Today’s Harvard Business Review’s ‘Management Tip of the Day’ included three characteristics of a real team. They point out that the word “team,” as used in business today, has lost its true meaning.
To be rightly called a team, and to maximize their potential, a group must be characterized by three things:
• a meaningful and common purpose
• adaptable skills, and
• mutual accountability.
In Make Over Your Marketing, I devote a whole chapter to the Employee Culture. Noting that many business owners have become so used to opposition when it comes to making even the most necessary changes that they often give up on a good idea if they can’t do it alone, I wrote:
Sometimes it seems almost impossible to make even the smallest changes in your business when it necessitates the cooperation of your team. It can feel like your employees actually want new ideas to fail, even if it means less success for everyone.
As human beings, we all bring our own ideas, prejudices, experiences, likes and dislikes into the employee group. Just because someone joins your team, it does not necessarily mean that they all do so with the same level of commitment and enthusiasm that you desire or even demonstrate. And even if someone joins your team with a high level of enthusiasm and energy for business-building activities, it still doesn’t ensure that they will agree with your ideas on how to build clientele or even who your “ideal clients” should be relative to marketing activities. And it does not mean they will agree with the environment and “feel” that you want all of your clients to experience in your business.
What does all of this have to do with employee culture?
Everything.
Your employee culture is a reflection of the sum total values, beliefs, attitudes, ideas, experiences, assumptions and behaviors shared by your staff. And this culture is reflected back to your clients in every area of your business.
If your employee culture is characterized by attitudes that are negative, lazy or careless, unmotivated or cynical, it is because those traits are present to some extent in one or more of your staff, and it is because these negative traits are allowed to dominate and influence daily operations.
Does this mean that you should only hire people who think exactly like you? Not at all. It is the variety of experiences, talents, skills and interests — the differences within us as people, when shared — that leads to higher levels of creativity, imagination, resourcefulness, abilities and strengths. But your business will grow and thrive only to the extent that these strengths, passions and creativity can be harnessed to pull toward the same goals; and when this occurs in a spirit of positive energy and optimism rather than predominant negativity.
Have you ever seen a marching band in action on the field during the halftime period at a football game? You might see a hundred or more people, all working together to play the same song. By mutual agreement, all of them use their individual strengths, abilities and play different instruments in order to deliver a performance for the audience. Every step they take is even choreographed specifically to further engage and entertain the audience visually, beyond the music. They create a visual, changing design that, like the music, is made up of completely individual routes and roles, purposefully designed and choreographed to create a visual whole made up of the sum of all its parts.
Each member has different skills and strengths, and many are skilled soloists in their own right as musicians and/or even as dancers. But as band members they come together with an understanding that the good of the whole is greater than the glory of any one individual. They agree to pool their strengths, skills and abilities in order to achieve a group goal—to perform the same song, to the same beat, as directed by the band leader, in order to please their clients—the audience.
School band members know that they will only be playing together for a short time, maybe even only for one year; yet they still come to this agreement and shared goal.
In the case of your business, where some of you may work together for decades, isn’t it even more important for you to agree to work together toward the shared goals of attracting and pleasing your clients? Of meeting your customer’s needs and making them feel that they are, in fact, vitally important to your business?
The chapter goes on to provide ideas about how to systematically garner employee buy in for common goals and create a more cohesive employee team. How does your team stack up to HBR’s three characteristics? How do they stack up against a student marching band? And what are you doing to build a true team for your business?
Elizabeth Kraus – 12monthsofmarketing.com
365 Days of Marketing is available on amazon.com in book and digital formats.
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