I’ve been asked to forward my reply to a question posed on LinkedIn on team building to a few of my friends, so thought I would republish it here.

Building a team is like building a good restaurant team
I often make the analogy that building a successful
business team is similar to opening a restaurant to serve great food. It
needs a capable, stable and motivated brigade in the kitchen as well as
a team of people to serve the food and make the eating experience
memorable.

Ingredients
The ingredients good or bad are often immediately noticeable by
customers. If the team, in both the kitchen and front-of-house areas
can’t work together then either the food or service will suffer and
customers will IMMEDIATELY stay away in droves.

The first task is to have a stable team. Staff turnover is a universal
problem, and not just in the catering sector.

Each new appointment seems
to carry with it a high risk of failure. Let’s explore why this is …

There seems to be three common mistakes that team leaders can make. The
first is failing to communicate the results that are required from the
team. Job descriptions provide an indication of the required results but
success in a job depends upon the boss’s assessment. The team,
therefore, needs to understand what constitutes a success in the boss’
eyes and how such success will be measured.

Gaining a clear understanding of what success looks like can be achieved
by holding a series of meetings with the the team. As such they are
best undertaken as formal 1:1 discussions, as opposed to short
conversations over the coffee machine or at a team meeting.

The types of questions that need to be asked include:

· How has the current situation reached this point?
· What problems have been identified if the situation is not improved?
· What actions the leader expects in the short and medium term?
· What would constitute success in the leaders’ eyes?
· How and when will performance be measured?

The second mistake is failing to communicate the boss’s management
style. This means understanding how the leader likes to be communicated
with and how often? What decisions the leader likes to make personally
and what decisions are clearly delegated to individuals in the team?

Don’t ignore culture
A big mistake a leader can make is to ignore the culture of the business
or not to consciously develop a culture for a new team. To ignore
culture makes introducing change more difficult. In addition the leader
needs to consider that all change will have an affect on other people,
particularly in other areas in the organisation, so prior to making
changes it’s important to consider the consequences both upstream and
downstream.

Then there’s the aspect of training. A leader wanting to build a strong
team needs to ensure that the team can deliver what’s expected. One of
the lessons from Restaurants is that there’s little point in placing
Duck a la Normande on the menu if the kitchen brigade haven’t the
ability to cook it properly and restaurant team don’t know how to serve
it. (Or what it is).

Now, isn’t that a recipe for business success?”

I’ve spent time working with a company where there is some conflict over strategy. Senior managers are arguing over strategy and each side writs off the others as being obnoxious and unreasonable. In reality the each side is making the other angry because people aren’t getting their way.

Right or wrong recipe
Over the past twelve years I’ve dealt with conflict within teams and between teams, conflict with subordinates and the boss so often that I know that the recipe is less a matter of right or wrong ingredients and much more likely to be a clash of styles seasoned with a pinch of insensitivity and a couple of drops of emotion.

The first thing I try to get people to understand is that conflict, in itself, is not always bad. A business where everyone agrees with the management and each other has a natural barrier created for its own potential and growth and possibly a poor culture if employees are afraid of reprisals when making challenges.

Ten keys to dealing with conflict
There are lots of systems to understanding and handling conflict such as the Drama Triangle developed by Dr Stephen Karpman in 1968 but my ten keys which I discussed with the combatants are these:

1. Listen to what’s being said. Be logical and observe body language as well the words
2. How important is this on a scale of 1-10. If it’s unimportant why argue?
3. Make efforts to understand the other persons position
4. Empathise with the other person’s argument and ask what the other person expects to happen and what the results will be for them
5. Avoid emotion
6. Clarify or set boundaries for behaviour and outcomes. This can be done by asking all parties to write down the boundaries and expectations, roles and outcomes.
7. Ask the other party to explore issues and alternatives (Use facts) and use open ended questions, “How would that…” “what would be the effect if…”
8. Don’t attack the person. Attack the issues
9. Say something positive about the person. This has the effect of often defusing emotions and says that you aren’t attacking the other’s character and that you have respect for them
10. Ask if my approach is appropriate and effective and be prepared to change tack if the conflict continues

How do you deal with conflict?

I was asked a question on LinkedIn and this is a brief outline of my answer that I thought those in my network might find interesting

For many people there is a direct relationship with management
capability and high staff turnover. In my opinion, however, there also needs to be other
considerations before one always blames team managers.

Too often, in my experience, blame is placed on “Salary” as a reason why talent leaves when in fact the real reasons are in the company’s power to prevent. A motivating statistic is that when a talented individual
leaves the RISK that further talent will follow increases by 50%.