50 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM

1. Sit down with a glass of wine, a pen and paper. Recall the boss you have had who you feel brought out the best in you – the best boss you have ever had. Make a list of the things they did which engendered that feeling in you. Do those things in the team, and get leaders within your team doing them too.

2. Likewise, recall the worst boss you ever had. Make a list of what they did which gave you that impression. Do none of these things. Encourage the leaders in your team to think about these and how to avoid them.

3. Ban criticism. The best teams are overwhelmingly positive places. You can experiment with this for a day, a week etc. And see how it feels.

4. Set up a formal space for praise in regular meetings, at which you ask: “what needs praising this month?”

5. Encourage people to name their feelings in meetings. “I feel sad....” “I feel excited.....” “I feel angry..........” Tap the vast potential database of the team’s emotions.

6. Establish a regular space for ideas. Take a subject on which the team works and allocate a fixed meeting space for ideas. Make it informal and only about ideas. Suspend judgement of all ideas till the end of the session so you get the maximum number of ideas on the table.

7. At the end of an ideas session have a race to find the winning ideas. Lay out all the written up ideas and promote each one place by voting. The winners will go the furthest.

8. Ban tables. Sit openly facing each other. Tables make enmities.

9. Sit in a circle. Also promotes good ideas and harmony.

10. Ban update reporting in a team setting, other than as lessons we can all learn from. If people are honest, most update reporting bores the others to death.

11. Take seriously the notion of job titles in the team, and allocate tasks around these. I’m talking about the informal job titles that reflect individual strengths in the team.

12. Try an experimental period where you talk ONLY about strengths and what is being done well. Build ideas from this to extend best practice.

13. Have a moment or two of calm / silence before team meetings to get yourselves into a mental space that is all about good listening and a nice slow thinking pace to get the most from ideas and decisions. One minute of silence is nothing, yet it can change everything.

14. Be very formal about a decision log. Write all decisions in the log and check for agreement before they are agreed.

15. Promote wishfulness. Rather than talking about “the problem is.............” talk about “I wish it were like this........” or “How could we make it................”

16. Ask “how is everyone...?” and expect really honest full answers

17. Be careful about measurement. When you are measuring you are not actually managing. Be careful about the difference between the two. Try to do much more managing than measuring.

18. Managing is all about asking HOW can we do better at.............. rather than WHY is the result like.................

19. Reduce the number of performance indicators you look at. Decide the two or three that are really key and focus your energies on those.

20. Try to spend a bit of time each time you meet thinking like a consumer. If needs be, appoint someone “consumer of the month” to act as the consumer consciousness, even if it is unpalatable or difficult to hear. Alternatively, invent Arnold. Arnold is the customer. Then you can ask, what does Arnold say about this? He might well speak some sense.

21. Think carefully about your common goal. If it is a number, it is probably wrong. No one really wants to spend their life pursuing a number. We’re just not built to live that way. Connect your goal to what is really important in peoples’ lives – your customers and yours.

22. A good way to do no. 21 above is to think about time. What do we really want our next couple of years at work in this team to be like? What do we want the minutes a customer spends experiencing our brand to be like? How do we engineer both?

23. Promote team members in reading, viewing and experiencing the world widely. Leave management models behind and encourage people in talking about the inspiration they are finding (perhaps from practice, perhaps anew) from other, unrelated areas – arts, philosophy, science, sport, you name it. By asking yourselves “is there anything we can learn from this field?” You will be surprised at how much you can import. Excluding management thinking is important here. Generally that gene pool is depleted. You refresh it best from unlikely sources.

24. Nick ideas. Look at the competition – indirect and direct. What are they doing that is a good idea you can pinch or adapt?

25. Be rigorous about your own experiences of your own brand. Try as far as you can to watch how consumers do experience it. Try and be as much like a consumer as you can in experiencing it yourselves.

26. If you can, bring in unusual people into your meetings, or hold special guest sessions. Get in anyone you think is genuinely interesting. Here I refer not to so called interesting consultants or business people (who often aren’t) but that bloke who has pioneered wheelchairs for Africa, the lady who has got prisoners sewing for a living, the first female Everest conqueror, the chap who lived for months with the tribe in Borneo, the pianist with the unusual background. You get the picture. These are the people who will fire your team’s curiosity. And that is gold. Curiosity is the mother of ideas.

27. Ask yourself where you expect ideas to come from within the organization. If your first answer isn’t YOU, then you may be taking delegation a bit far.

28. Vary where you meet. Most meeting rooms are insufferably dull places. There is no god reason why you can’t meet by going for a walk on a beach, by strolling in a forest, or sitting with your feet hanging in a river. Indeed, it’ll be better if you do.

29. Whenever you feel yourselves behaving professionally, be extremely cautious. These are the moments you are most likely to desert the consumer’s logic, and probably that of your staff also.

30. Include in your meetings a space for people to say “....... what I’ve really appreciated about you Doreen is..........; what I appreciate about you, Derek is..................” (calling each other Derek and Doreen is optional).

31. Allocate some time to meeting without agenda. Just a time to catch up on how you all are. You’ll be amazed at what stuff this can throw up.

32. Allow boasting. “Do you know what, we’ve got really good at............”

33. Party. Good teams do.

34. When you talk about a model, a process, a strategy, a theory, be aware you are not talking the same language as consumers.

35. Likewise, jargon and three letter acronyms.

36. Be careful with mickey taking. Humour is one thing. Allowing internal competition and rivalry is another. The enemy is out there. Not in here.

37. Why are we better than them? Why are we better than them? Why are we better than them? When it comes to your real competition you can safely become quite obsessive about this question. The harder you can answer it, the more the consumer will listen.

38. Simplify goals and tasks. Multiplication of goals eats time – time that can be spent figuring out how to be better than the competition, and acting on it.

39. Laugh. It’s not that serious is it?

40. Oh, and where there is laughter, ideas will quickly follow.

41. If your brand collapses tomorrow, it will make very little real difference to consumers. That’s partly why taking yourselves too seriously is a bad idea.

42. State your intentions and outcomes for each meeting you have. “I intend this meeting to be wow.” “I intend this meeting to be a place full of ideas”. I intend that we decide xyz....”

43. Have shorter meetings standing up. They’ll be shorter.

44. A posture guide: for ideas, sprawl. For discussion and opinion, sit. For decisions, stand.

45. Share on an ongoing basis what people in the team are really interested in, and see how any of that passion can be brought to work.

46. Eat together. If possible, cook together.

47. Don’t just have coffee and biscuits. Try some different forms of refreshment.

48. Start a team blog. Sound off online.

49. When someone has a good idea, tell ‘em. “Nice one Cyril.”

50. Have dedicated sessions asking for, and offering help to each other. No stigma about asking or offering.