TEN
Be a Next Level Team and Get Great Results

At this stage of the journey your team possesses information that used to be almost exclusively in the hands of management. Team members also have a clear vision and a set of operating values. By combining information with clear boundaries and team skills, your team can now draw on its collective knowledge, experience, and motivation to achieve impressive results.

More specifically you and your team members can now make many of the decisions that your supervisor or management previously made. For example, you can handle new team member interviewing and hiring, conduct team member performance evaluations, handle individual performance problems, prepare and monitor budgets, and arrange for equipment purchases. With information and clear boundaries, your team can identify problems or potential problems and initiate plans for resolving them before they become severe.

What you need now is to continually encourage one another as team members so that you can actually reach the Next Level. As a Next Level Team, you will have achieved total team competence. Your team members will feel confident about fully using everyone’s collective talents to achieve great results. 112

EXAMPLES

Clarifying expectations

A company in the pollution control design field initially found it difficult to make the shift to full responsibility The team members vividly recalled their frustration and dissatisfaction as they were learning new skills and did not like the idea of having to deal with performance problems of team members.

Their solution was to make sure that everyone had a clear understanding of the team’s direction and that their expectations of each other were completely understood. As a result, they found that performance problems occurred less frequently than in the past, and the problems were easier to resolve because they were spotted much earlier. Clear communication about direction and expectations allowed everyone to function as a team that worked well together to achieve great results.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

The skills of a next level team

Think about what you’ve learned as your team has moved through this book and toward the Next Level. What are the new skills you have acquired that help you work well as a team?

HOW TO MAINTAIN A HIGH PERFORMANCE NEXT LEVEL TEAM

Once your team has developed into an energized, high performance work team, an important task will be to keep it there. Without constant vigilance, the team may find itself falling back into old behaviors. Anything we do repeatedly sometimes becomes tedious, maybe even boring. So a challenge for the team is to keep it fresh. 113

MEASURE WORK PERFORMANCE

Doing the work is one thing; improving it is quite another. What determines success in our work? What determines good performance? The only real way to find out is to measure it.

Just about anything can be measured: goods produced per minute or hour or day letters written per day, sales volume, calls made to prospective customers, downtime, scrap and waste, cycle time (for example, time from the initial customer order to shipping), changeover time (time to prepare for a different product run), and more. The list of activities involved in work is almost endless, providing a host of opportunities for measurement and improvement.

Next Level Teams excel because they are always finding improved ways of working together to produce great results.

EXAMPLES

Creating useful measures

The maintenance team at a manufacturing plant had been working its way toward Next Level status when team members realized that they had no way of knowing how they were doing. How, they wondered, can you measure maintenance and repair work when it is mostly the one-of-a-kind variety?

The team decided to survey the members of the workforce about what they really wanted and needed in a good maintenance team. They began by surveying the supervisors who usually called them for maintenance work. What they heard from the plant supervisors was 114

• We want you to respond to our need quickly (later defined as fifteen minutes).
• We want you to complete the work within a reasonable time period (later defined as eight hours).
• We don’t want to have to call you back later for the same work (in other words, the quality of the work should be so high that you will not have to redo it).

Having defined the criteria for a good maintenance team, they set out to create a way to measure their performance. They developed a form that would capture the information. Then they found a way to chart the results weekly. Initially, they found that they were able to meet these criteria about 80 percent of the time. They began working on ideas to improve their ability to meet the criteria and within a year were successful 97 percent of the time.

One of their ideas for improvement dealt with the first criterion, responding to maintenance calls within fifteen minutes. The maintenance shop was a noisy area and sometimes they could not hear the phone ringing. So they connected a bright light to the phone that was activated whenever it rang. Through this innovation, they were able to eliminate missed calls.

These great results were brought about by defining and measuring the team’s high performance criteria as defined by their customers.

MEASURE HOW THE TEAM IS FUNCTIONING

You can not only keep your team from deteriorating, but you can, in fact, keep it growing in various ways. One way is for the team to periodically measure how it is functioning as a team. In addition to normal performance measurements that the team uses daily to measure progress against its goals, at least quarterly the team should conduct a team process evaluation. This can be accomplished in several ways, but one of the best is to use a team assessment tool that measures overall team performance. Each team member completes a questionnaire and scores it. Then team members meet to discuss results. These evaluations help expose and pinpoint specific team problems, allowing your team to resolve them before they become flash points. 115

EXAMPLES

The sales team assesses itself

Once we were asked to help two sales teams in a fish-importing business. These teams sold fish to restaurants, groceries, and retail fish markets. The work was intense, as each salesperson was constantly on the phone with customers, attempting to meet daily and monthly goals.

Financially, the teams were successful, and team members generally were motivated by the excitement of their work. As part of our assessment we used a tool called the “Team Effectiveness Profile,” which highlighted what team members thought about their performance.³ The overall result showed one team to be “immature,” which was the lowest of five possible rankings. This ranking was associated with a team that had not begun to develop task and process skills and was very dependent on its appointed leader for direction, decisions, and support. The profile also showed that the team was weakest in the category of “group interpersonal relationships.” 116

When team members met to discuss the results, they talked about how their work and its demanding goals left little time for supporting each other and developing satisfying, productive relationships. Each one said that this was the greatest source of discontent with his or her job.

For the first time, every team member was able to see that each one of them was dissatisfied with the current situation and wanted to change it. With this new information the team members found ways to provide each other more support and build their relationships, and a subsequent survey confirmed that they had made good progress.

EVALUATE DAILY

A simple method for maintaining and improving team performance is to evaluate smaller functions. For example, meetings are notorious for not accomplishing what is intended. To ensure productivity, all team meetings should end with a verbal evaluation by team members. In this evaluation—which usually lasts less than five minutes—each team member states what went well in the meeting and what could be improved. When evaluations are performed repeatedly, team members begin to hone their meeting management skills.

BUILD THE TEAM USING OFF-SITE EXPERIENCES

Another method of keeping your team growing and alive is to take members off-site periodically for a “battery charge.” Whole Foods Market, Inc., a chain of health-oriented grocery stores with an effective team process, directs all of its teams to schedule and hold annual off-site team-building sessions. This means, for example, that the Produce Team at Store X must schedule and design its own team-building session once a year. This demonstrates the company’s commitment to team and team member development. 117

At these sessions, team members learn about team communication, listening skills, conflict resolution, personality differences, personal values, store financial accounting, budgeting, gain-sharing strategies, process improvement, and more.

RECOGNITION

Another way of maintaining energy and team unity is for members to periodically recognize each other for something noteworthy. Recognition is simply a thank-you paid to another member for a valued contribution. This is also a good opportunity to enlist the involvement of your team’s leadership.

Building and maintaining team spirit is vitally important to the long-term health and vitality of your team and its members. Often lackluster performance and behavior in organizations stems from a lack of awareness of the human needs of people at work. People need to be recognized for their good work, and organizations, departments, and teams that pay attention to these needs tend to outperform others by a wide margin.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Measurement

As you think about your work, what do you measure now? What are the key performance indicators that would really tell you how you’re doing? What should you start measuring regularly that you do not now measure? 118

RAISE THE BAR: LOOK FOR NEW OPPORTUNITIES

Your team should continue to raise the bar of performance standards to stay ahead of competitors in other companies. Your team must join senior leadership in looking outside the organization for information about what competitors are doing and what customers need and want, as well as for new ideas that range well beyond the industry in which the company operates.

EXAMPLES

Teams analyze competitors

In the food processing industry, one company’s teams began analyzing competitors to generate new ideas for their own development When teams began presenting information about their competitors’ productivity rates, new machinery, profit-and-loss statements, and other “sensitive” information, company leaders were alarmed. They were truly concerned that their teams had overzealously crossed the border of industrial espionage.

When they inquired about how the teams acquired their information, the teams responded that every bit of information was obtained through public sources. Information about new production lines and productivity was obtained from articles in industry journals, and profit-and-loss information was obtained through stockholder annual reports. One of the teams had purchased a share of stock in each of the competitor companies so that it could obtain this financial information regularly.

When the senior leaders heard this they were relieved, and they were also impressed by the ingenuity of their teams. 119

The secretary develops a new business

A medium-sized food processing and sales company listened to a secretary’s idea for developing a new market for the company’s products. Prior to her suggestion, the company had sold only to wholesalers, who in turn sold to grocery stores. The secretary suggested starting a catalogue business to provide a direct avenue to customers. She was encouraged to pursue the idea, and after one year the catalogue business she was running had grown to over a million dollars in sales, with the promise of growing far more.

Ingenuity knows no bounds.

UNKNOWN

BEING A NEXT LEVEL TEAM WITH A FUTURE

Throughout this book, we have worked to help your team clarify where it is going and how it is going to get there. We have covered a number of topics relevant to team development designed to help your work group become a highly effective Next Level Team.

Your team is moving forward during one of the most significant transition periods of the postindustrial business age. Regardless of any bumps in the road you may encounter, understand that you are breaking new ground in how organizations work. You and your leaders are to be commended for your foresight and persistence in moving your organization to a new level of functioning and, ultimately, a new level of performance. Your team is now in a position to contribute to the business in extraordinary ways. 120

Your team is also in a position to generate self-development opportunities so that growth becomes a way of life. This is the time to broaden your horizons and think about new areas that would add value to your team’s work and its operation. Look into the future and see what new challenges and opportunities await your team.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

Prepare for a great future

Your team is now a Next Level Team. What can you do now to prepare for your team’s future and make use of these new skills that you have mastered?

When a team outgrows individual performance
and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.

JOE PATERNO