Leadership and team development question of the week; join the discussion Info ThreeBrainSynergy – Monday, August 24, 2009

Participate in this weeks leadership and team development question of the week. The question is:

What makes real teamwork in organizations so difficult to achieve and maintain and so rare to find in today’s workplace?

To post an answer go to the public forum in the basic membership area. 

This week is our monthly free tele-seminar conference call. The subject this week is:

Decision-Making Effectiveness with ThreeBrainSynergy.

The call is this Thursday August 27th at 2:00PM EST. Register now!

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

When I meet business owners to talk about my services and learn where they need help I usually write the word problems on the top of the page under results and then draw a vertical line down the page under problems.

I explain that businesses have two types of problems and on one side of the line I write the word Process and on the other side People.

Business owners and leaders need to make sure that the organization can solve process and people problems effectively in order to succeed.

Here is a set of articles sent to me from Wayne Vanwick of the Acheivement Center that can be more useful to business owners.

Good articles on business process & success.  A must read

Stephen

The Three Brain Synergy conference call to discuss the three cateogies of people also know as the three intelligences or brains is this Thursday July 30th at 2:00 PM EST.

My partner and author Fritz Glaus will take questions about his work and approach to self-knowledge based on the three intelligences or brains. Neuroscience calls these the head, heart and gut brains.

When you understand this and how it applied to yourself it opens up new opportunities for self-development.

Register for the free call here.

Smart entrepreneurs knosw that in order to survive and thrive in particularly difficult times like we are experiencing, it is essential to invest in innovation. Here is a good article that proves that entrepreneurs know this instinctively and are investing their money to push forward on their new ideas and opportunities.

Innovation is alive and well

This is another article to continue my case study on leadership and team development in a small business of about 50 employees.

After the initial workshops on leadership and team development, I met with the business owner to continue the process towards creating an organization that is scalable to meet the business opportunities in the marketplace.

This next phase of the mandate is about implementing a win-win agreement process that commits each manager to achieving certain organizational outcomes by applying good leadership behaviors of participative management that they learned in the leadership workshops.The first meeting I held with the business owner was to establish a win-win agreement between him and I for the mandate itself. This is to assure that we stay on track towards agreed upon objectives and to hold each other accountable through a clearly written document and evaluation process.

It also was to help the business owner fully understand the win-win agreement process so he would know how what is required from him and his managers in terms of time and resources.

The first meeting was so that I could interview him about his concerns and to have him articulate what he wanted out of the mandate and win-win agreement process.

After the interview I drafted an agreement using our template form for this purpose. Since it is a two-way agreement I also drafted the support commitment form for us to discuss and complete at the second meeting. The support commitments from me are what he feels he requires as support for him to achieve his objectives.

Each form includes the key goal that each person is working on related to the negative tendency of his type. This tendency is really what holds us back from fully using our qualities in what we do and in interacting with others.

We always keep the key goal of one’s type as part of the agreement because we never fully overcome our tendencies and they can always surface to make us ineffective. It also forces us to keep working on ourselves and develop the habit of continuous personal improvement of our behavior related to leadership and teamwork.

We had a second meeting where we reviewed the first document of his objectives for the mandate and the performance commitments required by him to achieve what he envisioned. Though some discussion we came to agreement on the leadership behaviors required by him to meet his objectives.

We then discussed the support commitments he would need from me to reach his objectives. These were comprised mainly of holding him accountable through confronting him when he was off track or neglecting certain commitments etc.

I was quite pleased with the commitment of this business owner to this process and to wanting to put forth the effort to modify his own behavior to achieve his objectives. He is confident and willing to be transparent with his team, to commit the time to coach them and to be held accountable.

As part of the agreement we worked out how to track our progress towards the objectives and even discussed rewards and penalties.

The next meeting will be to finalize the support commitment document and discuss how to begin implementing the same agreements with his direct reports. This will enable us to figure out the time required by me to coach him and his managers and thus formulate a budget that makes sense to him.

I will post an update after the next meeting.

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 was the last day of the Yoko Ono Give Peace a Chance exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts.of the. This reminded me of the great song Imagine by John Lennon in which he sings about a different world, one of people living in peace and treating each other with love and respect.

Of course this has not transpired in the world we live in today and this may seem out of our grasp.

Ever since I was quite young and discontent with what I saw happening in the world, I wanted to change things.

I realize now that all I can change is myself and how I treat others. One of the great things about being in business or a leader of any organization, is that we have power. We can use that power in many ways to influence people and how they behave.

This means that can can sculpt the organization of our dreams, just like Lennon inspired us to do with his song about imaging the world a much better place.

Leaders can choose the direction of their organization and can also imagine an organization of people working productively and in harmony. Cooperation and mutual support towards a common goal can become a reality if the boss so desires and builds a team of like minded individuals.

This is the thrust of the new online learning program and system we are developing. It is directed for leaders to develop this mindset in themselves and share it with their management team. This approach has the power to transform a person and an entire organization.

It begins with self-understanding and the desire to improve one’s own personal balance as a leader and team member. With this mindset one also develops a continuous improvement approach to life and work that balances task and relationship. We need both in order to be successful at our endeavors and our relationships.

We will be rolling out this new pogrom in the next few days. Please keep in touch.

Stephen Goldberg

My partner Fritz Glaus and I have been working hard (well not that hard but hard enough) at creating an online program to provide business owners and leaders with a system to gain the freedom to work less, earn more and enjoy life.

I have written about this a lot in the past. After all, who does not strive to have these things in their business and lives. We all would rather have our businesses serve us rather than being a slave to it.

But to achieve that status of freedom requires a way of leading and managing people so that they run the business not you. This cannot happen overnight and thus requires a clear commitment and an understanding of what to do and how to achieve it.

We had already launched a program and website to teach this system but it did not serve our intention and so we have been reconstructing the website.

We are now very close to completion and it will soon be launched. As I get closer to completion I will be able to give a launch date so stay tuned and subscribe to our news feed.

Stephen