Power Your Team!

Is your team running at full power?

 You mostly know what it feels like when things are going well. But how do you measure this - are things really as good as they seem, or is there room for improvement with your team? Based on a comprehensive data set of interviews with over 15,000 leaders, it's now possible to show what every leader can do immediately to improve their team's performance. The results might surprise you!

 It starts with asking yourself and your team the question, "are we running at full power?" What were the times in your career when things just clicked and what were the times when things felt clunky and hard?

 The research undertaken by Geoff Smart, Randy Street and Alan Foster (2015) found just three distinct groupings of strengths and competencies. Ask yourself these questions:

 Priorities
  • Do we have the right priorities?
  • Are they connected to the mission in a compelling way?
  • Are they correct and likely to produce the right results?
  • Are they clear so that everybody understands the critical few?

Who
  • Do we have the right "who"?
  • What's the bench-strength of the people on our team - how many "A-players" (people who can achieve the priorities in the right way) do we have? 
  • Have team members been "diagnosed" with a clear plan to address gaps?
  • Have we deployed the right people in the right jobs?
  • Do we have a recruitment process in place to select A-players to the team?
  • Do we ensure the team can play to their strengths while building new skills for the future?
Relationships
  • Do we have the right relationships?
  • Are we coordinated - do the right people talk to one another at the right times, share key information, and review metrics?
  • Are we committed - does the team buy in to the mission, trust the leader, and supports one another on the journey?
  • Are we sufficiently challenged - is each member of the team highly motivated and so they push each other to be their best selves, giving one another feedback, and practicing mutual accountability?

 Give your team a rating from 1 (low) to 10 (high) for each of these three dimensions, then multiply your three numbers together to get your team's Power Score.

P x W x R = Power Score!

Your PWR Score helps you understand what you need to do. It's like your weight. If you don't like it, you can exercise or go on a diet, or maybe both. In the case of your PWR Score, you want to improve your number to 729 or better.

Because 729 means you have rated each of your P, W, and R at a 9. That's where you want to be with your team, and it means things are going well in every dimension.

What do you need to focus on to get your team up to full power?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 6 Factors of System 3 Thinking for Making Wise Decisions!

Image
Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on system 1 and system 2 thinking in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” .  The idea that much of our thinking and decision-making is subconscious, and automatic (system 1), as opposed to rational and deliberate (system 2). But he missed the observation by Japanese theorists, Professor Emeritus Ikujiro Nonaka at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, Hitotsubashi University, and Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi, of the Management Practice in the Strategy Unit of Harvard Business School that there is a third system . We typically rely on system 1 thinking because it’s automatic, fast, and experience-based. We use our innate or gut feel to quickly arrive at a decision that “feels right”. System 2 thinking is logical, rational, and fact-based. We use system 2 when we need to slow down and analyse the i...
Read more

Patience, young grasshopper!

Image
"Patience, young grasshopper" is a quote from the 1970's Kung Fu TV series starring David Carradine as Kwai Chang Cain. His teacher, Master Po called him "grasshopper" as a child, emphasising patience as the ultimate martial arts skill. But we live in an era of high-speed, same-day, cutting-edge, first-to-market, fast-food, get-it-now, snap-judgement. If we're told we have to wait, we get irritated. If we can't come up with the right answer right away, we get upset. if someone or something gets in our way, we get angry. Why is patience considered one of the most powerful martial arts practices? Because patience is the antidote to anger, and anger represents the most terrible and destructive manifestation of self-driven desire. When we're angry with someone, we're estranged form them and from the true core of our being. We end up losing the very thing we believe we're fighting for. Patience is a discipline. It takes practice to over...
Read more

How to Lead Millenials!

Image
Herding cats is easy compared to keeping a bunch of smart millennials motivated for long enough to make a meaningful contribution. Yet, fast-growing, agile, entrepreneurial organisations need this kind of sustainable energy to do good things for clients and communities. What's the secret?  It turns out this is exactly the same problem faced by professional service firms - the McKinseys, Deloittes, and BCGs of the business world. They have to entice a group of disparate professionals to give up autonomy in return for a group share of the profits, while at the same time maintaining the bonds of a matrix-structured organization which threatens to fly apart at any moment under the centrifugal force of massive ego! Have they cracked the code?  Laura Empson, Professor in Management at the Cass Business School, London, and Ann Langley, Professor of Management at HEC Montreal think they have. Their model of the professional service firm (2015) is an elegant guide in how t...
Read more