Chapter 3. Week 3 – Facilitating the Team Effectiveness Day
| | "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." | |
| | --Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher |
In the previous chapter you learned about decision making, team engagement and empowerment, facilitation, and developing an owner's mentality for yourself and within your team.
This week you will build on and implement the learning of last week as you facilitate the team effectiveness day. You need to discover how effective your team can become when engaged and empowered in decision making, teamwork, brainstorming, presenting draft solutions, and in reality, leading the process through self-discovery, commitment and most importantly, ownership. Without this experience, for you and your team, nothing will change.
In this chapter you will learn:
Day 11 – motivating factors in the workplace
Maintaining motivated staff is not always the easiest of tasks, but it does pay off for you, your customers, and the employees. As you prepare to enter a new year, season, quarter, or month, you must take the time to reflect on what made the last period or event successful and what could have made it better. So, who better to answer those questions than the people who determine the success or failure for your operation—your team.
By bringing all your employees together in a room for a meeting you create a team environment. By including them and sharing information with them, you are giving your employees an opportunity to share their perspective.
With this inclusion, you are indirectly empowering the team to contribute to the success of your whole operation, because it gives them a chance to see and understand the bigger picture. This in turn leads to them taking initiative and improving things in their own area of responsibility.
Day 12 – the importance of C.H.A.N.G.E.
| | "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." | |
| | --Barack Obama, President of the U.S.A |
Do you agree that change is constant?
In today's society things are changing so fast, it is hard to stay current. The challenge with change is bringing acceptance of change. People have a tendency to reject change, especially when it comes by surprise, or when they were not involved in the change process.
Tomorrow, you will be facilitating your team through a change process. It is important for them to be fully involved in the change, which in turn will increase team effectiveness.
Change is an acronym for an important message: C.H.A.N.G.E.—Can Help Accept New Growth Experiences.
There is a choice that you and your team can make—accept or reject change. If you reject it you refuse to grow. To grow you must flow with change, like water, and grow with it.
You have to help...
Day 13 – facilitating the team effectiveness day
The following is a checklist of what you will need in order to facilitate the team effectiveness day and a guide to what order you should run the day.
Items you will need before beginning the meeting include:
Room setup
Flip chart / markers for facilitator and each table group
Masking tape to post charts
Post-it notes
Notepads
Pens/pencils
Fun gifts for participation, appropriate behavior, and so on
Now that you have all these in place, use the following steps to facilitate the flow of the day:
Welcome/opening remarks.
Delegate or find a volunteer to take notes, gather notes, and type up highlights of the day.
Ask the team to complete confidential post-it notes on "How effective are we as a team?"
Determine the average team effectiveness rating.
Have a group discussion or presentation on "What factors contribute to that rating?"
Recognize and applaud each presentation.
Have a group discussion and/or presentation on "Areas for improvement." Recognize and applaud...
Day 14 – sharing what was learned on the team effectiveness day
When I was in the corporate world, I got more training than anyone else. Not because I needed it, but because I always shared what I had learned with others. One of the keys to learning is to share what you learn. When you share, you are giving, and it is in the giving that you gain.
One of the key things you as a leader can now demonstrate is a quick follow-up to the team effectiveness day. By providing a summary of the highlights or minutes of the day, and the action plans moving forward within 24 hours of the meeting, you will demonstrate discipline, proactivity, and the importance of meeting as a team. This in turn is creating an appropriate behavior for your team to do the same.
Too many meetings happen without any follow-up and all momentum gets lost. You cannot afford to do that at this step. Do everything you can to get the information out within 24 hours. After that, you will start to forget things, so do it now.
By the...
Day 15 – giving and receiving feedback
One of the toughest parts of being a leader is giving and receiving feedback. Without feedback no one knows where they stand. It is a must when it comes to overall performance and productivity.
Today is feedback day. Conduct casual one-on-one interviews with team members, starting with those who contributed heavily first, to recognize their appropriate behaviors, followed by those who did not contribute at all, to get them more involved.
At the same time, it is an opportunity to get their feedback on the event and on how you did. Without feedback, how can you improve? How can meetings improve? This is the time to be asking questions, listening, and equally importantly, to be taking notes.
There are many feedback models out there, but it all boils down to asking questions. Start by asking permission to ask questions and take notes. Then ask open-ended questions like "What went well?", "What did not go so well?", and "What should we do differently next...
In this chapter, we covered the following:
The motivating factors in the workplace from a supervisor's point of view, and how this differs from an employee's point of view
How to present these motivating factors to your team, and help them find the solution to any problem based on attitude
Managing change, how people react to change, what you can do to ease the change process, and how you can engage the team to successfully implement the change
How to facilitate your team through a team effectiveness day
How to follow-up from the meeting effectively, and how to learn from evaluations and individual feedback
In the next chapter, you will learn both the real and the perceived strengths and weaknesses of your team, while learning an inspiring way to conduct performance reviews.
