Video: Why "Family" Workplace Is A Bad Idea

This week, let’s take a look at the concept of trying to build a “family” in your workplace or imposing “team-building” on your people. The truth is, most of your staff have nothing in common with each other except where they work. So don’t force them into becoming a family or a team. That just creates a disconnect.

Mission Statements And Employee Engagement

"It is our mission to dramatically initiate performance based opportunities as well as to proactively leverage existing quality leadership skills to meet our customer's needs."

Huh? Is that your mission statement? Cripes, could you be just a little less specific? Not much wonder you can't get your people to engage. They don't know what you do.

Here's the deal: if your mission statement isn't absolutely specific about what you do, how will your people ever know what TO do?

"But," you complain, "I'm just a manager. I don't have any say in the mission statement."

"Horse-pucky," I say. Develop a departmental or work-unit mission statement. Get your staff involved in writing their own mission statement. Get them real clear on what they're supposed to be doing and they will do it. And they will engage because you engaged them in finding their purpose.

Managers manage. They don't throw their hands up and say they don't have any power to change it. That's not managing. That's excusing.

No more excuses. Call a staff meeting for Friday at 10 in the morning and work for two hours to craft your departmental mission statement. If you can't get it done in two hours, then that's a sign that your department has no leadership. So, you won't be using the word "leadership" in your mission statement.

Advice: craft something. You can always revisit it at any time to smooth it out. But do something. It doesn't have to be perfect - it just needs to be something specific.

Why Team-Building Rarely Works

Anne Thornley Brown wrote an interesting article on Why Companies Are Cutting Team-Building. In it, she offers these four reasons:

• too much focus on activities of questionable value
• not enough focus on results
• too little tie-in to the business
• no attempt to measure return on investment

And she's not wrong, but she's not entirely correct either. The problem is that Team-Building rarely includes adjusting Culture initiatives to support the Team-Building initiative.

What that means is that you can send you people out into the woods for a few days, sing a few verses of Kumbaya and get them to work together, but the moment they get back to work, if they have already built silos, the ingrained Culture will swallow the newly-minted Team-Building effort.

You see, Culture is stronger than any course. Culture is "the way it is." And in order for "the way it is" to change, you have to take aim directly at the problem. People working together isn't the problem. The team isn't the problem. The existing silos and work-flow based on working inside of silos is the problem. The Attitudes of why your people don't want to work with each other is the underlying problem. That isn't solved by pretending to like each other for a weekend or forcing them to work together when they don't want to. They know the Team-Building effort is only for a few days so they'll suck it up and grit their way through it. Then, come Monday, it'll be back to business as usual.

Team-Building, without addressing the underlying Culture, is like painting a car and hoping the new paint will stop the engine from burning oil. Nice effort - wrong place. You've got to get under the hood if you want to fix the problems. A new coat of paint won't cut it. It's the engine that's malfunctioning - not the paint job. You've got to fix the Culture - not the behaviors that result from the Culture.

Do Checklists Actually Work?

Checklists work for people who either need or like checklists. My wife is a great checklist person on those little, teeny scraps of paper. It's a system that works for her. My system involves only big items (appointments, proposals, meetings, etc) on my Blackberry. I make priorities first and then squeeze all the other little stuff to less-productive times of the day. The little stuff gets done after the big stuff is accomplished. I guess I'm more of a "rocks in the jar" kind of guy.

But some people are convinced that every little thing needs to be written down. And I suppose that's true if you're forgetful or you need to pat yourself on the back for feeling like you got a lot of things accomplished in a single day.

Here's the problem with list-building though: it doesn't overcome procrastination and lack of motivation. Having a list doesn't mean you'll get get off your fat butt and get it done. The motivation to get started is an attitude. The decision to procrastinate is also an attitude. Dealing with underlying attitudes is the part missing from most training - the "why do it now" especially when you don't want to.

It's why there is no universal Time Management course that works. If there were a Time Management course that worked for every person every time, there would be no need for any more Time Management courses because everyone would be doing it already - having already taken the course.

There are no universal communications courses because everyone has their own communication style. There are no universal team-building courses because each person's contribution and attitude towards their workplace is different.

If universal learning courses worked, there would be only one Time Management course, one Interpersonal Communications course, one Team Building course, one Supervisory Management course, one Sales course and, well, you get the idea. There would be one course only because it works and anything else would be a foolish waste of time and money - having found one that worked all of the time for all people.

So before you embark on investing in a new list-building program, ask yourself if you really want to do the job in the first place? If not, no list-building is ever going to work for you - or your staff. Address the "attitude" part of productivity first before you throw money and time at it. The illusion of taking some sort of action still doesn't solve the underlying problem. There's no single solution to each problem. Each employee is managed a bit differently if you're trying to get maximum performance out of each person.

Stat: Women Hold 51.4% of Management Positions

Women now hold 51.4% of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1% in 1980. That's a continually growing market - 100% growth in 30 years. And there's no sign of it slowing anytime soon because honestly, women are just overall better managers - especially when it comes to having the skills to manage Generation Y.

The truth is, in this time of change, the old-style "command and control" model of management is dead. Any organization that continues to embrace that model is already seriously disadvantaged in the market when it comes to recruiting and retaining quality staff. As I've said repeatedly, coaching and mentoring are the new models of management today and overwhelmingly, women are better at it than men. Here's why:

• Women adapt better to new situations.
• Women are more likely to delegate and more likely to reward people.
• Women are better inspirational mentors who encourage underlings to develop their abilities and creatively change their organizations.
• Women managers tend to have more of a desire to build than a desire to win.
• Women tend to be better than men at empowering staff.
• Women encourage openness and are more accessible.

As it turns out, men are still more confident and make quicker decisions than women in management. But when it comes to building strong Corporate Culture, women managers are more likely to have a bigger impact with their management style.

So if your organization is not yet embracing the new reality that there are more women managers than men, then you may need to rethink your Culture to figure out why.

Why Teamwork Is Not For Everyone

Is teamwork a bad idea? It can be if the 20 - 60 - 20 rule applies in organizations, companies and teams. What the 20 - 60 - 20 rule applies to are the percentages comprising most workplaces. The top 20% of employees will be go-getters and high performers. The bottom 20% will be low performers and slow-getters. The remaining 60% in the middle will be the mediocre and average performers.

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip says, "To mediocre minds, a brilliant idea and a dumb idea sound exactly the same. Every team will vote out the best ideas and the worst."

Forcing a high performer to work with a low performer simply for the optics of teamwork may be counterproductive. For the sake of workplace harmony, well-meaning but ill-informed managers trot out the "we're going to work in teams" philosophy because he or she once read an article touting the benefits of teamwork. But that same manager did not bother to explore other options and opinions.

Forcing your high performers to sit as equals on a team with slow performers is the most expedient way to irritate a high performer. As well, the low performers become increasingly frustrated by how quickly the team is attempting to move forward even though the "slow-getter" isn't up to speed yet. That one person feels rushed on this team. Meanwhile, the collective average in the middle simply sits by and watches as both the high performers and low performers battle for power on the team.

Unfortunately, the most influential people on the team and the most powerful are not necessarily the high performers. Because teams are all-inclusive, a team will not move forward without all of its members. Therefore the person who holds the team hostage becomes the most powerful person in the team. That is usually the person who doesn't get it the most.

Before you go thinking that teamwork is the answer and spend large sums of money on team-building exercises, maybe you should consider whether your place of business needs teams at all. Perhaps more would get done by leaving your people alone to do what they already excel at. Forcing people to join teams simply for the sake of inclusion is a bad idea.
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