Successfully Managing a Remote Team of Employees
Successful remote team leaders are created, not born. Focus on these 6 basic goals to ensure highly functional and smooth-running teams of employees.
6 Critical Domains To Managing Others Successfully
Assigning work to others and telling them what to do is not the same as effectively managing them.
Rather, managing others requires a set of people skills that, when combined with a strong sense of integrity and professionalism, allows you to work through other people to accomplish important objectives.
As a manager you must encourage performance through motivation and feedback and also hold people accountable.
While this topic can be extremely comprehensive and notoriously difficult to master, we’ve narrowed success in this area down to six key domains of mastery – based on our years of successful client engagements – that if achieved, lead to a consistent and repeatable process for managing others successfully.
We also follow each of the six domains with a link for further reading on that domain that will expand and enhance your ability to manage others. …Continue Reading »
How to Effectively Address Employee Performance Issues
In a recent blog entitled The Paralyzing Effects of Poor Performance I discussed the psychological drivers behind why many Leaders become paralyzed in the face of taking action when faced with employee performance issues.
In this post I wanted to share 6 proven steps that if followed,will effectively address any and all employee performance issues a Leader will face while affecting change within your organization in a straightforward and non-biased manner. …Continue Reading »
The 6 Truths of Creating & Building a Strong, Supportive Business Team – Part 2
In Part 1 of this article, we started talking about the 6 truths of creating and building a strong, supportive business team, and detailed the first 3 truths.
In this post I’m going to share with you the final 3 truths so you can get started creating and developing your own team using these strategies.
Truth Four: Spending Off-Line Time Together
Strong, supportive teams make a conscious effort to spend off-line time together. They know that this type of time helps build relationships and helps to create a feeling of team identity.
Off-line time together can involve eating meals together, participating in community events, celebrating special events, holidays, or just plain “hanging out.”
To spend off-line time together try the following:
- Make team members aware of the importance to spending off-line time together and encourage them to do it
- Make the effort to purposefully have certain meals together or to take workplace breaks together
- Plan monthly team outings and make it easy for all to attend …Continue Reading »
The 6 Truths of Creating & Building A Strong, Supportive Business Team – Part 1
Leaders in every organization talk about building the team, working as a team, and “my” team. Yet few understand how to build and create a strong, supportive business team.
Why is this?
Because most skilled company executives and managers are exploring ways to improve business results and rightfully so, view team-based organization structures as the best design for involving employees in creating business success.
No matter what you call your team-building efforts – whether it is continuous improvement, total quality, or lean manufacturing – you are striving to improve results for customers.
Unfortunately, few organizations are pleased with the results their team efforts produce. If this describes your organization, then you will gain a tremendous edge by learning what our experience has shown in helping organizations across North America and Europe to build and create strong, supportive teams.
We call these “truths” because they have stood the test of time.
That is, in our work spanning over 25 years, these truths of creating strong, supportive teams in the workplace continue to re-occur across time, genders, industry verticals, and national boundaries.
The Six Truths to Creating a Strong, Supportive Team are:
- Truth One: A Sense of Commitment
- Truth Two: Showing Appreciation
- Truth Three: Sharing Positive Communication
- Truth Four: Spending Off-Line Time Together
- Truth Five: Shared Values
- Truth Six: Cope with the Unexpected
Let’s review each and provide some practical actions on what you can do to ensure success in your quest for creating a strong, supportive team in your organization
The Paralyzing Effects of Poor Employee Performance…And What To Do About It
Recently we were asked to engage with a CEO of a global company who was having a very difficult time coming to a decisive action on one of his direct reporting employees whose performance and track record were very poor.
We were told that he has been wrestling with this issue for close to 6 months and has not been able to take the necessary action – action that would apparently terminate the relationship between this report and the organization.
Now, one would think that at this executive level a decision like this would be old hat. After all, you don’t get to be a CEO of a global organization if you can’t make timely decisions. Yet this type of paralysis is more common than not, whether you’re a CEO or a first-line manager.
So why is this? Why do bright, assertive, results-oriented leaders often get paralyzed when required to deal with the poor performance of a direct report?
The answer to this leadership paralysis is this: It’s because of their anger and guilt. …Continue Reading »
Leadership Moments: The Magic Move
In this Leadership Moments video, I’ll outline the steps for executing the Magic Move for achieving your top objectives, discuss the importance of each step, and explain how to effectively approach the process.
In our executive coaching practice one question keeps recurring with clients across America and abroad: How can I, as a leader, better align my people to ensure that we achieve the results we promise the organization?
Critical question? You bet it is.
Our direct answer? You need to execute the “Magic Move.”
What is the Magic Move? This is what we will be discussing today. …Continue Reading »
Leadership Moments: How To Delegate
In this Leadership Moments video, I’ll discuss the importance of delegation skills and techniques, and how leaders can learn how to delegate quickly and effectively.
Your ability to employ effective delegation skills and techniques could be a major factor in blocking or securing your opportunities for advancement. You might be surprised just how common it is for delegation skills to be seriously lacking at management and executive levels.
At upper levels of management a key issue with delegation techniques is that many executives harbor a deep unwillingness to admit to themselves that they need assistance to accomplish all the tasks they are responsible for.
The simple truth is that, as a leader, even at your best, you effectively cannot do alone all the things that you are expected to do. Delegation is necessary and you will be wise to learn to make it work for you. …Continue Reading »
Delegation for Effective Leadership
One of the most crucial and challenging tasks for Leaders is leadership delegation; i.e. to effectively apportion work among the people they lead. Yet the truth is that many simply don’t. They don’t for many reasons.
For some it’s about control and perfection. They can’t give up control to someone else. No one can do the task as “perfectly” as they can. For others it’s about time. They are the ones who frequently complain that that they have too much to do and too little time in which to do it. As a result, they never make the effort to learn effective delegation techniques. There are many others, too, who simply don’t know how as delegation skills are rarely taught in formal academic centers.
So to be “the best” at delegation you need to know the answers to the following four questions:
1.) What do effective delegators do?
2.) How do I know what to retain and what to delegate?
3.) Did I delegate all that I could?
4.) How can I be confident that the results will be achieved? …Continue Reading »
Manage Your Remote Team by its Results
Goal: Focus on the quality of your employees’ work, not their style of doing it.
The nuances of how people work, and when, become more pronounced when you’re managing a remote team, but they’re not a good basis for performance evaluation. Forget points of style — how long it takes an employee to reply to emails, for example — and focus on the results: both tangible and intangible.
Tangible results might include the proposal an employee submits for next quarter’s operating plan and whether it’s comprehensive, on target, and on time.
The intangibles are just as important: whether she collaborates well, makes decisions on her own, delivers what she promises, anticipates problems before they happen, generates ideas, communicates clearly, takes responsibility for her work, and goes beyond the call of duty, say to help a new co-worker get up to speed on a client. …Continue Reading »
A Successful Remote Team Requires a Strong Sense of “We”
Goal: Establish strong relationships to fuel motivation, collaboration, and productivity.
Recent research from the Gallup Organization’s Tom Rath shows that people with strong friendships at work are more motivated, loyal, collaborative, and productive.
In a typical office, those relationships form naturally.
Across remote locations, you need to foster not only your connection to your remote employees, but also their connections to one another.
Plan Face Time
To build relationships, there’s no substitute for meeting face to face.
In person, your employees are more likely to tell you about what’s not working. You’ll better understand their work style, how they make decisions, and the types of tasks they are best suited for. There’s no set equation for how often to meet, but twice a year is a good rule of thumb. …Continue Reading »
