Step 1 Make sure they understand that they belong

When people join a team they are usually both optimistic about the new challenge and at the same they’re wondering whether they’ll fit in. You need to remove this question mark. When I moved to ABB in Switzerland, it was a big adventure for me: new industry (gas turbines), new company, new country, new language (Swiss-German). On my first day, my new boss assigned me to one of his long-time engineers to show me the ropes, both inside and outside work. This had a powerful effect, as well as ensuring that I could be quickly productive. Clients with whom I’ve shared the story, report to me that positive effects of helping their people to settle quickly.

Once they’re settled, it is also important to give praise and recognition, when due and to ensure that they are included in any social events you or your team organise.

Steps 2 and 3 Tell them where you’re going and help them understand how they can contribute to this

One of the main differences between a team and a working group is that in the latter each person is basically working on their own and the output is the sum of individual efforts. In a well-functioning team, you can achieve more than just the individual outputs through a high degree of cooperation. One way to do this is to make sure that they understand where you are taking your research, what the long-term focus is and how their work fits into this picture.

Having such a common goal provides a focus for all activities in the team. When your people see that their work is not only serving their own interest, but is also contributing to something bigger, this helps to provide their work with more meaning, which also helps their motivation and energy levels.

Step 4 Ensure they have the skills required to contribute

There’s not much worse than being asked to do something and you have no clue how to tackle it. There’s not much better than being given a something you don’t know how to do and being given the appropriate coaching, tips or training to complete the task. I spent a year in a compressor design team to help me better understand how research could contribute to the product. On my first day I was asked to solve a technical issue about which I had no clue. Upon noticing my mild panic, Wolfgang stepped in and told me he’d show me how to work out the solution after the meeting.

Step 5 Give and receive regular feedback

It’s important regularly to give your staff feedback on their performance – this is one of the key contributing factors to high energy levels at work.  I’ve written a blog article on how to give feedback.

If you take this one step further and establish a feedback culture in your team, the multiplicative effect is powerful as the Johari window shows. Everything about a person can be assigned to one of the four panes; a team’s effectiveness can be estimated by looking at the size of the Public pane. When someone receives feedback, their blind spot pane reduces and their public increases in size. This means that more of their qualities are known and can be accessed by the full team.  In addition, any of their annoying behaviours have been addressed before they start to generate conflict.

A feedback culture usually has a positive impact on trust levels in the team. When trust rises, then people are more willing to move something from private to public to help the team further. For example, many years ago, my boss’ boss was told to run a summer school on fluid mechanics. This was new land to him and he asked for input. I told him about my experiences growing up in my parents’ international summer school in Dublin (which had been in my private pane) and got the task to set up a series of CFD summer schools close to Oxford.

I’d like to hear about how many of these you have in place and what their impact is. I’d like even more to hear about other ways you have to get your team moving.

Tip #1 There is an “I” in Leader

Clarity is a hallmark of good leadership communication. One source of confusion is that many people use the second or third person when they intend to talk about themselves, their own ideas and standpoints. “You want to …”, when they mean “I want …”. This can be confusing. Simply a shift to the first person, “I would like you …” adds a lot of power and clarity to our speech.

Tip #2 Keep it Simple

It’s almost a given that an R&D team is international and that few people in the team are using their native language in day-to-day work. Since the team’s language is often “poor English” (as Goran Lindahl used to call ABB’s official language), it is helpful to keep things simple when communicating. Three concrete ways to do this are:

• Formulate your sentences positively. Tell people what you want, rather than what you don’t. This removes guesswork on their part.
• In her wonderful little book Making Contact, Virginia Satir demonstrates the danger of “but”: It tends to erase what precedes it. “I agree with you completely, but I think we also need to …”. The agreement gets lost. Simply replace the “but” by an “and” and notice what happens.
• If you use slang and other colourful language to add spice to a conversation, you run the risk that people miss the message. It just gets lost in translation.

Tip #3 Ask open questions

When I support leaders to develop coaching skills for use with their people, I notice that the majority tend to use closed questions (which can be simply answered with a yes or no) in the practice conversation. Such questions can be quickly answered with a low level of engagement on the part of the conversation partner. They are useful when you want to check a specific piece of information, e.g. “Did you run the experiment at 28.7°C?”, or to test a particular idea or hypothesis you have.

When you ask open questions (“when …?”, “what …?”, “how …?”, “who …?”), you engage your discussion partner and activate their thinking. You draw out information and help them and yourself to gain insight. You know that you’ve asked a particularly useful question when the other person needs to pause for thought. It’s usually a sign that learning is taking place.

Tip #4 Why not why

Many clients are not too happy at first when I suggest that they reduce heavily their use of the question “why?” It has the reputation as being the fundamental point in research. I reframe that as saying the fundamental point is to understand.

The challenge when dealing with people and their work, is that the “why” question can automatically generate a defensive reaction, which is unhelpful. “Why doesn’t the program work?” will usually not quickly lead to a solution of the problem. (A typical response is, “I don’t know, it just doesn’t give any answers.”) Instead, by asking some well-chosen open questions, you can often quickly pinpoint the source of the problem. (A better starting point to might be, “What error message does the software give?”)

Tip #5 Listen

Especially when you are busy, it is tempting to interrupt and answer – as I have learned many times to my own cost. Far better is to wait until the other person is finished and then reply. This allows you to listen on different levels, which can provide valuable insights. Three typical levels of listening are:

• Cognitive – the factual information the person is delivering. This is the strongest level in research conversations.
• Emotional – this can provide clues about how important the topic is, or what is colouring the conversation.
• Meta-level – here we look down on the conversation in order to recognize any patterns emerging. This can be particularly helpful when a conversation is unproductive as we can then switch from the topic of conversation, to a conversation about the pattern that the conversation is taking (e.g. “we seem to be going around in circles here”).

Tip #6 Paraphrase and summarise

How many meetings have you attended in which people seem to repeat their position several times? One way to short-circuit this, if you’re leading the meeting, is to summarise the conversation from time to time. This helps people to focus and also lets people know that their contribution has been heard, which reduces the likelihood that they’ll repeat it. When this is done well, it also helps the meeting participants to reach a consensus more quickly.

Tip #7 Use pictures and metaphors

Although slang is not so helpful (see Tip #1), a message without colour and imagery would be dry as two-day-old bread. Well-chosen pictures and metaphors not only brighten up a conversation, they also help people to remember your ideas.

This list isn’t exhaustive – as the number of books on communication attests. What tips have you found most useful to help your communication?

(Photo: RichVintage)

Some leaders unintentionally take a leaf from Lenin’s playbook (“trust is good, control is better”) and control every single step their people take. While this strategy has its place in an early phase of development, it is counterproductive with good and experienced people. With them you need to agree the goal and trust them to know how to get there. The delegate strategy in this chart (pdf) outlines one way to do this.

Mistake #7 One size fits all

Sometimes we find a good way to help someone develop and fall into the trap of thinking that the next person will learn in the same way. Since our people have different strengths, levels of experience and personalities, we need to tailor our approaches accordingly.

Mistake #8 Keep your thoughts to yourself

In the beginning, development focuses on helping people to acquire technical skills and think for themselves. As staff mature, it’s important to share with them how you arrive at your decisions, how you read certain situations in the lab or the department. This helps them to learn how they could handle such situations themselves during their career.

Mistake #9 Give people all the room available

Some leaders don’t like boundaries themselves, so they give their people complete free rein, whether or not that’s what fits their working style. However, creativity and development thrives on well-chosen and enforced boundaries. Therefore it’s important to set some limits.

Mistake #10 Focus on the next deliverable

Early on, people need to learn how to take small steps. Most of them find it hard to think longer term, to think strategically. You can help them by gradually increasing their planning horizon. If you’re preparing someone so that they can lead their own team, as a rule of thumb they need to be able to think at least one-and-a-half projects into the future.Which of these mistakes do you know and how have you learned to avoid it? Which other mistakes are – in your experience – candidates for the Top Ten?

To figure out how to delegate a task to someone, you need to answer two questions: How willing are they do complete the task? What’s their skill level for the task?

Depending on how you answer those questions, you need to select an appropriate strategy, as summarized in the figure below  (you can download a pdf of this figure here).

People can be low on willingness for a number of reasons. For example, your leadership style may rub them up the wrong way. A remedy for this is to think about how they need to hear about the task, not how you’d like to tell them.

Another reason is that they may find the task dull or boring. You can usually tackle this if you give them some context as to why this needs to be done. When I used to run R&D software projects, the team always kept the documentation up-to-date. This was because I framed this task as one that saved us lots of work down the road, rather than a drudge that nobody likes doing. Once people understood this (and experienced the benefit when they had to fix a bug), it was easy to keep the documentation current. A related approach involves establishing a healthy norm in the team to make sure that people each complete their fair share of the necessary but not so glamorous tasks – for the good of the team. Finally, the reasons for lack of willingness may lie outside work.  In this case, depending on your relationship with the person, you might be able to support them so that they can begin to concentrate on work again.

When skill levels are low, you can structure how you delegate the task so that they can learn what they need to complete it. You can either show them yourself or get someone else from your team to show them. Here it’s important to foster an environment in which people are allowed to make mistakes, as long as they learn from them. When skill levels are high, you need to focus on agreeing the goal for the task; leave the “how” up to them – otherwise they may feel micro-managed.

Let’s look at attitude first: What’s the purpose in giving someone feedback? To let off steam? Then, I button my lips. To put someone down? Button lips. To appear knowing? Lips. If I am interested in improving the working relationship,alerting someone to a potential blind spot, and improving team productivity, I can give feedback. If the time is right.

Now timing: Have we enough time for a conversation? Feedback is not done while passing by on the corridor. Is the other person open to feedback? Perhaps, they’re having a bad day and are not in the mood. If they don’t say yes, I let them live without my observation for a little bit longer.

So far, so easy. Now comes the tricky bit: technique.  how I give feedback in three steps:

1. I describe what I observed,
2. its effect on me, and
3. what I expect in the future.

The first step is a challenge, because most people state their interpretation or judgement of what happened, not thebehaviour itself. The statement needs to be clear (anything else will trigger defensiveness) and about soemthing in the recent past (or else the person may have forgotten the incident).

For example, “your presentation was terrible” is not feedback, it’s a put-down. “When you present your conclusions before you show the supporting data, I feel confused and frustrated. In future, I expect you to show the data first” is feedback.

“You ran that meeting brilliantly” is praise, not feedback. While the receiver basks in the glow of praise for a while, they may be none the wiser what it is they did that helped them to run the meeting so well. “The way you summarised the discussion at regular intervals in yesterday’s meeting helped me follow the complicated discussion more easily and to reach a decision. I’ve heard similar comments from other participants. Please keep it up!” That’s feedback.

In the first case, the recipient knows what they need to consider improving; in the second, they know where one of their skills lies. There is no substitute for practice when it comes to feedback.

(Photo: Bartco)

The second path to curiosity for leadership is to view things from another person’s perspective. It’s a common pitfall not to do this. In a recent coaching conversation, a manger was telling me about how one of their direct reports had turned hostile and rude. They couldn’t understand why. As we talked further, it became clear that this hostility had surfaced after a meeting in which the manager had helped their direct report reshape their project (and in the process handover a good chunk of the responsibility to another colleague). All very logical. Once they began to think about how this looked from the report’s perspective, they realized what had gone wrong and how they could raise this topic and get the relationship back on track.

Good questions to ask yourself include: What do they think about this? How do they feel about it? How does it impact them or others? Many leaders find it difficult to answer these questions. They protest that they have no clue what their people are thinking or feeling. Perhaps not. However, that’s an invitation to start learning and take the time to get to know their people. Some people protest that they don’t have time for this. Yet they never stop to count the cost in time, results and frayed nerves to deal with what results from not having invested in these relationships.

A word to the wise: only make this investment in your leadership, if you are genuinely interested in your people.

Photo: Sarahnaut / flickr

Managers have answers; leaders ask questions.

Lawyers only ask a question (in court) when they already know the answer; leaders ask questions to which they don’t have the answer. They are curious. This curiosity pays dividends.

By asking questions, leaders engage their followers and tap into the knowledge and experience of their team. They have let go of the need to have the answer. Instead, they focus on being able to recognize the answer when they hear it. Certain types of questions hinder this curiosity, others support it.

Let’s start by looking at a couple of types of questions that hinder. The first type is closed or yes/no questions. They suffer from two main drawbacks. First, they require no thought or reflection to answer. Second, the presuppose the answer and strait jacket the search for answers. The very opposite of letting go.

The second type of question that’s not very helpful is “why”. It doesn’t help to promote understanding, since, in many cases, it can trigger defensiveness. If you don’t believe me, just observe your own inner response when someone asks you why you did or didn’t do something. The idea behind the question is to gain understanding. to do that, we need to ask other questions.

Questions that support curiosity come in different forms; they all strengthen leadership. One basic form is the open question, where we probe for more information by inviting the other person to give us information. Notice the difference between the following two questions:

1. Will  the report be finished by Friday?
2. What else do you need to do, to complete the report?

The first one is a standard yes/no question. It can be answered without the person needing to think. Since many people find it difficult to say no, you get the default answer of “yes” and are none the wiser. The second question, however, requires the person to think for a moment. As they begin to outline what else they need to do, you can begin to see whether or not you need to probe more deeply for information, or whether you need to take supportive action to help them achieve the goal.

Tomorrow, we explore another form of question that supports curiosity.

Photo: Marek Uliasz / iStockphoto

The keys to success outlined in the talk were:

• a definition of success. Presidential math is simple: you need 270 electoral votes; however, figuring out from which states those votes will come is not so easy. They had a clear idea on this. And also a clear idea about why Barack Obama was running for president.
• a clear strategy for achieving that success. This contrasted with both he Clinton and McCain campaigns, where strategy changed frequently. This led to confusion in the campaign and reduced effectiveness.
• making sure that all staff and volunteers understood the goal and the strategy, so that they didn’t get thrown by media turbulence. He was worried that he was sending too much information to the volunteers via mail; it turned out they wanted more. In the presidential phase of the campaign, they sent about four mails a day, on average.
• flexibility in local implementation (Colorado is not the same as Florida).
• clear metrics and targets for people and giving them the necessary authority to reach their targets.  People regularly received clear feedback, the discussion being based on the targets and support to get back on track, if people weren’t reaching their targets; a readiness to replace people, if they showed no improvement after being supported.
• Listening to your people, not just talking to them. They can deliver great ideas, you just need to listen.
• They also decided it was vital to have a high-quality web presence. It wasn’t enough that the site be better than those of the other candidates; they wanted to be able to stand comparison with google, amazon, cnn or yahoo. The site was the hub of the campaign and allowed the staff and volunteers to coordinate local activities on a stae and community level.
• A consistent message across all platforms. People pick up their information in fractured ways these days; just accept it and make sure you send the same message on all channels at the same time. People will piece it together and it gets across.

He also spoke openly about some of their mistakes, e.g. the mishandling of the Ohio and Texas primaries. If they’d picked up wither one, they’d have been able to close out the primary season much earlier. They also spent too little time on internal communication in the early stages of the campaign. They realized the importance of this and corrected this problem later on. David stressed the importance of not getting sucked into devoting all your energies on reaching the goal: it’s important to make sure you reserve time in your schedule for  communicating with staff – keeping them up-to-date with your thinking and listening to their ideas. Indeed, almost all the improvements to the campaign came from listening.

During the question and answer session, the value of the campaign web site to the presidency became clear: the President can get his message out to 13 million people by email; something he does on a regular basis. David also said the decisive moment in the campaign was when Obama spoke to 200,000 people in Berlin. Although this was mocked by the US media at the time, it delivered a string message to potential voters that the US had a politician who could reach out to the world and repair America’s standing in the international community.

The part I found most fascinating was his body language and gestures during the speech: blend out the skin color, and it was really as if  President Obama himself was delivering it!

Another interesting snippet is about hiring: when hiring at management or executive level, he tends to ask people to talk about the last three or four books they’ve read, what they learned from them and what motivated the choice of book.

7. The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.

I admit I find this one draconian, although the sooner the better is always the rule with meetings. Here, the trick is to schedule time for the minutes, so that someone else doesn’t grab the time for your participation in another meeting. In addition, my experience shows that it’s important to include all decisions in the minutes: so, minutes and actions. That’s enough.

The list seems to be based on the predicate that people know what the meeting is about. I have often experienced meetings where the chair began by asking the participants what was on today’s agenda. (No, they weren’t using an Open Space format!). It’s a waste of time and energy.  Simple rule to add to Seth’s list:

No Agenda = No Meeting

This ensures that people can focus on the topics, do some thinking ahead of time. It’s more than

3. Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don’t, kick them out.

To sharpen this one a bit, make it clear to the people in advance, which decisions will be on the table at the meeting. It gives them a chance to contribute better to the decision-making.

How have you improved the quality of your meetings at work?