple exercise that your team can do to dramatically increase its effectiveness.

It goes like this …

Get your team together for about one hour inside a room without distractions - and have all of your team members brainstorm ideas about what you need to do to become more effective as a team.

Have available three or four flip-charts and/or a large blackboard with plenty of markers of different dark colors - at least black, blue and red.

Note One:

For brainstorming to be effective - keep in mind these four rules:

1) Focus on quantity - not quality. Brainstorming is about divergent thinking: The more ideas you generate - the greater the possibility to create breakthrough ideas.

2) Welcome all and every single idea - all ideas are valid - especially the most unusual ones.

3) Combine and improve ideas: Feel free to steal from other people's ideas to come up with your own ideas, associate other ideas, etc.

4) Keep criticism out of the way. Don't criticize - especially your own ideas. The worst enemy in brainstorming is our own internal self-judge.

Note Two:

Your brainstorming must be about relationship-oriented ideas – not about tasks/results-oriented ideas.

By "relationship-oriented" I mean the relationships between and among team members - like trust, problem solving, communication, feedback, conflict management, meetings, decision making, etc.

By "tasks/results-oriented" I mean all the tasks and results that your team must perform and accomplish - like performing tasks with the expected quality, reaching goals on time, working within scheduled budgets, etc.

Once you finish your brainstorming - identify the two or three most important / necessary ideas that your team would like to adopt - and then incorporate these ideas as ground rules for your team.

For example - if your team decides that feedback must be multidirectional (up, down and sideways) instead of just down (from boss down to direct reports), adopt this idea as a team's ground rule - and then execute it consistently until this new ground rule becomes part of your team's culture.

Repeat this team-building exercise every time your team considers it necessary - like every quarter or every semester for example.

Conclusion ...

One hour doesn't take up much of your time - and your team will reap long-term benefits beyond your most optimistic expectations.

Questions? Feedback? Reply to this Newsletter and tell me what you would like future issues to be about.

Feel free to re-send this "Leader Newsletter" to your colleagues.

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