Have You Assessed Your Team’s Personality? Maybe You Should

Here is an article written by Wayne Turmel for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.
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Is your team made up of Drivers, Extroverts, or even Red-Greens? These are all descriptions you’ll find in different personality, strength or work style assessments. They might seem silly or frivolous, but assessing our teams can have a powerful impact on the way we all work together.

If you’ve been involved in the corporate life for very long you’ve probably done some kind of personality test, work-style assessment or strength-identifier. They go by a number of names. Some are well known Myers Briggs (or one of its offshoots, the Myers Briggs Type Indicators (MBTIs), Strengthfinder and others with lesser notoriety like Insights. Some measure specific skills or behaviors like listening skills, or presentation styles.

So why do they matter, and which ones should we use? The answer to the first is easy. The answer to the second question is pretty much up to what you’re trying to accomplish.

These tools matter because they serve as a way to help your team understand themselves and each other quickly. If we work together every day, we get to know each other–our likes, dislikes, how we like to get information (Is that person in Dallas a big picture person or a data driven nit-picker?) and how we handle everyday situations.

In some cases, these tools are used to help hire the right people for the team. After all, do you really want a book keeper who has no attention to detail? More importantly, it offers a glimpse into how people prefer to work.  The problem with working in remote teams is we don’t have the chance to observe each other and develop those impressions. In fact, with project teams there’s often very little time for social niceties. It’s more like.”Hi nice to meet you . Our careers depend on this bunch of strangers making this work. Ready?”

By taking an assessment of this kind as a unit and sharing the results (as appropriate) you can accomplish a number of things:

• The team bonds over an activity. These assessments are often easy and fun to do. If they’re not, well, misery loves company.

• You develop a quick snapshot of the people you work with that can prevent or clear up misunderstandings. You know that person you never hear from on the conference calls? They’re not really an idiot, they just don’t like to shout things out to get heard. Maybe a one-on-one conversation is required.

• You get a sense of how people prefer to work. We managers should know who needs a little monitoring and encouragement, and who can be wound up and left alone til the job’s done.

One thing about these tools to remember, is they are generalities and, while some are statistically and scientifically valid, shouldn’t be used to diagnose and pigeonhole people. Just because someone has a strong preference for one type of behavior doesn’t mean they can’t work in another way when the situation demands it. Even some of us big-picture people are capable of attention to detail when it’s required, and they are often misinterpreted. Just because someone’s an introvert, doesn’t mean they won’t be a terrific sales person. You just might not want to sit next to them at the next awards banquet.

As to which tool you should use, that depends on what behaviors are important for your team. For getting to know each other quickly, a simple MBTI is often a good place to start. These tools assess your preferences in how you get your energy, how you like to gather data, how you make decisions, and how you take action. If your project depends on picking the right players and assigning roles that play to people’s strengths it  helps to know these things.

Yes, some of these tools are often overly simplistic and some of us are a little skeptical about their overall impact or effectiveness. But that doesn’t mean that having our teams learn about each other and how best to work together isn’t worth a little time and effort.

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Wayne Turmel is obsessed with helping organizations and their managers communicate better, even across cyberspace. He’s a writer, a speaker, the president of Greatwebmeetings.com, and the host of one of the world’s most successful business podcasts, The Cranky Middle Manager Show, where he helps listeners worldwide deal with the million little challenges and indignities of being a modern manager. His book 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar: Generate Leads and Tell Your Story to the World is the leading web presentation book on Amazon.com. Follow him on Twitter @greatwebmeeting.

How To Build Trust When Your Team’s Members Don’t Know Each Other

Wayne Turmel

In many (most?) larger organizations,  cross-functional teams are formed whose members are in different locations (sometimes in different states and even in different countries) and know little (if anything) about each other. At least initially, one of the greatest challenges is to develop trust between and among members of the team.

Here is an especially interesting article written by Wayne Turmel for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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We know that trust is absolutely critical to team and project success. It’s always been hard to build and maintain, but when you don’t work in the same physical location it can feel even more difficult. The good news is that we know the three components of trusting teams. The trick is to make them work remotely.

What are the three components of trust? Well there are several models but the one I use most frequently in my work with remote teams labels them as 1) Common goals, 2) Competence and 3) Motives. Why does each matter, and how can we build them when we’re not around each other all the time?

Common Goals: is everyone pulling together for the same reasons to reach the same end result? This might seem obvious but the matrix structure of most project teams (there is a project leader but most people have other, “real”, bosses) makes things awfully complicated. Even if you do a great job at the outset in agreeing to goals, over time priorities and focus shifts. Also, what was clear at the beginning of a project might get fuzzy as people leave and join your team.

Ensure that you kick off the project with clear, documented goals and refer to them constantly. Some companies actually use the project charter to kick off every status meeting. It might feel like overkill but at least no one can claim they don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.

Evidence of competence: You can have everyone attempting to achieve the same goal, but are they competent to get the job done? If you work together all the time, you know each other’s strengths and weaknesses (you know Bob’s not a detail guy, so we’ll give that to Sharon). With teams that have been put together quickly or people who don’t know each other you don’t have those opportunities and it only takes one missed deadline or one piece of work that isn’t up to snuff to start people muttering about whether someone’s pulling their weight.

There are many ways to show off the competence of team members. When you have message boards and social network tools, there are opportunities to answer questions, refer other team members and generally offer individuals a chance to shine they might not otherwise get. As the manager, take the chance to commend workers in ways that let the entire team know who did such great work. Finally, take the opportunity to delegate tasks. Not only will that allow the team member to see individuals as more than just the role they’re known for,but might actually stop you from doing a lot of the grunt work yourself.

Proof of motives: one of the most insidious challenges to teams is the sneaking suspicion that so-and-so is capable of doing that work but they missed the deadline out of spite, or because they don’t care, or because their “real” boss is taking up too much of their time. Why people do what they do (or not) is hard to prove but easy to speculate on…and few of us create best-case scenarios.

Not answering our IMs? Obviously they don’t consider us important. We don’t know if that’s true or they were home sick that day but we’re happy to act as if we know. Managers should work with the team to create communication charters and standards, then monitor and coach the team to ensure those standards are met. When problems arise, make sure that they are discussed openly (where it’s applicable) and that all parties are fine with the solution. Letting things fester is a great way to save time now, and spend a lot of precious hours dealing with the fallout later.

People who are working towards a common goal, who appear to be good at what they do and have the team’s best interest at heart are easy to trust, whether they’re on the other side of the globe or slaving away at the next cubicle.

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Wayne Turmel is obsessed with helping organizations and their managers communicate better, even across cyberspace. He’s a writer, a speaker, the president of Greatwebmeetings.com, and the host of one of the world’s most successful business podcasts, The Cranky Middle Manager Show, where he helps listeners worldwide deal with the million little challenges and indignities of being a modern manager. His book 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar: Generate Leads and Tell Your Story to the World is the leading web presentation book on Amazon.com. Follow him on Twitter @greatwebmeeting.

Having a team communication plan is great…making it work is something else

Here is an article written by Wayne Turmel for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Carl von Clausewitz

The German general Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “no plan survives the first contact with the enemy.” Not that your remote team is the enemy (seriously, no matter how badly your day is going) but the idea is the same: having a process in place doesn’t mean people will use it, the results will be what you think they’ll be, or that you won’t have to constantly adjust and adapt.

I was speaking to a group of Project Managers the other night about managing their remote teams and the idea of team communication plans came up. “You have to have a process!” they proclaimed loudly. Project Managers are big on processes, as they should be. I asked how many people had a true, formal, written plan for team communication. Most of their hands went up (I’ll be charitable and assume that none of them were sheepishly refusing to admit they didn’t have one.)

Then I asked how many felt their team adhered to the plan. Hands dropped. Then I asked how many of their team communication plans looked the same now as they did the day they were created. One or two lone hands remained. Communication plans, like Prussian defense strategies, are subject to the harsh reality of the work.

Out of that discussion, we came up with some guidelines for putting a team communication plan in place that will survive in the real world:

1. Have the team build the plan and commit to it. Top-down plans are doomed to failure. Getting the team to talk about what’s important to them, then gaining their commitment is critical to building trust and making sure what’s really important gets covered. A great example is response time. It’s one thing to say “all messages returned within 12 hours,” it’s quite another to say “when you leave a message, state the priority so people can prioritize their responses.” The important things get handled first- that’s a good thing in any plan.

2. Post it where they can see it and refer to it constantly. The communication plan needs to be properly built and launched, but it also needs to be the way you work as a team. If people use it well, trumpet that success with the team. If it failed in an instance, ask the team why and find out if it was a one-time problem or there’s a bigger problem.

3. If people aren’t using it, find out why. Now. There are plenty of reasons why a plan fails in a specific instance. Maybe the person got distracted and forgot to answer that question. Maybe they were out of town and forgot to post their status. Maybe that fancy SharePoint system such a pain they can’t be bothered. Track your team’s performance against the plan from the beginning. If it’s a “people” issue, coach them right away. If it’s a system or equipment problem, fix it and show your commitment to the team’s success. Enforcing rules that are counterproductive or defy the laws of physics can damage team morale. Maybe it’s the plan that needs fixing, not the people.

4. When choosing technology, start with the end in mind. Technology is critical to remote teams, but only if it helps get the work done. When deciding on the tools you’ll build into your plan start with what work needs to be done. “We need to have quick access to the latest version of that document, so use the shared files” is a good idea. “We have this new shared file system, so learn to use it for version control” is the same idea but sounds like so much IT nonsense to people out in the field. If a tool isn’t getting the job done, find out why it’s not working. Does it not do the job? Are people not using it because there’s a technical problem? Do they need more training or do you just have to enforce the rules?

5. Revisit the policy. Periodically (and how often depends on whether it seems to be working or not, but at least once a year) the whole team should honestly discuss what’s working and what needs to be tweaked/changed/scrapped. Technology changes, team members change and the demands of the job (especially in project work) change. The plan needs to evolve to meet the job at hand, not the other way around.

Clausewitz may not have had a Blackberry in his pocket or Google Docs at his disposal, but I’m not sure it would have changed his attitude much. Like Prussian defense strategies, communication plans only work until the work starts in earnest.

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Wayne Turmel

Wayne Turmel is obsessed with helping organizations and their managers communicate better, even across cyberspace. He’s a writer, a speaker, the president of Greatwebmeetings.com, and the host of one of the world’s most successful business podcasts, The Cranky Middle Manager Show, where he helps listeners worldwide deal with the million little challenges and indignities of being a modern manager. His book 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar: Generate Leads and Tell Your Story to the World is the leading web presentation book on Amazon.com. Follow him on Twitter @greatwebmeeting.

Stever Robbins’ unusual tips to manage email from the “Get It Done Guy”

Stever Robbins

Here is an article by Wayne Turmel about Stever Robbins (the “Get It Done Guy”) featured by BNET, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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Email is one of those things that were supposed to make our lives easier and has wound up consuming way too much time. It’s even a bigger problem for remote teams, because popping your head over the cubicle like a meerkat isn’t an option. How can you reduce the volume of email while increasing your team’s productivity?

Stever Robbins is the “Get it Done Guy”, and the author of the upcoming book The Get It Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More [click here]. He has some rather unconventional tips for taming the email beast. The trick then is to coach the people on your team to do the same.

1. Check email at specific times of the day. Productivity experts agree unanimously that checking email every time the little bell rings is a waste of time. Choose specific blocks of time and focus on your email then. Stever recommends first thing in the morning, mid day and then end of your day.

2. Handwrite a list of which emails you’ll respond to and then respond appropriately. This may seem downright weird, but the thinking is sound: If you create a list of what you need to do, you can look at it carefully, prioritize what needs to be done and even combine several emails into one cogent response (which will reduce annoying email threads).  The goal here is to slow down long enough to actually think about your communication instead of replying at the speed of light.

3. Just ignore it. Really. Respond on your schedule and quit trying to make everyone else happy. You’ll respond better and you’ll be surprised how many of those burning fires are actually burning.  Now, my caveat to this is, it’s the kind of thing it’s important to get the whole team to buy into, perhaps as part of your team communication charter  [click here] at the beginning of the project. Simply declaring unilateral email avoidance can be traumatic.

4. Turn spell-check off. This doesn’t mean don’t use spellcheck at all… but you’ll be amazed how much quicker you can craft a coherent message if you’re not having a Pavlovian reaction to every red squiggly line. Finish crafting your message and then run spellcheck on it to proof your work. Without the interruptions you’ll have a clearer head.

5. Summarize your message in the subject line. People are scanning your email to help them prioritize their responses, just like you do to their messages. Make it easy. If you’re changing the time of the conference call, putting “conference call” in the subject line and then typing a message about the time change and new information is annoying. And for heaven’s sake if there’s new information don’t just hit the “reply” button. There’s no way someone can know if the new information is important or not.

The hardest part about helping your team use email efficiently is probably modeling the behaviors and breaking your own bad habits. Once you start to establish a pattern that works, suggest others on your remote team do the same. Share best practices and consciously adopt those that work.

You can finally get email to be a useful tool again.

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Wayne Turmel is obsessed with helping organizations and their managers communicate better, even across cyberspace. He’s a writer, a speaker, the president of Greatwebmeetings.com, and the host of one of the world’s most successful business podcasts, The Cranky Middle Manager Show, where he helps listeners worldwide deal with the million little challenges and indignities of being a modern manager. His book 6 Weeks to a Great Webinar: Generate Leads and Tell Your Story to the World is the leading web presentation book on Amazon.com. Follow him on Twitter @greatwebmeeting.