Unlock the Power of Teamwork

Have you ever seen a team fall apart because of bickering, infighting, or a failure of accountability? Not only is it frustrating to watch, it's also incredibly disheartening.

Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, defines “Teamwork is the state achieved by a group of people working together who trust one another, engage in healthy conflict, commit to decisions, hold one another accountable, and focus on collective results.”

High performing teams are the cornerstone of healthy and cohesive organizations.  Building these teams is not a complicated task, but many leaders fail because they allow one of the following issues to manifest within the team.

TRUST – A team needs to be comfortable with being vulnerable with each other about their weaknesses, mistakes, fears, and behaviors. Trust grows when relationships are strong!

CONFLICT – A team needs to share their passions, disagree, and challenge and question one another.  The stronger the relationships, the healthier the conflict!

COMMITMENT -   A team buys into important decisions (even if they initially disagree) once all ideas and opinions have been considered. Strong relationships promote buy-in!

ACCOUNTABILITY -  A team does not rely on their leader to be the primary source of accountability but rather deals with their peers directly. Strong relationships build comfort levels creating the ability to discuss missed deliverables and mistakes, and encourages ownership.

RESULTS -   Teams that trust one another, engage in conflict, commit to decisions and hold one another accountable are more likely to put aside their individual needs and focus on what is best for the team as a whole. When relationships are strong, team needs become the priority!

Use your awareness of the five dysfunctions to recognize issues as they happen, so that you can help your team to be more effective. And remember that these are just five of the factors that can affect the performance of your team, so use these alongside other team effectiveness tools.

The Real Impact of Poor Quality

Quality affects a company in a variety of ways, from productivity and profitability to customer satisfaction and public perception. In addition, quality affects the overall operating costs of a company. Focusing on quality helps keep a company strong in all areas.

In this article I highlight three effects on how poor quality can affect your organization.

Influencing Customer Satisfaction

Quality has a direct bearing on customer satisfaction. If a company produces a quality product, satisfied customers will rank that company higher in surveys than companies that fail to provide quality products or services. In addition, dissatisfied customers are more vocal in their criticisms of a company with quality problems. Various websites will rank different companies according to customer satisfaction and quality products. Poor companies may get an initial sale of a product or service but it will not create repeat customers.

Causing Problems with Productivity

Poor quality costs a company a significant amount of money in terms of productivity problems. If a company uses low-quality parts, systems break down, regardless of any high-quality parts also used. Low-quality parts can cause mechanical breakdowns, as well as work slowdowns or even stoppages. If quality is not a proactive measure, employees will spend their time on inefficient process and fixing incidents on a regular basis. It is crucial to find out which processes are inefficient and how to improve them.

Impacting Company's Profitability

Poor quality can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability. While using less expensive parts and equipment might cut costs in the short term, the long-term effects might be far more expensive. This could also be a lack of quality in human, physical, financial or knowledge factors that are needed to perform business processes.

Good quality increases profitability. When employees are engaged in a work environment in which teamwork is emphasized and where quality products are the goal, the work environment flows more smoothly than one in which quality is an afterthought.

The Solution

Investing in proper quality control is key to reduce poor quality. Focusing on quality can help a business maintain a satisfied customer base. When focusing on quality, it must be a team effort, with everyone within the company committed to implementing any quality changes managers mandate.  Ultimately, the cost of working with an ineffective system are exponentially higher than the cost of working with a proper quality management platform.

Lean Quote: Don’t Be Left Wishing You Had Started A Year Ago

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"A year from now, you may wish you had started today."   —  Karen Lamb 

It never feels like quite the right time. There’s always something just a little bit more pressing to finish up first. You’ll start that new project or new hobby tomorrow, or maybe this weekend. You’ll get started learning a new skill as soon as you have a little more time. Pretty quickly, a week has passed, then a month, and then a year. Looking back you’ll realize, that if only you had started way back when, you’d be a year into your project. You’d be a year into mastering a new skill.

This quote, attributed to author Karen Lamb, might inspire you to get going on that project you've been putting off for "someday." "A year from now you may wish you had started today" simply says: The time is now.

Nike had a motto for its athletics line for a while, “Yesterday you said tomorrow.” It resounded heavily with those who often find themselves saying they’ll start running or hitting the gym tomorrow, or this weekend or next week. Everyone knows that feeling. You tell yourself you don’t have enough time tonight, or the weather isn’t great or that you really just don’t feel like it. Tomorrow comes, and the same excuses get used.

Combat this procrastination by taking that other Nike motto to heart, “Just do it”. Plan a day to begin and don’t miss that date no matter what. Dig deep, drag yourself to the gym, or to that seminar or class and just get started. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to keep going once you’ve started. Once you’ve been at it for a year, you’ll be proud of yourself for everything you’ve accomplished in the year, rather than lamenting the fact you never got around to beginning.

It's easy to delay working on our goals when the day-to-day stuff takes up so much of our time. But as The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin says, "The days are long, but the years are short." Just a simple reminder not to let the years fly by without meaning or enjoying them as much as you can.

10 Ways to Make Goal Setting Extraordinary in Your Business

Setting effective and achievable business goals is at the heart of any good business goal setting strategy. While many people say they want to achieve success in business, not everyone has the wherewithal to follow through and do so.

Determining the right direction for a business requires setting ambitious and inclusive—yet attainable—goals. If a business’ leadership team aims too high, it’s likely to create frustration, lost opportunities and unhappy clients, and if goals are too narrow, lagging areas are likely to affect the entire company before long.

Setting comprehensive yet achievable goals may not be easy, but it’s necessary if a business is to grow. Here is my top 10 list of the ways I’ve seen goal setting go from ordinary to something useful in aligning, enabling, and accelerating individual and organizational performance.

1. Align to Company Mission – Goal setting, at its best, is used to align the individual goals to those of the organization, in support of executing on a competitive strategy in service of the organization’s mission. Make sure the individual goals are consistent with, aligned to, and enable the organizational strategy or that they are relevant to the organization’s mission. The natural flow is: Mission >> strategy >> objectives >> plans (budgets) >> capabilities >> performance >> behaviors. A great check to see if the behaviors enable better performance to achieve the strategy is to ask: “If this person delivers 1000% above their set goal, what difference will that make to the organization achieving its strategic goals?” If the answer is “nothing” or “not much” then you are either measuring the wrong goal or you may have to look at how that job is designed.
2. Manage Risk – The riskier we make goal setting and performance reviews, the more defensive the activity will become. This risk is where people will maximize their outcomes. If you have a risky environment where people who fail to meet their goals get fired then that will drive a defensive approach to goal setting (e.g., sandbagging or under-promising to then over-deliver). First, risk mitigation is to de-couple goal setting and performance reviews from compensation discussions. Yes, performance and compensation should be aligned. But we all recognize that more goes into compensation than just goal setting. The more tied to compensation, the more likely you are to see ‘gaming the system’ or other manipulation for personal maximization.
3. Fewer, Simpler, More Meaningful Metrics – We have a growing capability to measure a lot of things. That data can become overwhelming. Some of the best people who are measuring performance boil it down to one, two, or three key things. Too many metrics, too many goals and they will invariably come into conflict with one another or get so complicated in tracking that the marginal utility turns negative. Even people who measure a lot of things, over time will tend to simplify things into a primary measure with a few supporting measures. For example, Apple Watch uses 10,000 steps as a proxy for activity. It is not complete or definitive, but it is directionally correct, easy to remember, easy to monitor, and easy to action. There are hundreds of other metrics they could use.
4. Focus on Outcomes, not Activity – Goals should reflect the outcome we are trying to create. I ask clients which they would prefer: the person who accomplishes a task in 2 hours or the person who accomplishes an outcome in 20 hours? Let’s not reward activity. The goal should be SMART, but also reflect the outcome. SMART goals are specific, measurable, are attainable, relevant, and timely. Avoid counting hours or number of times attempted or other work-in-process indicators. What is the result you are looking for?
5. Understand Your Contribution – One of the most important elements in a goal setting conversation is the discussion to understand how well the person setting their goals really understands their context. How well is the company doing? What is their contribution to key processes? Are they part of a cost center or a profit center? What are the key things the organization competes on in the marketplace and what is their contribution to achieving that. Be sure to ask a number of questions to check their level of understanding. If they don’t understand the business, then that could be one of their goals.
6. Motivate, Not Discourage – Goal setting and performance management is an opportunity to build the capabilities of the people in the organization. Only in a few cases does being critical to a person become motivating to them. Those people tend to do well in athletics or the military. Most people work better from encouragement, mentoring, and guidance on what to do. Often simply stating the impact their actions or inactions have had are enough to motivate a desire to improve, then the focus can shift on helping them to improve. That help should start with building on what they are already doing well.
7. Be Aware of Set Backs – Goal setting usually involves doing something more or different or new. If it’s a case of doing something different or differently or new, as the reviewer you need to expect performance to drop initially. This effect – where performance degrades as the person tries new skills or behaviors, but eventually returns to baseline then improves – is called the J-curve. Putting in new systems in warehouses or data processing, we knew it would take 13 weeks of practicing the new way to get back to baseline and within 6 months there would be significant year-over-year improvement. So, build that learning time into the goal setting.
8. Behaviors are More Important than Numbers – When you are trying to adopt new ways of working or achieving higher performance, focus more on the demonstration of new behaviors and less on the actual performance metrics. When Harley-Davidson moved to a new production method in their York plant in 2009, the focus was on the behaviors, not on the metrics. They knew that if they focused on recognizing and acknowledging their team members doing the right things, then the performance metrics would eventually show that improvement. Simon Sinek has a great example about working out and eating healthy – if you look in the mirror every day after working out, you won’t see much progress, and you’d be tempted to say after a few days that it’s not working, even though there is long-term data that exercise and good diets promote health.
9. Vertical Accountability – Goal setting is as much about the person setting the goals as it is about the person they report to. Goal setting for the manager and executives should be aligned throughout the vertical reporting chain. Meaning, as a manager, one of my goals should be that my team members achieve their goals. Getting the boss invested in helping their team members succeed is an important way to gain alignment and support. If a manager has a team where no one meets their goals, chances are good that it’s not entirely the fault of the staff. Know what your boss’s boss’s boss’s priorities are. Even better is to hold the leaders accountable for their teams achieving their goals.
10. Increase the Frequency – Employees entering the workforce today are digital natives. They are used to getting things on-demand (e.g., Amazon, Google, YouTube, etc.). They are feedback intensive. They want to know if they are doing a good job – and they want to succeed. If they are working for you, and you are still reading this, chances are they (and you) did well in school. Digital natives had instant feedback and constant pressure to get an A in school. So, the more you can move goal setting and performance feedback from annual to quarterly to monthly to constant, the more they will benefit from those short conversations where you check in on their progress, ask them what help they want from you, and offer some suggestions. They will love the feedback and strive to achieve their goals and, in doing so, achieve your objectives, and in doing so, help the organization deliver on the strategy and serve their mission.

Exceptional leaders understand that goal setting is not a one-time event; it is an ongoing process that requires commitment, resilience, and adaptability. By setting SMART goals, aligning personal and professional aspirations, developing action plans, tracking progress, and staying motivated, leaders can unlock their potential and achieve extraordinary success.

8 Life Lessons From Martin Luther King, Jr.

It will have been 95 years ago this month that Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta. One of the greatest Americans to have ever lived, King devoted his life to the struggle for civil rights, a struggle that continues to this very day.

In both word and action, he had a profound and immeasurable impact both at home and abroad. Today, as we honor his life and his memory, we note a few ways in which the rest of us can follow the example of this great man with these eight important life lessons.

1. Dare to dream.

It doesn’t matter who you are or how big your dreams are, your dreams are valid. Teaching youth to dream big and work hard is such a powerful lesson. No matter how big or small, let’s continue to teach youth to believe in themselves in order to make those dreams come true.

2. Love others.

Martin Luther King Jr. believed in the power of love. He taught us to love others and not hate because love always wins in the end. He believed that hating people is stooping low and that no one should ever fall prey to hate. Because when you return hate for hate, no one wins.

3. Don’t judge others by their appearance.

Everyone may look different in appearance, but the character of individuals is what matters most. Just because someone looks different from you on the outside doesn’t mean we should treat them differently.

4. Push on and persevere.

MLK believed in his mission. If you are going through challenging moments, don’t quit. Today’s youth must learn that goals can be difficult to reach, but do not give up at the initial indication of hardship. The most promising goals are often the most formidable to strive for.

5. Serve others.

This is one of the greatest lessons from MLK. Martin Luther King Jr. exemplified a life of service. He believed serving others is the epitome of greatness. Youth who learn how to share, be kind, and be selfless can make their lives (and the lives of others) more pleasing.

6. Forgive

Forgiving others can be difficult, but we should never allow hatred to develop in our hearts. Preventing hatred starts by learning to forgive quickly. Learn to talk to children about forgiveness and how it releases pain for themselves more than it does the other person.

7. Stand up for what is right.

His stance on justice was obvious, which meant speaking up in a silent room. If youth see someone being bullied, encourage them to stand up for those who are being bullied and do what is right, even if it goes against the grain.

8. All things are possible.

For Martin Luther King, Jr., “impossible” was not an acceptable word. He dreamed of a future of equality and equity. Whatever your child’s dreams are, they are possible. Work hard, never give up, be kind to others, and follow our purpose. They shall succeed!

Thank you, Martin Luther King Jr, for inspiring, teaching, and guiding this nation. Thank you for the opportunities you’ve given millions and millions of people and the hope you’ve instilled for a brighter future.

Lean Quote: Goals Give Your Life Meaning

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score."   —  Bill Copeland 

Goal setting should not be taken lightly because your journey to success depends on it. Goal setting is a process whereby you decide what you want to achieve and set up a plan to do it.  The very first step of goal setting is to, first, determine what you want at the end of the journey. That is your ultimate destination.  Some people say that goal setting is just a matter of sitting down and deciding what to do.  If you fully intend to achieve your goals, you should perceive goal setting as an extremely powerful process of personal planning.

You should start with one goal and stay focused on this goal at least for 30 days. If after 30 days you feel you're doing well and getting closer to the desired outcome you can start with the second goal. 

The simple rule is: Don't set a lot of goals at the same time. You won't achieve any. The key to goal setting is staying focused. And it is impossible to focus at many goals at the same time.  Start with the most important one.

If there is any doubt in your mind that you can achieve something, you don't give it your all. In fact, you may very well just set it aside. In order to fully achieve anything, you must believe it is possible at a cellular level.

If you believe that you can be successful, that you'll enjoy being successful, then you will be successful.

8 Tried and True Ways to Reach Your Goals

There’s a lot of articles about the importance of goal-setting, however, most of us don’t take the time to lay out clear and measurable goals to work toward. Goal setting will help you stay motivated, determine what’s important to you, eliminate distractions, and build your self-confidence.

When we get busy with work and everyday life, we often put our big dreams and goals on the back burner. Many times that free time doesn’t often come, so it’s important to find the time to work towards and achieve your dreams. These eight tips can help you to work towards achieving what you really want, as they have helped highly successful people for many years.

These practical tips on goal setting can help make it easier to set and reach goals:

1. Specific, realistic goals work best. When it comes to making a change, the people who succeed are those who set realistic, specific goals. And that makes it easier to stick with.
2. It takes time for a change to become an established habit. It will probably take a couple of months before any changes — like getting up half an hour early to exercise — become a routine part of your life. That's because your brain needs time to get used to the idea that this new thing you're doing is part of your regular routine.
3. Repeating a goal makes it stick. Say your goal out loud each morning to remind yourself of what you want and what you're working for. (Writing it down works too.) Every time you remind yourself of your goal, you're training your brain to make it happen.
4. Involve others. It is always good to involve others in the process of setting and achieving goals. Take advice when necessary. And don’t be rigid. There are people out there who are better at this. Their suggestions are always valuable.
5. Make an action plan. So you have set goals, written them down and now you are all set to start working towards achieving them. First step – make an action plan. There could be more than one method to achieve a goal. Which one suits you? Decide on it.
6. Track progress. Extremely important. If you don’t track progress, you don’t get an idea if you are going the right way and if you would ever achieve it in the time frame you had set in your mind. So track your progress everyday. There are various methods and tools to track progress and I’ll discuss them in detail in my next article.
7. Roadblocks don't mean failure. Slip-ups are actually part of the learning process as you retrain your brain into a new way of thinking. It may take a few tries to reach a goal. But that's OK — it's normal to mess up or give up a few times when trying to make a change. So remember that everyone slips up and don't beat yourself up about it. Just remind yourself to get back on track.
8. Persist. Don’t give up. As I mentioned, there could be many paths leading to the same destination. Try out different methods. Learn and improve. Be patient. Be persistent.

Enjoy the journey. Sometimes we are so deeply entrenched in setting and achieving our goals that it can be easy to get overwhelmed and frustrated. We encourage you to take a step back, take a deep breath, and relax. Studies show that enjoying what you do makes you more likely to succeed. When you focus on the process and not the outcome all of the time, you can enjoy the present moment and improve at the same time.

Life continually offers up opportunities that allow for the striving of new goals and bringing talents forth in new ways.