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…

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:

1. Your employees are suddenly uninterested in any group functions.
2. Your office is quieter than usual, less banter/chatter among your staff.
3. Team members divide into two groups with strongly differing opinions.
4. Productivity is going down fast.
5. Everyone is quick to blame someone else.
6. Team members are hyper-sensitive to criticism from you.
7. Employees seem overly defensive when you ask them for something that isn’t available or done yet.

Ignoring Personnel Problems~ Head In The Sand As An Office Cyclone Brews?

Too many times, as bosses we prefer to stick our heads in the company sand pile and hope the ill wind in the office will blow on by. It rarely does. Instead, a cyclone brews, someone quits in a huff, and then you have a real mess on your hands.

Ignoring personnel problems -no matter how trivial they may seem- is rarely good management practice. In sales we often say, “close early and often”. When it comes to managing people “counsel/intevene early and often” should be the mantra of a good leader.

Pause and Ponder:

• Strong teams focus on results.
• Knowing the deterioration signs fosters awareness.
• Ignoring Personnel Problems is rarely good management practice.

Strong teams prioritize what’s best for the organization. Stay tuned for Part 2 of Building A Strong Team…

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.

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 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!

“Success is the freedom to be yourself.”
~Kathy Kolbe

Since getting recertified recently as a Kolbe Consultant, I decided to share some more information about how I use the Kolbe System™.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, here are the basics (which apply just as much to the boss as to the team).

Research now proves we all have a natural tendency to initiate solutions, prevent problems and respond to changing needs. Human instinct is the power behind our actions. It’s the source of our mental energy. Understanding how your instincts combine with your talents and personality will help you optimize your opportunities.

A brief history of where I’m taking you

More than 40 years ago, an intelligence test was developed by E.F. Wonderlic, which was for many years considered a standard in hiring new employees. The test measured not only how smart the applicants were, but also how quickly they could complete a task with the fewest number of errors. His team figured that with this data, an employer would not only hire the best and the brightest, but employee turnover would decline as a result. As it turned out, while the test provided valuable information to employers, turnover rates did not change.

Then along came Dr. Wonderlic’s oh-so-smart daughter, Kathy Kolbe, who shared his passion for understanding how we are wired. After years of research, Kathy developed a simple, effective tool to help people determine their right fit within a company, based on how they instinctively initiate solutions and get things done. For the first time in your life, you’ll have valuable, scientific data that explains how you and your team function best in the world and what you really enjoy doing.

For that reason, I suggest you invest in your future and take the index at www.kolbe.com . (You can do them in about 20 minutes, and you’ll get your results immediately. By the way, I have no financial investment in her company, nor do I profit from your ordering your index.) What I can say, is that reading my index results changed my life and has truly given me the freedom to be myself. If you want to ensure you’re in the right business, improve job satisfaction and productivity for your team, please consider getting the Kolbe A Index for all of you. There are other valuable profiles on the market today including, Now Discover Your Strengths and the Caliper Assessment tool, that you may want to explore in the future. For my time and money though, the Kolbe A Index was the easiest to transfer to both my business and personal life.

In my book, Finding Joy In Your Job, I go into all this in much greater detail, but in a tiny nutshell, Kolbe divides people into profiles based on their abilities in four areas:
1. Being quick to initiate things
2. Fact finding
3. Having the skills to implement ideas
4. Being able to follow through with ideas to completion

For example, many business owners have the entrepreneurial profile, because they rate high as a Quick Start (initiator) with a good dose of Implementer. However, they’re usually much weaker in research and follow through—which is why you want to hire people who complement your strengths and weak spots.

Here’s an excerpt from my book which gives more examples:

If you want to grow passionflowers, you need a hot sunny exposure; if you prefer violets, they’ll thrive in deep shade. One isn’t a better flower, they’re just different, but knowing what they need to flourish determines whether they bloom or wither. You can grow passionflowers in partial shade, but they won’t be prolific bloomers. We can all learn to adapt by trying to function in a different style, but it will never feel quite right. A Fact Finder who is rushed into delivering a presentation without her usual preparation will feel insecure and stressed, afraid she won’t be able to perform up to her usual high standards. Meanwhile, a Quick Start who is asked to design an instructional system before she ever leads one seminar, will go bonkers. She’d rather just jot down a few notes, wing the first seminar and be confident she’ll get better each time she does one. Without physical models of what she’s trying to understand, an Implementor may well panic when asked to explain over the phone how to fix your laptop. A Follow Thru person will feel very unsatisfied if pushed to create a series of press releases, then move on to a different task without knowing whether or not they were effective.

It’s all about doing what is instinctively natural for you.

Imagine having a team where each person understands her strengths and gets to spend the majority of her time excelling because she is working in her core aptitudes. Which also means, she experiences far less frustration, because she isn’t doing many things she’s poorly suited to do. Understanding how each person on your team can make their best contribution and how you can all complement each other, is truly the key to employee satisfaction, a thriving team—and business.

It was a great one, for sure—an incredibly warm day, enjoying the river from my deck with loved ones—everything was perfect. That’s the kind of day we all wish we could have more of, so here’s the wake-up call: we can. We need to make it a priority to squeeze more joy out of the lemons in our lives—to consciously buy more sweet oranges, to extend the metaphor. When’s the last time you took off on a weekday and went fishing or played golf or stayed home with your kids? We may talk a good line about work/life balance, but do we live it ourselves?

I’m blessed with three grandsons, and this is me with my twin grandkids Cruz and Hudson—am I a lucky guy or what? Being around them reminds me of a wonderful little book from many years ago (which is still in print): All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. The author, Robert Fulghum, writes about simple life lessons that we do, indeed, learn at an early age but that still contain useful life management tools. Things like play nicely with others, share your toys, really look at the world around you. When I look into my grandsons’ eyes I wonder what their world will be like. I wish for them a world where joy prevails over hardship, where fun is valued as much as work. I especially hope they don’t grow up too fast, which will be tough to accomplish once they’re old enough to use a computer. (Which ought to be any day now, I suppose!)

Anyway, my point here is that all of your employees feel these same emotions about their families and lives.

We’d all like to slow down our hectic pace a bit. We’d all like more happiness in our lives. As your team’s leader, you do have the power to sprinkle some joy dust on your team.

• Send them home an hour early someday for no reason other than it’s Thursday.
• Have picnic lunches delivered and take everyone off to a park to enjoy some fine spring weather.
• Have a Bring Your Kid To Work Day this summer and don’t stress out over how much work actually happens.
• Bring your dog to the office and let him cheer everyone up.

You get the drift. Little things can have big consequences if you let them. Work hard, but play harder.

If you’re not familiar with Kolbe, it’s the world’s leading provider of performance forecasting software. I’ve been using it for years to help me make better hiring decisions for my agency. In addition, I encourage other agents and clients to have their teams and applicants tested, and then I help them to understand and apply the results.

It was great to see Kathy Kolbe again, as well as colleagues from around the country who are making use of this great tool. We learned about some new reporting options, but the most fascinating thing I heard was that there’s been another shift in how business teams are functioning. Kolbe researchers noted that the most recent trend of having leaderless teams is proving not to work well. In fact, teams really do need a leader to function optimally. In most cases, that would be you, the business owner.

So if you bought into that management trend—which was seductive on many fronts, for sure—and you’re not seeing the results you expected, then you’re not alone. It may be time to go back to basics and resume leading your team.

All it takes is one person who watches too much cable news or subscribes to fear mongers from any source. That person might even be you! More likely, it’s some team member who is stuck in a negative spiral and is trying to take others down with him or her.

The time to stop that energy is the very first time you catch a whiff of it. I’m not saying these events aren’t real and that we should all poke our heads in the sand. I am saying that we don’t have to allow what’s wrong in the world to dominate our thoughts and fuel our actions. What’s wrong with our lives is always available to wallow in. Then again, so is what’s right. You may simply have to look a bit harder to find it in these times.

So how do you improve employee motivation? How do you reverse such negative spirals of energy? Well, you can dissect them for starters. Show your team where the reasoning fails. Point out what IS working in the lives of your team members. Remind them that you’re there to lend an ear, to reassure them about their jobs, to be the solid foundation your business is built upon. These are times that test your leadership skills, that may ask of you things you’ve never had to deal with before. Many people are living in a heightened state of emotion, are on edge, are intensely worried about their futures. You know what worry does to your team—it halts productivity, it sucks the life force out of your staff.

Here are a few remedies.
• Distraction often works. Give them something new to focus on, perhaps a project that’s been on your To Do List for a long time.
• Find no-cost ways to boost morale. With warmer weather, have lunch outdoors or bring in a jug of homemade lemonade—with the idea that you are all going to make lemonade from your situation. Brainstorm among your team for ways to improve whatever situations are bugging everyone. Never underestimate the value of employee feedback. Ask THEM what would cheer them up.
• Start a friendly competition over small things. I’m not talking about big sales contests which are stress-inducing. Instead, contests to see who can field the most phone calls in one week, or find the most ways to save money around the office through conservation measures. Or what about a contest to see who can make the most calls to clients just to check on them and see how they’re doing, to ask them if there’s anything you could do for them? Hey, how about a contest for the best contest ideas!

• Food rarely fails. Bring some homemade cookies or asparagus from a local grower or fresh strawberry shortcake. Comfort food. You must deserve it!
• Collect a few short inspirational videos from YouTube (like the one below) and download them onto CDs, then give one to each employee. Let them watch the CD when they need an emotional boost during the day. Videos like this are great at shifting a person’s mental state.

Above all, as the boss, you are the leader of your “tribe” and it’s up to you to set the example of someone who maintains a positive attitude and good work ethic—despite what may be going on around you. So how are you doing on that score? Are you taking extra long lunches, sleeping in, playing more golf, finding excuses to avoid the office? Are you in denial about the general mood of your team members? Is it time for you to confront your own mindset? Just asking.

For more ideas on motivating your employees, download my free report: Engaging the Disengaged.

First off I want to recommend an excellent book on the subject: Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us by Seth Godin. Godin is definitely a genius, one of those guys who could’ve been an example in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (another great book, by the way). A world-famous marketer, author & pot-stirrer, Godin founded Squidoo.com and also has the most popular business blog on earth. Yes, on earth. So he can be trusted on the subject of leadership.

One of his points is that leaders help their tribes create change. Now that might sound scary because you might be change-averse. What I’m talking about is creativity, ideas your team might have to change how things have always been done, ideas to improve your customers’ experience with your agency or business. Teams need to feel their ideas are heard, and when appropriate, valued and implemented—and then credited back to them. Life is nothing but change; clinging to the status quo will just wrench your back and ruin your golf swing. Therefore, why not encourage your team to think for themselves, to improve your business, to innovate?

Now I realize that not all team members are inherently wired for that kind of initiative. Nonetheless, some of your employees probably are, and innovation can actually be contagious. So stop resisting and start encouraging. Besides, it’s really good for employee morale.

In his book Godin explains the importance of a happy tribe:

“How was your day?” is a question that matters a lot more than it seems. It turns out that the people who like their jobs the most are doing the best work, making the greatest impact, and changing the most. Changing the way they see the world, sure, but also changing the world.”

Godin contends that people now hunger for novelty, for change, for a new way to look at things. He encourages us to be remarkable, fearless and to avoid selling in the same old boring manner. He believes the marketplace rewards innovation. How about you? Have you come up with (or encouraged your team to invent) new ways to drum up business in this economy?

Godin also says leaders can expand the effectiveness of their tribes by “transforming a shared interest into a passionate goal.” For example, when some natural disaster or big weather event hits your area, do you complain about all the extra work and claims you’ll have to process? Or do you see it as an opportunity to lead? You might get your team all fired up and impassioned about helping people to recover from the event. As a team you might volunteer to help your community outside the office. You might do some subtle self-promotion of that fact on your blog. (Though if you really make a great effort on behalf of your fellow citizens, word will spread on its own.)

The feel-good vibe that ensues among your team members will carry over long after the claims are settled and the windstorm is forgotten. In addition, your standing in your town will rise, and you’ll develop a reputation as the kind of place where people want to take their business.

As Godin also points out, happy tribe members recruit other tribe members, which is one of the core ideas in my Employee Attraction program. Inspiring and leading your team well really can lessen your work when it comes to finding the best people to work for you. When your valued team members bring in their friends and family, you can skip right over the recruitment phase—wouldn’t that be nice? Try taking the time and money you would have allocated to that process and instead applying it to creating a happy tribe. You’ll all have a lot more fun.

For additional ideas on the topic of leadership, download my report: Employee Motivation: Coach Your Team To Success.