What happens when you see a co-worker’s desk empty? I know from my brief time working in an office that I would think they are slacking off either in a meeting, at an out of office appointment, on vacation, or dealing with a family issue. I NEVER thought “wow, they must have important work to do and found a productive place to get it completed that worked for them”. Virtual teams are a hot topic that’s not going away anytime soon. In the last few weeks, I have given two webinars for two different associations to a total of 3300 people from around the world. This has been the greatest number of attendees I have had on a webinar to date. The level of interest blew me away. One of the questions that come up the most is “How do you hold virtual team members accountable”. This is understandable as unfortunately our corporate culture has been built on ‘being seen’ and perceived effort. We have been trained to believe if we can’t see someone sitting at their desk during the allotted time they are supposed to work there, they must not be getting any work completed. In many cases, this could not be further from the truth. To keep your virtual team members and frankly all your employees accountable, there are three keys elements you can implement: Identify Values And Behaviours:Create a set of work guidelines that outline expectations in terms of core hours, availability, communication, and project tracking. Getting clear on these behaviors will help get your virtual team on the same page. This doesn’t mean you should tell employees...
By Shawn Stratton | Follow him on Twitter (Note – this is a 2016 summer addition ‘best of the best’ blog from the past.) You’ve heard the expressions “I’m so busy,” “I’m too busy to do that,” or “I just can’t find the time …” I believe that these phrases have caused an epidemic of excuses in our society. It has become a sign of prestige to say how busy you are when someone asks, “How are things?” When was the last time you answered that question with “Things are pretty slow right now” or “Fantastic, I’m spending my time on things most important to me”? The reality is you are never too busy to do anything. You spend our time on what seems to be the most important thing to you right now. Think about the last time you told someone you were too busy to do something. I’m willing to bet you weren’t too busy at all; you just placed a lower priority on the task you were talking about than the one that was filling your time. An honest response would have been, “I’m sorry but that isn’t a high priority for me right now and I have other tasks that are more important to me taking up my time.” That brings us to the priority list. A priority list allows you to rank the importance of the tasks, which fill your time. I love writing these lists (and thinking about them even more) and ranking them so that I always know what I should be doing with my time. You are what you did today. (Tweet...
(Note – this is a 2016 summer addition ‘best of the best’ blog from the past.) A few years ago Google set up a research team to find out the elements that create high performing teams. What they found and the length of time it took to find it surprised them. For several years they studied over 150 teams working within Google. Many of the senior executives in the company believed that the best teams developed when the best people were put together on a project. After gathering an enormous amount of data, the researcher found it was almost impossible to find meaningful patterns. In an article recently published in the New York Times’ Google’s lead researcher on the project Abeer Dubey stated, ‘‘At Google, we are good at finding patterns. But there weren’t strong patterns here.’’ The people comprising the team didn’t seem to matter. This finding didn’t surprise me. Leading wilderness expeditions for years with new teams, people would often ask me “what do you do if you get a bad team and you are stuck with them for a month in the mountains”. Strangely enough, that was never a concern of mine. As I gained experience leading, I came to realize that leaders play a more significant role in creating effective teams than the people who make up the team. Frustrated with the lack of patterns in the data they collected, the researchers delved further into reviewing past academic studies on how teams work. In the literature, they discovered that psychological and sociological research kept using the term “group norms” when describing successful groups. Norms are...
Last week, I presented at a project management conference on leading a safety culture, a culture where near misses are seen as a significant learning opportunity and not as potential disasters that are swept under the rug for fear of reprisal or job loss. A near miss is an unplanned event that did not result in injury, illness, or damage – but had the potential to do so. It is safe to say that of the dozens of the minor and major incidents I was involved in over 15 years of leading expeditions, most, if not all, were successfully resolved due to past learning from documented near miss situations, everything from arranging and paying for an Indian military helicopter to perform a dramatic rescue at 12000 feet in the Himalayas, to managing challenging river crossings in the Yukon to encountering grizzly bears deep in the back country of Alaska. Fortunately, most organizations I worked with had progressive cultures around documenting and learning from near misses. Unfortunately, not all organizations are like this. Recently, I have been speaking with some project managers who work in a culture of fear of disciplinary action for being involved with a near miss incident. This fear has caused them to not want to report near misses and minor incidents. Alternatively, I know of several organizations that have rephrased the term ‘near miss’ to ‘good catch’. I know it is only semantics but in an area that usually conjures up fear, semantics can be important. One company not only expected to report ‘good catches’ on potentially dangerous situations but also have their employees report “good catches’ of...
Part 2 Most of my life, people have told me I was hardworking, especially my schoolteachers. It always felt a bit odd because I didn’t necessarily feel like I was working harder than anyone else. Perhaps they would say it because I didn’t do particularly well with their testing methods, but still wanted to build my confidence because being called a hard worker by someone of authority feels good. Or perhaps they understood locus of control (LOC) and wanted me to develop a strong external LOC in me from an early age. As I discussed in last week’s post (How Your Locus of Control Explains Your Thoughts, Actions, and Motivations), LOC measures generalized belief in internal versus external control of reinforcement. In the post, I have mentioned an example of how the US Marines develop an internal LOC among their new recruits. Here, I will give another example of how this can be developed in children as well as adults. Don’t Tell Them They Are Smart! Someone’s LOC can be influenced through training and feedback, especially children. New York Times’ business reporter Charles Duhigg highlights one experiment by Stanford physiologist, Carol Dweck to demonstrate this in his book, Smarter, Faster, Better. The experiment gave students in grade 5 a series of challenging puzzles to complete. All were told they did well. Half of them were told they must have worked hard at solving the problems. The other half were told you must be really smart for solving the problems. The second round of puzzles included some easier and more challenging ones. The kids who were praised for their intelligence...
