Team
29/01/10 22:43
It has been some time without talking to you.
The struggle to open our office in Johannesburg has been far greater then expected, as it usually is. You know, they say that if we knew in advance how much will it really cost our next initiative in terms of personal effort and sacrifice, nobody would ever start up anything! This new location opening has totally absorbed my last weeks.
As part of this tasks, we have discussed the need to start giving shape to an exceptional team from the very beginning.
And the reason is that whether on a project, an entrepreneurship and even in daily work to have a good team is not only important but fundamental. It can be a temporary team or a permanent one; an external, internal or mixed one, whatever it is nothing will have more impact than the quality of the human team we work with.
Tools, methodologies, budgets, or any other factor can fail but if we count on the right team we will able to face any challenge.
Conversely, if everything is in place but we do not have the right team, all will be in vain.
How de we outline a good team? What are the team characteristics needed to make things work? How will we face the growth of our team and the creation of a new company branch?
Evidently, team specific abilities differ from one case to another and, ultimately, are irrelevant (by saying this maybe I should prepare myself for flame mail flooding my inbox).
However, there are certain personal characteristics which properly perceived can define if a candidate is capable to adapt him/herself to each situacion and accomplish performance of excellence. In my experience, following recruitment policies successfully applied at Navix, these attributes or conditions are the following:
1. Results orientation.
We move ourselves within a world based on objectives. We develop relationships with our customers because we help them to achieve their objectives. We recruit associates looking for help to attain our own objectives, and we do our best to help them accomplish their personal objectives.
Everything than happens between the starting point and goal completion is secondary, what’s left is the achievement.
I am not saying that processes, methodologies, or techniques are irrelevant, all I say is that they are secondary. If all practices are used by the book, all methodologies suggested by the experts are followed but the goal is not achieved, everything has been just showing off.
If you focus on HOW and not on WHAT, the most probable is that —after some time spent diving into HOW— you’ll find yourself forgetting WHY you do what you are doing. In my opinion this phenomenon —forgetting the objective, which is THE important thing— happens not only at professional level but is a real problem affecting big companies (there are some surveys reporting interviews to blue ship companies’ employees on what is their objective or niche, not that of the company but that of their business area, and the collected answers were most of the time some “do not blame on me” gestures).
Frequently this affects us in a personal way and we forget why or who we work for. Over and over again is a whole challenge to have clear what is my objetive or our objective as a working team.
Today’s world changes at an amazingly fast pace, warning us to stop for a while just to reshape and update our objectives. But once defined, we have two alternatives: we attain them or we reach them.
Is this the way to think of your professional life? Do you have clear what you are after? If is that so, you are a good candidate to work with us.
2. Commitment with excellence.
Some time ago, me and a colleague personally interviewed a candidate. He was a young man with an excellent academical background who already had two job experiences. He moved from his first job to the second one in search of better pay but in the second job he found himself stuck because the project he was working at —which was the foremost in the company— was experiencing serious problems, even jeopardizing the company’s survival.
Part of those problems were originated in the use of a tool which did not fit with the job requirements. Right after the candidate told us this and without previous coordination with my colleague, we followed the same reasoning. He asked the candidate: “Then what did you do to overcome the situation?” and his answer was that being himself just an assistant within the team, what was going on was not his responsibility. Both of us interchanged “O man!” glimpses and I asked: “How did you feel of being involved in such a situation?”
Again, his answer disappointed us both: “for me it’s the same, not being myself the boss I had no responsibility whatsoever in what was about to happen”.
Just like you’re thinking (being yourself a reader of this blog), this person was not hired.
The achievement of objectives requires effort, dedication, and commitment. You have to give the best out of yourself in order to get them. Nobody obtains anything worthwhile if not entirely devoted to the goal. If achievements were an easy thing barely demanding to comply with job description, everyone would be the best one (or nobody would be worst), everybody would win their bids, and all purveyors would share a small fraction of all contracts.
That world doesn’t exist. Excellence, achievement is attained only when the whole team pays all their best attention whether to big questions or to each tiny detail, making that even most technical and restricted jobs are passed OK at the first attempt. Not because someone is demanding it but because that is the way you understand how things are to be accomplished.
That doesn’t mean that all within a team share same level of accountability. But you have a commitment to excellence, it is your duty at least to explain your point of view related to situations or performances that threatens the project’s success or weaken team achievement, because what happens to your team is what happens to you.
These takes us to the following point.
3. Leadership.
If you think that whitin an organization it is enough with only one leader at the top, well forget it. If, besides this, you think that leadership is requested only at certain levels, also forget it. Leaders are necessary at each and every position within the organization.
Let’s start by saying that a leader is not the one who commands. That one is the boss, which is not the same thing, although chances are that a boss can also be a leader.
The most simple definition that comes to my mind for the word leader is: the one who goes ahead pointing to a path. It is not the one who pushes from rearguard nor the one who is encouranging you at your side or whipping at your back.
Whatever your capacity or hierarchy is, there will be a moment when nobody will know where to go from there or what to do next, except you.
If you are not a leader, you’ll justify yourself claiming: “it isn’t my responsibility”, “I am not paid for that”, “what if I am wrong?”, “I don’t think they will hear me”, “it's got to be something I am not aware of”.
If you are a leader, you’ll come up to the front and will propose: “let’s do this…” Along with that you’ll do the job to demonstrate that your proposal makes sense and will assume with no hesitation all the efforts or additional taks that this demands.
Your attitude will show the way, you will start it, we will follow you.
You don’t need to be appointed the President of a company to be a leader. Whatever your position and working environment, it’s expected that you perform as a leader and as a leader you will be open to your working mates leadership. By performing leadership you will grow up and will be able to take ever growing responsibilities.
Sure, it won’t be a rose garden. There will be discussions, harsh discussions sometimes, anger. But when leaders discuss they make it to look for solutions. The fact of being leaders does not make them forget of their commitment to excellence, nor the final objectives of their jobs. That is how they will come to the best decision, one which once established will be deployed no matter what.
If you are part of a team with these characteristics, that is to say, an upright person with values and principles to which you abide by… you are a leader.
Then you already know it.
If you fit with this profile and are interested to attain amazing achievements with new ways to apply and make use of technology, get in contact with us.
We will be happy to meet the next Steven Jobs or a new Peter Drucker.
The struggle to open our office in Johannesburg has been far greater then expected, as it usually is. You know, they say that if we knew in advance how much will it really cost our next initiative in terms of personal effort and sacrifice, nobody would ever start up anything! This new location opening has totally absorbed my last weeks.
As part of this tasks, we have discussed the need to start giving shape to an exceptional team from the very beginning.
And the reason is that whether on a project, an entrepreneurship and even in daily work to have a good team is not only important but fundamental. It can be a temporary team or a permanent one; an external, internal or mixed one, whatever it is nothing will have more impact than the quality of the human team we work with.
Tools, methodologies, budgets, or any other factor can fail but if we count on the right team we will able to face any challenge.
Conversely, if everything is in place but we do not have the right team, all will be in vain.
How de we outline a good team? What are the team characteristics needed to make things work? How will we face the growth of our team and the creation of a new company branch?
Evidently, team specific abilities differ from one case to another and, ultimately, are irrelevant (by saying this maybe I should prepare myself for flame mail flooding my inbox).
However, there are certain personal characteristics which properly perceived can define if a candidate is capable to adapt him/herself to each situacion and accomplish performance of excellence. In my experience, following recruitment policies successfully applied at Navix, these attributes or conditions are the following:
1. Results orientation.
We move ourselves within a world based on objectives. We develop relationships with our customers because we help them to achieve their objectives. We recruit associates looking for help to attain our own objectives, and we do our best to help them accomplish their personal objectives.
Everything than happens between the starting point and goal completion is secondary, what’s left is the achievement.
I am not saying that processes, methodologies, or techniques are irrelevant, all I say is that they are secondary. If all practices are used by the book, all methodologies suggested by the experts are followed but the goal is not achieved, everything has been just showing off.
If you focus on HOW and not on WHAT, the most probable is that —after some time spent diving into HOW— you’ll find yourself forgetting WHY you do what you are doing. In my opinion this phenomenon —forgetting the objective, which is THE important thing— happens not only at professional level but is a real problem affecting big companies (there are some surveys reporting interviews to blue ship companies’ employees on what is their objective or niche, not that of the company but that of their business area, and the collected answers were most of the time some “do not blame on me” gestures).
Frequently this affects us in a personal way and we forget why or who we work for. Over and over again is a whole challenge to have clear what is my objetive or our objective as a working team.
Today’s world changes at an amazingly fast pace, warning us to stop for a while just to reshape and update our objectives. But once defined, we have two alternatives: we attain them or we reach them.
Is this the way to think of your professional life? Do you have clear what you are after? If is that so, you are a good candidate to work with us.
2. Commitment with excellence.
Some time ago, me and a colleague personally interviewed a candidate. He was a young man with an excellent academical background who already had two job experiences. He moved from his first job to the second one in search of better pay but in the second job he found himself stuck because the project he was working at —which was the foremost in the company— was experiencing serious problems, even jeopardizing the company’s survival.
Again, his answer disappointed us both: “for me it’s the same, not being myself the boss I had no responsibility whatsoever in what was about to happen”.
Just like you’re thinking (being yourself a reader of this blog), this person was not hired.
The achievement of objectives requires effort, dedication, and commitment. You have to give the best out of yourself in order to get them. Nobody obtains anything worthwhile if not entirely devoted to the goal. If achievements were an easy thing barely demanding to comply with job description, everyone would be the best one (or nobody would be worst), everybody would win their bids, and all purveyors would share a small fraction of all contracts.
That world doesn’t exist. Excellence, achievement is attained only when the whole team pays all their best attention whether to big questions or to each tiny detail, making that even most technical and restricted jobs are passed OK at the first attempt. Not because someone is demanding it but because that is the way you understand how things are to be accomplished.
That doesn’t mean that all within a team share same level of accountability. But you have a commitment to excellence, it is your duty at least to explain your point of view related to situations or performances that threatens the project’s success or weaken team achievement, because what happens to your team is what happens to you.
These takes us to the following point.
3. Leadership.
If you think that whitin an organization it is enough with only one leader at the top, well forget it. If, besides this, you think that leadership is requested only at certain levels, also forget it. Leaders are necessary at each and every position within the organization.
Let’s start by saying that a leader is not the one who commands. That one is the boss, which is not the same thing, although chances are that a boss can also be a leader.
The most simple definition that comes to my mind for the word leader is: the one who goes ahead pointing to a path. It is not the one who pushes from rearguard nor the one who is encouranging you at your side or whipping at your back.
Whatever your capacity or hierarchy is, there will be a moment when nobody will know where to go from there or what to do next, except you.
If you are not a leader, you’ll justify yourself claiming: “it isn’t my responsibility”, “I am not paid for that”, “what if I am wrong?”, “I don’t think they will hear me”, “it's got to be something I am not aware of”.
If you are a leader, you’ll come up to the front and will propose: “let’s do this…” Along with that you’ll do the job to demonstrate that your proposal makes sense and will assume with no hesitation all the efforts or additional taks that this demands.
Your attitude will show the way, you will start it, we will follow you.
You don’t need to be appointed the President of a company to be a leader. Whatever your position and working environment, it’s expected that you perform as a leader and as a leader you will be open to your working mates leadership. By performing leadership you will grow up and will be able to take ever growing responsibilities.
Sure, it won’t be a rose garden. There will be discussions, harsh discussions sometimes, anger. But when leaders discuss they make it to look for solutions. The fact of being leaders does not make them forget of their commitment to excellence, nor the final objectives of their jobs. That is how they will come to the best decision, one which once established will be deployed no matter what.
If you are part of a team with these characteristics, that is to say, an upright person with values and principles to which you abide by… you are a leader.
Then you already know it.
If you fit with this profile and are interested to attain amazing achievements with new ways to apply and make use of technology, get in contact with us.
We will be happy to meet the next Steven Jobs or a new Peter Drucker.
0 Comments
Relevant and Feasible
07/01/10 17:29
When you are defining KPIs or measurable indicators for a business unit, process or task, two basic and fundamental attributes are to be taken into account. Without them our efforts make no sense:
Relevance: The indicator must be a reflection of process performance in one of its aspects (duh!). An indicator’s availability is not enough to consider it relevant. In fact, to focus on the wrong indicator can carry disastrous consequences. Although it may sound as a contradiction, in many organizations these indicators are measured only because they can be measured, not because they are relevant to the strategy underway.
Feasibility: The indicator must be obtainable whether directly (metric) or indirectly (calculation or algorithm). This is, so to speak, the opposite of previous requirement, and is really conditioned to it.
Amazingly, this last point is usually ignored. Managers, supervisors and leaders start providing a long list of the things they “would like” to measure, frequently in generic terms such as “productivity”, “performance”, “costs”, without a clear and documented definition. If you are not correctly measuring the process’ result at each stage you will hardly be able to obtain relevant indicators associated to management.
Notwithstanding above, this “dreams” are not to be dropped. They can be of use to establish gaps to be filled by identifying the adequate measuring points, the right way. Furthermore, they can simply reflect how far we are in relation to our business or area’s strategic objectives.
If we can figure out a gap within KPIs, that is to say, move forward from wishful expectations to the real ability to measure, we encounter an important improvement opportunity within organizations and their departments.
To fill a gap like this can go from increasing information recollection out of existing systems, through the implementation of complete operational systems. If by measuring these KPIs significant increases are obtained (let’s recall that everything that gets measured improves), we’ll have a pretty business case in our hands.In fact, better profitability can be expected from a system oriented to measure productive or management processes than from a system merely oriented to “automate” functions, even though this automation yields measurements in which case we go back to the beginning: we have many indicators, but… are they relevant?
How KPIs are defined in your organization? When was the last time you revised them? Are currently defined KPIs still relevant? Have you found yourself in the need to gauge something but could’nt make it?
Relevance: The indicator must be a reflection of process performance in one of its aspects (duh!). An indicator’s availability is not enough to consider it relevant. In fact, to focus on the wrong indicator can carry disastrous consequences. Although it may sound as a contradiction, in many organizations these indicators are measured only because they can be measured, not because they are relevant to the strategy underway.
Feasibility: The indicator must be obtainable whether directly (metric) or indirectly (calculation or algorithm). This is, so to speak, the opposite of previous requirement, and is really conditioned to it.
Notwithstanding above, this “dreams” are not to be dropped. They can be of use to establish gaps to be filled by identifying the adequate measuring points, the right way. Furthermore, they can simply reflect how far we are in relation to our business or area’s strategic objectives.
If we can figure out a gap within KPIs, that is to say, move forward from wishful expectations to the real ability to measure, we encounter an important improvement opportunity within organizations and their departments.
To fill a gap like this can go from increasing information recollection out of existing systems, through the implementation of complete operational systems. If by measuring these KPIs significant increases are obtained (let’s recall that everything that gets measured improves), we’ll have a pretty business case in our hands.In fact, better profitability can be expected from a system oriented to measure productive or management processes than from a system merely oriented to “automate” functions, even though this automation yields measurements in which case we go back to the beginning: we have many indicators, but… are they relevant?
How KPIs are defined in your organization? When was the last time you revised them? Are currently defined KPIs still relevant? Have you found yourself in the need to gauge something but could’nt make it?