Click here to read about healthy workplace conflict in Part 1 of Building a Strong Team

Strong teams prioritize what’s best for the organization then move forward.

Prioritizing puts things into an order of importance or gives special attention to something. Want to prioritize what’s best for your company?

The second point the Gallup Management Journal article emphasizes is:

• Good teams stay focused on the big picture, the larger goals of your company and…
• Don’t get bogged down defending their own ideas or positions…
• Focus!

Focusing On The Big Picture

After a healthy debate about whether or not to adapt a new office policy, a great team pulls together and those who championed the “losing” ideas don’t let that bother them. The whole team understands that these things are not personal, that the only thing that really matters is what’s best for the company.

Sounds like a dream team, doesn’t it? So how do you nurture that kind of generous attitude in your own team?

First, you must model that kind of attitude yourself.

When someone else comes up with an idea that is better than the one you put forth, suck it up and say so! Applaud the creative thinking of your team. Encourage them to share their ideas. Your office should not be a place where employees are afraid to make suggestions or contradict you.

Reward acts of generous behavior.

When you see your team pulling together, acknowledge it. Don’t be afraid to voice personal observations. Odds are most of your office staff is female-and most women just happen to respond more to open communication. Sorry fellas, they usually are more sensitive than we are, so meet them on their own turf.

Has there been a big disagreement issue?

Be sure to make the people on the “losing” side feel like their opinions are valued too.

Pause and Ponder:

• Stay focused on the big picture. What’s best for the company?
• Applaud and acknowledge creative thinking and behaviors.
• Encourage idea sharing, and make everyone feel all input/opinions are valued.

True or False?…Members of strong teams are as committed to their personal lives as they are to their work. Part 3 reveals the evidence…

Interested in Building A Strong Team in Your Workplace?

I’ll get you started by sharing some of Tom Rath and Barry Conchie’s (Gallup Management Journal) findings in Keys to Well-Functioning Teams, as well as ideas about…

• Conflict vs. Results
• Identifying Team Deterioration Signs
• Consequences of Ignoring Personnel Problems

Conflict vs. Results:

The first sign that you have an excellent team working for you is having differences of opinion.

Conflict doesn’t destroy strong teams because…strong teams focus on results.

The authors believe that disagreement and healthy debate is a good thing. Well-functioning teams know how to argue in order to sharpen their own points and see other views -without making the conflict personal.

On the other hand, poorly functioning teams foster hurt feelings and productivity tanks. Once bad feelings are triggered, things usually just keep getting worse.

As an employer it’s up to you or your office manager to spot deteriorations and turn them around before your whole team becomes disheartened and unable to work well together.

Deterioration Signs:

Click here to keep reading…

As I explained in my previous post, encouraging your team to have their own office blog can be a tremendous tool to attract the best and brightest candidates. It offers an authentic view into your office culture and presents your workplace in a way that you can’t—from future co-workers’ perspectives. In this article we’ll look at some of the refinements you can add to the blog as well as how to get it found online.

Photos: Be sure to upload lots of photos (it’s a snap) that tell the story of life in your office. Pictures of all team members are essential, as well as plenty of candids from around the office. (Be sure to have them sign a photo consent form.) Display the perks of working there.

• If you have a lounge area that you’re proud of, show it.
• Do you eat your lunch outside in a pretty area on warm days? That’s a photo opp that shows the quality of work life at your agency.
• Does someone bring their dog to work?
• How about a birthday party?
• Anytime you are doing something that demonstrates an aspect of your workplace brand, that’s a photo opp.
Keep an inexpensive digital camera in the office, so you won’t miss those great moments.

Audio: If you want to go farther into multi-media, consider adding audio to your blog. Even just an audio welcome from you would be nice. Snapvine is a free service that records your message over the phone and makes it easy to add to your blog. A message from your office manager might be good, too. Audio is great for team member testimonials and for job opportunity info.

Video: Here’s where it can really get fun! For about $120. you can buy a Flip digital video camera that fits in your pocket and only weighs a few ounces. The learning curve is all of 10 seconds—push the Start button and you’re making a high-quality video. Plug it into your computer to transfer the video. Push a few more buttons and it’s uploaded to the Internet. Really, it’s that simple. Nothing sells like video. And after all, this IS a sales site, selling job candidates on how great it would be to work for you. Document fun activities in your office and even outings you may have with your team. I wish I’d had one when I took my team whitewater rafting. It’s also great for giving a grand tour of the office. Even the video hosting is free! Just open a free account at YouTube and Flip will upload your videos to that page with one click. Then from your YT page you can capture the code to paste into your blog. You can shoot a video in your office and have it online in under five minutes.

Promoting your blog: Here’s the really cool part. Have 500 or more colorful business cards printed up (Vista Print is an inexpensive online company). On one side have a brand statement, proposition or qualifier; it could even be in the form of a question. Use anything that sets you apart form your competition. For example:

• Want to work with great people?
• Where fun and work coexist.
• Want work/life balance?
• Looking for a better job in DesMoines?
• You just found the healthiest place to work in Richmond.
• Ready for a change and a challenge in Atlanta?

Then on the reverse, in large letters, simply have your domain name: www.workinghereisfun.com . Do not put any phone numbers, names or your agency name on the card. Just the blog address. The whole point is to send people there to learn what they need to know about working for you. Trust me, the cards will be intriguing, especially if your question or statement hits a hot button for job seekers in your area. Give these cards to everyone you know to pass along. Drop them off at college placement offices, daycare centers. Leave them at Starbucks. Pin them to bulletin boards. Have your team think of inventive places to leave a stack of them. Where do people you’d want to hire spend time? A local bookstore? Because of the uniqueness of this approach, many people who get the cards will pass them on to people they know who may be good prospects. Then let the blog do all the heavy lifting. (Be sure to say on the blog how interested applicants should contact you.)

Another idea would be to advertise the blog in simple classified ads—perhaps even in other categories besides Help Wanted, using the same technique to stimulate curiosity. Again, the idea is to just get candidates to the blog, and then let it do the work. Consider advertising in a nearby college paper or nay of the many websites that post jobs.

Getting your blog found online: Search engines love blogs—as long as they are updated with some regularity. If you’re in a competitive job market, then you might be able to attract applicants directly from the Internet who are searching for job openings. In that case, you’d want to optimize your blog to do well in searches, which is beyond the scope of this article to explain, but you can learn all about it by Googling: SEO for blogs.

Advanced effects: If you have someone on your team (or maybe it’s you) who is tech-savvy and creative, there are endless free tools you can use to spice up your blog even more with animations of the boss (Blabberize), slides shows (RockYou), music videos (Animoto)—you are limited only by your imagination in how you portray the work experience at your agency.

There’s an added benefit to this process: your existing team members will have a good time doing it, be reminded of the fun they’ve been enjoying working for you and become invested in the recruitment process. So get blogging!

If you’re serious about improving your recruitment processes, check out my Employee Attraction System™ here; it’s full of great ideas like this.

Nothing says: “We’re a 21st century company” faster than being able to send job candidates to your team blog.

It’s not nearly as daunting as you may fear, and I’ll walk you through the major steps in a 2-part article this week. The best part is, your team can probably do most of the work (which is actually the point—this is primarily their blog on what it’s like to work in your office).

The reason for suggesting a blog is that you don’t have to set up any infrastructure or create any web pages. It’s fast and simple. The real value of this is it creates an archive of credibility for your workplace brand, because it’s not just some static company web page that blathers on about what a nice place it is to work. Instead, here’s your actual team, saying in their own words, what they like about working for you. It’s exactly the kind of information that applicants under the age of 40 would find appealing.

Goals of blog: Team member recruitment is the primary goal, but you may come up with additional uses—just be clear at the outset. Attracting new clients probably does NOT mix well with this objective.

Plan the content: What aspects of your workplace brand do you want to illustrate? To be sure the blog meets your goals, get clear about the messages you want to convey. For example: • How gorgeous your office is? • How much fun you have working there? • How well-organized your space is? How friendly your team is? While the actual blog should read as a mostly spontaneous, casual creation, it should actually be carefully thought out ahead of time to be sure all your objectives are met.

Domain name: Register a unique name for your Internet blog address that says something positive about your agency and will be intriguing to job candidates. For example, my team is using: www.workinghereisfun.com . You might use a variation of bestplacetoworkportland.com, greatplacetoworkdallas.com, bestteaminboston.com and so on. As you’ll see in a moment, the idea is to be a bit mysterious with the name. If you are in a competitive market, by all means, include the name of your city in your domain name.

Hosting: This is free at many Internet locations (Blogger, WordPress.org), or in some cases, there is a very minimal monthly fee (TypePad). You may already have your own website with a free blog as part of it that you just need to activate. There are endless blogging resources online, just Google ‘em.

Customize it: You will want to do a few minimal things, such as selecting a color scheme, adding your bio and photo, putting the name of your agency in the header—this can be done in under an hour by most people with an average ability at using the Internet.

Start blogging: There should be a welcome message pinned permanently to the top of the blog. It would probably be from you, though it could be from your whole team. The point of it is to explain to first-time visitors what the purpose of the blog is. From then on, blog entries (posts) are made as often as you like and are automatically archived chronologically as well as into categories that you determine.

Key tip: Whenever you do have an active job opening, have an alternate welcome post pinned to the top of the blog that tells about the opening.

Assign a head blogger: Pick someone to be in charge of getting it up and running and making sure enough content is put on it to make it useful. He or she should also see that new posts are added at least monthly and especially whenever something significant happens. (A new team member is added, a career milestone is celebrated, professional awards, team outings, etc.)

That’s enough info to get you started—I don’t want to overwhelm you. We’ll finish it up in my next article. Remember, as newspapers fade as the go-to source for job openings, more and more candidates are doing their job hunting online. Make it easy and inviting for them to learn about your company and why they’d want to work there, and you’ll have a big advantage over your competition.

If you’re serious about improving your recruitment processes, check out my Employee Attraction System™ here; it’s full of great ideas like this.

I’m kind of a geek when it comes to studies of the human brain.

I find the research fascinating and love applying it to my career and life. One of my favorite books on the topic is Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. In it he shares new knowledge from the emerging field of social neuroscience. The latest brain research can be so revealing when applied to office dynamics. Neuroscience now proves that our effects on one another—both good and bad—are significant. As Goleman demonstrates, we are indeed social beings who respond on a chemical level to other people.

For example, the act of being kind to another person raises serotonin levels in both the giver and the receiver of the kindness. More surprising is that just witnessing an act of kindness raises the serotonin level of the observer an equal amount. (Serotonin has been dubbed the Happiness Molecule, and is a neurotransmitter directly associated with mood. Higher levels of Serotonin put a big old smile on your face.)

Here’s a useful takeaway: If you have something good to say to an employee, when appropriate, do it in front of the whole team and let everybody share in the hormonal rush.

Conversely, negativity breeds more of the same. We all have mirror neurons, brain cells that sense another person’s feelings and prepare us to imitate what they are feeling. That’s why it’s important to dump any bad apples that may have landed on your team. Once you’ve determined they can’t be brought back from the dark side, then they simply have to go. Sadly, once employees become actively disengaged they drag the whole team down. Even worse, neuroscientists can now see that stressful relationships have a negative effect on our immune systems. Fewer bad apples may indeed equal fewer sick days for the whole team—and that includes you! As Goleman states it: “…toxic relationships can act like slow poison in our bodies.” There’s a whole section in my book Finding Joy In Your Job that examines how to handle bad apples, with tips to help you determine if they can be salvaged.

Another fascinating finding of new research is how plastic our brains are, how able we are to learn new things and even grow new brain cells at any age. That’s comforting to this older dog, that we can still learn new tricks after all. But an unexpected result of our malleable brains is that we shape them throughout our lives by the relationships we maintain. As Goleman explains, “…being chronically hurt and angered, or being emotionally nourished, by someone we spend time with daily over the course of years can refashion our brain.” Again, the implications for our work lives—and beyond—are immense.

You simply must make it a priority to move your team into thrive mode as quickly as possible.

We live in an exciting age when we can finally learn and apply the latest brain science. I’m always reading books on this subject, so I’ll continue to share what I discover with you—and help you find ways to implement some of these ideas. For starters, be kind to your team today!