Our model is to increase employee freedom as we grow, rather than limit it; to continue and nourish innovative people, so we have a better chance of long-term continued success. Excellent quote from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Can you read the traits of your staff working as a team? Hopefully, there are there many more positive traits than negative traits.
One of the more interesting topics we help our clients improve is their teamwork. We at Digital Spark Marketing are fanatical about teamwork within a company. Our experience through the years has shown us time and again that engaged and happy employees make happy customers make happy shareholders.
Plus, it’s just a lot more fun to go to work when you enjoy the environment, your co-workers, and the company’s mission.
To keep current on this topic, we make it a point to study great teamwork cultures—Disney, Zappos, and NetFlix are on our list, among a few others, and we’re big fans and followers of Jim Collins’ work regarding team-building culture.
Related post: Building Collaboration and Sharing Skills in your Staff
Over the years, we’ve come to realize that maintaining a great team almost always boils down to a strong management-employee relationship. The list of natural wedges that typically drive apart management and employees is massive, but they all generally fall into one of five big categories.
If you have the desire to create and maintain a great team culture in your company, here are five mistakes that you must avoid and what you should do to prevent them:
Keeping Your Business Results a Secret
Does everyone in your company know where the company stands in meeting its business financial results? Along with the usual financial suspects – revenues, expenses, profit, cash flow – ensure that employees know the key drivers of performance metrics.
And make sure they know how the company’s doing with them on a quarterly basis. The more you share, the more people feel ownership and can make a difference.
Working as a team … not communicating business strategy
Is your business strategy clearly articulated, written out, and shared with the company or stuck in the recesses of your mind? An un-articulated strategy is almost certain to fail… especially if you’ve got more than an employee or two.
Limited decision-making delegation
It’s easy to keep decision-making authority restricted to one person or a small group. But by empowering front-line employees – regardless of their title – to solve problems, you allow them to grow. People generally live up to the decision-making power they’re granted.
Withholding positive feedback
In Marcus Buckingham’s book, “First Break all the Rules,” he suggests people need specific positive feedback on their job performance AT LEAST every seven days. Are you doing this with your direct reports? If not, their fire may be dying. Catch them doing something good. Good leaders/managers know people perform better when they are praised.
Working as a team … talking down to employees
Too many in the labor pool are made to feel like second-class citizens. Intelligence and good ideas are hardly confined to owners and managers. At the heart of great cultures, you’ll find leaders who love working with others, and leaders who want to “partner” with employees to create a great company. Too many people say they want to create a great culture, but don’t want to overcome the one, fundamental barrier to culture building: Ego.
Remember that teamwork, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
Please share a teamwork-building experience with this community.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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