The 5 Cs of Team-building

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” –Andrew Carnegie

Running a company, even if it is a small business, needs a team of committed and capable employees who can get the job done. But a team is not something that happens by itself. The process of team-building teamworkteambuilding-c-9.html) takes time and effort. The end result is to create a work environment in which every person feels like his or her contribution is a vital and valued part of the organization’s success.

We have put together a list of 5 Cs of effective team-building to help you on your way:

1. Clear expectations: One of the key characteristics of a successful team is clear role delineation of every team member – every person has to know the role he or she is expected to play in the company as well as the roles of the other team members. As the business owner, you have to ensure that every employee in your organization clearly understands how and where he/she fits in the organizational structure. Use organizational charts and staff meetings to facilitate this understanding.

2. Channels of communication: Create and maintain open channels of communication CommunicationIntro.htm) with your employees. This must not only be between you and your employees, but also among the staff. Create a working atmosphere such that your employees know that you are always available to listen to their concerns. Also encourage them to discuss genuine issues amongst themselves. Without free and unfettered communication, team-building is only a distant dream.

3. Conflict resolution: Getting a group of people to work together is not a bed of roses. There will invariably be times when the going gets rough and differences come out in the open. Develop conflict-resolution skills among your employees and create a mechanism for grievance redressal, if they can’t resolve their problems on their own. If necessary, arrange for professionals to conduct workshops on this subject.

4. Consequences: Make members feel responsible and accountable for team achievements. Enable them to understand that each individual contribution is a vital piece in the whole picture. At the same time, encourage individual creativity to blossom by instituting a system of rewards and recognition.

5. Celebrating achievements as a team: Give your team-building efforts a fillip by celebrating successes as a group. Since every employee plays an important part in the success or failure of your business, it only makes sense to celebrate your achievements as a team. Depending on the size of the achievement, your celebration can be as simple as a pizza party or as spectacular as a company trip to Hawaii.

Use these tips to ensure that the people who make up your small business work together as a team

Indisputable-Laws- towards the same goal. By empowering and instilling a sense of belonging in your employees, you will have created a successful team
that works hard to achieve the best results for you.

The Five Ps of Leadership

There are whole libraries full of things that tell you what to do about leadership and how to remember what’s important. Here’s another short edition to that library – the 5 P’s of leadership. They are:

• Pay Attention to What’s Important
• Praise What You Want to Continue
• Punish What You Want to Stop
• Pay for the Results You Want
• Promote the People Who Deliver Those Results

Pay Attention To What’s Important

Time management courses, strategy books, and management gurus all will tell you that there’s not a lot that’s really important. Your job as a leader is to concentrate on what’s most important so that it gets taken care of. Then let the rest of the stuff take care of itself.

Now if you’re a perfectionist, that’s going to be hard for you to do. But there’s not P for perfectionism in this scheme of things. No, we recognize that there are limited resources of time, energy, people, and money. Because those resources are limited, you want to go for the big stuff first.

What you’re after is the 20% of stuff that gives you the biggest bang for the buck. What underlies all of this is something called Pareto’s Law. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian Economist and Sociologist in the late 19th century. He formulated something he called “The Law of the Unequal Distribution of Results.” You probably know it as the 80/20 rule.

All the 80/20 rules says is that there’s 20% of the stuff you do that gets you 80% of the results. The trick is finding that 20%. Once you’ve found it you then have to pay attention to it.

Pay attention to it in your written and oral communications. Restate the key themes over and over. Don’t undervalue repetition, repetition makes for memory and memory makes for action.

Pay attention to it in your casual contacts. John Kotter, in his book to general managers, pointed out that effective general managers make great use of the random contacts they have with people. Those contacts could be in the hallway, at the water cooler, in the elevator, or walking down the street. The seize on those moments to talk about the things and ask the questions that are important to their leadership agenda. You should do that too.

Organize you day, your communications, your organizational structures, your reward systems and everything else to pay attention to what’s important and then do that with unremitting diligence.

Praise What You Want to Continue

Praise is your best training tool. In technical terms, praise is a positive consequence that follows a positive action. It’s a reward for something done right. Use praise to get people to continue to do things or to take positive action. That’s where it’s best used.

Remember, too, that praise is a tool that is most effective when it’s used inconsistently. Used consistently, praise tends to loose its force. So, don’t worry so much about praising everything that people do right, but do worry about praising.

That’s important, because most of us came up in a world where we didn’t praise enough. Seek out opportunities to praise but don’t get anal retentive about it.

Punish What You Want to Stop 

Punishment is the mirror image of praise. It’s a negative consequence that follows negative behavior. It follows a principle stated almost in biblical terms by one of my past trainees. She said: “the good shall be rewarded and the unjust shall be punished in proportion to their deeds.”

Punishment – negative consequences – are the tool you use to get people to stop stuff. If you figure out what’s most important for people to quit doing in your organization, rig up some kind of negative consequence for them if they do it. Be careful though, because you may fall prey to the hot stove guideline. It was Mark Twain (or if it wasn’t it should have been) who said, “A cat who sits on a hot stove will never sit on a hot stove again. But he won’t sit on a cold stove either.

The management lesson here is that if you zap people too much with negative consequences, they don’t just quit doing the stuff that you don’t want them to do. They quit doing pretty much everything. That’s why “rule by fear” and “controlled ferocity” cultures have a devil of a time getting people to take initiative. They’ve been zapped so often they’re just not willing to risk it.

Pay For the Results You Want

Years ago when I was managing distribution and customer service centers I happened to compliment one of the customer service reps. She immediately turned around to me and said, “Don’t just tell me, show me, payday is Friday.”

Pay is one of the tangible ways you can reward people for doing good stuff. It’s another form of praise in visible, tangible form. Don’t limit your thinking about pay to just money, though. Pay people with time off, recognition, choice assignments, small gifts, and special bonuses to encourage the behavior you want.

One of my clients used to carry around a pocket-full of restaurant gift certificates as he wandered around his trucking company. When he found somebody doing something that he wanted to encourage he was likely to whip out a gift certificate and hand it to them on the spot. It created the kind of event and drama that makes for good communication, and it encouraged positive behavior.

Another client of mine, a police chief this time, did something similar. She was a police chief in Texas, and, as you might expect, she talked like a Texan. She had little slips made up with one of her favorite phrases on them. It was, “’preciate ya.”

When she heard something about one of her officers that was positive, she sent them one of her ‘preciate ya slips. When she caught somebody done something she wanted to encourage she handed one out. Officers collected the slips and when they got enough, they got recognition in the department newsletter and some extra time off.

Look for ways to pay for the results you want. Pay and praise are the things that get the engine of progress going.

Promote People Who Deliver The Results You Want

This one just makes sense. The problem is that lots of organizations forget about it. They maintain reward and promotion systems that reward the old behavior, even while they’re trumpeting the new behavior in memo’s, meetings, and executive retreats.

When I was just starting out in consulting, a much more experienced and wiser consultant said to me, “When you first go into an organization, pay attention to who it is they promote. Listen to the stories that folks tell you about who gets promoted and rewarded and why. That will tell you just about everything you need to know about what the real organizational priorities are.”

What are the stories that your people tell in your organization? What are the stories they tell about their bosses? You want those stories to be positive about great things their bosses have done. If all the stories are negatives, buddy you’ve got a problem.

What do your folks say about the folks who are promoted? Do they feel they got promoted on merit because of their performance or because they just happened to “know somebody” or worse.

The five P’s of leadership will help you stay on track to positive organizational change. Remember to pay attention to what’s important, praise what you want to continue, punish what you want to stop, pay for the results you want, and promote the people who deliver those results and you’ll help your organization be the very best that it can become.

Project managers need to manage Their Boss

Most people have one. Yet attending to their demands and idiosyncrasies can be nerve-wracking. Wise people engage good boss management strategies. After all, bosses are not exalted and invincible gods. They are human beings with special roles and authority as well as the requisite levels of human weaknesses, problems and pressures.

Assess Leadership Style

Recognize leadership skills inherent in your own boss. This assists you to better understand your boss. You also benefit by becoming a better manager.

Leader #1: The Press Leader

These leaders pretend to be drill sergeants. Low self-esteem and a strong fear of failure drives them. They are impressed by outward displays of project management and busyness.rather than by results. The leader treats people as expeditors who obey orders. They tolerate no mistakes. Trivial details snare their energies and attention. They oversupervise and manage by punishment.

How to handle The Press Leader: Quickly discover on-the-job limits. Determine whether your boss is simply tough or ruthless. The tough leader precisely delegates authority balanced with appropriate responsibility. The ruthless one disregards human factors. If you choose to resist the press leader, do it privately, not within view of colleagues. This way your leader will not lose face. Support your position with plenty of evidence. Otherwise you lose.

Leader #2: The Laissez-Faire Leader

This leader abandons staff. These leaders provide little or no support in tough times. They stipulate little of what is expected of employees. They provide virtually no project management guidance on how to accomplish tasks. While the Press Leader may hover over an employee’s shoulder, this leader does nothing to train or guide. The Press Leader overmanages. The Laissez-Faire Leader overlooks.

Managing The Laissez-Faire Leader: The individual who is self-motivated and needs little praise will work well under this type of leader. This leader craves facts such as costs, statistics and research findings. Provide these facts and figures for your boss, while at the same time trying to stress some human elements. Encourage your boss to clarify exactly what is to be accomplished.

Leader #3: The Participatory Leader

The Participatory Leader is adept at communication procedures. Under this type of boss, employees are given precise feedback and recognition when deserved. The Participatory Leader strives to involve employees in the assessment process. He or she is inspirational and innovative. The Participatory Leader customizes the type and amount of feedback required for each employee.

Managing The Participatory Leader: The most effective way of dealing with the Participatory Leader is to feed back the same techniques that he or she uses with subordinates. Keep them informed of what does and does not work. Since this type of leader is interested in results, your opinions will be heeded.

Leader #4: The Develop Leader

This leader goes a step beyond the Participatory Leader. The Develop Leader fosters staff self-esteem, autonomy and competence. Techniques for success are isolated and taught to subordinates as the need arises. The Develop Leader empowers staff and nurtures a feeling of reverence, not in the boss, but in employees themselves.

There is often a high staff turnover rate for employees of develop leaders. But it is a good one because it is upward. Because this type of leader creates such a high level of competence amongst the ranks through professional development and project management, there is always someone to take over when someone moves up.

Keep Your Boss Happy

• Learn what your boss expects and values.
• Strive for high quality results.
• Solve as many problems as possible without the help of your boss.
• Keep your boss informed.
• Be your strongest critic.
• Get regular feedback from your boss.
• Differ with your boss only in private.
• Save money and earn revenue.
• Be a good leader yourself.
• Promote only valuable ideas.
• After all. Your boss is not interested in the storms you encountered, but whether you brought in the ship.

How to improve your soft skills at work

In a previous article we listed 60 soft skills, which if practiced at the workplace, could boost your professional life.

Subjects like financial management, marketing management, HR management can be taught in the classroom and can be studied at home. But not soft skills. Soft skills are acquired and experienced on the spot and cannot be developed by merely reading textbooks.

The soft skills you gain will equip you to excel in your professional life and in your personal life. It is a continuous learning process.

The 60 soft skills mentioned can be classified into corporate skills, employability skills and life skills. In some parts of the world like in USA and Australia, soft skills ate also known as world skills.

Corporate skills

These are generally CEO level skills, but if you are familiar with them you will be in a position to guide your boss towards success ie working together for a common goal as a team. You can become a courageous follower as mentioned by Ira Chaleff in his award-winning book Courageous Follower: Standing Up To and For Our Leaders.

These skills include:

~ Political sensitivity.
~ Business and commercial awareness.
~ Strategic awareness.
~ Understanding funding streams and mechanisms.
~ Information management.
~ Organisation and control.
~ Team building.
~ Communication and persuasion.
~ Networking and public relations.
~ Leading change.

Employability skills

These have to be mastered by employable graduates and freshers include communication, team working, leadership, initiative, problem solving, flexibility and enthusiasm.

Every skill helps us to learn one more as they overlap each other.

To quote an example, leadership encompasses a number of other skills including cooperating with others, planning and organising, making decisions and verbal communication. Verbal communication itself involves various means of communication, some of which you may find easier than others — talking over the phone, making a presentation to a group, explaining something to a person with a more limited understanding of the topic for example.

By improving one skill, you may also improve a number of others. In the context of your career planning and development, they are called career management skills

Life skills

These skills are related to the head, heart, hands and health ie highly personal and behavioural skills which reflects our personality and naturally helps in personality development.

Source: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/learningandliving/main/tlsmodel.html

We manage and think with our head. Resilience, keeping records, making wise use of resources, planning/organising and goal setting are ‘head’ related managerial functions. Service learning, Critical thinking, problem solving, decision making and learning to learn were related to our thinking processes, which we manage with our head.

Functions of the heart are relating to people and caring. How do we relate to people? We relate to people by accepting differences, conflict resolutions, social skills, cooperation and communication. The second function we do through our heart is caring. We care through nurturing relationships, sharing, empathy and concern for others.

We give and work through our hands. Community service, volunteering, leadership, responsible citizenship and contributions to group effort — are our way giving back to society. We work through our marketable skills, teamwork and self-motivation to get the things done.

Living and being comes under the functions of health. Healthy lifestyle choices, stress management, disease prevention and personal safety are our prime concerns for better living. Self-esteem, self-responsibility, character, managing feelings and self-discipline must be practiced without fail for our well-being. In a nutshell, the essence of life skills is share well, care well and fare well.

Things to do everyday

Follow these ten golden rules and enjoy every moment of living.

~ Greet your family members first thing in the morning. If you are not used to this, they will be surprised with your sudden and nice gesture.

~ Greet your peers, subordinates and boss once you enter the office. Smile at even the ’security’ personnel standing at the gate, who takes care of your safety.

~ Greet your friends along the way and do not ignore them.

~ Continously reciprocate to breed communication. If you do not reciprocate at least with a ‘thanks’ when you get information or a source on your online network or your offline network, you will not be remembered for a long time. If you are not remembered, you are out of your network.

~ Be a proactive listener and empathise with others to command respect.

~ While talking to others, your voice, tone and tenor must be audible and soothing. It should not be aggressive or in a shouting mode.

~ Dress well to suit your profession and to create positive vibes in your workplace. If you are a sales representative, do not go out with printed shirts and jeans, which may turn down your customer.

~ Political and religious comments must be avoided at all costs in the workplace, when you are in a group.

~ Your communication should not provoke others.

~ Do not speak ill of others if you can help it.

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The author is a certified trainer and facilitator (CAMI, USA) and is a career management consultant and corporate trainer by profession. The author can be reached at challaramaphani@rediffmail.com.

Soft Skills: 60 most required softskills

Every now and then we see people or also become a victim thinking that I had the skills the MBA the degree and everything but i couldn’t get through the job WHY??????

Reason: Blame it on his soft skills.

Soft skills play a vital role for professional success; they help one to excel in the workplace and their importance cannot be denied in this age of information and knowledge. Good soft skills — which are in fact scarce — in the highly competitive corporate world will help you stand out in a milieu of routine job seekers with mediocre skills and talent.

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