This is the ultimate aim, right? Is the reason you are a manager to bring out the best in others? What a cool thing to do for a living. In fact, try using this as your tagline when people ask what you do for a living. Instead of saying you’re a middle manager (most of us are in the middle, a terrific place to be, but we all know that saying “I’m a middle manager” tanks any conversation), declare that you bring out the best in others. Talk about a conversation starter! And what a great pull-oriented way of viewing our work.

Saying this is what we do is one thing, but it’s another matter entirely to try doing it—actually bringing … out … the best … in others. Quite a heavy thought, isn’t it? The good news is that if you define and model excellence (step 3), use pull versus push motivation (step 5), and reinforce and reward the nonnegotiables (step 6), you will create a strong foundation for building great teams whose members do their best work together.

Let’s pause a moment to define what I mean by great team. I’ve had managers tell me they loved their teams because their teams gave them no problems. Others look for team members who won’t buck the system. Some indicators of team success value when members stick to themselves and focus on their own jobs versus others. OK. To some degree these are all nice behaviors, but a team is a group of people who can accomplish more than the sum of their individual efforts. This is where “best” in bring out the best in others lives. And even if your employees do not operate as a team, you should help them maximize the strength of their workplace partnerships and interdependencies. How does this happen? Well, it happens when we appreciate nice behaviors but transcend them to add some edgier ones.

I want employees who will not hesitate to challenge one another or me. I want productive conflict because that’s how we grow and learn. I want my team to be a pain in the neck sometimes—business is a contact sport. I want spunk, passion, sharpness, and occasional anger. That’s what a great and energized department looks like to me, and I think you could benefit from that kind of team too.

Before you send me a bunch of angry emails, let me remind you that I like niceness. And there’s a time and place for peace and harmony and dividing and conquering. I want people to enjoy working together and to help one another out, but that’s not the only thing I’m looking for in my team.

As managers, we create the work environment and foster the conditions for the kind of work the team engages in together. Our daily actions, how we structure meetings, how we respond to diversity, our staffing choices, and the questions we ask all communicate the team behaviors we’re seeking. If we embrace and reinforce compliance, we’ll get lots of it. If we show sincere gratitude when people are candid about concerns, we’ll get more candor from everyone on the team. When we promote the productive troublemaker, we send a big message to everyone on the team that it’s OK to express real feelings and beliefs.

Create Connections

Business is a contact sport, and management is a social act. Until the robots take over, we need to get things done through people. What that really means is that our relationships are the conduits for results. We explored this theme relative to your success in step 2, “Work Well With Others.” Think of a complicated telephone switch box with wires running to each home and then to the telephone company. There are wires of different colors, some with stripes; some are hot, some ground the current. Wires everywhere making each conversation happen. If one wire gets kinked, cut, or corroded, every conversation stops. Your department or team is like that box, and making sure you have each relationship wired and maintained is critical to ensuring the right conversations can occur.

Team members who know each other work better together. They care about each other’s successes and are more likely to put up a big stink if things aren’t going well. That’s what we want—we want people to look out for one another and bring potential problems to the fore. Tolerance, trust, respect, collaboration, and even anger, challenge, and confrontation come from knowing. We need to make sure employees get to know one another, even if they are located in different countries or speak different languages. With the communication options we have available today, there’s no reason a team of peers can’t develop deep and productive work relationships.

To create the connection is basic—people need to spend time getting to know one another. I’m not advocating a bunch of sit-in-a-corner-chanting team-building sessions or outdoor ropes classes or off-site golf outings. Those get-togethers are OK, but not necessary. I do like facilitated behavioral-style team sessions—like using the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)—but otherwise recommend that you get to know one another by talking about the business. The business is what binds you together. If people have robust and open conversations about the business during their team meetings and morning huddles, you’ll find that they’ll also have more informal conversations during other times. If you pepper in a few informal team conversations and bring in fruit, granola bars, and vanilla lattes, you’ll find that people begin to connect—the carbs and caffeine help and are fun.

Be careful about the signals you send your team members because our efforts can sometimes cause an unintended reaction. For example, coddling people who have clashes of personality is a well-intended act that ends up hurting relationships. Variety adds spice, and I hope that you have a team filled with people so different they might not want to go bowling together. That said, I’ve seen very dissimilar people enjoy a game of bowling. Business is business, and we don’t have the luxury of working only with those people toward whom we naturally gravitate. In fact, that would be bad for business.

As a manager, you should model productive work relationships with all types of people (step 2) and not tolerate immaturity from others. That’s right, immaturity. When professionals use diverse personalities or clashes in style to justify poor partnership, they’re being immature. We all have a job to do, and we might need to partner with someone distasteful to us—so what? Get over it and do great work!

People rise to our expectations, so expect that all employees will develop and maintain deep work relationships (step 6). Structure your day and week to reinforce and model this goal. Here are a few examples of how to create workplace connections:

• Begin holding morning huddles for five to 10 minutes so everyone can check in. Over time, huddling will strengthen mutual trust and understanding.

• Help individual contributors learn how their work affects upstream and downstream partners and teams. Encourage interdepartmental relationship building.

• If you have a company lunchroom, make it a point to eat there most days, sitting with peers and employees. Create a positive group conversation.

• Talk about the importance of building deep work relationships and begin every team meeting with business-related questions that prompt each person to share something about their experience, opinions, or ideas.

• Hold more group brainstorming sessions.

• Assign some tasks to pairs and trios. Switch up the pairings you assign so employees get to know their co-workers.

• Ask the training department to facilitate a session about behavioral styles. There are many easy and inexpensive assessments you can use for this purpose, like the MBTI, the DiSC Profile, the Social Style Model, or Activity Vector Analysis.

• Increase the likelihood that team members will converse by changing up their assignments, physical locations, meetings, and schedules.

• A team that feels connected by a common goal or mission will relate more deeply. Make sure that your team members know why they’re here and why they’re here together. If your employees do not regularly work together, use departmental and company goals as their shared mission.

Creating relationships takes time, so don’t be cheap when it comes to ensuring your team spends time together. Sure, each individual has a specific job to do, but each person’s success depends on how well individual efforts come together. Great managers are relationship builders because they know that connection forms the foundation that enables best efforts.

Enliven Minds

What’s the purpose for a team? Why is a team structure of any advantage? Why don’t we just have individual contributors who do their own things? The only reason to have a team and to develop a team is to benefit from the members’ abilities to think and work together, strengthen interest and commitment, and thereby make the organization stronger and more successful. That’s it; that’s why we have teams.

As people managers, it’s our job to ensure employees do great work together. Teamwork is a social act, just like management is a social act. The work of teams occurs in conversation—all that teams can do is think, collaborate, decide, and coordinate or plan. And it all starts with good thinking by enlivened minds. I addressed this briefly in step 5, but let’s apply the ideas of creating more pull specifically to helping teams do their best work together in the service of organizational goals (enliven is an intrinsically driven aim).

I can’t count the times that I’ve seen intelligent and hardworking people performing far below their potential. I’d bet you’ve seen this, too. Sometimes it’s a problem of burnout or maybe the person is in the wrong job. Most of the time, however, it’s a management problem. The degree to which our team members’ minds are engaged in their work is a direct reflection of our management effectiveness. In other words, it’s our fault either way. Individuals might get into a funk every now and then—that’s normal. But if we have people on our team who are just going through the motions, we likely have a systemic management challenge.

This—that it’s our fault—is a good thing. It also means that we influence what’s going well and whether team members engage fully. Notice I wrote influence, not determine, because we’re in the world of pull, not push. I shared a few ideas for increasing engagement in step 5, and Tool 7-1 offers a few specific ideas for enlivening team member minds.

Enlivening minds has a lot to do with making the work more fascinating and meaningful. This can be done in any industry or department. Why is your function crucial to the success of the organization? How is it changing? What might new trends offer your department in terms of productivity, efficiency, or service? Ask each team member to tell you the coolest thing they do each day. These questions and others can help your team members fall back in love with their work.

I hate to keep throwing this back on managers, but enlivening minds begins with role modeling. Is your mind alive and engaged? If not, you need to fix that right now because no one wants to get excited about working for an uninspired manager (re-read steps 1 and 2 for some ideas).

Cultivate Productive Irreverence

When we’re irreverent, we show a lack of respect for people or things. Productive irreverence, however, is showing a lack of respect for things, processes, practices, and tasks that ought to change so the team can make progress. I’m not advocating that team members demonstrate a lack of respect for one another, but I am encouraging a lack of respect for projects that no longer make sense. Productive irreverence is needed to ensure that you and your team members are questioning practices and tasks that ought to be questioned. Someone who is productively irreverent is an occasional troublemaker and a person you want on your team—more than one would be even better.

Another aspect of being productively irreverent is knowing when and how to communicate concerns and knowing when to keep concerns to yourself. I love occasional troublemakers, I really do. That said, too much is too much! Productive irreverence is selective. I’ve coached several less-than-selective troublemakers about how to pick their battles for maximum influence and impact.

As the manager, how do you cultivate productive irreverence? Here are two powerful strategies. I bet you can guess the first one—model productive irreverence yourself. Make sure that you challenge the status quo when challenge is warranted and show impatience with continuing to do the wrong things. Managers have told me that their work environment doesn’t tolerate productive irreverence. I wonder why that is? Of the people who say this, a small number are stuck—they work for the top-paying employer, need the work to feed their kids, or work in an environment where compliance matters more than contribution. Honestly, this book is written for people who can cultivate influence and improve the workplace culture—or can work toward that end. And I believe that most managers would improve their reputation, not harm it, by being productively irreverent.

Here’s a bonus: Being productively irreverent is so much fun! It’s fun because breakthroughs can occur when we help our managers, peers, or team members see something in a new way. Breakthroughs are cool. Think about your current list of projects. I bet one or more of those projects ought to be changed or killed. What a relief it would be for the team and business if you crossed irrelevant projects off their lists of worries. And that relates to enlivening the mind as well, because working on a stupid project feels stupid—and draining—and it’s no fun.

Here’s how you become productively irreverent. Ask yourself if there are tasks, projects, or processes that are taking up people’s time and energy but not directly supporting the results you’re being asked to produce. Evaluate everything, even small things like reports, meetings, approvals required, or documentation. In some productive way each day, question one action or task with the appropriate people. Here’s an example of how you might tee-up that conversation:

I call someone who is productively irreverent a prodIR (sounds like “prodder”). Effective prodIRs share their intent first—always something along the lines of making everyone’s work life easier and more productive. ProdIRs are a bit like beauty pageant contestants: They always want to create world peace. Productive irreverence is all about making the work planet a lot better. The power of this effort is that when we improve our workplace, everyone raises their game.

That’s how you become a prodIR—start small and start having well-intended, open, and positive conversations that ask, “Why?” But don’t get upset if people defend the status quo and decide they want to keep things as they are. Do your best job of explaining the potential opportunities for improvement, and keep plugging away (remember, you still need to be selective to some extent).

Never go negative—that’s not productive; it’s just plain irreverent. I had a manager friend who’d occasionally blow a gasket if he didn’t get his way when he brought up things he thought needed to change. Such immaturity hurt his ability to influence peers and managers and got in the way of his career. Eventually, he overcame this derailing factor—and that was great because had he not changed, he would have become more of a troublemaker than the business could tolerate.

The second strategy for cultivating productive irreverence is to ask for it. Seek all kinds of input and show you’re thankful for challenging questions, concerns, and diverse ideas. Call it productive irreverence and ask for it by name when you meet with your team. This will help some members get over the fear of sharing their concerns. Ask for ideas that might seem crazy or impossible. Make it a routine to ask your team members for the tasks on their list that they think aren’t worth the effort. Show gratitude, no matter which tasks they identify. Ask clarifying questions to better understand why the task is of low value. Hire people you know will challenge you. Promote employees who take the initiative to try to improve processes and practices, even when doing so might involve bringing up a sensitive topic (like your pet project). If an employee questions your pet project—great! Really, it’s great because if it’s your pet project, it’s important to you and therefore important to do well.

Use Worksheet 7-1 to help your team members think of prodIR ideas. Email everyone the worksheet ahead of the meeting and then ask subgroups of three to five team members to pool their thoughts and present their best collective ideas to the whole team and you. Be thankful for whatever you get, even if their ideas are a bit safe. If you repeat this process regularly, the responses will get better and better. Team members need to learn how to be productively irreverent.

Reinforce Collaboration

Collaboration is a great way to bring out the best in others. This brand of co-creation can be surprising, electric, and highly innovative. What’s not to love, right? Most managers will say they want collaboration, but few act consistently with those words. When we set goals, are they individual or team goals? When you fill out a performance evaluation, are you rating individual or team performance? What’re the criteria for promotions, pay raises, and bonuses—individual accomplishments or team accomplishments? I’m not suggesting that acknowledging and reinforcing individual excellence isn’t a good thing—you should reinforce it. But it’s important to notice the balance of what you’re reinforcing so you can determine to what degree your actions and words match your intentions.

People collaborate more when they’re given the time, when it’s easy to communicate with peers and team members, when they’ve had the opportunity or practice at working with others, and when they gain a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment from working together. How many of those conditions exist in your work environment? You can help create the place for all those conditions.

I was talking to a team manager for a software company. He’d done a research project that looked at the effectiveness of project teams. His research showed that the teams who collaborated outperformed the teams who didn’t by a longshot. Collaborating teams were several times more productive and successful than their noncollaborating peers. Remember, our goal is to bring out the best in others. This team manager advocates for seating teams together when possible—like in a square of cubicles facing inward with a team meeting table in the middle. This may not be possible or practical in your workplace, but it’s good to look at how easy or difficult it is for teams to communicate. Personally, I like letting the team get involved with how their workplace should be arranged.

When I was at Black & Decker (B&D), I was part of an international cross-functional product development initiative where many of the product development team members never saw each other. That made it difficult to encourage collaboration and effective communication. B&D wanted to improve and shorten the product development life cycle, so it got all the global teams together for a four-day training program. One of the best outcomes of that training initiative was that teams met and were able to build relationships and agree on the best ways to communicate and collaborate. They became more interested in one another and committed to their collective success. B&D was very successful in improving its development process, and its next large new line of power tools—the DeWalt line—was a huge success for the company. Collaboration and communication were key to that success; they will be key to yours, too. Tool 7-2 offers several ways you can reinforce collaboration.

Add these ideas to those offered to enliven minds in Tool 7-1. In particular, I like handing out provocative articles or blog posts to get people talking. Once they get into conversation, team members will transition more naturally into collaborating on specific business issues or opportunities.

This step, “Bring Out the Best in Others,” has focused on the team because that’s where “best” lives. Whether introvert or extrovert, experienced or newer to the job, it’s when engaged employees get together with open, curious minds that their finest efforts emerge and become useful.

Building ACCEL Skills

The management techniques we’ve explored in step 7 will help you build the following ACCEL skills:

• Collaboration: This step will help managers use daily practices that facilitate, enable, and catalyze collaboration.

• Engagement: The four parts of this step—create connections, enliven minds, cultivate productive irreverence, and reinforce collaboration—are also managerial practices that will improve engagement.

• Listening and assessing: For managers to bring out the best in others, they will need to listen well and assess as a regular part of their managerial regimens. As they practice the techniques offered in this chapter, they will spend more time listening and responding based on the meaning they derive from their team members’ contributions.

Your Turn

To bring out the best in others, start by shoring up the practices found in steps 3, 5, and 6. Once you’ve created this foundation for best efforts, try the following:

• Do a quick assessment of the team elements presented in this step: How strong are the relationships among team members (and with you)? Are your people’s minds actively engaged? Do you have an environment of productive irreverence? Are you productively irreverent? Do team members regularly collaborate?

• Based on your assessment, go back to any section in the step that seems to need improvement and try a few of the techniques I recommend. All the techniques produce a common outcome—they facilitate people spending quality time together and creating better business conversations.

• Embrace your role as a catalytic conversationalist and make every meeting and discussion a great one.

The Next Step

Step 7 has offered you ways to tap into your potential and amp up team outcomes by helping ensure that your team’s efforts are focused on the tasks and work that will make the greatest contribution to the organization’s goals. Now you are ready for step 8, where I offer my thoughts on the importance of planning.