The 8020Info Water Cooler

The 8020Info Water Cooler

Highlights from the latest information
for managers, leaders and entrepreneurs

Feb. 16, 2009 -- Vol. 9 No. 3

1. Four Ways To Encourage Teamwork

We live in an era of teamwork and collaboration. But we also live in a culture that promotes individualism. That means your organization will need to develop procedures that encourage better teamwork. In Harvard Management Update, London Business School Professor Lynda Gratton suggests:

Hire for co-operation: Organizations in which a co-operative mindset flourishes take particular care in hiring practices. They seek to attract co-operative people and discourage highly competitive and individualistic people. Review the competencies you use in judging job candidates. Do they include a proven ability to work in teams, deal with conflict, and share knowledge?

Institute onboarding practices that foster collaboration: In the first few weeks after starting a new job or joining a new company, employees are particularly sensitive to the cultural and behavioural norms around them. For this reason, develop onboarding procedures that emphasize the value of collaboration and ease employees into the networks they will need to get work done. At Nokia, in their early days new employees are formally introduced to six members of their team by their supervisor, and encouraged to talk in depth about each other.

Support mentoring: Promote mentoring and train mentors, since of all the human resources factors Gratton studied it was the one most strongly associated with highly co-operative people and teams.

Ensure that performance management rewards collaboration: Nothing pits colleague against colleague as a performance management process that rewards individual accomplishments and ignores collaboration. Make sure your process is collaborative itself -- and rewards collaboration in your staff.

See: http://harvardbusiness.org/

2. Slow Leadership Advice For Fast Times Top

On his Slow Leadership blog, consultant Adrian Savage urges us to slow down. But he also acknowledges that we live in fast-paced times, and occasions will arise when we are busy and pressured. At those moments, he suggests you follow these practices to avoid compounding your problems:

Always think ahead about the most likely consequences of what you are doing, not just the results you want to happen. One of the most common consequences of being under pressure is a failure to look ahead. But cutting corners and rushing into precipitate action can cost you far more time in cleaning up a mess down the road.

It's always worth taking ample time to get a message across to others. Rushing through a phone call, e-mail, or conversation can come back to haunt you. Few situations are more maddening than discovering that someone you were relying on for a key element of a project misunderstood what you said you wanted.

Consider every request to attend a meeting with great skepticism. Avoid any meeting with no clear agenda, no obvious ending time, and no purpose that makes sense to anyone other than the organizer. "Your default position should be to stay away," he urges.

On that score, practise a dozen firm but polite variations on "no" until you can say them in your sleep. Then use them whenever is needed -- which will be all the time. The best way to stop yourself from being overloaded is to refuse to take anything else on.

See: http://www.slowleadership.org/blog/

3. Identify Your Web Site's Three Key Tasks Top

Marketing consultant Jay Lipe was recently hired to audit a company's web site. He asked the client to name the top three things he wanted visitors to do when they came to the web site. But when Lipe then checked the site, he couldn't see how to do any of those tasks.

Could you be making the same mistake?

In his Marketing Tips And Tools e-newsletter, he says for your web site to succeed you must know exactly what you want visitors to do, and then make those tasks blindingly obvious. Identify the top three tasks, and then work with your web site designer to box them in, shade them in a different colour, feature them in a burst, or whatever it takes to make them unmistakably clear.

See: http://www.emergemarketing.com/

4. Leadership, Innovation, and Trust Top

Innovation and creativity are always risky. So if you want staff to be creative, you need to build trust with them. In his Wisdom newsletter, consultant Robin Sharma offers these four steps for building trust:

Do what you say you will do.

Celebrate diversity.

Treat others with respect (no gossip, no sarcasm).

Expect the best from others.

See: http://www.robinsharma.com/

5. Zingers Top

Being productive doesn't necessarily mean doing more. It can mean doing less, provided you focus on more important tasks and activities that are aligned with your values and goals. (Source: Productivity 501 blog)

In the regular one-on-one conversations you should be having with staff, here are six key questions to continually ask and answer for yourself: (1) Who is this person at work? (2) Why do I need to manage this person? (3) What do I need to talk about with this person? (4) How should I talk with this person? (5) Where should I talk with this person? (6) When should I talk with this person? (Source: Rainmaker Thinking web site)

Negotiations expert Michael Sloopka says it's important to highlight the word "proposal" in all your negotiations. The word proposal implies flexibility. (Source: Negotiatingcoach.com)

Bar charts get overused because they are the first choice in many graphing programs. Use them to show how several items, not just one, change over time. When graphing how a single item changes over time, use a line or area chart, and use a pie chart to make a key point when comparing a few items on a common scale. (Source: Seth's blog)

After a meeting or conversation with a colleague, do you instantly remember things you meant to raise with him or her? Use the tasks/reminders feature of Microsoft Outlook or its equivalent on your computer to create a new task for each person you regularly deal with, and in the body of the task write out the issues to discuss with that person. Use one task per person. Or try the same thing with your paper planner or notebook -- one page per person. (Source: Jason Womack Company e-newsletter)

Links:

See: Productivity 501 blog
See: Rainmaker Thinking web site
See: www.negotiatingcoach.com
See: Seth's Blog
See: Jason Womack Company e-newsletter

6. Q&A with 8020Info: Designing communication plans Top

Question: There are so many ways to go about developing a communications plan -- what's the best way to start?

8020Info President & CEO Rob Wood replies:

We have found that the best first step almost always involves careful identification and examination of your priority audiences.

Communications must relate to your relationships and what things of value you have to offer these audiences. Their mindset will determine how your messaging is interpreted. Their profiles will indicate which channels are the most effective ways to reach them. Their environment will suggest optimum timing for your communications, as well as who might influence them and what others might be competing for their attention.

In practice, given limits on time, money and energy, you will typically select fewer than five priority audiences, although there are many to choose from -- current clients or customers, future prospects, funders/donors, regulators, government, advocacy targets, current staff, future staff, volunteers, members, champions, partners, professional colleagues, referring agencies, the community in which you operate, local neighbourhoods, suppliers, intermediaries, media and so on.

After you have developed a thorough understanding of your priority audiences, but before you can really get down to designing a plan, you need to clarify your communication objectives for each audience. Here are some typical goals, and they may vary from audience to audience:

Increase awareness of your organization, services, products or programs

Reposition how audiences view your organization and/or its services and products

Explain reasons, features, benefits, policies, or how to do something

Increase interest, enthusiasm, desire, support or morale

Elicit action (create urgency or make an offer/call to action)

Advocate (educate the public, lobby decision-makers, respond to threats or attacks)

Achieve efficiencies (e.g. reduce enquiries or handle them more efficiently)

With well-defined goals for clearly identified audiences, you will have the framework you need to develop a strong plan for communication content, timing and channels. With a plan in hand, one significant challenge remains -- to execute it effectively.

7. News From Our Water Cooler:
Coping with Chaos Top

At a mixer on Friday to celebrate the retirement of John Robertson, Fort Henry's inimitable award-winning manager, we found ourselves comparing notes with another guest, a lawyer, on the impact of the economy on professional practices. "I guess your business thrives on chaos," he teased.

8020Info does focus on helping leadership teams think better in times of change and choice (if not chaos). And clearly, no one can stand still today. In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Brian Milner noted that "a computer or big-screen TV loses an estimated 1 to 2 per cent of its value every week it sits unsold". That would be a 10 per cent loss from just sitting there, and in only six weeks since we celebrated the New Year!

In the public sector, organizations that have been squeezed for resources over the past several years are now being forced to make more substantial, strategic choices -- not a little bit more or less for a program or budget line item, but whether they are to be or not to be.

8020Info helps teams develop, communicate and implement more effective strategies. We would be pleased to discuss your needs and welcome enquiries at (613) 542-8020, or by email at watercooler@8020info.com.

8. Closing Thought Top

"Prosperity has always returned, and will again."

- John D Rockefeller