Teams: 8 things that can go wrong.
Nº 2. Great meetings, but no action, guilt and blame.
Sometimes meetings can be very different from the scenarios we looked at last time. You may find yourself in a fast, participative meeting full of ideas and really great fun. The group covers a range of issues and concrete decisions and action steps are agreed.
But, nothing happens. No one delivers.
At the next meeting, the meeting leader and those team members who actually did something succomb to temptation. The get angry, start blaming and give out "punishments". The idea being that this tough approach will produce results next time.
In my experience, this is a "quick fix" that can give short term results, but has a negative effect long term teamworking and on medium and longer term performance.
Individuals think twice before taking on responsibility, before offering ideas, before committing to group success. Truth and transparency are locked away; less risk to the individual of blame and public recrimination.
As with so many things, a little preparation and pre-work at the beginning can produce great results and avoid the avoidable.
So, here is a 5 point discussion process to help a team to set its objectives and generate the motivation to achieve them. This means discussion and not just Question and Answer.
- What are the critical success factors for this organisation today?
- Where can our team best contribute to achieving them? What are the priorities for the team?
- What can each team member best contribute to achieving the team objectives?
- If each of us meets our objetives, will our team have made a significant contribution to the success of the organisation?
- If each of us meets our objectives, will our team have made a significant contribution to the organisation?
Each of the steps requires discussion, making notes, summaries and at the end explicit agreement and commitment by whole team.
The additional steps to take are:
- make sure action decided upon has a name attached to it
- check that the understands and agrees to the action
- review the progress of all actions at next meeting
- helpfully discover what hasn't been done and the factual reasons why. Avoid blame and stop others from blaming. Find out how others can help
- look for and celebrate/congratulate achievements.
Adhere to these simple guidelines and you can prevent a good team from degenerating into a friendly, unstructured group that is not going very far; and heading for trouble in the long run. Prevention is better than cure.
We will look at the remaining 6 problems in future newsletters. The information and advice is focused on team working, but is also of much wider application in our day-to-day lives.
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