The change of a calendar year can be a wonderful time to acknowledge the investment required to maintain growth and development, including the quality of your relationships at work.

One of my favorite tools for team maintenance is the Reorientation Process.

Assembling all the players for reorientation is a powerful way to acknowledge that ALL productive relationships go through periods of being highly oriented — aligned, in sync, in the flow — as well as periods of not being so.

When teams get out of sync, committed members feel they have to “push harder” on the content of the team’s work.

A more fruitful strategy would be for them to notice — and acknowledge — that the team seems to have lost energy and/or direction (energy and direction are my simplest indicators for a team being “built”).

When this happens (and it may happen several times in the life of a team) I like to say, “It’s always a good time to reorient.” Get started with this week’s 5-minute practice tip.

5-Minute Practice Tip

To orient or reorient a work relationship, gather the players together and ask each of them to articulate their views of the following:

1. The WHAT — what are we as a team to do together?
2. The WHYs — why am I here? What’s in it for me to be on this team?
3. The HOWs — how are we playing? What are our team rules and agreements?
4. The WHOs — who’s doing what where? What does each of us bring to THIS task at THIS time?

When everyone has been heard, asking the group to craft a clear and elevating goal together (one that’s meaningful to every member) will help refuel the WHY for energy and the WHAT for direction.

You’ll always know when this conversation is on track — because you can see, hear, and feel the group’s energy increase and the team members’ direction come into focus.

Reorientation is a great way to start a new year with your teams — with renewed, positive energy.

Let me know your thoughts and experiences with a quick comment below.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Build a responsible team (or family) and master your leadership skills with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

It’s the most straight-forward approach to building any team any time. I promise. (If you find a better approach, please let me know.) I’ve written plenty about these before and they bare repeating often and in different ways.

These umbrella principles of team building can be easier to follow if they are translated into specific steps.

Here are 4 ways your team can put proven principles into action:

1. Assume personal responsibility for team productivity

At your next opportunity, whether in informal encounters or at a team meeting, announce to team members that you will only do work that leads to the entire team’s success. Further, announce that you will not be able to meet your goals unless the team meets its goals, so it is in your best interest for the team to be extremely productive and effective.

In addition, say that you have decided to do everything in your power to help the team operate at superior levels of performance.

2. Define and then get in the same boat together

At the next meeting, get on the agenda and ask teammates to put aside individual roles and have a conversation about what you will collectively accomplish. Think of the team as a unit, indivisible (i.e., not divisible) into smaller roles, and answer the question:

What must this unit do?

Insist on continuing that conversation until everyone seems to share the same clarity about what you are to do as a team. When you have done that, make that your “super-objective” — make it larger than any individual role or objective and give it more importance than any other objective or goal.

3. Determine “What’s In It For Me?” then “What’s In It For You?”

Once you know your super-objective, sit down at your keyboard, or with pen and paper, and generate a series of answers to this question:

What is in it for me to pursue this super-objective?

Keep asking the question and writing down answers. Encourage yourself to probe deeper inside yourself and generate more possibilities. When you have a complete list (five to ten answers), then prioritize your responses until you truly understand your motivation for serving on that team.

After you know what’s in it for you, focus on team building by asking your teammates the same question. Say, “What’s in it for you beyond the paycheck to pursue this task with this team?” Then wait patiently for the responses.

Encourage their answers and probe to discover which response seems more important or energizing than others. Watch for non-verbal cues like sudden smiling, twinkling eyes, head rocking back, or a gaze of recognition. That will tell you when they have accessed an important desire.

Test for the most important interests by asking the question, “Is that important to you?” and listening for a congruent and powerful “Yes!” You can also test for commitment by asking them, “If by serving on this team, we can help you get (fill in their important interest), then would that be worth your investment in this team?” If they answer “Yes!” your team building has effectively tapped a source of team power.

4: Make and keep agreements

Since you have made your interests known, wouldn’t you like to protect them? While at your keyboard, or sitting with pencil and paper, inventory your “shoulds.” These are the expectations you have about how others “should” behave in your presence, in your teams, or at meetings you attend. List them all.

Then turn each important “should” into a “request” and present it to your teammates. Here’s an example: “Would you be willing to start and stop each and every meeting at the time we have agreed to?”

Then negotiate your request into a proposed agreement on which you can get team consensus. Of course, nothing guarantees the agreements will be kept, so you must also be willing to call yourself and each other out on broken agreements.

Making and keeping agreements builds teams and trust.

Now take action

Implementing just one of these steps will make a positive difference. Following through on these four principles will form a team full of team members who help each other and work together toward a common goal.

Please comment and tell me your experience.

Lack of shared clarity about direction is often the cause of the team getting stuck. When a group lacks clarity about the task at hand, it’s not just easy but natural for people to get frustrated and lose interest in what they are doing.

What does shared group clarity look like? Each member should be able to explain simply and clearly what the whole team is accountable for and what the collective purpose is, similar to the elevator pitch one should have prepared when pitching a business idea to someone. When done successfully, every team member should be able to see their own sense of the shared clarity reflected when listening to each other.

How Do You Gain Shared Clarity to Optimize Teamwork?

Shared clarity can be gained by discussing and aligning the teams direction. Instead of using ambiguous goals like: “Make money!”, be more clear and detailed about the direction, as in: “By the end of the year, our goal is to build two additional stores.”

Shared Clarity for Temporary and Ongoing Teams

When a group, such as a project team, is temporary, it’s important to align members around the collective task they are to perform.

When a group, such a department, is ongoing, it’s important to align members around the ongoing purpose of the group.

Either way, the tasks and purposes must be clear and shared by everyone in the team.

Personal Challenge to Gain Clarity:

Answer this question: What’s the purpose of this teamwork relationship? Describe it fully and then ask your partner or partners to answer the same question.

Team Challenge to Gain Clarity:

Ask the team members: If we were already finished and successful, what would our outcome look like? Have every member describe this fully in writing.

For both challenges: Talk about what you each wrote down until you can all articulate a common and clear description of your purpose and the desired outcome.

By taking these important, preliminary steps to achieve clarity about the common goal before the start of the teamwork, you can maximize the efforts of the individual team members and the whole team toward the most powerful and successful outcome.

More about maximizing teamwork, his Leadership Gift Program for Leaders, and Christopher Avery’s coaching and speaking engagements can be found on ChristopherAvery.com

I’ll be talking about How to Build Any Team Any Time: 6 Team Leadership Skills for High Performance and Low Stress at Work. Of course there will be fun and shenanigans too.

If you are in SA and want to go, better make your reservations now.

The good folks at Agile University yesterday published my team building commentary titled: How to Frustrate, Thwart, and Ultimately Bring Down Any Team in 4 Easy Steps Without Even Trying. Click the AU link above to read it, or read it below, after the video window.

Or, just watch this video…

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How to Frustrate, Thwart, and Ultimately Bring Down Any Team in 4 Easy Steps Without Even Trying

By Christopher Avery

Everyone says they want to be on a winning team. And nobody ever says they want to be on a lousy team. So how come we get the frustrating teams much of the time?

Here are the steps you can take to make sure that your teams remain the worst, most frustrating experiences ever. Master each of these 4 steps and then be sure to pass them to others so they too can bring all their teams down.

P.S. These steps are especially important if you want to bring agile practices to a standstill…

Step 1: Assume someone else is responsible for team building

Never, under any circumstance, should you allow yourself to feel a sense of ownership for the quality and productivity of the whole team, collaboration, partnership, or relationship. By all means, let someone else do that, preferably someone you can despise for not having as much technical competence as you. Also, assume team building is so much black magic instead of a skill set composed of straight-forward repeatable conversations anyone can bring to any relationship any time. Repeat after me: “I specialize in ‘hard’ skills.”

Why? Someone – anyone – regardless of their role in the team, who cares about the productivity of the team will make a huge difference in putting into motion the conversations and ideas that build the team. But when no one does, then it’s completely up to chance whether the team develops effective dynamics.

Consider this: 15 years ago I had the opportunity to interview dozens of science and engineering staff in a couple of large failed programs. Everyone was a “top 10%” graduate from a “top 10″ university, the crème de’ le’ crème. When asked “To what do you owe your participation in this failed program?” the #1 response was “I got put on a bad team.”

Memorize that line so you can repeat it in your next review, or even earlier, maybe tomorrow.

Step 2: Resist attending to anything other than the most narrow description of your role accountability

Whatever you do, refuse all invitations to meetings, orientations, or informal gatherings where the team’s overall mission might be discussed. If you do, you might get sucked into caring. And if you actually cared, then you might feel a sense of ownership, and next thing you know you’ll be sub-optimizing for your own role and optimizing for the whole.

Why? The #1 point of leverage for team building and team leadership is to talk together about the larger goal. I call it the what-we-must-do-together-that-is-bigger-than-any-of-us,-requires-all-of-us,-and-none-of-us-can-claim-individual-victory-until-it-is-achieved conversation.

Step 3: Care less whether others on the team and extended teams are winning or losing

By all means, whatever you do, maintain a constant vigil of nonchalance about how what you do affects others on the team or beyond. This is relatively easy to master. Besides repeating the mantra “I don’t care” you can also:

1. Assume the only way to motivate anyone is with the carrots and sticks of management, which peers on teams don’t have available, thus you can’t affect other’s commitment.
2. Never ever ask “What’s in it for you-beyond a paycheck-to work on this project?” That way, you can continue to not care, and you also don’t have to know whether you are stepping on someone’s win.
3. Also never own up to having any inspiration at all about why you come to work other than for continued employment and a paycheck. That way you can maintain low interest and commitment to most things.
4. Finally, assume that other people and departments should do what you think they should do because you all get a paycheck from the same company.

Why? Most people say they want to be on a winning team. That means actually practicing win/win/win at every level and juncture which requires some caring, knowledge and effort. And that means understanding how peer motivation works (you can understand it if you want to) and committing to generate as many wins as possible out of every decision and action.

Step 4: Make only agreements you must in order to get others to leave you alone. Don’t worry about keeping them.

Since there is a fuzzy authority system in teams, collaborations, and partnerships, feel free to say and do anything you can to get people to leave you alone. That usually means resisting opting in and engaging until they twist your arm, and then saying whatever you must in order to end the pain and move on. Making agreements you never intend to keep is a great way to ensure continual frustration and failure.

Why? Teams, collaborations, and partnerships operate on a different frequency than the hierarchical functions of an organization. Where authority structures create the fabric of the institution, making and keeping agreements of all types, from operating rules to delivering work, creates the fabric of the team.

All kidding aside…

In sum, to make sure you continue to be frustrated your entire career by being on lousy, low-performing teams, then whatever you do, please don’t register for or attend Knowledge Team Leadership: The Art & Science of Being Amazingly Effective in Any Team, October 21-22, in Boulder, CO. If you do, Christopher might show you how learning to get more done with others may be the single greatest thing you can do to boost your career. P.S. Seating is limited and should fill soon. Hurry.

* Christopher Avery, Ph.D. wrote the popular book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your work Done when Sharing Responsibility (which Fortune Magazine claimed is the only teamwork book worth reading), co-founded the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), and is the developer and Agile University trainer for Knowledge Team Leadership: The Art and Science of Being Amazingly Effective in Any Team. More information at Agile University or at Knowledge Team Leadership.

© Copyright 2008, Partnerwerks Inc. Permission granted to re-publish only in its entirety including the “about” paragraph and copyright statement.

P.S. Yes, you may republish this in your online or offline media. If you want to alter anything, just ask first.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Team Leadership Expert Christopher Avery, PhD, to Lead Highly Effective Two Day Team Building Workshop

Unique Team Building and Leadership Workshop Intensive Teaches How to Develop Excellent Team Dynamics

Comfort, TX, August 22, 2008 – Nothing feels better than knowing exactly how to make a team click and acting on that knowledge.  The thin line between success and failure often depends on our ability to work with  team members that are spread too thin, live in different time zones or cultures, may not be aligned around the project and don’t have common goals.  In a perfect world, we’d lead or work with a team of people that practice the highest standards of shared responsibility every day, in every situation with everyone around them. According to Christopher Avery, PhD, and author of Teamwork is an Individual Skill, “It is possible to master leadership under conditions of shared responsibility.” With this in mind, Avery is offering a uniquely effective two day workshop to teach team leaders, members, project managers, and coaches a proven approach to systematically take responsibility for succeeding while depending on others over whom they have no control and deliver results every time.
“Throughout my 20 years in the field, I’ve found one fundamental principle that accounts for the difference between truly great team builders and those who are average, struggling or failing.  The difference is in how they deal with personal and shared responsibility.  Effective teams feel it.  On effective teams, if one person drops the ball, another picks it up, and if one person makes a mistake or falls behind, another lends a hand.  Low and average performing teams seem to lack this sense of shared responsibility. I developed the Knowledge Team Leadership program to give team leaders and members the tools they need to deliver results and have fun with any team starting immediately,” adds Avery.

Knowledge Team Leadership is an intensive two days of hands-on proven-on-the-frontline leadership development and team building program held October 21-22 at Agile University, a division of Rally Software, in Boulder, CO, USA.  Participants will walk away understanding why a team does or doesn’t generate a felt sense of shared responsibility, a set of team building activities they can use at work with any team, and diagnostic and interpersonal “tools” that can be used immediately. Most importantly, participants will learn there is always some effective action they can take to build a team any time.  According to past participant Dale Legband, Director, R&D, KLA-Tencor, “The powerful teams I’ve created since attending this seminar five years ago have delivered almost every project run on-time and on-budget and employee retention has been excellent.”

Knowledge Team Leadership was developed and is facilitated by world class expert on personal and shared responsibility, Christopher Avery, PhD.  A popular speaker, author, and mentor, Avery is committed to redefining responsibility in all societies throughout the world.  His book, Teamwork is an Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility is in its ninth printing and was recognized in by Fortune Magazine as “the only teamwork book worth reading.”

The cost for this high impact event is $1395.  Space is limited so act quickly.  For information or to register for Knowledge Team Leadership, visit http://www.christopheravery.com/ktl or contact Christopher Avery at christopheravery@christopheravery.com.
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In this hour-long show I shared some of the most important truths I’ve learned in 17 years of studying and teaching team leadership communication skills for team building. These included busting a bunch of team building myths that are still prevalent in our society and businesses, and spilling the beans about the top four thinks I would do to build any team any time.

I also previewed the upcoming Knowledge Team Leadership intensive I’ll be leading in in Boulder, CO, October 21-22, and I answered a number of questions I’ve been asked about that session.

Promised Show Notes

I promised to post my notes from the show for you to download. Here they are:

Christopher’s PDF of show notes

And I suggest you download this one-pager of 3 case studies of client results for clients using Knowledge Team Leadership:

KTL Case Studies of client results

What about the bonuses?

I just got off the phone with someone asking about the promised bonuses. Here they are…

Each person who registers at my site (and my site only) by August 29 will receive a private 20-minute coaching session with me:

• in-person during the workshop or on the phone before or after
• recorded (if on the phone) for you to re-listen later
• valued at $300+

Additionally, when 3 or more people on the same team register my site (and my site only) and attend together, their entire team (even if more than the 3 participants) will receive a 1-hour coaching session with me:

• before, during (if time allows) or after the workshop
• recorded (if on the phone) for you to re-listen later
• valued at $1700+

Note: What’s the big deal about registering at “my site?” There are other sites where you could register. I’m not opposed to you doing that, but my bonus offer is only for those registering at www.KnowledgeTeamLeadership.com. It’s intended to be a benefit to readers of my Responsibility eTips and blog. You too can sign up for Responsibility eTips at the top of this page and get first notice of information and opportunities I’m involved with.

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The live Q&A preview talk show is Friday, August 22 at 1pm Eastern / Noon Central / and 10am Pacific. Click the button to go to the show’s website where you can subscribe to RSS reminders and read all about the show.

What do you want to know about leading, building, or succeeding in teams?

Call in and ask your question…

Or use the comment section below to ask your question…

We’ll discuss whatever you want to know, as well as tell you about the content, format, objectives, and benefits of the upcoming session of Knowledge Team Leadership and whether it is right for you or your team.

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