Over the last fifteen years that i have worked in the training and coaching field I have met many business owners and executives who always had concerns about people performance in their organizations. I see this as good because I don’t think we are ever fully satisfied with ourselves and people when it comes to our business and organizational performance. Being able to openly admit what bothers you to a stranger is not easy, but it is always beneficial to voice your concerns.

One thing i have noticed consistently over the years is that most business owners and executives do not understand what teamwork is. They often mistake people working together as teamwork. In our training workshops we explain the four stages of team development and what it means for people to function at each level. Most employees in organizations I have visited or worked with usually had people functioning at the first level of team development most of the time, which we describe as the dependency level.

To have teams function at a higher more productive level requires team members to learn new skills in collaboration, communication, decision making, problem solving etc. It also requires the business owner to change his/her leadership style to foster team development and less dependency supervision. I mention again the business owner because change has to start at the top or the culture of the firm will not evolve much.

I posted the question, what is the difference between groups of people working together versus a team of people to my leadership groups on Linkedin. Interesting responses have started to come in. Someone posted links to two articles which I think are great, especially the first one.
Here are the links to these articles:

The Top 10 Key Differences Between a Team of Individuals and a Group of Individuals
Team Tactics: The Critical Difference between Groups and Teams

So what does it take to create a dream team starting at the top management level? It starts by understanding the difference between a group and a team followed by the role of the leader in making this happen in his/her organization.

This month we will be holding a tele-seminar, Creating Your Dream Team where we will describe the Three Brain Synergy approach to creating a dream team and the fundamental knowledge that it takes to make this transformation a reality.

You can join the discussion by signing up for the free call now.

Stephen Goldberg

From DDI http://www.ddiworld.com/thoughtleadership/pulseoftheworkforce.asp

I have posted to my Three Brain Synergy blog an audio recording taken from our October telephone seminar on the leader a facilitator.

You can access the recording here.

This weeks question of the week was submitted by someone through a group on leadership on Linkedin.

How does one implement a participative leadership style when she/he is just new in the position, the relationships and knowledge of the team members have not been developed and business needs to keep moving forward?

Last weeks question and answer from know-yourself expert and author Fritz Glaus has been posted on the Three Brain Synery blog.You can post your answers for others to see here by adding a comment.

I have also posted an audio recording of last weeks tele-seminar conference call on Effective Decision Making using the three brain approach. Here is the link.

Answer to last weeks leadership & team development question Info ThreeBrainSynergy – Monday, August 24, 2009

Here is Friz Glaus’ answer to last weeks leadership question along with a video interview with Fritz  sharing his views on the subject. Watch the video on You Tube

Leadership question of the week of August 17th 2009:

What type of person and what style of leadership are required in a leader intent on developing a team of managers and/or vice-presidents reporting directly to him who are self-directed and fully autonomous?

I would like to deal with this question in relation to a specific group of business people rather than to leaders in general. The basic leadership  requirement will be the same, but I would like to focus on the specific business leaders that ThreeBrainSynergy is addressing, namely company owners (Presidents or CEO’s) whose innate style of leadership is that of quick action. They decide and act quickly themselves and they expect quick action from the vice-presidents and other executives who report directly to them. They also expect their direct reports to be able to carry out such action without the need for detailed explanations.  Read more

Strong leadership and team development is more crucial now than ever before for your organization if it is to make it through rough waters and to ride the tides of good fortune.

Leadership that drives high performance in an organization does not just happen but is a decision that comes from understanding what motivates and drives people to perform. To help you remove any ambiguity in your thinking about what makes for great leadership we are offering you to participate in our leadership and team development question of the week.

This weeks question is:

What type of person and what style of leadership are required in a leader intent on developing a team of managers and/or vice-presidents reporting directly to him who are self-directed and fully autonomous?

You can post your answer in the public forum on the Three Brain Synergy website. To access the forum, register for FREE as a Basic Member and then log in to the basic membership area and click on Forum. You will see the question, and you can post your answer right there.

We are offering a prize of our complete Know-Yourself e-learning to the first person to post the correct answer i.e. an answer that agrees with the TBS philosophy. This is a value of $197.00. We will post the answer next Monday on August 24th on the forum.

Participating in this discussion will help you to clarify in your own mind what kind of attitude it takes to be the leader of a high performance organization.

Stephen Goldberg

http://threebrainsynergy.com

I have added the follwing comment to an article on creating a coaching climate. Here is the link to the full article.

http://www.trainingzone.co.uk/topic/strategy/training-managers-be-good-coaches#nodecomment-120432

Breaking down the barriers to a creating a coaching culture

Excellent article by David Minchin and good comments as well.
Transforming an organization’s culture takes time, determination and patience. It really requires the understanding of the benefits of a coaching management style for the business owner or CEO in order for him to fully support and drive the process of change. The owner of CEO holds the highest power of decision making in the firm and is also the role model that sets the tone of behaviour that dictates the style of leadership and teamwork that ensues.

To create a coaching culture people need to want to help and support each other rather than compete and dominate. This can only happen when they learn to understand and accept each other and their differences. Coaching skills alone do not cut it.

Stephen Goldberg
Work less, earn more and enjoy life!
http://threebrainsynergy.com

This post continues my case study of a client with whom I am coaching on implementing a win-win agreement process with the goal of building a high performance management team. The idea is to provide the support to implement what was learned during the Leadership Styles and Team Development workshops that took place recently. Please refer to my previous posts in this category to see the progression of activities that took place up to now.

I met again with the president last week to finalize our win-win agreement together. This included completing his performance commitment form that I had modified after our last meeting. He needed help writing the personal development goal relative to the tendency of his type that was most important to overcome. In his case the tendency was being to dominant and he realized that it is easy for him to take charge and direct people to do things according to his perspective. He realized that this closed the door for his managers to participate more in the decision making process and to become more autonomous.

We also completed our discussion and agreed on the support performance commitments that he required from me to be successful in his commitments to the process. We also identified how we were to measure progress towards his expectations.

In this system we developed a way to measure each commitment based on a rating scale of 1 to 10. This is prepared by each party before a review session and then there is an exchange to discuss each person’s rating and perspective. This is also where both parties need to practice skills such as active listening and coaching, as well as keeping the others person’s motivation and needs relative to their type in mind.

This week I will conduct a performance review using the aforementioned approach and form and then discuss how to set up the win-win  agreements with his direct reports.

Stephen Goldberg

I just completed delivering a six week leadership workshop on Styles of Leadership and Team Development with a new client in the telecom industry. There were six half-day sessions spread over the six weeks.

I met the owner earlier this year to discuss opportunities to improve the people side of business rather than the processes or systems. Most small business owners are caught up in keeping their sales funnel full and on managing the processes to deliver the goods.

This company is small with about 50 employees in total and most of them working out of the home office in Montreal. There is a sales office in Western Canada and in Europe.

The organization is quite flat in structure with only six people in management roles including the president/owner. Most of the managers had never had any formal training in leadership and had been promoted to these positions as the company grew.

I curently use only one approach to leadership development, the Styles of Leadership & Team Development program developed by Fritz Glaus. I do this because it has contributed to producing the best results for my clients. It is part of a complete approach to help the business owner or CEO free himself from the day to day decisions regarding how the company of organization operates. This allow him to act on new opportunities and use his talents to solidify the organization in whatever way he sees best.

It takes a leader or business owner that is at the point of realizing that greatness is about bringing out the best in people and helping them fully understand and use their qualities to the benefit of all. This then required the leader to start by understanding himself and his direct reports.

The Styles of Leadership and Team Development program incorporates the types of people approach that Fritz Glaus has applied to the training workshops. The program also lay the framework for people to be open to change and continuous personal development. They learn that we all have strengths and weaknesses and this is normal and not to be feared.

During each session over the last six weeks I could see the managers opening up a little more and making attempts to apply what they were learning. Before the third session one of the direct reports of one of the managers participating in the workshops came to me with a big smile and said that she could already see some change from the managers, especially the person she reported to.  She said that they were making a distinct attempt to communicate more often and recognize people’s efforts and contributions.

The program integrates the types of people approach to self-knowledge and understanding of others with the principles of participative management and continuous improvement. Each person identified a key restrainer that interfered with fully using their qualities and set a goal to lessen the impact of this restrainer on their performance.

I met with president a week after the last session and he said that he could see the managers making an effort to apply what they learned. He could see them holding more effective meetings and using the problem solving techniques that were taught.

The next phase of the mandate is to establish win-win performance agreements between the managers and the president. The system we developed has the manager, with our help, formulate a win-win performance commitment with his boss along with support commitments from his boss.

I had the first meeting with the president to begin this process and will submit a new post about that soon.

Stephen

Yesterday I read an interview with Seth Godin in Les Affaires , a Quebec based business newspaper in which Godin said that the web has the power to change the world because of the opportunity to communicate and reach a global audience and have it circulated almost instantly around the world. He says that this was never possible before.

I agree with Mr Godin’s statement and I am sure many people do as well. At the same, time is the world really changing as a result of this great new opportunity afforded us? Perhaps it is to a certain degree but there is obviously something much more that needs to happen.

Again this morning I read another article in the business section of the Montreal Gazette about the mess that the global economy is in and that to change things we need to change the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

I agree with this line of thought but the solution proposed in the article again misses the mark. That is because the root cause of the problem is not being addressed with the proposed solution.

The article went on to say that group think is the cause of the problems we face in the economy and the world and the solution is to have more woman in leadership roles. The author states that woman do not necessarily think differently from men, but men think they do and causes men to check their perspectives and think more broadly. This is hogwash to me and again comes from a deep misunderstanding of the true cause of the problem

The real cause of the problem is fear and unconsciousness, which stems from a lack of self-knowledge, self awareness and the conditioned misconception of what makes us happy.

There is a great piece in the fabulous documentary film “Crude Impact” where they comically show how we have been lied to and sold on the concept that more stuff is better and makes us happier. This is just a big lie and one of the biggest illusions in life.

The fact of the matter is that happiness is within us and must only be rediscovered and not recreated on the outside through having more stuff. I say this because when we were very young we were happy as long as we had the basics and one most important ingredient, love.

The real purpose of life is not to build empires and become famous because that again is just more stuff on the outside. It is to experience the happiness and fulfillment of life and to enjoy the journey.

When every human being understands this and can make this their first priority and help others on their journey feel the same, things will REALLY change. The web and technology can help make this happen but it cannot change the mindset of people. This can only come through a process of self discovery .

Leaders of either gender have the power, authority and perhaps the greater self esteem to take the risk to lead the way. But first they need to discover who they really are and use that knowledge and understanding to nurture the same in others.