Team Accountability – Workshop 8 (Debrief Part 1)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Team Accountability is provided by Mr. Teschner MBA BA Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Mr. Teschner is a transformational Leadership Coach and Trainer and Founder & CEO of VMax Group. VMax Group is a St Louis-based Leadership Development company specializing in teaching accountable leadership and high-performing teamwork to businesses across the globe. VMax Group has centered much of its signature training around the proper practice of Accountability. Real Accountability—positive, forward-focused Accountability centered around the process of taking Absolute Ownership for the outcomes the team achieves—is something Mr. Teschner and his team lived during their collective time as member of high-performance military teams. Now they’ve made it their mission to teach what they know to those who need to learn it.
A decorated graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, Air University, and the National War College, Mr. Teschner is also both a Distinguished Graduate and former F-15 Instructor at the USAF Weapons School – the Air Force version of “TOP GUN”. It was there that he honed his craft of teaching accountable leadership to the top practitioners in the world. Additionally, Mr. Teschner was privileged to command an operational F-22 “Raptor” squadron, flying America’s most advanced air supremacy platform. Mr. Teschner was ultimately honored to be promoted to the rank of full Colonel but retired early as a result of a battle with colon-rectal cancer. Mr. Teschner has over 20 years of hands-on leadership experience in High-Performance, High-Reliability Organizations and brings all of that experience with him wherever he speaks, teaches or coaches.
Mr. Teschner has a special way of connecting with his audiences, blending high-impact stories of fighter aviation and personal humility to achieve the intended outcome. In addition, his story of his personal fight with cancer serves as the launch pad for talks about humility, growth, motivation, and constant improvement. Mr. Teschner is the author of the #1 bestselling book, Debrief to Win: How High-Performing Leaders Practice Accountable Leadership, and released his newest bestselling book Aiming Higher: A Journey Through Military Aviation Leadership, a book co-authored with 4 other former Air Force pilots, in May of 2022. His next book, Building Resilience, is due out in the Spring of 2023.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
This is the part of our course where we’ll dig into the methodology of the debrief, with an emphasis on theory. Outcome: the team understands the theory of the debrief form of team accountability. Desired Learning Objectives: We understand the tenets of the “RAPTOR” Debrief
We understand how the tenets support positive, forward accountability.
Objectives
01. Mission Focus: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Mindset & Attitude : departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. The Approach: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Mission Clarity: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Driving Factors: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Tough Topics: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Way Forward: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Memorialize Results: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Absence of Blame: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Dissemination: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
Strategies
01. Mission Focus: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Mindset & Attitude : Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. The Approach: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Mission Clarity: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Driving Factors: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Tough Topics: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Way Forward: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Memorialize Results: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Absence of Blame: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Dissemination: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
Tasks
01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Mission Focus.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Mindset & Attitude .
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze The Approach.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Mission Clarity.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze RAPTOR Debrief Part 1.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze RAPTOR Debrief Part 2.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Driving Factors.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Tough Topics.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Way Forward.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Memorialize Results.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Absence of Blame.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Dissemination.
Introduction
RAPTOR Debrief:
The RAPTOR Debrief methodology’s ability to be both straightforward and reproducible is what makes it so important and effective. Every debrief should follow the same format. It’s also important to remember that every team member, from senior leaders and managers to technicians and lower-level employees, may practice each component. It’s important to note that the RAPTOR Debrief is a life skill that can be used in ALL areas of human endeavor, not only as a tool for high-performing teams to hold themselves accountable. You should be aware that the six actions we’ll list here are intended to:
1. Easy to grasp,
2. Simple to use, and
3. Extremely effective when used properly.
We are now moving on to a description of how to carry out the precise phases of the debrief, steps that build on what we have previously discussed. Consider yourself a student in a business training school while you read this workshop. Be prepared to ponder certain sections and draw connections between the elements to see how you might apply them to your advantage. Note the passages that either don’t make sense at the moment or that make you realize how you can use them to satisfy your needs. Make notes, then think about them. Return to them. Don’t let them languish in an unopened notebook.
First, Analyze What Happened
As mentioned in previous workshops, those of us who work in aviation use technology that allows us to accurately reconstruct what happened while we were in the air. The goal is to make certain that we have exact “truth data” to draw lessons from. Whether we are aware of it or not, business requires many of the same skills. Every company to which I have offered consulting services can obtain extremely precise data on sales performance and other important metrics. Since the numbers themselves are only one aspect of what needs to be captured during the “Reconstruction” phase, metrics are a great way to capture one part of the “truth data” we seek.
Even more crucial is that we accurately record ALL of the significant incidents, occurrences, data, etc. that impacted our success. It’s crucial that we combine the many points of view on how things appeared from those of the different team members. I’ll use the chapter four dogfighting scenario to clarify what I mean and how we would use this strategy in a fighter debrief.
Case Study: The Tactical Debrief
Using the example of a Flight Lead in a “dogfight” exercise, we’ll assume that the administrative portion of the debrief is finished and we have transitioned to the tactical part of the mission, “the meat” of the mission. The first thing he needs to do is to ensure both pilots agree on what actually happened. He’ll do this by reconstructing the path each fighter flew. He’ll place special emphasis on times when the Offensive Fighter employed weapons, as well as those times where the two might have had a close pass, and where one was able to gain an advantage over the other. The challenge with manually reconstructing the flight paths of high-performance fighters is that what actually transpired in the air did so in three dimensions. The simplest forms of reconstruction— chalk boards, white boards, butcher boards—only allow for a two-dimensional reconstruction. That said, we always train to manually draw up our engagements because we thereby learn how to ask critical questions of our teammates.
To assist in our manual reconstruction, the Flight Lead will initially reconstruct the fight from what we call the “God’seye” perspective: as you might imagine, looking straight down from the heavens. The other perspective we use is the “Grandstand” perspective, where the fight is viewed as if from the bleachers or grandstand at a sports event.
The main purpose in using this example is to demonstrate how the Flight Lead frequently collects, represents, and confirms data with his Wingman during the Reconstruction phase. The Flight Lead (FL) is focused on collecting precise data because it will lead to more accurate reconstruction. The only way to ensure correctness is to make several, focused inquiries. There is no question as to who is in charge throughout the fighter debrief’s reconstruction phase or who is supplying the raw data used to cross-check everything. No one can deny, however, that the Wingman (WG) has crucial information to share—a perspective on the incident that must be recorded if the reconstruction is to be correct.
Reconstructing in a Business Setting
Fear not when it comes to retracing events that happened on the ground and may have occurred over a number of days, weeks, or even years. The same fundamental approach works.
Both a “tape review” in which each participant records their own opinions on significant occurrences and a reconstruction phase in which those same significant events are recorded on a board are equally feasible. Since we don’t have tapes in the business world, we must rely on our memories, emails, texts, notes, data spreadsheets, and other means of information storage to piece together what actually happened. The secret to success in this situation is to be both concise and clear.
A Visual Capture of the Truth of What Happened
What’s particularly helpful is that, if we’re thinking critically, the problems we want to solve—and the solutions to these problems—jump straight out when we have the truth in print in front of us. Not that the solutions are always directly written on the board—they aren’t always. But if we’re telling the truth and, as leaders, constantly ask ourselves, “Did I set my team up for success?” we’ll be able to figure out what we need to know to succeed.
I applied this strategy a few months ago when I was working with a customer. In this specific instance, we were recapping a unique event we put on that had components from across the organization (marketing and sales, operations, finance, etc.), as well as the introduction of a brand-new non-profit organization to the public. As part of our debrief, I particularly recorded the happenings over the period of three weeks on a single sheet of flip chart paper. I broke down our reconstruction into manageable weekly portions and further divided it into parts that made sense to our crew. The “Management Team,” “Events,” “Sales,” and another sub-group were among these components. Additionally, I created a category called “Pressure Points” to include places where we encountered challenges. Here is how this particular reconstruction turned out in the end:
It’s noteworthy that every line was written with unanimous team approval. Apart from what I had written down in my own, private notes, nothing was pre-written. I asked the entire team for feedback, viewpoints, and observations, talking through each idea before putting it on writing. In other words, I recreated this in the same manner as the prior “dogfighting” lines.
Again, any currently used data capture technique that is available in any industry can help with the “tape review” process. Health care providers have data from their systems to determine how long it took, for example, from the time a prescription order was placed to when the patient received medicine. Sales teams keep track of contact information, engagements made and kept, conversions, and other information. Athletic coaches frequently have access to video recordings of what happened on the field or court. There are innumerable examples and a ton of data sources. Indeed, there is a way to record what actually happened in almost every endeavor.
In the end, it is definitely worth the effort to describe what truly occurred using concise sentences. One benefit of the method is that it highlights information that the leader might not have known otherwise and fills in knowledge gaps for him.82 The main goal of the reconstruction phase is to write this information down so that everyone in the room may see it, evaluate it, analyze it, challenge it, and perhaps even add to it or utilize it in other ways. It’s crucial that only one individual, namely the Leader, writes all that needs to be written. He or she is in the greatest position to provide lengthy summaries, to combine several statements that essentially express the same thing, to decide which topics should be included and which ones the team can discuss separately or later, and so forth. The leader should plan ahead for this fact-finding process, thinking about everything from how to record and summarize the facts to how he plans to use the available space (a flip chart can only hold so much information) to portray the history of events, at the very least the night before.
Yes, it can be simple to get distracted during the reconstruction process or to want to jump right to the performance review and root cause analysis. Leaders must be prepared to tell a team that wants to push forward to “Hang-on… we’re not there yet!” For a team to succeed, leaders must be prepared to assume control, maintain accuracy as the primary goal, and hold team members accountable for adhering to the Team Charter’s principles.
Reconstruction Timing
Let’s talk about time expectations for a moment. How much time we spend on the Reconstruction phase will depend on the urgency and “seriousness” of the problems we need to solve. The debrief’s context will be extremely important in determining our timing. In a professional situation, we will probably spend the majority of our time—roughly half of the total time for our debrief—during the reconstruction phase, particularly in the early stages of the switch to a debrief-focused flow. Once the organization adopts time-saving strategies and the team becomes accustomed to the process, this process will eventually move more quickly. Just keep in mind that one of the key components of successful debriefs is taking the time to effectively reconstruct; do not rush or short-change this process. You’ll be astonished by what you discover.
Agree on the Fundamental Question(s) & Focus Points
We take the information we gathered during the reconstruction phase and decide which details need more investigation during the RAPTOR debrief. We do this with the understanding that our time together is limited and precious. As a result, we begin by evaluating how our results compare to the goals we set. The RAPTOR Debrief, to put it another way, focuses on whether or not we succeeded in achieving our goals. The goal is to identify any gaps or deltas, both good and poor. If we didn’t reach our objectives, our analysis begins there; if we did, we need to determine if it was due to something we did well or lucky circumstances. In either case, the context of the debrief will dictate what more we need to evaluate once our Objectives guide our initial emphasis. The RAPTOR Debrief is relatively simple to carry out because the core procedure is so logical and well thought out. Unfortunately, not everyone who engages in debriefing does so in this manner. To further comprehend the advantages of the RAPTOR methodology, let’s briefly examine a rival strategy.
The Effective Debrief Centers on Objectives
The lesson here is that the debrief should be driven by our goals. The goals should be our main emphasis if they truly matter (which they should). Next up are the coaching techniques we must use to enhance team performance, which may or may not be inherent in our goals. It should be quite simple to determine whether or not we have reached attainable, measurable objectives that are specified throughout time. Simply put, we ponder “why” or “why not?” Developing the “Fundamental Question(s)” or FQ is the official term we’ll use for this. We’ll refer to any additional issues we wish to go through as “Focus Points” or FPs, depending on the context of our debrief. Fundamental Questions are posed in the form of queries. Any format that makes the most sense is used to identify focus points; for example, if I were on a dogfighting mission, I would circle these points on the board.
Focus Points
While a leader’s debriefing strategy is guided by the objectives, the context dictates whether additional learning is required to boost team and individual performance. This additional knowledge may go beyond what is discussed while responding to the Fundamental Question, but there is a very solid reason for it. If we hadn’t answered today’s Focus Point, it’s possible that tomorrow’s Fundamental Question would have been it. Think about the treacherous pass that I mentioned in the “Pre-Brief.” If we hadn’t quickly debriefed, we might have collided during a subsequent engagement. How much time we decide to devote to addressing a Focus Point as opposed to a Fundamental Question (typically, but not always, less time) is an important factor, the same fundamental worry mentioned before. I have discovered the following through subsequent mission debriefs during the course of my career:
The dashed line in this graph serves to illustrate how ALL of the issues we’re attempting to address lose importance when we treat each issue equally, that is, when we devote the same amount of time to each issue we emphasize. On the other hand, each issue shines out as it should when we handle each one at the “appropriate” level (shown by the dots). Teams notice the difference, and those watching the debrief take place (the participants more so than the leader) will undoubtedly enjoy this strategy. In the same way, they won’t tolerate it at all when every problem is treated as if it had equal importance.
We efficiently get to the purpose of the debrief by laying out the objectives first, then assessing our performance in regard to them. This procedure requires some getting used to, like everything else, but the debrief leader can speed learning by ensuring from the outset that the team as a whole acknowledges that the right question has been identified. Furthermore, we are unable to identify any Focus Points because we don’t yet know anything else about this scenario.
Returning to the issue of perspective, it is often the case that individuals who are not in charge of the debrief have a better understanding of what the FQ should be, partly because they experience less pressure and have more time to reflect. The conversation’s facilitator should take this into account, assess the feedback from a different viewpoint, and decide whether to include that viewpoint in the debate. Where the debrief goes in a RAPTOR Debrief is ultimately up to the leader. He makes a decision after considering the suggestions of his team. As an Accountable Leader, he must make judgment calls, and this is just one of many that will be made during the debrief. Despite the difficulty, this ends up being one of the numerous advantages of this crucial strategy: Leaders have the chance and are actually called to lead.
Executive Summary
Chapter 1: Mission Focus
Any project should include a debriefing session because, strangely enough, we learn more from an experience or project after it has concluded than we do while it is being carried out. And yet, we frequently complete a task and move on without getting together to talk about and consider how things went.
However, there is value in doing that, and it also requires skill. The good and the terrible should not be glossed over; instead, you should determine what worked and what didn’t. You also want to be able to take something away from it.
Consider how a sports coach creates their plans. The coach can only determine what works and what doesn’t for the squad after watching them play, and then make adjustments for the following game.
When you debrief, you are acting in the same capacity as a manager and coach (albeit one that is not athletic).
Asking a few strong questions after a project that put more of an emphasis on community building and learning than on gauging success is your best bet. Instead of seeing it as an opportunity to point fingers, think of it as a method to learn what worked and what didn’t.
1. What did we hope to accomplish?
2. What took place?
3. What are the takeaways?
4. What should we change for the upcoming situation?
5. What happens next?
Aligning Your Workforce
Ever attend a marching band performance? The band turns to face the drum major, who is waving a baton at the top. This aids the band in determining how to move in order to set up the proper formation on the field.
Your firm is led by its mission, vision, and values. Employees can march in unison and arrange themselves as you wanted as long as they can see the baton.
Some employees will work toward one goal while others will be working toward a different goal if a company doesn’t connect itself with its objective. For instance, the goal and vision may be focused on a separate, current product while the manufacturing team purchases a brand-new, expensive machine for a new product. This kind of misalignment can cost your business money because it reduces both employee productivity and the real cost of the error.
You are the baton’s keeper, senior leaders. They must be responsible for ensuring that every day, employees’ work supports the goal and vision. The accounting team’s portion will differ from the service team’s portion as it trickles down. However, in order for each team to make the right choices, they must understand what their share is and why it is significant.
The Progression Of A Team
The stages that teams often go through, from formation to dissolution, are covered in this section. It should be noted that the stages are not always easily discernible. This is probably the case if a team runs for a short period of time or if its membership changes. There might not be much “storming” in the first scenario, but there might be a lot in the second.
Managing a team entails seeing it through all of the highs and lows of the team process. Understanding the various’stages’ of team development can help one determine what the team needs and how to support it most effectively. The most well-known explanation of the stages of team growth was provided in 1977 by Tuckman and Jensen. As follows:
1. ‘Forming’
2. ‘Storming’
3. ‘Norming’
4. ‘Performing’
5. ‘Adjourning’
Chapter 2: Mindset & Attitude
The constant learning attitude, which helps us to prioritize learning, personal growth, and development rather than judging success on short-term outcomes and restricted criteria, then further fuels and sustains a deeper sense of purpose. We run the risk of ignoring long-term aspects, such as culture, values, and wellness in order to attain short-term goals, such as meeting annual sales targets or winning Olympic gold. When that occurs, those goals lose their significance, and motivation levels immediately decrease. Simple measurements do not motivate employees to go above and beyond, to collaborate as a team, or to successfully adjust to changes in their environment. When learning and purpose are lacking, creativity, invention, and resilience are lost.
Learning takes place outside of classes and isn’t just something that’s discussed at retreats. Both must be a part of a daily mindset that views every interaction as an opportunity to learn and find meaning that we can carry with us.
Connection
It is challenging to establish clarity around our purpose if we don’t connect as a team. It’s challenging to continue learning, foresee growing demands, and get ready for an unpredictable future if we don’t interact with our clients and coworkers.
Relationships were crucial throughout my professions as a British diplomat and an Olympic rower. No Olympic crew would dare attempt to prepare and compete against the rest of the world without forging strong interpersonal relationships. This was effective not just at the level of sharing the common objective of moving quickly and winning, but also at the level of comprehending deeper motivations and drivers and paying attention to other points of view, all of which were crucial for maximizing group performance. In the field of diplomacy, the entire basis of negotiation is based on relationships and understanding the perspectives of others in order to foster cooperation and collaboration that may lead to innovative solutions to some of the most significant global crises of our time.
We provide a simple—yet non-formulaic—alternative to the destructive winning mentality. It’s time to rethink what success means and to begin pursuing goals that go beyond simply placing first. More riches are up for grabs than just the upcoming round of annual bonuses; there is a wider game to play.
Developing a Business Winning Mindset: How to Handle Failure
Although it can be rewarding, owning your own business also has its share of difficulties. Being able to deal with failure is a crucial component of running a business because not everything will go as planned every time. Failure may be disappointing and demotivating, whether it was a marketing strategy that didn’t succeed, a product that didn’t sell, or a monetary loss.
It’s crucial to keep in mind that failure does not spell the end for your company. It’s an opportunity to grow, learn, and get better.
Chapter 3: The Approach
Bringing the Post-Mortem Business Meeting to Life with Retrospective Meetings
You’ve succeeded! You are prepared to celebrate after finishing a huge project with your team. Your team performed a fantastic job of responding to the difficulties and finishing the assignment. The team put in a lot of effort to finish everything, and they were successful. Everyone should be proud of themselves because it was a great accomplishment. How will you continue to work on this project? You take what you can from it and establish a continual improvement cycle. Even unsuccessful projects can teach you something. So, on your subsequent project, you’ll perform even better! Retrospective meetings are the best method to learn from a failed project. In a retrospective meeting, you discuss what occurred and its causes. You can also talk about what could have been done differently to prevent reoccurring issues.
An evaluation meeting should be held after each project. Retrospective meetings known as “postmortems” (PM) allow teams to analyze their accomplishments and shortcomings. Teams can review their experiences at these sessions and learn important lessons about what worked and what didn’t. PMs are useful for seeing concerns before they balloon into bigger difficulties. The team benefits from this and improves as a result. If a project goes well, set up a meeting to review it and determine whether any lessons were learned. If you have a problematic project, arrange a meeting to discuss what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. In order for them to be heard, this should comprise at least one team member from each team and possibly two from any remote units.
This is a sample agenda for a good retrospective meeting, but feel free to alter it to suit your needs. Your team collaboration will improve if you come up with a clear action plan at the end of the meeting that includes useful improvements. Teams that perform well are always looking for ways to get better and keep turning the flywheel to increase productivity.
Agenda For A Retrospective Meeting
Recap (5–10 minutes) the project: Give a fair synopsis of the endeavor. Remind the group of the initial goals and how you achieved them. Have the deadlines and deliverables been met? Did everyone have to work long hours and on the weekends to complete it on time? Was the client satisfied—internal or external—? They adored it, right? Was the cost of delivery met? During this part, rely on facts and data rather than emotions. Later, participants will have the chance to talk about their feelings.
The retrospective meeting’s project recap is a crucial component. It’s important to establish the meeting’s purpose as making everyone in attendance better at what they do. Don’t concentrate on placing the blame for project errors on other people. Instead, concentrate on assisting everyone in improving at what we do.
Asking your team members questions is a great way to get them talking about what went well and what could have been done better. You can pinpoint your areas of improvement with the use of these questions. They can also be used to talk about the project as a whole, find out what everyone thinks of it, and gauge the mood of the team.
• We’re pleased with the results our effort produced.
• What made it outstanding?
• If not, what was lacking or incorrect?
• Were our deadlines met?
• Were our initial objectives met?
• Did the project turn out well?
• What was successful for us?
• Everyone who takes part names three.
• Which of our procedures did you find difficult to utilize or to follow?
• Everyone who takes part names three.
• I’d approach things differently the next time to prevent frustration.
• Was the original timetable accurate?
• If not, what can we take away from this experience to make our projections more accurate moving forward?
• What else might we do better?
• What procedures must we continue to follow?
• What procedures must we discontinue using?
• What actions should we take?
• Summarize the action items, inform everyone that the meeting note taker will disseminate the notes from today’s meeting, and express gratitude to everyone who attended.
Use this opportunity to talk about what you’ve discovered about one another and how you can cooperate to solve issues. Consider how you can advance your abilities and expertise as well.
Chapter 4: Mission Clarity
2021 data shows that around one-third of the biggest corporations in the world struggle with purpose alignment. That many workers lack a clear understanding of their motivations for reporting to work each day.
Mission Alignment: Why It’s Important
Although it can be difficult to get employees on board with a company’s mission, the effort is worthwhile.
A focus on output above results, minimal interaction, and unilateral communication: This way of thinking was successful during the Industrial Revolution, but it is outmoded and useless in the modern knowledge economy. Knowledge workers yearn for meaning and connection. To succeed, they require it.
Employees who have a clear sense of their purpose are more engaged in their job, find significance in their contributions, and produce results that are in line with the overall objectives of the organization. It’s the distinction between workers who put in their eight hours because they have to (ahem, Industrial Era thinking) and those who put in their hours because they want to pursue interesting, important projects that fit into a bigger vision.
Imagine distributing knowledge workers with a connection to the mission who carry out meaningful work throughout the entire organization. You’ll soon grasp the importance of mission alignment for good company outcomes. In fact, over 90% of purpose-driven firms generate profits that are equal to or higher than the industry standard, according to PwC’s Strategy.
Fixing Misalignment
While it can be difficult to plan and execute, mission alignment is both advantageous and difficult. No of their job, team, department, or location, employees need to continually hear the mission statement that expresses your company’s distinctive value proposition.
Your purpose should also employ quantifiable goals to overcome language hurdles, cultural quirks, and inadvertent ambiguity because it needs to be understood by everyone in the organization. A clear, measurable mission statement might read something like “become an industry leader with 50% market share” rather than “become an industry leader.”
How can you be certain that the mission statement guides all business decisions, relationships, and activities? And how does the mission come to serve as the cornerstone of each employee’s job duties?
The approach of OKRs (objectives and key results) establishes the platform for precise mission alignment. As the first crucial stage in implementing effective OKRs, this methodology—or rather, this corporate mindset—requires leadership to establish an accurate company mission statement. The company’s leadership can then specify the business goals that spell out how it will carry out its mission from there.
But putting the OKR methodology into practice is just one aspect of the puzzle. These OKRs need to be used in conjunction with tools and tactics that give you the authority to share the company mission and objectives with everyone in your organization. You may make sure that the mission is understood by every employee and pervades the corporate culture by exchanging information and organizing workers to work toward a common goal.
Chapter 5: RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
Fact Gathering
Everywhere you go when you’re gathering data, people are accommodating and stop what they’re doing to help you. You should at least demonstrate your willingness to repay the kindness. When it’s not convenient, make plans to return at a later time. On occasion, a staff member will advise you to leave now and return later because the time is uncomfortable. However, there are times when an employee experiences severe annoyance but for some reason keeps quiet about it. A perceptive analyst might pick this up. The question “Is this a convenient time?” is useful, nonetheless, to be on the safe side. Coming back later usually causes only minor issues. You frequently have a variety of sites to visit. Return at a more convenient time. When you return, don’t be shocked if the employee has things ready for you and has noticed how much you appreciate it.
Whatever you do, resist the want to assume that everyone who irritates you is trying to undermine your efforts or is a difficult coworker. Assume that the person is genuinely inconvenienced and just return at a later time. As long as you have data to gather elsewhere, it is still only a small inconvenience if someone constantly delays you. Give the employees the benefit of the doubt despite the fact that you are increasing their debt with each accommodation you make. It is excellent to be able to point out how many times you have postponed for someone’s benefit if you do encounter someone who is actually resistant and must eventually enforce a time. You will also remember how important the project announcement meeting was when the top executive gathered everyone together, explained the significance of the initiative, and requested support.
The employee may bring up a topic for idle discussion as you are about to begin the interview, such as the weather, a sporting event, a new building renovation, etc. When two people first meet, they frequently engage in this practice to gauge one other’s interests before speaking up about more significant issues. You would be wise to enter the conversation politely and respectfully given that the employee’s goal is to get to know you. When it has gone on for the proper amount of time, move on to the interview’s topic, perhaps with a comment about not wanting to monopolize the employee’s time.
Respect
The majority of the time, analysts obtain data from junior-status employees who work at the operating levels (e.g., file clerks, messengers, and data entry clerks). Take care not to come across as superior. Setting the intention that you will speak to the highest authority in the organization whenever you gather data is one thing you can do to help. After all, the company is in big difficulty if the CEO is the leading authority on filing within the company. Take this matter seriously. We are all heavily conditioned to show great deference to those in positions of authority. Unfortunately, the unintended consequence of this conditioning is that people in lower positions are treated with less respect.
Unintentionally, analysts frequently insult operations staff by suggesting that they are stupid for carrying out their duties. Typically, the analyst is eager to identify areas for improvement. The analyst is likely to grimace, smile, act astonished, etc. when anything seems awkward or takes an excessive amount of time. An analyst may offer various ways to criticize or even mock the way the work is being done. The analyst is saying that they know how to do it better than someone who has been doing it for years after spending only a short amount of time watching them. This kind of conduct is unacceptable. Never do it! Talk to people to learn more about what is going on rather than passing judgment. Get the facts first. Later, we can look for more effective methods and ask experienced operators to join us in that endeavor.
Chapter 6: RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
Team members nearly often begin initiatives with excitement, as every manager is aware of.
Any assignment’s final stretch results in a sense of accomplishment at the other end of the journey. As a result of the team’s high spirits and pumped up attitude, they dash across the finish line.
What are some ways we might use this momentum in our daily work? When team members are halfway through a challenging project and the finish is elusive, how can we keep them motivated?
To do this, we work SMARTer rather than harder. Today, we’ll go over techniques for establishing team goals that will set your people up for success.
Setting SMART goals is important because…
Being specific is insufficient; instead, specialize
“Are our objectives specific enough to serve the intended purposes and test my team?”
It will be hard to define “success” if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want your team to accomplish. Think about establishing objectives that benefit the team members who will be working to attain them as well as the organization as a whole. Clarify the “what” to be accomplished, “how,” and “when” for each objective.
The ‘why’ should also be addressed, in our opinion. Show how accomplishing these goals will benefit the organization and how team members will develop as a result.
Which of the following objectives has the best chance of producing the outcomes we want?
“Let’s earn at least $20K by June!”
OR
“Let’s get $10K in new business from our remote sales teams in the UK by the end of the first fiscal quarter of 2019, through leads obtained from focused Facebook and Google advertisements, plus an additional $10K in referrals from our office workers here in the Mid Atlantic using the CRM! The team that reaches their $10K goal first will split a $2K bonus with the Mid Atlantic team, and we’ll also have a friendly competition between them and the U.K. team.”
The initial objective is nebulous and simply expresses our wish. However, the second goal gives more specifics, including which teams will work on it and how it will be done. It encourages collaborative inventiveness and gives team members an incentive to reach the goal. The team will gain from achieving the second aim since it is so narrowly focused and specialized.
Likewise, be measurable to the team.
“Can you quantify your success? What does it resemble?
How are you going to know whether you’re going that way? What is “done”? Create a point of accomplishment for your goals so that you can confidently state, “We achieved this specific thing we set out to achieve.” Choose the measures that will be used to gauge success after you have decided on the ultimate objective.
As a manager, you should also pinpoint opportunities for each team member’s development and link those to their quantifiable objectives. Making SMART goals for teamwork and elevating each person along the way, you give them the opportunity to quantify their own improvement by making it measurable.
Be Attainable
Is your team capable of achieving the objectives set? Are greater resources required?
Identify the requirements for success… and if that isn’t feasible, consider changing your objectives such that the desired results are still possible. To allow your core team to concentrate on their areas of expertise, perhaps some talent needs to be outsourced.
Be Relevant
How does the objective fit into the overall mission of the organization?
Make sure that every objective is pertinent to the organization’s overall mission. This reinforces the value of each team member’s unique contributions and aids team members in staying true to their mission.
Use a time frame
“Can your goal be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time?”
Once a goal has been established, break it down into smaller milestones with distinct due dates. This prevents team members from feeling overextended by lofty objectives. Concentrating on a tiny portion of a project at a time makes it less overwhelming. Establishing a sense of urgency without inspiring anxiety should be your main goal.
By developing OKRs and “chunking” chores into distinct projects that contribute to the current KR, you may make this work for you. Track progress and create seamless handoff procedures by using project management tools like Asana or Jira. To keep on schedule, use clever tools like ToDo lists or reminders.
When used effectively, SMART goals encourage a team to work together to complete a task that is significant to the whole company while also guaranteeing that they have the tools necessary to complete the assignment. The decision to empower your staff must come from a place of empowerment, though.
Chapter 7: Driving Factors
Cognitive drivers
Due to the processes in place before judgments are made, organizations are typically better at slower, more deliberate thinking than individuals. Groups are more cognitively sophisticated than individuals, according to recent, high-quality sources of research on non-interactive decision-making, and collective decision-making generally tends to lessen the biases displayed by individuals. According to experimental findings, employing teams for organizational activities can help employees become better at their individual jobs; in other words, using teams effectively has a strong positive ripple effect on the caliber of people’s decisions. (One possible implication is that those who follow teamwork are harder to ‘nudge’.) Additionally, groups may benefit from having access to a bigger body of knowledge than individuals do.
However, those in organizations must work within three inevitable constraints, similar to those faced by independent decision-makers: a lack of information, a finite amount of mental capacity, and a finite amount of time. This means that organizations might be happy to rely on straightforward guidelines rather than explicitly calculating complicated ideal solutions. Organizations can therefore encounter “cognitive minefields,” and there are specific situations where using “MINDSPACE-like” drivers is appropriate. Miscalculation of risk as well as the influence of “messenger,” “incentive,” “saliency,” “priming,” and “affect” can lead to deviations from “rational” behavior. Other elements shared by studies on social and cultural factors include “ego” and “norms,” among others. Experimental research has demonstrated that cognitive biases that affect individuals also affect groups, but when this happens depends on the “situational and procedural contexts.”
Particularly senior managers are sometimes prone to reinterpreting reality for their own purposes. They might, for instance, underestimate the power of their rivals. While having the chance to explain actions can lessen this bias, recent evidence from significant papers in the experimental literature suggests that being responsible for others makes people less willing to take risks (i.e., demonstrate risk aversion). The apparent discrepancy between some of the findings about leaders emphasizes the significance of taking into account contextual factors (such as the association between leadership and company ownership in specific organizations).
How “nudgable” an organization is may depend on where it is in the lifecycle of a corporation. There is data that shows that when evaluating business possibilities, entrepreneurs in particular are prone to be influenced by availability, representativeness, and anchoring and that they frequently rely on gut instinct and intuition. Evidence indicating that SMEs are more risk averse than larger organizations (due to limits in their capacity to process and analyze information objectively) must be used to counteract this. The relationship between business size and risk perception, or propensity for any other cognitive bias, is not an easy one, and the facts at hand makes it impossible to make a firm determination in this regard.
Chapter 8: Tough Topics
Nowadays, it seems like everything is contentious and polarizing.
But that doesn’t mean we should avoid discussing difficult subjects at work. In fact, now more than ever, we need to talk about them. Talking to people is the best method to establish bonds, grow in empathy, and consider opposing viewpoints.
Don’t put off having challenging conversations at work.
The more you delay, the more complicated such conversations might become. Additionally, you might develop anxiety over time, which would exacerbate the issue. “My job is not to be easy on people,” remarked Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Apple. It’s my responsibility to push and improve the already excellent team members. As a result, make it a habit to provide feedback frequently and to handle problems as they emerge.
Adjust your mentality
Instead of getting fired up beforehand, alter your perspective. Consider it to be a typical office talk. You ought to count on the meeting going smoothly. Get straight to the point and enter with confidence. By addressing the situation positively, you will also bring positive energy to the table.
Practice uncomfortable talks in the workplace
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, urges her staff to engage in difficult talks at least once every week. She holds that if you lack them, you are not developing. Holding difficult conversations forces businesses to address uncomfortable topics. And it can assist companies in addressing them, particularly when it comes to important issues like pay inequity and workplace diversity.
Prepare in advance
It’s usually a good idea to get ready for these challenging workplace conversations in advance. But resist the urge to practice or write a script. Instead, make a list of three goals you wish to achieve and concentrate on them. By focusing on the issue’s core right early, you reduce the likelihood that the conversation may take an unanticipated turn.
Control your feelings
Your objective is to maintain a professional and even tone throughout the talk. When you are meeting with someone you work closely with, this tactic is extremely crucial. Looking at things objectively from a factual perspective might be beneficial. Remind yourself that the more in control you are, the better you’ll be able to convey the message when emotions start to take over.
Be understanding
Give the other person time to analyze their feelings and take into account how they will feel during the talk. To ensure that they fully understand your viewpoint, make sure to clearly state the purpose of the meeting. When you observe someone suffering, take a moment to let them collect their thoughts. If they become upset, acknowledge how they must feel and reassure them that you are giving them this criticism out of concern.
Discuss ideas together
Finding a solution is the purpose of this discourse. If it isn’t evident right away, brainstorm concepts with others. While taking in what the other person has to say, offer your own suggestions. Make sure there is an action plan in place moving forward when you get to an agreement.
Hard conversations can be uncomfortable and awkward. But they must happen. The secret is to speak to them honestly and compassionately. You can successfully manage challenging talks at work while developing your potential by using the tactics listed here.
Chapter 9: Way Forward
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two successful businessmen, deliberately encourage failure in their close circles. According to Musk, “If you’re not failing, you are not innovating,” and Bezos is well known for hiring people who have failed. The corporate elite has developed something of a cultural obsession with achievement following difficult times, and there are innumerable podcasts and books that provide comforting examples of this.
But is this failure story appropriate for all entrepreneurs, or is it just a part of a public relations effort for a select few?
As Winston Churchill famously said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” You gain the crucial component of perspective by overcoming and emerging from a (perceived) failure. Then, you’ll be more adaptable, resourceful, and prepared for the next phase of your life.
No matter what kind of failure you’ve experienced, acknowledge that it was traumatic and that a grieving process will follow. There is no right or wrong way to deal with failure; instead, pay attention to your emotions and figure out what they are trying to tell you. Take a moment to reflect on what has transpired before moving forward since you could feel that you can recover more quickly than you anticipated.
Here are some pointers to help you bounce back the next time you feel discouraged following a mistake or mishap because that’s easier said than done.
How To Recover From Failure
Don’t ignore your feelings; instead, embrace them.
So that you may move on, give yourself permission to let go of any pent-up resentment, shame, or self-blame. Keep in mind that because you are human, you will occasionally perform less than optimally. Be gentle to yourself despite how your inner perfectionist rails against that thought and berates you.
Use the 10/10/10 rule.
Think more slowly and distinguish truth from fantasy in your head: will this concern be relevant in 10 weeks? In ten months time? 10 years? I’ll put everything in perspective with your responses.
Check your inner dialogue.
You could be prone to making depressing remarks like “I feel so stupid” or “Nothing is going as planned.” Reframing helps you break free from negative thoughts. For instance, “I keep messing up at work” becomes “I feel frustrated because I feel like I’m not accomplishing enough.” Self-talk that is in balance reduces stress and improves problem-solving.
To recalibrate, connect.
It is tempting to hide and mope around by yourself. Defy the desire to withdraw. Contact the one friend who always makes you smile with a phone call or text.
Take the offensive.
Build resistance to failure rather than running from it. Desensitization is the practice of gradually exposing yourself to frightening circumstances until the fear goes away. For instance, difficult conversations become easier the more at ease you become with them (and the more confident you become as a result).
For instance, look for low-risk opportunities to begin introducing your work to new people. Schedule regular one-on-one meetings with your boss. Establish a regular date night so you and your partner can talk about important things.
You cannot and will not always be able to please everyone. Going after your goals naturally results in failure feedback. Keep in mind that, in the end, it’s your opinion that counts the most.
Chapter 10: Memorialize Results
Documenting the results and recommendations of the debrief is, arguably, the second-most crucial step in this procedure. By recording our results, we may store them somewhere accessible and evaluate them before preparing for our next operation. When I was first qualifying for the F-15, I discovered this extremely helpful strategy. We maintained a binder at the squadron with notes made by students and instructors on what to anticipate on various missions, as well as a record of the results of past operations. This binder was very helpful in preventing new students from making the same mistakes as their predecessors. In the process, it made a significant advancement in my comprehension of what I was about to undertake. I quickly advanced my learning and improved my performance only by trying to avoid making other people’s mistakes. This procedure led to the development of the habit of consulting my notes from earlier trips as part of my flight preparation the following day.
Debriefings should be documented, yet the majority of managers and executives utterly fail to accomplish this. We’ve all left meetings feeling enthusiastic about the topics we covered, only to wonder why so little really came of it. What happened to the momentum?
The productive meetings tend to end with nothing said for a variety of reasons. Attendees frequently leave one meeting and rush to another, where they focus on a different set of problems. Or attendees leave the meeting without being certain of what was decided.
Meeting Summaries
According to an old Chinese saying, “the palest ink is better than the best memory.” The ideas and the agreements could be lost if you don’t record the conversation and put it in a format that can be easily accessible afterwards.
Making meeting notes is not necessary. They are a potent tool for influencing others. They aid in educating individuals who were not present about what occurred and serving as a reminder to those present of the agreements reached. They can help you keep everyone on the same page and concentrated on the tasks that need to be completed before your next meeting.
People love to be included and informed, so the notes become even more crucial if you’re trying to cut back on meeting attendance. Working to increase involvement includes sharing a meeting recap.
Here’s what functions: Distribute succinct, understandable meeting notes. In the past, minutes served as a meeting’s transcript, much like a court reporter would. You do not want this. Most meetings can be conducted on a single page. In order for non-attendees to understand what happened and for everyone to have a record of who will take additional action, the intention is not to recreate the debate but rather to record the major themes and the particular commitments for each issue.
The major takeaways from each topic you covered, a list of specific actions that will be taken, by whom, and when, should all be included in these notes.
Within 24 hours, if not sooner, write the meeting recap and disseminate it. With each hour that passes, you become less and less able to recall and distill the substance of each conversation. It also conveys a sense of urgency to send the summary out within an hour or by the end of the day.
Chapter 11: Absence of Blame
Avoiding the Blame Game
Placing blame doesn’t make the problem go away. Instead, cooperate to discover a solution. Clarify expectations and limitations for your team in order to avoid a blaming culture.
You can help the scenario from starting by doing the following steps:
• Establish clear accountability and obligations. People are less prone to lay blame on others when things go wrong and are less likely to go wrong in the first place when they are clear about their obligations. Your team members will continue to feel a feeling of ownership over their tasks if you encourage personal accountability rather than micromanage. You can even think about creating a team charter that outlines everyone’s goals and expectations in paper.
• Encourage openness. A team that is transparent and works well together will be better able to handle potential issues before they become major ones. Request regular feedback from your team during meetings (or one-on-one, for those who are less prone to speaking up in groups). Avoid groupthink, where individuals are reluctant to raise challenging issues out of concern for disrupting the current quo.
• Develop your empathetic side and emotional intelligence. Even if a coworker is truly at blame, there can be additional variables to take into account. They might have been overworked or distracted by a family situation, which caused them to forget something crucial. Try to be encouraging rather than critical. A team member may need coaching, mentorship, or training on a particular ability if they make a mistake or don’t complete a task.
Advice: Avoiding the blame game may necessitate a considerable cultural transformation in some businesses. Although you might not be able to do this on your own, you can influence change by making small changes to curb your own tendency to place blame and by encouraging others to do the same.
Changing the Dialogue
Things can spiral out of control when team members start blaming one another. Relationships might suffer, and feelings can get harmed. So how do you stop a blame game after it has already begun?
The actions listed below can assist you in reuniting the group and directing the conversation in a more useful direction:
1. Rephrase the circumstance
Ask yourself, “Where do we go from here?” while depersonalizing the issue. Instead than identifying the cause of the problem, concentrate on the team’s options for fixing it. Show them how it might be a chance to develop and learn as well.
2. Say sorry
If someone has been unfairly blamed, make an effort to get the offender or offender(s) to apologize. If it’s not possible to do this, you can apologize on their behalf.
The best course of action if you are to blame for unfair blame is to own it and make amends by apologizing. Keep an eye out for signs of rage or tension, and if required, provide further support in private.
3. Consult the group.
Educate your team members on the negative effects of placing blame as well as future prevention techniques. (See How to Avoid the Blame Game, above, for additional information.)
4. Learn From Your Errors
Inquire with the group, “What can we learn from this?” For instance, you might notice a communication failure. Focus on procedures; consider how to make them better and how to use the changes to stop similar problems from occurring in the future.
Chapter 12: Dissemination
The ability to successfully share information is essential for internal communication and employee engagement in the era of hybrid, remote, and deskless working. Here are our top suggestions and recommended methods for sharing information.
The is a danger of oversaturation in communication. At our disposal right now are a plethora of communication tools, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, emails, SMS, Zoom, meetings, and post-it notes. There are almost too many different ways to communicate.
How then can you cut through the clutter and give your message the weight it requires?
You’ll find a list of top recommendations and best practices for information sharing in this manual.
Establish Your Communication Technology Stack
As a technology company, we frequently consider our “technology stack,” which consists of all the numerous softwares and products we need to construct something. A “front end stack” composed of HTML, CSS, and Javascript is one illustration.
You can apply the same strategy when considering information sharing. For instance, dividing channels of communication into online and offline ones.
Online communication channels a business can use:
• For rapid communication, use instant messaging (like Slack).
• For official notices, use email.
• For knowledge sharing, use the company wiki.
• For “water cooler” talk, use Yammer.
Methods of offline communication in a business:
• Daily standups,
• weekly team meetings,
• monthly all-company meetings,
• quarterly all-hands meetings,
• and annual corporate retreats
What about hybrid workplaces, workplaces where some employees work asynchronously, or even workplaces without desks when employees are on the front lines? Being adaptable to the various ways a deskless colleague communicates can allow you to shoot and transmit movies, send SMS notifications, or even think beyond the box.
Establishing Transparency
Transparency is among the finest methods for exchanging information. The cornerstone of employee engagement, transparency is extremely significant. Some startups, like Buffer, share everything openly on a number of dashboards, including company salaries, equity, and even revenue. It will have an impact on how you share information whether you’re that open, wholly private, or somewhere in between.
Try to keep communication hierarchies as flat as possible. Different channels, like #HR, are used to categorize messages. Important messages can be pinned to the top of these channels. Individuals can be notified of messages by tagging them, and these channels can be made public or private.
Curriculum
Team Accountability – Workshop 8 – Debrief Part 1
- Mission Focus
- Mindset & Attitude
- The Approach
- Mission Clarity
- RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
- RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
- Driving Factors
- Tough Topics
- Way Forward
- Memorialize Results
- Absence of Blame
- Dissemination
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling on the Team Accountability corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, which will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in your program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program challenging and fun to do. However, if you have never been a distance-learner before, you may be experiencing some trepidation at the task before you. So we will get you started by giving you some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the modules, how you should manage the materials and what you should be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take a few hours or so to study this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a quiet and private place to study, preferably a room where you can easily be isolated from external disturbances or distractions. Make sure the room is well-lit and incorporates a relaxed, pleasant feel. If you can spoil yourself within your study environment, you will have much more of a chance to ensure that you are always in the right frame of mind when you do devote time to study. For example, a nice fire, the ability to play soft soothing background music, soft but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if possible and a good size desk with a comfortable chair. Make sure that your family know when you are studying and understand your study rules. Your study environment is very important. The ideal situation, if at all possible, is to have a separate study, which can be devoted to you. If this is not possible then you will need to pay a lot more attention to developing and managing your study schedule, because it will affect other people as well as yourself. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
Try and make sure that your study tools are sufficient and in good working order. You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, with access to the internet. You will need a very comfortable chair, which supports your lower back, and you will need a good filing system. It can be very frustrating if you are spending valuable study time trying to fix study tools that are unreliable, or unsuitable for the task. Make sure that your study tools are up to date. You will also need to consider some study rules. Some of these rules will apply to you and will be intended to help you to be more disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help you and after you have read it you can put some thought into what your study rules should be. You will also need to negotiate some study rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you. They too will need to be disciplined in order to ensure that they can support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as you can.
Successful distance-learning
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes or workshops, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. But unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s responsibility, with a distance-learning program, to ensure that they manage their own study contribution. This requires strong self-discipline and self-motivation skills and there must be a clear will to succeed. Those students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others and who enjoy working in isolation, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to be aware of the main reasons why you are studying and of the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You will need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. There is nobody available here to pamper you, or to look after you, or to spoon-feed you with information, so you will need to find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are in all cases post-graduate programs. Consequently, you should already have obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. You should therefore already be aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying? It is important to understand yourself as a learner and so some self-assessment early on will be necessary if you are to apply yourself correctly. Perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that can ensure that you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study and the responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it, it is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it. All students study in entirely different ways, this is because we are all individuals and what is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen. Prescriptive Change, is far easier to manage and control, than Emergent Change. The same is true with distance-learning. It is much easier and much more enjoyable, if you feel that you are in control and that things are going to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Targets are not met and we do not understand why. Sometimes we do not even know if targets are being met. It is not enough for us to conclude that the study plan just failed. If it is failing, you will need to understand what you can do about it. Similarly if your study plan is succeeding, it is still important to understand why, so that you can improve upon your success. You therefore need to have guidelines for self-assessment so that you can be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start is developing your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point in order to avoid confusion. Do not just write the first things that come into your head because they are likely to be too similar to each other. Make a list of possible departmental headings, such as: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing and Production. Then brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve under each heading and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top item from each department heading and choose these as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Team Accountability corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability and current commitments. The reason why there is such a variance in time estimates is because every student is an individual, with differing productivity levels and different commitments. These differentiations are then exaggerated by the fact that this is a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program. Consequently all of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We would always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, but you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case. With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them, these will be your milestones; you can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook, you could also use a financial forecasting software; break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time, the more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be; finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance. With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives; with reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented; remember that you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks; you also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training modules which are relevant; then break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately ten to do’s for each task and enter these into your study plan; once again you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning and this could constitute your study plan; you could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistic in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner. Once you have completed your first study module, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this you must first time yourself while training by using an alarm clock. Set the alarm for hourly intervals and make a note of how far you have come within that time. You can then make a note of your actual performance on your study plan and then compare your performance against your forecast. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts as a result. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
With reference to time management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual time taken in your study plan; consider your successes with time-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; consider your failures with time-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to time planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your time expectations. You need to be consistent with your time management, otherwise you will never complete your studies. This will either be because you are not contributing enough time to your studies, or you will become less efficient with the time that you do allocate to your studies. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies, they can just become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on. We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. If you have a problem relating to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and your family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to achieve feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards distance-learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, client partners or your family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement. You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
Prepare your study environment, your study tools and rules.
Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
Create a format for your study plan.
Consider your study objectives and tasks.
Create a study forecast.
Assess your study performance.
Re-evaluate your study forecast.
Be consistent when managing your study plan.
Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Team Accountability corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Team Accountability program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Team Accountability corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Team Accountability corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Team Accountability Specialist (APTS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Team Accountability – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Online Article
By Kudyba, Fjermestad & Davenport,
Journal of Intellectual Capital,
April 2020.
“A research model for identifying factors that drive effective decision-making and the future of work
Introduction: the evolving digital era, intellectual capital and the future of work
The emergence of new technologies has unveiled a “digital transformation” of organizations across industry sectors. New technologies have augmented the ways businesses create, access and communicate information resources. These functional attributes have enhanced the current incorporation and future demand of an evolving “new workforce,” which entails a knowledge-intensive focus – the knowledge worker. However, the mere availability of new technologies and existing labor resources do not ensure enhancements in operational strategizing and corresponding efficiencies and innovation. The interactions of workers and technologies introduce vast complexities that involve obstacles that must be identified, understood and managed (Hagelet al., 2017). This evolving area requires rigorous research in the realm of intellectual capital (IC) management. IC refers to structural capital (the systems and information resources in an organization), human capital (workers) and relational capital (the way organizations interact with external entities such as customers, suppliers, vendors, etc.) (Bontis, 1998). Additional research has included another element to IC that includes social capital or the way people work together (Seemann et al., 2002).
The digital era is introducing disruptions and opportunities for organizations to enhance efficiencies and innovation. A major requirement at this juncture is to increase the understanding of how organizations best implement the components of IC, including human, social, relational and structural elements that underpin this dynamic transformational phenomenon. New technologies involving information creation, communication, dissemination and process functionality are creating new ways to provide value to the marketplace. These opportunities require the inclusion of diverse worker and team attributes to interact through various mediums to achieve successful transformations. These collaborations facilitate knowledge transfer and value to the organization (Sveiby, 2001).
The purpose of this work is to introduce a research model that provides a structure to examine combinations and interactions between the components of IC to better identify worker and team attributes essential to successful digital endeavors. Because of the evolution of new technologies (e.g. cognitive and communication-based) there exist gaps in existing research regarding elements in IC interactions and project success. Some of the elements not addressed in literature include effectiveness of IC components for strategic (longer-term initiatives), controlled proportions of gender and social sensitivity within groups, cognitive skills of groups and the incorporation of augmented technology, to name a few. This work will provide a literature review that illustrates research addressing the topic of understanding worker/technology interactions for successful projects. It will then include a synopsis of the important findings along with gaps that must be addressed in order to incorporate the essential combinations of labor and technologies to achieve success for evolving projects. The proposed model will address gaps in existing theory and incorporate evolving elements more unique to digital transformations”
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Online Article
By Robinson, Perryman & Hayday,
The Institute of Employment Studies,
2004.
“The Drivers of Employee Engagement
What is engagement?
IES’ first research step was to investigate what HR professionals understood when they used the term ‘engagement’. A clear view of the behaviours demonstrated by the engaged employee emerged:
• belief in the organisation
• desire to work to make things better
• understanding of business context and the ‘bigger picture’
• respectful of, and helpful to, colleagues
• willingness to ‘go the extra mile’
• keeping up-to-date with developments in the field.
Engagement has clear overlaps with the more exhaustively researched concepts of commitment and organisational citizenship behaviour, but there are also differences. In particular, engagement is two-way; organisations must work to engage the employee, who in turn has a choice about the level of engagement to offer the employer.
IES defines engagement as ’a positive attitude held by the employee towards the organisation and its values. An engaged employee is aware of business context, and works with colleagues to improve performance within the job for the benefit of the organisation. The organisation must work to develop and nurture engagement, which requires a two-way relationship between employer and employee.’
Measuring engagement
Our analysis used data from IES’ 2003 attitude survey of over 10,000 employees in 14 organisations in the NHS. Twelve attitude statements representing engagement were tested; all 12 were found to ‘sit together’ reliably, to comprise a single indicator of engagement. Although tested within the NHS, the statements are not NHS-specific; they can be transferred to other organisations and sectors. If attitude survey space is at a premium, and organisations feel unable to include 12 statements, an engagement sub-set of five statements can be used instead. This sub-set can be safely used, as it represents the essence of engagement and has been tested for reliability.
Positive responses to the engagement statements indicate:
• a positive attitude towards, and pride in, the organisation
• belief in the organisations’ products/services
• a perception that the organisation enables the employee to perform well
• a willingness to behave altruistically and be a good team-player
• an understanding of the bigger picture and a willingness to go beyond the requirements of the job.”
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Online Article
By Allen J. A. et al,
American Psychological Association,
2018.
“Debriefs: Teams Learning From Doing in Context
Debriefs are a type of work meeting in which teams discuss, interpret, and learn from recent events during which they collaborated. In a variety of forms, debriefs are found across a wide range of organizational types and settings. Well-conducted debriefs can improve team effectiveness by 25% across a variety of organizations and settings. For example, the U.S. military adopted debriefs decades ago to promote learning and performance across the various services. Subsequently, debriefs have been introduced in the medical field, the fire service, aviation, education, and in a variety of organizational training and simulation environments. After a discussion of various purposes for which debriefs have been used, we proceed with a historical review of development of the concepts and use in industries and contexts. We then review the psychological factors relevant to debrief effectiveness and the outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations that deploy debriefs. Future directions of particular interest to team researchers across a variety of psychological disciplines are presented along with a review of how best to implement debriefs from a practical perspective.
Sometimes called critiques, after-action reviews, after event reviews, huddles, hot-washes, and post mortems, debriefs are a type of work meeting in which teams discuss, interpret, and learn from recent events during which they collaborated (Allen, Baran, & Scott, 2010; Reiter-Palmon, Kennel, Allen, Jones, & Skinner, 2015; Salas, Klein, et al., 2008; Scott, Dunn, Williams, & Allen, 2015). According to a recent meta-analysis, teams who engage in debriefs outperform teams that do not (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013). In fact, well-conducted debriefs can improve team effectiveness by 25% across a variety of organizations and settings (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013). In particular, debriefs have been suggested as an important mechanism by which individuals and teams use postincident communication to learn and improve performance.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that debriefs in a variety of forms are found across a wide range of organizational types and settings. For example, the U.S. military adopted debriefs decades ago to promote learning and performance among a variety of teams across the services (Morrison & Meliza, 1999). More recently, debriefs under various names are found in the medical field (Reiter-Palmon et al., 2015), the fire service (Crowe, Allen, Scott, Harms, & Yoerger, 2017), aviation (Smith & Dismukes, 2000), aerospace (Rogers & Milam, 2004), education (Ellis, Ganzach, Castle, & Sekely, 2010), and in a variety of organizational training and simulation environments (Rosen, Salas, Tannenbaum, Pronovost, & King, 2012). In all of these settings, debriefs are implemented ideally in accordance with the needs of the teams who use them and in association with variations in purpose, scope, formality, structure, and so forth.
After a discussion of various definitions and purposes for which debriefs have been used, we proceed with a historical review of development of the concepts and their use in various industries and contexts. We then review the factors relevant to debrief effectiveness, the inputs for effective debriefs, and the outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations that deploy debriefs. Finally, we will identify future research directions of particular interest to team researchers across a variety of psychological disciplines as well as future practice directions for individuals engaging in debriefing activities in their organizations.”
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Online Article
By Gardner, A. K. et al,
American Journal of Surgery,
Feb 2017.
“ Setting goals, not just roles: Improving teamwork through goal-focused debriefing
1. Introduction
Debriefing has been recognized as one of the most crucial components of simulation-based team training.1 It is the process that occurs after the simulation, in which facilitators encourage trainees to reflect on their own practice so that they can explain, analyze, and synthesize information and emotional states.2 In this way, debriefing capitalizes upon experiential learning principles by having learners actively explore what went well, what went wrong, and why it happened so that learners can identify and close gaps in their own knowledge and skills.3
Although various debriefing models have been created to help facilitators lead these post simulation conversations in a systematic manner,4, 5 most existing approaches do not include a formal component that includes a specific discussion of goals to work toward in the next session. Instead, most debriefings are centered on past behaviors and why they occurred.6 Numerous studies from the training literature, however, have documented that combining feedback with goals for future training helps both individuals and teams engage in more efficient and effective behaviors in subsequent training episodes.7, 8, 9, 10 These studies suggest that having trainees focus on goals for the next session is valuable because it helps learners direct, motivate, and sustain behavior.11 Thus, previous literature would suggest that integrating goal setting into the debriefing process would enhance value the value of these reflections by directing learners towards specific strategies for improvement.
When considering goal setting for team training, though, educators must consider the focus of those goals. Specifically, goals can be directed at the individual, in which individual team members are encouraged to focus on their own personal performance, or they can be directed at the group, in which individual team members are encouraged to focus on team performance.12 This focus is discrete, but powerful. A majority of work suggests that group goals will increase team performance, as it helps focus attention toward the team and helps establish cooperative feelings among team members.13 The impact of individual goals on teamwork, however, is less known. Researchers have suggested that individual goals might direct attention away from strategies that would facilitate team performance. Focused on maximizing personal performance, team members might neglect team needs. These propositions are supported by work that has shown a negative effect of individual goals on team performance.14, 15 However, the impact of these goal types on teamwork in a simulated-based setting is unknown.
Thus, the goals of this study are twofold. First, we wanted to examine if inclusion of goal setting techniques within the debriefing session enhanced teamwork performance. Second, we wanted to investigate what types of goals – individual or group-focused – would be most beneficial for teams.”
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Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Mission Focus
Advantages Of Debriefing
One of the most important lessons from the past few decades is that there is no substitute for constant learning in today’s corporate world. Rapid worldwide change can almost instantly make specialised professional skill sets outdated. Additionally, businesses that don’t regularly update their presumptions about their operating environment (the market) will soon become irrelevant or obsolete. It is more crucial to cultivate the ability to adapt to a changing environment than it is to learn from a specific lesson. Without formal learning mechanisms to maintain the ability to learn and preserve information, an organisation would fail.
Debriefing offers a potent and crucial framework for preserving the ability to learn. By developing lessons learnt through the debriefing procedure, we produce explicit knowledge, a type of knowledge. Both explicit and tacit knowledge exist, according to knowledge management theory. Simply put, explicit knowledge is knowledge that can be recorded and/or stored. But tacit knowledge can only be found in the minds of people because it is complex and challenging to codify. Concepts of competence and experience are intimately tied to tacit knowledge.
Individuals gain experience over time as they battle daily difficulties. But experience can also be acquired by observing others and interacting with others within the organisation. Through these activities, a company’s culture can either be carefully cultivated or allowed to spiral out of control. Execution should follow a planned, disciplined procedure so that beneficial behaviours are reflected in the organisational culture.
Every person involved in a project or work has a direct link between cause and effect thanks to debriefing, which greatly boosts learning and experience. Additionally, the tendency to seclude learning within “stovepipes” and “silos” may be avoided when lessons learned are made available to the entire organisation through web-accessed databases. There is a propensity for knowledge to align itself with organisational frameworks, as several knowledge management practitioners have noted. When this is the case, learning will probably take place simultaneously without awareness of what another department within the organisation is doing. One of the goals of sharing lessons gained is to connect these parallel learning “silos.”
Many veterans who have made a successful transition to both large and small U.S. businesses have been surprised to find that debriefing is a largely unknown practise outside of the armed forces. Although it is used in some businesses as a training tool, routine business operations rarely employ it consistently. Here are three compelling arguments for your sales, marketing, or entire organisation to adopt a debriefing practise and culture.
1. A Daily Reminder of Raising the Bar and Continuous Improvement. The adage “If you’re not growing, you’re dying” is undoubtedly one you’ve heard. Effective debriefs provide everyone engaged with the opportunity to learn and advance, whether tactical or strategic. They inspire fresh concepts and remedies for issues’ underlying causes. The egos, finger-pointing, and brown-nosing are out. Truthful self-evaluation, helpful modifications, and promises to avoid making the same mistakes again are the order of the day. A well-run debrief ought to have everyone enthused about the prospect of improving performance in the future. Engaged teams are better able to acquire more business and provide clients with more value when debriefing is done well.
2. A Strong Forum for Recommendations. Senior sales, marketing, and product development managers can learn a lot from sales activity debriefs at all levels, which will help them better understand the market, customer insights, competition, differentiation, innovation, training, and a variety of other elements that are essential to an organization’s success. Management cannot afford to lose track of the marketplace’s pulse in the dynamic and competitive environment of today. Not every meeting or contact with a customer or potential customer can involve the entire company. Regular and well-planned sales debriefings can be a useful instrument for disseminating market intelligence.
3. Strengthen accountability and deliberate action. Disciplined debriefing is a key component of strong organisational cultures that frequently foster better awareness and accountability. Debriefing is not a method of accountability like to Orwell’s Big Brother. It is a self-managed practise created to discover, address, and prevent future avoidable mistakes as well as confirm the efficacy of successful activities and results. As a byproduct of this strategy, team members frequently behave consciously, aware of their ongoing obligations and the accountability that comes with the debrief.
Purpose, Mission and Values Alignment
In a corporate environment that is continually changing, organisations are well-positioned for long-term success if their purpose or mission is clearly defined and supported by values. These organisations with distinct missions and purposes know why they exist and how they intend to accomplish their goals. They are well-equipped to deal with disruption, change, and increased demands from their partners, consumers, and community members. The need for firms to navigate these market forces has never been greater because of the intense competition and rapid pace of change they face.
When deliberately created and successfully executed, purpose, mission, and values are strategic business components that serve as a roadmap for organisations, assisting them in staying on course and working towards attaining their long-term objectives. They support the formation of customer loyalty, employee motivation, and company decision-making.
Mission-Driven vs. Purpose-Driven
For organisations, purpose and mission both fulfil the same function, but in different ways and with different effects. An organization’s reason for existing and its mission serve as a guide for decision-making.
Even if a purpose and a mission both have strategic value, organisations cannot be both purpose- and mission-driven. In actuality, operating a firm with a purpose as opposed to a mission is very different. Businesses with a purpose focus their operations, procedures, and personnel on improving society. A mission is timeless and frequently has a broad reach.
Companies with a mission also have a good influence, but typically focus on a smaller group of stakeholders. A company’s mission may also alter over time as the market changes or as corporate goals alter. On the other hand, a purpose rarely, if ever, changes.
Although it’s common for businesses to mix up these two concepts, knowing whether a company is purpose- or mission-driven is crucial.
Examples Of Organisations With A Mission
companies with a purpose commit to a cause that advances their company’s goals. Organisations gain clarity, concentration, and direction from their missions. It enhances the client experience and complements the organization’s core competencies.
Delivering value to its main stakeholders, such as customers, shareholders, and staff, is the focus of mission-driven businesses. Beyond these stakeholders, they do not, however, aim to help a large, worldwide public. Revenue, profit, and client involvement are the performance indicators used by mission-driven businesses.
Case Study
A well-known firm with a mission is Starbucks. Its purpose is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighbourhood at a time.” Starbucks doesn’t exist to address major societal issues like racial unfairness, poverty, or climate change. With its coffee and coffee shops, it aims to improve the lives of its customers. Although Starbucks’ mission statement is not focused on providing global good or solving global problems, it is still illuminating, inspiring, and elevating.
Case Study
Other instances of organisations with missions are:
• Google: Compile and make accessible all of the world’s information
• Peloton: A global exercise network that connects individuals via technology and design, enabling them to be their best selves wherever they are.
• Southwewt Airlines: Connecting people to the things that matter in their lives through hospitable, dependable, and affordable air travel is Southwest Airlines’ mission. (Note: Southwest presents this on their website as a purpose statement, however we argue that Southwest is mission-driven rather than purpose-driven.)
What are The 4 Stages of a Team’s Lifecycle That a Leader Should Know?
One of the most important business abilities today, in my opinion, is the ability to create, inspire, and manage a winning team. This skill is essential to both our success as managers and the success of our organisations.
The 500 Fortune Companies invest millions of dollars in research to determine how to assemble “the perfect team.”
Google ran an experiment called experiment Aristotle in 2012. To determine the ideal formula for the winning team, it cost millions of dollars, took years, involved comments from hundreds of employees, and entailed examination of more than 100 current teams.
However, not all of us fully get how teams function. Alternatively, what distinguishes teams from workgroups? I hope this paper clarifies this crucial subject.
First, let’s define a team: “A team is a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common goal for which they hold each other accountable.” In this definition, accountability and common goal are the two crucial words.
How is a team different from a work group is the question at hand. A work group’s ability to operate as a whole depends on the individual contributions of each member. On the other side, a team aspires to something that is more than what any one of its members could do alone, which we refer to as SYNERGY.
Four common team types are as follows:
• Functional Teams: created in a department of an organisation that performs a specific function, such finance, human resources, or marketing
• Cross-functional teams: different functional domains
• Self-managed teams: cross-functional or functional, whatever. Although these teams are autonomous and have the power to make operational decisions in order to achieve their objectives, the organisation still determines the team’s budget, scope, and mission.
• Virtual teams: The extent to which participants interact via technology across organisational, geographic, and other borders. Virtual teams have proliferated as a result of communication technology developments, namely in fields like new product development and innovation where agility, speed, and flexibility are crucial.
Lifecycle of a Team
Understanding these stages will have the biggest impact on your ability to lead your team effectively and successfully. Each team goes through four unique periods in its life cycle.
Forming:
Members of the team are becoming acquainted. determining the common standards and guidelines for behaviour, process, and performance. Talk about “rules” or “procedures.”
Answering queries and outlining objectives, regulations, and expectations are useful team leader tasks at this phase.
Storming
Conflicts or pronounced differences of opinion frequently occur in this stage since teams are still “immature.”
As a leader, you should be concentrating on team procedures, reiterating the vision, and encouraging win-win thinking among team members at this time.
Norming:
The group establishes its ground rules, develops a feeling of identity and purpose, and starts working together more successfully.
Giving feedback and promoting role difference are both parts of your leadership responsibilities.
Performing:
The performance phase is the “pay-off” for the teams who advance to this stage. The team is highly productive, has a clear understanding of its strengths and shortcomings, and has a concentrated approach to problem-solving.
During this stage, your job is to continuously give the team performance feedback.
Make building and directing a winning team your top goal because it is a difficult undertaking, but success in this area ensures your place at the top of your business.
Keep in mind that the most successful individuals are always outstanding team leaders, like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson.
Exercise 8.1: Retrospective Sailing
Course Manual 2: Mindset & Attitude
Why Having A Winning Attitude Is Essential At This Time
Success is a learned attitude and approach to life rather than a fleeting fact. Your work ethic and the motivation behind the activity, more than the actual task you do, are what give it significance.
Your conduct is determined by your thoughts, and your thoughts ultimately shape your reality. In today’s environment, developing a winning mentality entails succeeding at living life to the fullest. It does not define success in terms of constrained goals and numbers, but rather redefines it in terms of an abundance attitude.
The Importance Of Mindset
It is essential to have a growth attitude for success to continue to gain momentum. greater than their obsession on the result of a situation, successful people have greater power over how they view it.
A growth mindset aims to view obstacles more as chances to learn than anything else. Failures are accepted graciously since they provide guidance for future decision-making that is more informed.
People achieve because they know how to get around difficult circumstances rather than because they are put in advantageous ones. In their minds, the availability of other resources is more important than the absence of anything.
A growth or abundance mindset is exactly what this method of thinking is known as. No matter where they are in life, those with this mindset succeed because they are mentally oriented for success.
Fight the Right Battle
It is undeniable that change occurs when we step outside of our comfort zones. Building an unbeatable winning mentality that is based on intentional, persistent effort is not always a simple task, though.
After all, it is far simpler to place the blame on the situation than it is to take responsibility for our own actions.
We mistakenly think of failures as “setbacks” because of our ego. The most important thing is to combat this idea and concentrate on our true motivations for thinking, acting, and behaving the way we do.
The ability to envision the path ahead and use setbacks as “stepping stones” for improvement is the foundation of a winning mentality.
When we change our viewpoint to reflect this, we give ourselves the inspiration to prosper rather than just get by.
10 Effective Ways to Develop a Winning Mentality
The next question is how, now that we are aware of how important cultivating the appropriate mindset is. The good news is that this way of thinking may be created rather than being born. It can be developed and grown over time with the appropriate actions and direction.
1. Getting the Mind Ready to Win
Of course, having the desire to succeed is essential, but so too is having the will to prepare. An essential component of any outstanding performance is mastering our timetable. Successful people don’t just turn up for a chance without having a predetermined plan of action or strategy in place.
These people are aware that they can never fully rely on their skills and abilities to succeed. They take into account their flaws, plan for setbacks and emergencies, and understand the importance of having a backup plan.
The power of preparedness enables us to face our vulnerabilities head-on rather than cowering in fear. With a blueprint in hand, it also aids in structuring our advancement. SMART, which stands for “smart” goals, is a framework that aids in our preparation.
• specific
• measurable
• achievable
• relevant
• time-based
Consistent effort and the fortitude to recover from setbacks are necessary for success.
When you are ready for difficulty, you can anticipate its pitfalls and know how to recover and continue. In her book “Grit,” Angela Duckworth explains how this combination of enthusiasm and the ability to stick with a plan increases chances of success over and above natural talent.
2. Developing Your Trade
Instead of being masters of numerous trades, successful people specialize in one or two. They continuously conduct research and put what they already know into practice.
Passion alone is insufficient, and a vision without action is useless. Because of this, trainers and athletes understand how crucial it is to lay a solid foundation upon which to build.
Someone who is committed to succeeding will maintain their momentum if they have a strong core.
Because of this, winners think that strengthening their abilities, information, routines, and even intention will give them a strong foundation from which to build.
When a company’s mission or guiding principles are clear, it takes considerably less for us to err since we have the knowledge and guidance we need to keep ourselves on solid ground.
3. Focus On The Current Task At Hand
The most productive people are not the ones that keep a ton of lists of things to do. In actuality, it’s because they know how to concentrate on a task without any interruptions at all.
Author Nir Eyal discusses how we may control our reaction to stimuli that interfere with our ability to concentrate on the task at hand. Is this trigger serving me, or am I serving it? is a question he asks the reader in his book “Indistractable.”
In the modern era, social media and technology act as quick diversionary strategies that account for the root reasons of our distractions. Nir offers constructive solutions to handle them, regain control of our time, and develop mental resilience.
In a journal, a Trello board, a calendar, or both, you should ruthlessly prioritize your tasks in the second step. Keep in mind that productivity and success depend heavily on using the synergy of other people’s contributions and resources.
4. Have No Fear Of Change
It takes more than just physical prowess or intellectual prowess to succeed; success ultimately depends on your capacity to adapt to change. The term “Agile Mindset” refers to this type of mental conditioning.
No of the difficulties encountered or the adjustments made, it looks for fresh approaches to the issue. With an agile mindset, you become adaptable and concentrate on your solution to the issue rather than the issue itself.
Reframing the issue at hand, questioning our own ideas, and opening up new options are all part of embracing change. With whatever changes push you off balance in life, you obtain a new perspective when you imagine and build your own reality.
5. Losing Is Acceptable, But Giving Up Is Not
One who has a winning attitude is always willing to experiment and make mistakes in order to learn. This is arguably the most important characteristic that separates winners from the others. You don’t fail if you don’t succeed at anything; you fail if you give up and stop trying.
Case Study
Michael Jordan, one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known, is a shining illustration of this. At the height of his career, he switched sports and embraced the challenge of succeeding against all odds.
Jordan understood that success depends on having an open mentality and being eager to learn from experience. Obstacles may only be surmounted, climbed, or avoided with the right mental preparation.
Your genetic make-up and natural abilities can only get you started; it’s your dedication and work ethic that will get you there. Even when faced with setbacks and difficulties, a winning mentality will always aim for improvement.
6. Identifying What’s Effective And What Isn’t
A winning attitude emphasizes adapting to the times and recognizes the value of development and innovation. In order to determine what is working for us or against us, it is crucial to reflect on the methods we employ as well as our behaviors, routines, and behavior.
Effective people are always searching for fresh, ground-breaking methods to advance their knowledge and abilities.
We must intentionally adapt and adopt practices that boost our output at all levels in order to get further in any subject.
When we move with the times rather than against them and make use of the most recent developments in thought, practice, and trend, we can make real progress.
7. Always Support Constructive Competition
Healthy rivalry is advantageous, even required. It forces us to think outside the box and be more inventive and creative. If that were not the case, we would be in danger of taking our performance for granted.
It helps to be inspired and motivated by people who compete against us instead of becoming overwhelmed with cynicism and jealously. Failure not only makes us humble and grounded, but it also teaches us to work even harder the following time.
When we see competition as healthy, it motivates us to study the traits and values of successful people.
Instead of only counting the points earned by defeating a rival opponent, having a winning mindset is more about the attitude, knowledge, and experience acquired along the entire process.
8. Always Have A Backup Plan
This goes hand in hand with the importance of and benefit from thorough preparation. Winners always have everything planned out and strategically approached; they never rely on chance or hope.
Without a backup plan, it is simple to feel defeated and illiterate after failing. However, having a backup plan in place makes sure that we can bounce back in the event that we lose or experience a setback.
This tactic makes sure that we always have a different path ready to take as we work our way up the ladder of success. Without this, it is simple to give up and find an explanation. Having a backup plan ensures we never have to start from scratch and always have something to work with.
9. Try To Join A Support Group That Has A Winning Mentality
Never be afraid to ask for assistance or constructive criticism because you could be rejected. The people who have never been scared to seek for help go on to achieve a lot in their careers.
Making decisions can be made lot easier for us with the correct guidance and perspective from the right individuals. Time is saved, we are held accountable, and we are motivated to advance.
We are more likely to acquire empowering beliefs and use that synergy to produce better and greater results when we are in the correct support group.
We shall be restricted to only our own notions and definitions of what success can look like if we don’t expose ourselves to other people.
10. Study The Very Best Material
The most powerful individuals of our time have always developed their minds by purposefully observing and picking up tips from other successful individuals. People are drawn to extremely successful people’s behaviors because we are aware of their effectiveness.
Studying the lives, beliefs, and practices of such individuals means ingesting time-tested and helpful principles for anybody pursuing excellence.
The benefit of learning from the greatest is that we have the necessary knowledge and do not waste time trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
It’s also useful to keep in mind that these folks are more scholars of life than of their particular fields of study. They are always willing to learn from the experiences, viewpoints, and concepts of others as well as their own.
An Overview of Creating a Winning Mentality
The richest people on earth also have the same 24 hours each day at their disposal. Their winning attitude and self-control are the only things that set them unique.
Despite having the necessary abilities and knowledge, winners understand the value of planning and preparation. They always have a firm foundation, understand how to set priorities, and are able to quickly adjust to any situation.
They see success as a multifaceted process that expands when shared with others, provided they have the necessary support system and the desire to collaborate with like-minded others.
This mindset is developed and strengthened by their willingness to learn from failure, view setbacks as opportunities to adapt, and constantly refine their strategy for success.
Finally, and most importantly, they are always focused on the goal. They imitate, pick up knowledge, and work to excel. For them, having a winning attitude means not only doing well in their respective fields, but also taking advantage of all that life has to offer.
Exercise 8.2: Examine Your Rejections
• Consider a few circumstances where you experienced rejection. Maybe you weren’t chosen for the basketball team, didn’t get the job offer, or got passed up for a date.
• What did you discover?
• Has the experience given you a better understanding of who you are and what you want and don’t want from life?
• What benefits emerged from the rejection (perhaps not right away, but later)?
• Can you wish the person well, let go of any resentment, and forgive them for rejecting you?
Course Manual 3: The Approach
Leading a Debrief Successfully
“We do not learn from experience … we learn from reflecting on experience.” – John Dewey
Postmortems, retrospectives, after-action reviews, wrap-ups, and project “success” meetings are a few titles for these debriefs. Whatever name you give them, they all share the same objective and fundamental structure.
What is a Project Retrospective?
The Project Retrospective is an opportunity for the team and organisation to reflect on a project that has been finished and learn from both the achievements and shortcomings in order to go forward with improved methods of operation.
These discussions, which the US Army has formalised as the after-action review, guarantee that a squad quickly absorbs the lessons from each fight.
The typical queries there are along these lines:
• What did we plan to accomplish?
• What truly took place?
• Why did it take place?
• What will we do the following time?
Retrospectives allow a team to take stock of their lessons learned.
The Primary Method
About the same issues are covered throughout the project debriefing process as during the brief after-action conversation. It appears as follows, but I’ll go into more depth below.
1. Review the undertaking.
Start by going over the project’s objectives, schedule, budget, significant events, and success measures.
The team needs to have a common knowledge of the facts and comprehension of the aspects of the project that they may not have been directly involved in in order to generate ideas that everyone can agree on.
This process shouldn’t be rushed or skipped, especially for bigger projects. People will show up at the retrospective prepared to talk about and work out issues, frequently assuming they are well informed about what occurred. Rarely is this the case.
If you are evaluating a project as a team, it took a lot of people with various backgrounds to get there. Before someone tries to address a problem they may only partially understand, this phase makes sure everyone has all the information straight.
2. Talk about the good and bad points.
The meeting’s primary focus is on this. Everyone discusses their project-related learnings, both positive and negative.
This is the meeting’s most entertaining and difficult section. By selecting the questions you’ll pose and how the team will share its responses, you, as the meeting facilitator, can have a significant impact on how well your retrospective goes.
3. Action planning: Specify methods to enhance next work.
Have you ever worked with a group that constantly speaks about their goals, issues, and needed changes but never takes any action?
That’s awful. It’s time-wasting, discouraging, and demotivateing.
The most accurate indicator of a retrospective’s success is actual change. You’ll conclude the discussion by developing a detailed action plan for changes to make sure that your retrospective actually leads to anything getting better. Making real progress is wonderful.
Framing principles
The practise of retrospectives.
It requires expertise to lead a truly excellent retrospective, and experience is the only way to develop it. Effective participation also requires practise.
After you’ve done these meetings a few times, they run more smoothly and produce better results. People need to gain a sense of the kind of feedback that are effective. They must feel that their opinions are valued and that the meeting produces genuine change. The team can make better decisions more quickly and more easily when they have practised. More importantly, a well-run retrospective results in improvements that enhance how the team works moving ahead; the chance to actually make a difference is a powerful incentive.
Schedule adequate time.
Every meeting must last AT LEAST one hour. 45 minutes each week should be the general rule for project work.I once oversaw digital web initiatives that lasted between three and six months, as one example. After each significant milestone, we conducted a brief retrospective before holding a larger “Project Wrap” or “Success Meeting” to wrap things up. After the Project Wrap, which usually lasted three hours, we all went out for nachos and beer.
Planning is necessary.
You’re asking the group to think back on their experience, identify the most important lessons, then apply those lessons to make real changes. Rushing it will result in you saying whatever comes to mind, which usually reflects more on how each participant’s current project is progressing than what transpired during the previous one.
Avoid winging it. Make it simple for the team to prepare by having a plan in place.
Start out positively by emphasising your accomplishments.
This seems overly optimistic, but that is undoubtedly one of the main goals of this rule.
But more significantly, you must introduce successes so that they are covered. There is no turning back once you begin discussing difficulties. People are hardwired to notice when things aren’t going well and to concentrate attentively on finding solutions. As a result, we tend to take our triumphs for granted and believe they were a result of our excellent work.
It’s a trap.
Have you ever seen someone who was extremely well-off, who breezed through childhood and college on their parents’ dime, with awards for all their “accomplishments” hanging on the wall, only to be startled and dejected when the “real world” didn’t recognise and reward them for merely turning up? Of course you have if you’re fortunate enough to reside in the US.
Businesses act in the same way. Luck plays a significant role in why one initiative succeeds while another fails, and we often take it for granted. Instead, we ought to devise strategies for success that we can directly control and learn from our fortunate encounters.
You must first set aside time to examine your successes in order to make sure that occurs and to escape the unique unicorn trap.
The remains of our debunked beliefs, flawed theories, and busted myths clutter the road to success.
Ensure safety.
Do you know what “blameless” retrospectives are? The importance of making sure the retrospective is about sharing ideas and learning, rather than assigning blame, complaining, or resolving interpersonal conflicts, is highly stressed in the software community.
Learn about blameless retrospectives if you think your organisation could be prone to assigning blame. Additionally, think about introducing the Retrospective Prime Directive at the start of the meeting.
Per The Prime Directive:
Regardless of what we find, we recognise and firmly believe that everyone did the best they could given the circumstances, the information they had at the time, their knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Everyone knows so much more after the project’s conclusion. Naturally, we will come across choices and deeds we wish we could go back and change. This is wisdom to be appreciated, not condemnation used to humiliate.
Good Ideas That Never Materialise Have A Greater Impact Than Small Adjustments
You must leave the meeting with a list of specific steps you intend to take. Big, bold ambitions are exhilarating, but if they never materialise, it’s a real letdown. People will quit attending if they notice that while these sessions produce a variety of ideas, nothing concrete ever comes of it.
Make sure the action plans that come out of your meeting are feasible and that the individuals in charge of the changes can actually carry them out for a meaningful outcome. If the person in charge has the time and power to implement the change, it could have a significant impact. If not, though, think beyond the box and opt for the easy victory that the team can control.
Another piece of advice on this one is to reflect more frequently if you and your team can only affect little improvements. These minute adjustments will add up over time.
How to Design Your Debrief
The Schedule
1. Welcome
2. Project Review
3. What did we learn?
• Successes
• Challenges
• Other Insights
4. Priorities: What matters most?
5. Changes to Make: Action Planning
6. Closing
Preparing
1. Decide who they are. Whom will you “hand off” the meeting’s outcomes to? Is this for your team’s internal process improvement, for a team that will take over your project, or for the department or business as a whole?
2. Make a project report and timeline with important occasions and milestones.
3. Examine the initial project definition, the success criteria, and any metrics you have available for the project’s results.
4. Adjust the schedule.
5. set your intentions for the meeting’s various segments and change the agenda as necessary. If this is your first retrospective, we advise adhering to the straightforward structure provided below.
6. Plan the meeting at least three days beforehand.
7. Embrace the group.
8. Instruct them to bring their most important findings, insights, and suggestions for development.
9. Obtain supplies.
10. Sticky notes or online voting platforms are some supplementary materials needed for some retrospective procedures. Snacks are beneficial during in-person meetings!
Bonus: It would be fantastic if you could find an unbiased facilitator and a committed note-taker. This frees you from having to benefit the group and allows you to concentrate on offering your ideas as an equal.
Controlling the Meeting
1. Welcome
Connect to the objective and one another.
Invite everyone in first. Make sure everyone is aware of the meeting’s intended outcome and the steps you’ll take to get there.
Then, if there are any strangers there, have a round of individual introductions.
Share the Retrospective Prime Directive or something comparable to set the tone.
2. Project review
Next, ensure that everyone has the same perspective on the project.
One of three methods will work for this.
Option 1: Discuss it with the group.
You can ask the group to discuss the facts if the project is shorter or if a mid-project retrospective is necessary.
• To ponder: What was anticipated to occur?
• What truly took place?
Or
• What did you hope to accomplish?
• How did you want to accomplish this? How did this evolve as you went along?
Option 2: Share a report – The team offers feedback while the project leader presents the project report.
Option 3: Create a shared timeline – This is one method of establishing a shared timeframe. Even though it takes more time, the discussion and shared experience are greater for it. Additionally, it’s enjoyable!
3. What did we learn?
The majority of the meeting is spent discussing the lessons you’ve learned, which you’ll either pass along to other teams or utilise to modify your work moving forward.
There are numerous methods for requesting this feedback. The possibilities are listed in our facilitator’s guide, which is downloadable. However, you must first determine precisely which questions to pose before deciding on the best way to gather responses.
We maintain simplicity in our internet template. Asked about are:
Successes
What about this project worked particularly well?
What must we make sure to carry out once more in the future?
Challenges
Where did we run into challenges?
Other Insights
• Where did we get lucky?
• What was unexpected?
• Who helped you on this project?
Case Study
A few years ago, I took part in a debrief that was facilitated by a well-meaning CEO whose goal in gathering us all together was to ensure that we learned from our experience. We had just ended a product launch event, and the purpose of the debrief was to assess how we did and where we could improve going forward while the event was still fresh in our minds. Our staff was in a great mood, the event we just organized was enjoyable, it was a sunny day, and our hotel was on the beach, so we had a very favorable setup.
Unfortunately, the promise was almost immediately broken. I was surprised to discover that practically everyone who had attended the conference was permitted to participate as I had been a big supporter of this debrief. Spouses and partners, as well as others who were ardent supporters of our group but weren’t a part of the core tactical planning team, were present. Others had just the loosest ties to the organization. Everyone was welcome to spend some time debriefing, and to my utter shock, folks showed up! Naturally, this completely stifled our ability to address any complex or divisive issues. No one on our core team would talk about those topics in front of friends, family, or other “outsiders” since the necessary psychological safety was lacking.
The CEO addressed the group in a broad circle and said, “I truly simply want to know what’s on your mind and how we can improve for the next event. Let’s go around the room counterclockwise and just talk one after the other. With a full room and this as our format, everyone had an immediate platform to complain about whatever they wanted. This structure is similar to that used in other debriefs I’ve discussed (basically: “What went well?” “What didn’t go well?”). As I recall, we had a lengthy conversation over the breakfast alternatives. We discussed a wide range of administrative issues, including registration glitches and speaker order. We discussed a music that one of the presenters played throughout her presentation—it turned out that everyone really like it. With the exception of the song, we chatted about anything and everything that came to mind, without having any particular focus. Three and a half hours passed before we finally made it to my location in the circle. By that time, I had grown somewhat impatient with the procedure as a whole as well as with myself for allowing it to reach that point.
Instead of expressing my annoyance, I just questioned, “What was our objective this weekend?” Nobody knew the solution, as evidenced by the subsequent hush. I then gave a brief synopsis of what I believed we were attempting to accomplish (importantly, we had never officially stated our goal for the weekend), followed by an assessment of whether or not we had succeeded (I awarded us a “pass” by saying it was “too early to tell”). My argument was that we ought to have done a debrief to assess if the weekend was successful and, if not, to establish what steps we ought to take to ensure success at our product launch. The breakfast choices were therefore unimportant. The song didn’t matter. The majority of the topics we discussed during our three and a half hours of discussion were unimportant because they didn’t address the issue of whether or not we had accomplished our vague goals. Despite being organized with the best of intentions by highly intelligent individuals who genuinely wanted to get better, our debrief turned out to be a complete waste of time.
4. Priorities: What Is Important?
After compiling all the comments, you’ll have a large number of suggestions to choose from. Focus on the three to five items that will have the most impact because you can’t possibly address them all at once.
Choose the main concepts (or themes) that you wish to talk about as a team as a group.
5. To change: action planning
Create action plans for each of your prioritised ideas. Be more precise. List who will accomplish what by when, along with a deadline by which the team can review the results.
6. Final action and analysis
Then begin wrapping up the meeting. After saying thank you to everyone present and summarising your accomplishments, let them know how and when they may access the meeting notes.
Get comments on your meeting as a last step before you depart, or in a follow-up email. To find out how to make the meeting design better the next time, you want to know if attendees found it useful.
Exercise 8.3
Individual evercise
• What were the successes, challenges etc so far?
• What are your priorities?
• Action plan for the next couple of days prior to your ascent
Course Manual 4: Mission Clarity
It may seem simple that any organization should be clear about what it is attempting to do, but in my opinion, most employees would find it painfully difficult to sum up their firm’s aim in fewer than fifty words.
In business, having a single, shared mission is crucial. Everyone is confused with multiple missions. Individuals will continue to focus on their own function and profession when faced with confusion, which is what so many employees experience when a company has a clear and shared objective. This will maintain the “function-focus” quality, which reduces productivity. The transition from a function-focused to a mission-focused organization is made possible by Foundational Element 2. But in order to accomplish this, the company needs a shared mission.
Then, how do we define our goals in a clear, concise, and understandable manner? In a manner that will inspire everyone involved in the objective to work toward “Mission accomplished!” Additionally, in terms that will promote profitability and growth. The third principle offers the solution in a solitary, unifying idea:
A single goal that prioritizes the needs of the customer while functioning within the constraints of stakeholder demands, resource readiness, legal requirements, and social obligations.
The ultimate goal of the company, no matter how it is designed, is to give its clients the best value, as those clients define it. Their mission and goals must be accomplished first and foremost. All staff members and partners in the business who are involved in its success must have that one mission at the forefront of their minds.
However, it is not as simple as it may seem to make our customers’ missions our sole, top priority. The astronauts at NASA are aware of their place on the team as a whole. With those in Mission Control, they practice their missions numerous times. Customers may not see us as partners and are not as cooperative. When awareness of information, such as their anticipated demand, would allow us to better serve their interests, they hide it from us. They might not have embraced the idea of prioritizing consumers themselves and are not hesitant to pursue only their own financial advantage.
This is not to argue that it is unimportant to keep in mind the clients’ financial interests. In fact, doing so is essential. Similar to this, business executives need to take action to secure the cash flow, which is the lifeblood of the company, and continuous profitable growth. It is just an issue of priorities; doing so does not lessen the significance of a mission that prioritizes the needs of the consumer.
Know Your Client
Knowing what the customer wants is necessary in order to meet their expectations. Many business executives make the incorrect assumption that their clients want their goods and services.
The egotistical business that thinks it knows best what the client should want might make it through. It might even succeed, at least until a rival enters the market with the maxim “Build what customers want, and they will come.”
To be truly customer-focused, we need to understand our clients well enough to foresee their needs and take part in meeting them. We need to think like our clients, communicate with them using their terms, read their trade publications, go to their trade fairs, and interact with their organizational executives. We need to be familiar with both our business and that of our clients.
We will ultimately fail if we don’t give our customers what they want all the time, no matter how many goals and objectives we have, how successful our company has historically been, how technically advanced or competitively priced our product or service is currently.
A Motivating Mission
Employees will be challenged and inspired by the firm’s singular, customer-focused objective if it is one that the organization considers to be worthwhile.
Chris Kraft was preparing a report at his NASA Control Center console while watching President Kennedy deliver the momentous address that launched us to the moon. In his own words, Kraft: “We were overwhelmed with emotion, with a sudden new sense of enormous adventure, with pride and awe that the president had dared to stand there and say such a thing.”
Kennedy’s bold challenges continue to inspire people long after his death, which further demonstrates the importance of a declaration of clear, compelling purpose that is easy for everyone to comprehend.
Jim Collins, a business author, agreed that aiming high is essential. He discovered that one of the main success factors shared by the select few businesses that progressed from good to great and were built to survive was the presence of what he called Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). Collins made the following comparison between a BHAG and NASA’s moon mission: “Like the moon mission, a true BHAG is clear and compelling and serves as an unifying focal point of effort—often creating immense team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.”
A mission like this will inspire and direct people to coordinate and link the resources, information network, and organizational energies to complete it. At its best, the motivating mission will keep staff awake at night thinking how to achieve it to the highest standard.
It is required to increase shareholder value through financial success and growth, which could result in greater stock prices for owners and bigger bonuses for some workers. But for the majority of us, “making money” is not a goal that consistently inspires and ignites passion in our work. People may join a firm for financial gain, but according to a national human resource council’s four-year study, they stay because they have an emotional connection to it.
5 Causes Why Your Staff Is Ignorant of Your Company’s Mission
Leadership teams frequently spend countless hours carefully crafting the vision, goal, and strategy of their company, only to have workers lament, “We don’t have a north star.” When executives receive criticism indicating a lack of an aspirational vision, they are frequently taken aback and then spend extra time trying to create the ideal statement. This flawed strategy makes very little headway in establishing their people’s idea of a defined future course.
Case Study
At a leadership team off-site, the mission and purpose were clearly stated, and Roman, the CEO of a consulting services company, was enthusiastic about them. They had thoroughly considered their main capabilities, analyzed the competition, and generated futuristic ideas. They spent hours perfecting each detail and shared the results with the business. But after a year, many senior managers began to complain that the business lacked a north star. Roman was so frustrated that he wanted to collect his leadership team for another off-site so they could improve the work they had already done. They chose, however, to look into the underlying cause of people’s ambiguity first. They were shocked to find a number of very distinct underlying problems.
We’ve seen five potential causes for this frequent issue after working with hundreds of teams and observing CEOs leap to offer quick solutions. Before responding to an employee’s request for direction, pause and determine the source of their quandary. Knowing the motivation behind the request can help you respond to it more skillfully.
Not enough communication.
Executives frequently believe that mentioning their purpose once during an all-hands meeting or once via email is sufficient to accomplish this. However, the further away from the executive suite someone is, the more frequently they need to hear your message. It helps to convey the message in many ways. For instance, it would be nice to have anything in paper or via a video – occasionally both — since your audience might not understand it all verbally. Repetition makes sure that newcomers hear it too and sends the message that this point of view is here to stay in addition to allowing individuals time to comprehend what you’re offering. It isn’t just a managerial fad or a trendy idea at the moment.
We may give specific examples of how the vision has been realized as we spread a consistent message across time. Roman, for instance, never discussed the company’s vision without citing a current instance of it being successful in practice. Roman highlighted employees every week who had provided exceptional customer care regardless of the size and cash worth of the account since treating every customer as though they were their only client was a key component of the company’s strategy. As soon as individuals could link the vision to these specific examples, it quickly became ingrained in culture.
Various altitudes.
Some mission and strategy statements are written from a high vantage point (50,000 feet). They may sound good, but they leave too much to the employee working at a lower level to connect the dots between their day job and the organization’s ostensible goal. Ensure that the message is modified for delivery at various organizational levels. When someone completes a project, emphasize how it contributes to the overall goal.
But the CEO, who is seated at a different vantage point, cannot be the only one responsible for this kind of messaging. Managers on their own must participate. Roman, for instance, worked with all of his direct subordinates to establish distinct tag lines for the overall objective that complemented the unique contributions of each section. After that, to close the information gap between the C-suite and the cubicle, they cascaded to their direct reports for more details. Teams are able to turn your ideas into reality when we take the vision from the boardroom to the hallways.
Low quality.
The management style reveals the organization’s genuine mission. When managers say yes to everything, lofty declarations on paper go down the drain. Employees’ claims that “there’s no north star” in this situation refer to the fact that, despite the existence of a written statement, individual decisions and behaviors are not consistent with the commitment made known. People in Roman’s organization were overworked, juggling several objectives, and spending just as much time on unimportant tasks as on their ostensibly more important tasks. “Perfection is achieved,” according to author Antione de Saint-Exupery, “not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Combine your newfound clarity with a framework for making decisions that outlines standards for the kinds of work that contribute to the objective. Cut out the unnecessary, and support individuals who refuse work that is not in line with the main goal so they may focus more on the important things.
Distaste.
Sometimes it’s simpler for a team member to claim ignorance of the mission than it is to express disapproval or disagreement. This is especially true if there is a large power gap or if the society values safety above dispute. If your business objective has been well expressed and you don’t experience the aforementioned symptoms, look into how much support you have from your team. Investigate the root causes of your concerns to start this process. You might need to conduct anonymous surveys asking individuals what they are scared about losing or what they fear might be revealed as a defect in order to determine what is genuinely going to stymie development. Analyzing the losses, anxieties, and concerns of your constituency will be a better use of your time than trying to seem more clear by constantly searching for the next catchphrase.
Avoiding doing work.
Change is disruptive by its very nature. It calls on us to change our habits of thought and behavior and stop doing what is easy for us. Many people would prefer to become accustomed to the status quo over venturing into the unknown. For some people, aligning with the mission may entail extra work. They could want to shirk this duty and leave it up to you to provide more clarification. Find strategies to encourage the adoption of the business program and to positively recognize (even tiny) steps in the correct direction if this is a problem in your firm.
Case Study
Together with him, Roman’s head of HR made sure that incentives and bonuses correlated with the adoption of the new plan. Additionally, one of the division heads held monthly triage sessions where legacy practices were scrutinized and justifications for their continued use were challenged. They simultaneously increased funds for sound strategic procedures.
Roman and his direct reports were taken aback to learn that all five of the causes were simmering beneath the surface and stoking opposition to the north star. Having a fresh perspective on the situation, they developed a strategy for frequent and consistent communication, enlisted the aid of their teams to link the vision to particular, everyday tasks, set up a system to reward those who switched to the new vision and follow up with those who didn’t, gave assurances and training to those worried about losing relevance, and supported workers who reduced the noise to concentrate on the priorities. After six months, Roman started asking everyone he met to explain the company’s objective and ensure that it was a concise and unified story. Roman and his organization were able to accomplish their goals considerably more quickly because their teams were going forward with them rather than swimming against the current when they took the time to recognize the true difficulties associated with adopting a north star.
A team must have a mission in order to decide on and produce results. Understanding when the absence of a north star is perceived to be due to what is not being said rather than the actual mission statement’s wording is equally important. We can link our staff to our objective rather than chasing modifications once we are aware of their true worries.
Exercise 8.4: Mission Statement Analysis
1. “Be the best in the eyes of our customers, employees and shareholders.” – American Standard
2. “Undisputed marketplace leadership.” – Hershey Company
3. “The Home Depot is in the home improvement business and our goal is to provide the highest level of service, the broadest selection of products and the most competitive prices.” – The Home Depot
4. “Dell’s mission is to be the most successful computer company in the world at delivering the best customer experience in markets we serve.”- Dell
Answers:
Course Manual 5: RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
When two persons enter the same space to acquire information, they may come away with completely different findings. Weeks of work result in inaccurate and incomplete data. The other offers complete and reliable facts and is finished in a matter of hours.
Obtaining Collaboration
Fact-finding requires the operating population’s assistance. It is naive to expect them to assist if the operating staff believes that the goal of the fact-finding process is to alter the work with the intention of decreasing staff. Two-way loyalty and trust are essential for achieving cooperation. We achieve this by making a commitment to creating innovations that simultaneously serve the interests of owners, managers, and customers while also serving the interests of employees.
Process improvement initiatives should be carried out with the goal of improving the company, not cutting people. Naturally, process improvements will alter the work, frequently removing tasks. This is clear. The notion that cutting duties doesn’t necessarily entail cutting staff is not as clear. It could entail having resources available to carry out any number of tasks required by the organization, not the least of which might be more work on improvement. Nobody is in a better position to improve the work than the individuals who are most familiar with it. When firms genuinely care about their employees and when those employees are aware of this, they can relax and passionately commit to continual development.
What Data to Collect
Effective fact-gathering requires having a clear idea of the information you wish to obtain. People who don’t know what they’re looking for but try to learn as much as they can—in other words, when they’re trying to “gather all the facts”—engage in endless and frequently fruitless effort. Just as crucial as knowing the necessary facts is understanding what information not to gather.
Fact-finding follows a pattern that is very useful during process optimization. It employs the typical journalistic inquiries of “what,” “where,” “when,” “why,” “who,” and “how.” This pattern concentrates on the data that is important for process improvement and steers clear of the data that is not. It’s not entirely clear how it manages to accomplish this. It proceeds as follows.
Case Study
Consider a driver who is transporting concrete, which can only be maintained in motion for so long before it becomes useless. He is instructed to perform a reconstruction of his obstacles with a few short comments while he is still on the road because he is running late. He could record the directions he received, the path he took, his experiences along the way, the choices he made in response to the difficulties he faced, and finally the exact amount of time it took him to get from point A to point B. An example of the procedure might be as follows:
This is a clear representation of all the important data points and aids in painting a picture of what actually happened on a difficult day. With this knowledge, it is possible to determine WHY this driver encountered these difficulties. Short sentences are a fantastic and effective technique to convey the information.
Differentiating Facts from Skill
No matter how meticulously information is obtained, it will never equal the perceptions of those who have done the work themselves for a long time. They are endowed with organizational memory. They have amassed in-depth knowledge that is only available to them. When they need it, they naturally and in a way that feels like common sense access this knowledge. But they can’t just tell someone else about it.
For example, if we were to ask a seasoned physician what he does when he sees a patient, we could anticipate a standard response like, “I examine the patient and enter a diagnosis on the patient record form.” If we were to then inquire, “How do you do that? We would be asking for information that took years to compile if we asked, “How do you know what to write as the diagnosis?” Over the course of those years, this detail has changed from being a large number of distinct facts to an instinctively usable skill. We are unable to collect it.
The doctor’s knowledge, as well as that of all other staff, is easily accessible, and it provides a response to the query “What?” The answer to the query “How?” is included in the knowledge that cannot be divulged since it is under the domain of talent. We acknowledge that the information is not available to the fact gatherer rather than attempting to gather the information and settling for simplistic or superficial data.
However, effective improvement depends on this knowledge. We must encourage the individuals who own it to participate in the improvement development activity in order to access it. Employee teams’ core strength lies in this. They offer the collective memory.
Also, don’t think for a second that doctors are more skilled than clerks. There are variations in skill levels across all fields of employment. In order to improve processes, we should aim to use the best abilities that are now available. Therefore, we form teams with our most skilled and experienced workers. Anything less invites superficiality.
The Description Pattern in Use
Instead of talents, the description pattern offers facts. As useful reminders of the processes in a process, we arrange these facts on charts. We have the knowledge required for progress when persons using these charts are adept at carrying out those procedures.
Therefore:
• What – Respond to this question at each stage. This explains the procedure and gives the team the essential reminder.
• Where – The place is the focus of this query. If you respond to it for the very first step of the procedure, you will constantly be aware of the location.
• When – This question typically asks how long a process will take. Ask it at various points during the fact-finding process, noting any delays or unusually time-consuming procedures.
• Who – The answer to this question focuses on who is carrying out each step. Noting each time a new leader takes over is the simplest approach to gather and present this data.
• How – This inquiry is significant, but it shifts the focus from obtaining facts to gathering skills. We shouldn’t discuss it too often. Instead, we leave it to the team to deliver this information as needed.
• Why – This is a unique question. Rather of being descriptive, it is evaluative. While we are gathering information, it is premature to consider it important until we study the process for improvement. Just gather information. We will later ask each of them why they did what they did as a team.
If you follow this approach, you’ll always be able to demonstrate what’s happening.
• You’ll always indicate the location of the work.
• Whenever someone is participating in the work, you will identify them.
• You’ll display the times when processing is taking place most frequently.
• You won’t encumber your readers with non-flow detail about how the various steps are carried out.
Common Sense Guidelines
The analyst must seek out the facts in order to learn about them. This entails visiting to the place where the work is being done and gaining knowledge from the workers there. If numerous persons are performing the same task, a very knowledgeable person should be chosen, or perhaps several people might be interviewed.
Sadly, analysts frequently attempt to gather data in a circumstantial manner. On occasion, this can simply be because the analyst is too lazy to go where the work is being done. The management may have also asked the analyst to keep the project under wraps in order to prevent fears of job loss. Unfortunately, when workers discover—and they will—that covert projects are being carried out in their communities, their anxiety levels will increase even more, which will encourage less cooperation.
Introverts frequently seek for reasons to avoid social interactions and are drawn to research-related jobs. Instead of speaking directly to the operating staff, they are frequently tempted to use written procedures as their source of information. Or, to avoid having to look for information, they might just assume it.
Occasionally, when an analyst visits the supervisor’s office (as is appropriate when visiting a department for the first time), the supervisor prefers to give the information to the analyst rather than having the analyst bother the worker. This might be brought on by a true wish to assist. The boss can also wish to skew the information. The analyst is cut off from the workplace and the person conducting the work, regardless of the motivation.
Whatever the motivations, the quality of the analysis degrades each time an analyst opts to gather data that is disconnected from reality. Facts are replaced with assumptions. Reality is replaced with fantasy. Analysts may get away with it in cases when the variations are little, but professionals shouldn’t try to do the same. Where there are significant differences, the analyst may feel extremely embarrassed. The job quality decreases in the meantime, and in the worst scenarios, significant commitments to work techniques are made based on false assumptions.
Places to Find Facts
The analyst must seek out the facts in order to learn about them. This entails visiting to the place where the work is being done and gaining knowledge from the workers there. If numerous persons are performing the same task, a very knowledgeable person should be chosen, or perhaps several people might be interviewed.
Sadly, analysts frequently attempt to gather data in a circumstantial manner. On occasion, this can simply be because the analyst is too lazy to go where the work is being done. The management may have also asked the analyst to keep the project under wraps in order to prevent fears of job loss. Unfortunately, when workers discover—and they will—that covert projects are being carried out in their communities, their anxiety levels will increase even more, which will encourage less cooperation.
Introverts frequently seek for reasons to avoid social interactions and are drawn to research-related jobs. Instead of speaking directly to the operating staff, they are frequently tempted to use written procedures as their source of information. Or, to avoid having to look for information, they might just assume it.
Occasionally, when an analyst visits the supervisor’s office (as is appropriate when visiting a department for the first time), the supervisor prefers to give the information to the analyst rather than having the analyst bother the worker. This might be brought on by a true wish to assist. The boss can also wish to skew the information. The analyst is cut off from the workplace and the person conducting the work, regardless of the motivation.
Whatever the motivations, the quality of the analysis degrades each time an analyst opts to gather data that is disconnected from reality. Facts are replaced with assumptions. Reality is replaced with fantasy. Analysts may get away with it in cases when the variations are little, but professionals shouldn’t try to do the same. Where there are significant differences, the analyst may feel extremely embarrassed. The job quality decreases in the meantime, and in the worst scenarios, significant commitments to work techniques are made based on false assumptions.
Observation
An someone who has been performing a task for a long time will have an understanding of the work that beyond their capacity to articulate it. Never assume that someone using a machine will convey something precisely, and never think that you can hear exactly. Sometimes someone finds it much simpler to demonstrate what they do than to tell it. A demonstration may also save a lot of time. A person may be able to demonstrate how to complete the activity in a matter of minutes but speak at length about it for hours.
The majority of individuals find it easier to communicate with a human than a machine. In addition, a tape recorder can’t record what is actually viewed. If you’re planning to record the interview on tape, do so after you’ve left the interview location. Without making the employee feel uncomfortable, it might help you record a lot of detail at the time it is still fresh in your mind.
Amount Of Detail
You will need to acquire vast volumes of data, and your project will be perpetually delayed, if you try to gather enough information to rebuild the procedure without consulting with experienced staff. For instance, if you are researching a method that involves five different desks and each of the five workers has five years of expertise, their combined experience totals 25 years. No matter how competent they are, an analyst will never be able to equal that experience through interviews. No matter how often you return, new issues will continue to arise. If you restructure the process based only on the limited information you have, your output will be inadequate in the perspective of these more knowledgeable individuals. After we have finished designing a flawed procedure, it serves no purpose to complain that they failed to inform us of that.
While the analyst cannot match the employees’ level of in-depth knowledge of what transpires at their workplaces, it is not at all difficult to learn some information that those individuals are ignorant of, information that pertains to multiple workplaces. By focusing on the flow of the task instead of the specifics of the individual steps, you can save a lot of time. You put it here. They carry out this. It salves. It is a copy. This section leads there. They get that one. Etc. I don’t care how they carry out the various steps. Just make sure to record the instructions in the correct order.
Then, when it’s time to evaluate, you bring in those five individuals who have a combined 25 years of in-depth experience. Voila! Both the overall view and the details are available to you. You already have all you require to take advantage of the opportunities available.
Exercise 8.5
Course Manual 6: RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
How to Encourage Staff to Create SMART, Unambiguous Goals to Enhance Performance
The first step in maximising productivity, improving performance, and delivering business value is to get your employees to create specific SMART objectives. The purpose of objectives is to keep employees on track and working towards a lofty company objective. They offer direction, focus, expectations setting, and motivation for your workforce. Employees can only perform to their full potential and go above and beyond expectations if they are aware of all expectations. Additionally, employees who are confident in their expectations won’t waste time or energy worrying, allowing them to make the most of their time and abilities.
Despite this, just half of employees strongly feel that they know exactly what is expected of them at work, according to a Gallup poll on global corporations. Where SMART objectives can help is in this situation.
Employees would feel better equipped to prioritise their workload and deliver results by properly applying SMART, clear objectives. This will contribute to the delivery of business value and general performance improvement. It is important to note that putting employees in the driver’s seat is a crucial step in the creation of SMART objectives. We are much more likely—and driven—to achieve the objectives we set for ourselves. McKinsey advises including your employees throughout the entire goal-setting process. This encourages ongoing development and ensures employee buy-in.
You can assist your employees in developing the knowledge and self-assurance necessary to write effective personal objectives by following the stages listed below. You can create SMART objectives that will enhance performance over time by following these simple advice.
In Contrast, Employees Should Be Aware Of Their Limitations
Stretching and challenging goals are fantastic, but they should serve as a warning to employees about the risks of setting completely unrealistic targets given the time and resources at their disposal. This is definitely something to be wary of if you have any employees who struggle with perfectionism. Over time, your employees will be able to gauge their own limitations and rate of advancement, but managers must intervene in the interim to make sure employees aren’t overworking themselves. This will only result in everyone’s expectations not being met, disappointment, and frustration.
Create Some Space And Flexibility Allowances
The needs and requirements of an organisation can change often, much like in any agile organisation. Three months ago, something pressing might have seemed important or supportive of your organization’s objectives. Employees should feel empowered to adjust their established objectives if this is the case. However, these adjustments ought to be helpful and meaningful; you can talk about them in your regular one-on-one meetings. This is an excellent opportunity for manager and employee to discuss goals and solicit feedback.
Use Performance Management Software To Keep Track Of Your SMART Goals
The entire process of setting, agreeing, and tracking SMART objectives is made simple for everyone involved by performance management software. The manager can indicate whether or not the SMART objectives are appropriate and discuss any necessary revisions after the employee has drafted them. This turns goal-setting into a really collaborative process and offers parties a common understanding of what has been decided. Once objectives are formalised, everyone involved can use the performance management software to monitor their progress and provide feedback as it happens. In this approach, everyone is informed about successes and setbacks, and managers can intervene if staff members need further assistance.
Make A SMART Definition Choice
Employees must be given a SMART definition before they can create their own SMART objectives. Numerous variations of the term have appeared since it was first used in 1981 by George T. Doran. At Clear Review, we advocate adopting the definition of the following SMART objectives:
S stands for specific and stretching. The explicit objective must be as concise as is practical. Stay away from any ambiguities or confusion. For instance, a worker cannot (and should not) be given the directive to “increase sales”. An objective that would be more beneficial would be to increase sales of a specific product by a given percentage over a given period of time. The objectives should also be challenging or stretching so that workers are more motivated to complete their tasks.
M — Measurable. The definition of success should always be included in a SMART objective. Measurable objectives give you a benchmark against which to gauge your progress. This will make determining whether it has been accomplished easier. Either quantitative or qualitative measurement options are available.
A —Attainable and Agreed upon. Although it is important for your employees to push themselves, all their goals should be practically attainable. Unrealistic and seemingly impossible goals simply help to foster a failure culture within your company, which is the exact opposite of the motivational environment you’re trying to foster.
Additionally, objectives should be agreed upon by both the employee and their manager. This autonomy will assist employees in truly owning their roles. The manager must be aware that the employee has input into their goals and that those goals are appropriate and consistent with company objectives. Software for performance management can be quite effective in ensuring that both parties are happy and agree on the objectives. Setting and monitoring goals can both be done using the same software.
R — Relevant. The organization’s overall goals should be relevant to all performance objectives, which should support them. Without taking significance into account, even goals that are attained may not have an effect on how well an organisation performs, which is the exact opposite of what an effective performance management system seeks to achieve.
T — Time-Based. Employers and managers should agree on specific deadlines for finishing objectives. This creates a feeling of urgency and enables managers to assess if a worker is on track to achieve their own objectives. Encourage employees to make “near-term” goals with a one- to six-month time period instead of long-term goals. Short-term goals are more motivating since they can be attained more quickly. Additionally, they are less likely to become obsolete as business requirements alter. Of fact, achieving short-term goals can also serve as “mini-milestones” towards achieving longer-term objectives.
Case Study: SMART objectives examples
Mark Von Bicycle, the CEO of Bikes-r-us, has a bold ambition. He wants to sell a lot more exercise bikes because they are a recent addition to his product line. “I want us to sell more exercise bikes next quarter”, Mark said in a group memo that was topped and tail with some inspirational speech.
Not so SMART, we think. See if we can be of assistance.
The SMART phases and the Kipling Method
It’s strongly recommend he use Kipling’s “six honest serving-men” to if he wants to set a fantastic SMART objective. He should inquire at each level of developing SMART targets.
• Who
• What
• When
• Where
• Why
• How
In honour of author Rudyard Kipling and his poem from the story of the Elephant’s Child, this approach has been dubbed the “Kipling Method.”
You cannot talk about one of the five SMART stages without taking into account the others. Use your own questions along with Kipling’s method to better formulate your goals since the questions you ask at each stage aren’t required.
Setting a goal requires that you describe the steps as exactly as you can and include all the facts at your disposal. Nothing should be withheld (unless it is a confidential matter).
Clear SMART Objectives
To make your goal specific you can consider things like:
• What needs to be achieved? What resources are needed?
• Why does this need to be accomplished?
• Who needs to be involved to get it done? Who is responsible for goal achievement?
• Where will this goal get achieved?
• When should we take action?
• How does it need to be done?
A specific goal example:
“I want the sales team in our London branch to sell 50 more next-generation exercise bikes in quarter two, compared to quarter one, because they have the highest margins of all our exercise bikes.
We’ll do this by making 300 more sales calls to our database and visiting all our current gym customers to discuss this new bike”
Explain To Your Staff The Importance Of SMART Objectives
Your employees need to understand that your company takes goal-setting seriously and why objectives important, whether you are setting general SMART objectives or personal development objectives.
Explain how effective goal setting can affect their performance during one of your routine performance coaching conversations; this will ultimately affect their career advancement and opportunities for advancement within your company. Point out that SMART objectives have frequently been cited as the most effective technique to define goals while describing the concept of SMART objectives.
You should also take advantage of this opportunity to illustrate to your employees the importance of their position and to your business. You wouldn’t be able to achieve your organisational objectives without them. Your employees will see your value for them and that they are an integral component of a dedicated team thanks to your transparency and authenticity.
Be Open About Organisational Goals and Motivate Employees to Align Their Objectives Upward
In the business sector, organisational transparency is a growing concern. Employers are requesting ever-increasing levels of openness, and forward-thinking businesses are satisfying those demands. Transparency is, after all, positively correlated with levels of employee engagement, trust, and organisational performance.
Context is important for establishing goals. Discuss the company’s overarching aims with your employees. Any pressing issues or obstacles that are preventing progress should be explained to them. Employees will be able to keep organisational objectives in mind while developing their own objectives if you are transparent and clear about them. They will also be able to raise their aims in order to support long-term corporate objectives.
Employees Should Push Themselves To Succeed
When a task is finished, we all feel a sense of accomplishment. This is the reason why so many of us make to-do lists and cross things off as we complete them. It gives us a sense of organisation, productivity, and efficiency. However, studies have shown that when we set our own particularly challenging goals, this sense of accomplishment is increased and our performance is higher. “Easy wins” aren’t as effective as a motivator, to put it simply. We work harder to complete the goals in question to standard and on schedule if they seem more difficult. Encourage employees to set challenging personal goals while creating their SMART objectives. This may be a fun method to encourage them to push themselves and achieve greater things.
Exercise 8.6: Smart Goals
• Whether you agree with the goals?
• Are they specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based?
• Where you impressed by any outside-the-box thinking?
Course Manual 7: Driving Factors
How Managers Drive Employee Engagement and Results at the Same Time
Is it feasible to lead with high expectations and a focus on outcomes but still developing a team that is enthusiastic and enjoyable to work with? Many would argue that mastering either of these makes mastering the other next to impossible. And yet, the results of an analysis of 360-degree evaluation data from over 60,000 leaders revealed that those who scored in the top quartile for both talents were among the top 91 percent of all leaders. It would appear that doing both things successfully is not only doable, but the finest leaders are those who are able to do both.
There aren’t many of them, though; in particular, researchers singled out leaders who scored highly in both driving for results and people skills. Only 13% of the leaders in our data set matched this description, we discovered. Nevertheless, this gave a data set of 7,800 leaders to examine.
Researchers examined this subset of data in greater detail to investigate the precise characteristics and behaviours of these leaders. They discovered that younger leaders excelled at managing a productive and enjoyable team environment. They discovered that leaders under the age of 30 were two to three times more likely than their older contemporaries to be effective at both results and engagement. Nearly one-third of the cohort, who were under 30, successfully completed both priorities. Leaders seem to have chosen between being results-driven and having strong interpersonal relationships at the age of 40. From that point on, just 10% of leaders in any age group would successfully do both tasks.
Why? Perhaps compared to older generations, younger people place more value on professional relationships. Anecdotally, it appears that this is accurate: While older workers appear more likely to declare that “Work is work, and life is life, and never the twain shall meet,” perhaps because these older coworkers know more people outside of work, younger employees do seem more interested in developing close, personal friendships with their coworkers. Older coworkers could have less of a need to rely on soft skills since they believe that their larger experience will have an impact on their coworkers.
Senior managers are substantially less likely than supervisors to possess both skills. In fact, supervisors are twice as likely as senior managers to excel at both tasks. In this instance, it was observed that there was some aging-related reduction in both skills, but as leaders advanced from supervisor to top management, people skills suffered more than results-driven drive. Age and position have a close correlation with one other, and both talents deteriorate with advancing years. Additionally, it is more probable that those in positions of authority, such as managers, will believe that their ability to influence others is essential to achieving their goals. The fact is, even if they are unaware of it, older or more powerful managers might benefit from highlighting their interpersonal skills.
Researchers compared the outcomes for the group in the top quartile of both skills to all other leaders in the data set in order to understand how some leaders are able to perform both capabilities successfully. They examined 40 behaviours and used a statistical test (t-test) to compare the outcomes of the two groups. They conducted a factor analysis on the items with the greatest disparities, and the results revealed six clustered groups. These actions seem to be what allow the 13% of leaders to continuously employ both sets of leadership competencies.
The data suggests that these clusters, which we refer to as “behavioural bridges,” allow leaders to pursue goals while also developing positive interpersonal skills. These results clearly identify leaders as having six powerful qualities that enable them to function at a significantly higher level than those who do not.
1. Explains strategy and direction clearly
• Strives for excellence. Peak performance depends on everyone being clear on the path to take and comprehending the plan to get there.
• People abilities. People become dissatisfied quite fast when they are lost or confused. A team is significantly more engaged when the leader is clear in their communication and gives guidance.
2. Inspires and motivates
• Strives for excellence. The ability to drive for results was ranked higher for more than 78% of leaders than the ability to motivate and inspire others. Pushing for results is sometimes referred to as “push” whereas pulling is often referred to as “pull.” A leader is far more likely to succeed when they have the capacity to push hard for results while also inspiring high effort and performance.
• People abilities. People are inspired to produce their best work by inspiring behaviour. The majority of us desire to have a positive impact on both the world and the work we do. A positive work atmosphere is best created by leaders who can engender in their team members loyalty, commitment, passion, and enthusiasm.
3. Establishes ambitious targets
• Strives for excellence. It is possible to motivate others to work harder and raise the bar by establishing stretch goals that the team accepts.
• People abilities. Amazing things take place when stretch objectives are developed jointly with a team. Work turns enjoyable. Everybody is on board. People experience competence and worth.
4. High moral standards and builds trust
• Strives for excellence. Team members frequently believe they are being used and taken advantage of by their management if a leader in whom they lack trust sets ambitious goals. The motivations of a respected leader are unquestionable.
• People abilities. Being trusted is essential for developing good relationships with others. Leaders must “walk their talk” if they want to be believed. They never assign tasks to their team members that they are not also willing to perform.
5. Helps others grow
• Strives for excellence. Leaders who are concerned about their subordinates’ growth and who invest the necessary time in it profit from the outcomes. People with more training are much more productive.
• People abilities. Most people desire the chance to learn new abilities and capabilities. Leaders that are committed to fostering the growth of their team members are constantly seen favourably. The dual effects of developing others include improving performance and fostering an enjoyable and lively culture. Additionally, it draws in more people who want to work there.
6. Is trainable
• Strives for excellence. Leaders who reject criticism are a lot like the emperor who is naked. People see don’t speak up because they don’t ask for or want feedback. It’s easy for issues to get overlooked. We miss deadlines. However, if a leader asks for input and is open to suggestions, coworkers won’t watch while that leader makes a mistake.
• People abilities. Leaders who solicit criticism from subordinates and actively seek to improve are well-liked. Their capacity for coaching is a model for everyone.
A leader’s performance is significantly impacted by their capacity to pursue results while also developing strong people management skills. We discovered that leaders who possessed both of these abilities scored in the 91st percentile for total leadership effectiveness, as was already mentioned. Ideally, you can pick out one or two of these behavioural bridges to help you attain this special mix.
What to Do About How The Most Common Emotions Affect Business Decision Making
We are all aware that our feelings influence our choices. In fact, according to scientific research, we lose all ability to make decisions when emotions are absent.
Teamwork is also impacted by emotions. This is a major factor in why current study indicates that emotional intelligence is one of the best indicators of workplace success. And when emotions and team decision-making conflict, the biggest issues appear.
Even if the feelings appear unproductive or unpleasant in and of themselves, some emotion might be helpful while making decisions. A small bit of anxiety, despair, or annoyance can help to motivate you or widen your search for solutions.
On the other hand, even if the emotions appear positive and constructive, a bit too much emotion is generally undesirable. A group of people are more likely to spend too much time gazing out the window while wearing matching rose-colored glasses or decide to drive straight off a cliff when they are all feeling curious, enthusiastic, or confident.
Therefore, it is crucial to be aware of how the emotional states of those gathered around the table impact the team’s approach to the decision when you are working with your team to make one. This is particularly true when everyone in the group is feeling the same way or when emotions are strong.
When emotions surface during team decision-making talks at your firm, use this list to maintain perspective. Based on thousands of team decisions recorded in the Cloverpop business decision database, it is based on the most frequent emotions felt by business decision-making teams.
Optimistic, Interested, Curious, Excited, and Hopeful = Slow and Distracted or Overly Optimistic
These feelings are pleasant. Each one of them keeps us going. Not how they feel, but how they can influence group decision-making is the issue. One the one hand, these feelings could lead to a state of “fabulousness paralysis” in which everyone is contently investigating multiple options without moving the decision ahead. On the other hand, if the proper catalysing individual or event sparks a spark, the group may move too quickly, brushing off actual hazards, failing to examine other possibilities, and eventually making judgements that fall short of expectations.
Anxious, stressed, concerned, unsure, and worried do not equal motivated or solution-focused.
These feelings are not good. But when it comes to making business decisions, that is where their power comes from. Except in rare cases, these feelings push us to change and are very helpful in expanding our list of potential solutions. They are the origin of the proverb “Necessity is the mother of invention.” It’s likely that you aren’t working hard enough to discover a better solution if your team isn’t at least a little freaked out or undecided about a decision.
Confident, content, and pleased lead to excellent team building but poor results.
Another set of positive feelings and another mixed bag in terms of selecting choices. On the plus side, these feelings foster cohesive teams, which is quite helpful when things go wrong. However, making wise decisions might be seriously hampered by these feelings. A confident and content team not only examines fewer options, but also analyses the options in front of them less effectively. Additionally, the worse it gets the longer a team is in this mindset.
Angry and Irritated: The Seeds of Rejection and Discontent
Not much positive to say at this point. These negative feelings have little positive effect. We reject one another’s viewpoints when we are angry and constrict our perception of the world to suit our emotions. Since different people are enraged by various things, this leads to unhappiness even though everyone is upset at the same time. Teams in a rage are quickly sidetracked by insignificant information and make snap decisions. Teams in a rage make poor choices.
Now what? Include Others And Record Your Ideas
Asking for other people’s opinions and writing things down are two strategies that almost always produce better outcomes when it comes to making decisions. The same is true of emotions. Here is what to do.
Research demonstrates that including five or fewer additional persons in the decision-making process promotes a more diverse and balanced emotional environment. It is less probable that everyone will be seeing things through rose-colored glasses the more people are involved. One of the numerous ways variety promotes improved decision-making is in this area.
Neuroimaging research demonstrates that writing down emotions reduces their intensity. This calms your own emotions while also regulating how you respond to other people’s emotions. That’s ideal for improved decision-making since excessive emotion is negative while moderate emotion is helpful. Here’s how to benefit from this neuroscience knowledge:
Good: Begin simply by listing your three to five most powerful feelings. You’ll make a better choice and find yourself to be a calmer, wiser version of yourself.
Better: To lessen their influence, list three to five of your own emotions in writing. Then, jot down your educated guesses regarding the reactions elicited in other people. When you do this in the middle of a meeting, it will help you control your own urge to react angrily or curiously.
Best: The best option is to ask everyone to list their top three to five feelings, and then have the group anonymously discuss the results. This is challenging to achieve at a meeting, but it can be simple before the meeting with surveys or online tools. Combining the best of both worlds, this tactic lessens emotional intensity for each individual while providing a common viewpoint for all. Keep watch over time and take action if the team’s emotional climate deteriorates for bonus points.
Case Study: Patagonia
One example of a company that prioritizes employee emotions is the outdoor apparel company Patagonia.
Patagonia has a strong company culture that emphasizes not only the well-being of its employees but also the well-being of the planet. The company recognizes that employees’ emotions and personal lives are important and can impact their performance at work.
To support employees’ emotional well-being, Patagonia offers a variety of benefits and programs. For example, the company provides its employees with access to an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) that offers counseling and support services for issues such as mental health, financial concerns, and family problems. The company also offers paid time off for employees to volunteer in their communities, recognizing the positive impact that community service can have on mental health.
In addition, Patagonia’s management team is trained to be attentive to employees’ emotions and to respond with empathy and support. The company has a “culture of feedback” in which managers are encouraged to provide regular feedback and support to employees, and to listen to and address any concerns or issues that arise.
Exercise 8.7: Group Emotions
• Are there any common themes?
• Are the outlier emotions any less important/ significant to the company?
• What would your next step be for addressing these emotions?
Course Manual 8: Tough Topics
How to Approach Difficult Discussions at Work
Conversations that are challenging at work don’t have to be nasty.
People frequently respond that they strive to avoid confrontation when asked how they normally handle it. In fact, a survey found that more than 80% of employees avoid at least one tense encounter at work that they know they must have but are dreading. Given that most people see conflict negatively, this figure is not surprising. However, avoidance tactics don’t improve the situation. In most cases, they aggravate the issue. As problems worsen and animosity mounts, individuals eventually stop participating.
Consider that you want to discuss a toxic coworker with your manager. Or perhaps you have a team member who isn’t contributing their fair share. The secret, according to Jean-Francois Manzoni, professor of human resources and organisational development at INSEAD, is to build conversational skills that result in “a better outcome: less pain for you, and less pain for the person you’re talking to.” Here are some strategies for handling challenging workplace conversations while preserving your relationships.
Case Study
Tense office discussions. They happen to all of us. They may also be unpleasant. However, according to Facebook executive Nicola Mendelsohn, they’re essential for addressing pay inequality and workplace diversity.
The vice president of Facebook for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa said having challenging conversations compels organizations to bring uncomfortable issues into the open—and can help firms handle them. She was speaking at a Financial Times conference in London. Although she claimed that such conversations are not “hard wired” into people, she added that “we really need to.”
In fact, her superior, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, almost mandates that she do so. “Every time I see my boss, Sheryl Sandberg, she always asks, ‘When is the last time you had a hard conversation?'” She is attempting to integrate it deeply into our culture, according to Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn stated that avoiding such interactions might cause professional difficulties to become “really difficult, really personal.”
Consider the topic of diversity. Facebook claims it is addressing the issue, despite the fact that its most recent workforce diversity report indicated little progress has been made. For each open post, Mendelsohn stated that its recruiters aim to offer managers with at least one applicant who belongs to an underrepresented minority. Parents and parents-to-be alike are drawn to the company’s generous four-month parental leave program for full-time employees.
She pointed out that despite these measures, only 27% of Facebook’s senior employees is female. We’re not happy with this, she declared.
Discussions about remuneration at work can be challenging. According to Mendelsohn, despite the “prevailing wisdom” regarding wage disparity that women don’t request raises, a recent study revealed that women do request raises—but typically receive them less frequently than males. She acknowledged that the first time she went into a pay review, “I turned around and went, ‘Thank you,'” so it’s crucial to have the “hard conversation” as well. She said, “That is not the advice I would give to my daughter.”
How To Have Awkward Talks At Work In 5 Easy Steps
Even though it can be uncomfortable, having difficult talks with colleagues is an unavoidable aspect of people management. Being able to approach delicate topics is crucial for assisting employees, whether it’s about performance, workplace conflict, giving and receiving harsh criticism, or talking about personal matters. However, 24% of workers do not believe that their direct manager is aware of their concerns, according to data from Officevibe’s Pulse Survey software.
Nearly 1 in 4 workers believe their manager is unaware of their concerns.
Effectively handling a difficult subject in a one-on-one meeting helps your team and employees grow over time. You can make every difficult conversation productive and solution-focused by using our step-by-step approach and advice from tough talk specialists.
Challenging Conversational Framework
• Set the talking point ahead
• Focus on facts, not feelings
• Create an environment for honesty
• Aim for understanding above consensus
• Find a solution together
Managers will always find it challenging to have uncomfortable conversations, but the following advice can make them easier
1. Prioritise The Discussion Point
Meetings with just one person are ideal for having difficult conversations. You should prepare for the challenging talk, but keep in mind that communication is a two-way street. It helps both of you to have clear expectations when you let the other person know in advance what you plan to talk about. The discussion point should be added to your shared one-on-one agenda, or you can send your team member a brief message with explicit instructions.
Rather than “We need to talk about what happened in the team meeting.”
Try addressing the issue by saying, “I’m intrigued to hear your perspectives on the many viewpoints that were raised in last week’s team meeting. Can we discuss it at our upcoming one-on-one meeting?
Officevibe’s one-on-one tool provides editable agenda templates, including one designed for challenging talks, if you’re unsure how to effectively prepare for the session. Additionally, if you need more ideas, there are a tonne of suggested talking points and questions you can pick from. Because meeting agendas are collaborative, you and your teammate can each add your own talking points to the agenda in advance to prepare for a conversation.
2. Put Facts Before Emotions
Investigate your emotions a little before a difficult one-on-one meeting so you can communicate your ideas clearly. Try to keep your knowledge and your thoughts and feelings separate. To get rid of any potential assumptions or projections, you can perform an exercise in objectivity. Consider the counsel you would offer a buddy in your position, or even in your employee’s position, as one such exercise. Gather all the information, then think about the result you want, advises Rachel Kent, a former camp director. Once you know what you want to happen, you can build the conversation from the end. Things you don’t want to forget to remember should be written down in advance and brought with you.
Having concrete assistance might assist in keeping the focus on facts rather than emotions during some challenging interactions. When giving staff either negative or constructive criticism, this strategy can be quite helpful.
Prepare a list of notes that includes figures, particular employee feedback instances, documents, or other materials that can assist you stand your position during a difficult conversation.
Avoid surprising someone with receipts
It’s one thing to prepare with tangible evidence, but it’s quite another to gather screenshots or other types of evidence to use against someone. When putting something together, take care to consider how it will advance the conversation.
Even the most regulated among us can experience some emotion when discussing a difficult subject or having a difficult conversation in general. It’s crucial to strike a balance between remaining calm and being genuine when it comes to managing your emotions. Don’t be too calm; just the right amount of calm, advises Brendan Collins, an experienced mental health worker who works with people from vulnerable communities. If you’re overly calm it might give the impression that you don’t care, or that you think you’re better than the other person.”
3. Fostering An Environment Of Integrity
To encourage your staff to approach you with more difficult subjects, it’s critical to cultivate a culture of mutual trust and respect. Maintaining periodic one-on-ones with each team member makes these discussions feel less frightening when they do arise. Regular feedback exchanges make employees feel comfortable to be open with you. Ask questions during your one-on-one when having a difficult conversation to break the ice and demonstrate your interest in hearing the other person out.
Declaring your openness to uncomfortable conversations up front is one approach to create a safe environment for them. Tony Ticknor, a manager at Irish Titan who oversees 15 workers, takes advantage of one-on-one interactions to have more uncomfortable conversations. In his own words, “I sit down with people and I say, ‘I want these one-on-ones to be awkward.'” I want people to come tell me when something’s hard, or they don’t want to do something, or they’re having a conflict with someone on the team.”
4. Prioritise Understanding Over Agreement
Understanding between two people is more important than always coming to an agreement while dealing with a challenging circumstance. You want to be sure you are not overlooking any crucial information because miscommunication can sometimes be the basis of conflict. Be sympathetic and give the teammate time to express their viewpoint before expressing your own.
“In the moment is not always the time to share your policy explanation or feelings. It can be about letting them express themselves, not about giving them information.”— Mental health worker Brendan Collins
Keep in mind that recognition differs from agreement; you don’t have to agree with an employee’s point of view in order to make them feel heard. However, Officevibe’s Pulse Survey data show that 17% of employees don’t believe their direct manager cares about their viewpoint, so listening is crucial. – Data from the Officevibe Pulse Survey
Beyond the manager-employee relationship, this sentiment has ramifications because we observe a strong correlation between employees’ perceptions of their manager’s concern for their opinions and their sense of belonging to a team. The secret to creating a friendly, cooperative work environment is to be transparent enough that individuals not only feel safe telling you the truth, but also that they think you care about them personally.
5. Together, Find A Solution
Every one-on-one meeting should end with a clear list of next steps. This is crucial when discussing issues like a conflict between coworkers, unfulfilled employee expectations, or a mistake. Take the time to debate them, expand on them, and decide on a course of action together even if one or both of you have action items in mind when you arrive at the meeting. Finding the best answer during a conversation is what counts, not being correct or demonstrating a point.
Where You Can, Provide Assistance And Support
When workers are struggling, showing leadership by acting as a team member and contributing to the solution fosters a stronger, more cohesive team.
The most crucial step in creating action items is monitoring. Make careful to revisit your defined strategy during your next one-on-one to make sure you both followed through on your commitments and got the desired result. This is done for you by Officevibe’s one-on-one software, ensuring that every meeting yields fruitful outcomes.
Even while it can be difficult, having these difficult conversations will help your team improve in the long run. You may make a difficult conversation fruitful and arrive at a satisfactory conclusion by approaching delicate themes with empathy and attention.
Exercise 8.8: Word Association
Course Manual 9: Way Forward
How to Recover from a Work Failure
Failure stinks, but failure at work might be even worse because it happens in front of people you generally see virtually every day. Let’s be honest and get that out of the way right now. However, we will all inevitably fail at work at some point. And as more issues that significantly impact our way of life emerge, many of us are failing more frequently than we anticipated.
Despite what none of us would like to admit, we are consistently making far more mistakes than we would like to. When our coworkers highlight our professional shortcomings, these circumstances become considerably worse. Although dealing with these errors and failures can be extremely difficult, doing so is crucial for growth. So let me share with you some strategies for recovering from a work failure.
1. Failure at Work Happens Often
The first thing to realise is that professional failure is by no means unusual. Everyone else makes mistakes, just as you do. Simply put, the demands on our time at work are increasing too quickly, and it feels impossible for us to keep up, let alone move ahead. These conditions make these workplace blunders, errors, and failures unavoidable.
Don’t waste time feeling humiliated when you make a mistake at work; the strain is enough to drive anyone to break. You are well-positioned to start overcoming the uncomfortable emotions and effects of these situations when you learn to accept failure at work as an inevitable part of the process.
Just keep in mind that mistakes and failures can be lessons for us to learn from and help us improve if you’re struggling with personal mistakes or failures.
2. Combat Negativity Associated With Work Failure
If you’ve ever failed at work, you’re aware that these situations can be a little rough on your ego. That is an unchanging reality. But as I just said, if you learn how to handle these breakdowns and the stress that comes with failing at work, you’ll be able to recover fast and get back on your game so you can succeed the next time!
This procedure will assist you in controlling the disappointment and probable humiliation brought on by a professional failure and make sure that these bad feelings don’t keep you down for an extended period of time. You must investigate what transpired in order to learn to control the disappointment and negativity that you frequently experience after failing at work.
That implies that you must consider the circumstances that occurred. Describe the positive and negative aspects of the event. Why did things go smoothly the way they did? Why did things go wrong the way they did?
You will gain valuable insights and a greater sense of self-awareness by responding to questions of this nature. You will learn from this experience and be better prepared to do a work of a similar nature in the future.
3. Get Ready For The Bad Things
Examining the situation is important, but there are also some typical feelings that come with professional failures. Several of these were already covered before in this text. After making a mistake or blunder at work—or in any other area of your life—learn to be alert for these kinds of thoughts and feelings so that you can deal with them more effectively when they do try to harm your mental health.
These could include a variety of emotions like embarrassment, disappointment, identity confusion, feeling useless and unimportant, thinking you have nothing to contribute, believing others are superior to you, etc. We could certainly go on and on about this since, for some reason, we humans love to criticise ourselves, especially in light of all our past failures and mistakes.
If you permit this, though, your ideas and feelings will run amok in your brain and harm your mental health. Therefore, just as if you were getting ready to engage in combat with another person, you’re going to plan your approach to handle these feelings before they ever arise.
By doing this, you’ll put yourself in a good position to deal with these feelings. Never undervalue the value of being simply prepared. One of the most helpful actions I’ve ever done has helped me stay strong after a professional failure.
You will acquire a very valuable set of abilities if you give it a shot and create a plan or strategy that makes sense for you and is pertinent to your life and area of work.
4. Consider, Acknowledge, Apply, and Repeat
Once you’ve developed your new strategy, it’s time to try to reflect on your existing coping mechanisms. These are the ones where, after making a mistake, you go cry about it, become defensive, and then go eat a lot of ice cream to try to make yourself feel better. Obviously, you can’t keep employing that tactic because it is ineffective.
So, take some time to consider how you are coping right now. Why are you behaving that way? Is it an effort on your part to disguise the uneasiness you feel inside? Or is there another explanation?
In this situation, knowing your motivational style may be helpful. What’s Your Motivation Style? is a free assessment that you may take. and discover your personal motivating style and what keeps you motivated the most. You can take the test for nothing here.
Once you’ve identified the cause, acknowledge it to yourself, realise that this is how you’ve always behaved and that a change has to be made.
From here, you may start retraining yourself so that you stop becoming defensive and eating ice cream and instead focus on developing self-awareness and learning from your mistakes. This is a crucial first step in understanding how to recover from failure at work. This is so you may start using the new methods you’ve just built for yourself and form new behavioural patterns and habits that are much more advantageous to your own growth and progress once you’ve done this and attained that self-awareness.
The method is then repeated as the last stage. I would advise going through some variation of this process of reflection and review if you experience professional failure or make a mistake in another aspect of your life. You can adapt and adjust your strategies as well as develop and grow as a person by repeating this process.
5. Take Responsibility
These people, who believe they are always innocent no matter what part they played or how much they contributed to the outcome, are people we all know. “Finger-pointers” are these people. Before they even evaluate their own role in the outcome, they will point the finger at everyone else.
They often aren’t looked up to by their peers for this behaviour, and they’ll end up moving forward much more slowly than the rest of us who are prepared to own up to our mistakes and accept responsibility.
No one likes to work with someone who can’t take ownership of their own actions and decisions, so do your best to avoid becoming a “finger-pointer” if you mess up, especially if it’s at work.
It’s not always simple to take responsibility for your actions and admit mistakes, especially when there are repercussions. However, how much accountability you have is crucial to your development as a person.
Recovering From Work Failure
You can learn a lot about yourself through your failures at work and the mistakes you make in life, if there is one key lesson I’d like you to take away from reading this post today. But in order to do that, you must learn how to deal with the negativity brought on by these errors, get past it, and develop better coping mechanisms.
Recognise these errors as learning experiences that can help you advance personally. If you can accomplish it, you’ll succeed in your own endeavours and advance quickly!
Case Study
A young woman who was previously demoted from her position as a news anchor was told that she wasn’t suitable for television. Later on, this woman redefined success on her own terms, creating an entertainment company and becoming the first Black multibillionaire in North America. Her estimated net worth is $2.9 billion, making her the richest Black philanthropist in American history. Meet Oprah Winfrey, a person who knew how to make failure into a driving force.
Case Study
A woman originally had dreams of becoming an attorney, but her low SAT score crushed these dreams. When she was 25 years old, she started to design the hosiery concept that would eventually become Spanx and make her a fortune. Meet Sara Blakely, a person who knew how to make failure into a driving force.
These two women in business are but two instances. The reality is that there are rockstar women everywhere who are advancing and developing daily because they know how to use failure as fuel for persistence and forward motion.
Exercise 8.9: Addressing Failure
Course Manual 10: Memorialize Results
Five Ideal Methods For Recording Meetings
Have you ever had an idea but chose not to record it because you believed you would recall it later? Do you recall it? Most likely, you didn’t.
We can stay organized, remember crucial information and choices, and facilitate the brainstorming process by writing things down.
Because of this, it’s crucial to record your meetings. Documentation used before, during, and after meetings promotes teamwork, keeps the group on task, and gives important decisions context.
Writing meeting minutes and adhering to an agenda are only two aspects of meeting documentation.
Make the most of your meeting notes and enhance teamwork by using the following best practices.
Why Meeting Recordings Are Crucial
There are several advantages to recording your meetings using agendas that are explicit, meeting minutes, and other note-taking tools.
Meeting notes are useful for:
• Thank team members for their efforts so they feel heard.
• Organize decisions, tasks, and action items.
• Keep a record of the conversation for future reference.
• Disseminate important information to meeting attendees’ absences.
• Involve the group in the discussion.
• Encourage productive group cooperation and brainstorming.
• Boost the effectiveness of meetings by ensuring that everyone stays on task and minimizing repetitive or circular talks.
In other words, your meetings won’t be as effective, interesting, or productive without appropriate documenting techniques.
To ensure that your meetings are effective both inside and outside of the boardroom, it’s crucial to use the appropriate tools and best practices in addition to recording them.
Case Study
Steve Jobs mandated that each item on the agenda for a meeting have a designated individual who is in charge of that task and any follow-up work that occurs. That person was referred to as the DRI, or the Directly Responsible Individual. He wanted to give his staff specific, well-organized directions to follow since he believed that holding people accountable would ensure that a project or assignment would actually be completed.
Best Practices For Meeting Documentation
Okay, so you are aware of the value of documentation. But how do you do it in practice?
Agendas, minutes, attendance records, task sheets, and visualizations are just a few of the various ways that meetings can be documented. Use these best practices, regardless of the tools you choose, to ensure that all of your meetings are structured, understandable, and productive both on and off the page.
1. Work together on a single shared document
It is more difficult to include the group and encourage teamwork if everyone is taking notes on their own. Instead, develop a common agenda that is active and accessible to all attendees both during and after the meeting.
It’s simpler for team members to discover the information they need, keep the group on task, and brainstorm together when all your notes and information are kept in one shared document.
It’s simpler to start a debate and build on each other’s contributions when everyone can see each other’s ideas, even if they aren’t fully developed. Innovation then really starts to take off.
Some websites can help you brainstorm and collaborate in one location so you can share and organize your ideas with ease. You can access the agenda and other meeting materials at any time by adding them to a notes panel. To ensure that nothing is overlooked, you should also include links to further project documentation, such as assignments, earlier meeting minutes, and decision trees.
2. Real-time decision-making and action items documentation
Everyone stays on the same page when meeting notes are good. If someone was unable to attend the most recent meeting, they ought to be able to swiftly and easily catch up by consulting your documentation. Meeting notes, however, aren’t merely for later reference; they can also aid in real-time discussion organization.
It’s simple to become distracted by the conversation during a meeting and neglect to take active notes. However, keeping track of decisions and talking points in real-time can help you avoid misunderstandings and make sure that everything is documented clearly and accurately so that everyone can refer to it later.
As important choices, conclusions, or next steps are discussed during the meeting, make a note of them. Don’t wait until the meeting’s conclusion to take notes on those points.
You are less likely to forget anything if you take meeting notes in real time. Additionally, you can clarify any points as you go along to ensure that everyone is clear on what was said or the decisions that were made. This leads to a meeting paper that is more factual and has support from everyone.
3. Names of meeting participants
Keep track of who attends each meeting. Even though it can seem insignificant, keeping track of your guests allows you to determine which team members should be included in discussions and who contributed to important choices.
To maximize the impact of your guest list:
• Include a section in the document where each participant’s updates and queries can be listed. By doing so, you can address crucial queries or concerns and ensure that significant conversation points are covered.
• Keep track of contributions so you never lose track of what was said. Utilize colored sticky notes that are assigned to each contributor to visually arrange concepts and points.
• Write down the names of everyone who attended the meeting but was unable to participate so you will know who to contact and with whom to exchange information.
4. Set your agenda as a guide.
Meeting agendas and minutes go hand in hand to successfully run and record your meetings. Include a review of prior choices, a follow-up on earlier assignments, and any new issues or concerns to be addressed on the agenda before the meeting begins.
Setting the meeting’s tone and objectives using your agenda is helpful. Use it to direct the conversation so that nothing is forgotten and everyone is aware of the meeting’s objectives. All participants should receive the agenda in advance so they are aware of what to expect and can contribute effectively.
Make sure to share the document so that everyone can access it and make changes in real time on the cloud.
5. Include visuals to help guide and document discussion
Visuals can be used to organize and clarify concepts, stimulate group debate, and deliver information more effectively. Simple whiteboard diagrams, connected photos, more complex charts, and templates can all be used as visuals.
There are online whiteboard applications that provide team collaboration, idea sharing, and decision documentation in a creative environment. With ready-to-use templates for things like SWOT analyses and Kanban boards, you can jump straight into the discussion while keeping your meetings (and your minutes) on track. Alternately, use the whiteboard to doodle free-hand annotations, share concepts using colored sticky notes, solicit feedback, and work together in real time from any location.
These kinds of visuals not only encourage conversation and teamwork during meetings, but they also give stakeholders and team members who weren’t there at the initial discussion important new information.
Showing your coworkers how you got from Point A to Point B in graphic form will help them catch up with you more quickly. Visuals that contextualize decisions help groups get support from stakeholders and more easily defend their conclusions.
Visuals aid in communication both on and off the page, whether you’re generating ideas from start on the endless canvas or outlining information in a more complex design.
For effective, fruitful, and captivating talks, meeting documentation is essential. And fortunately, recording meetings is now simpler and more efficient than ever thanks to technology like the cloud. Make the most of your meetings by using concise, accessible, shareable, and easily comprehensible documentation.
Exercise 8.10: Minute Madness
Time: 2 minutes
Course Manual 11: Absence of Blame
Imagine this: To submit a new customer proposal, your team is working on the weekends and in a time crunch. In the nick of time, you manage to gather all the paperwork together and push “send.” You inhale deeply and express gratitude to the group for their efforts. The proposal is excellent, and you are sure you will definitely succeed.
You receive an email from the client a week later saying, “We really loved your bid. However, we discovered a discrepancy between your numbers and the supporting documents, which prevented us from moving forward with your business. We have to go on with someone else because we’re short on time. I have no doubt that we’ll be able to collaborate in the future.
You’re angry, irritated, and frustrated. You summon your staff in, lecture them for not thoroughly inspecting the item, and then storm out of the room.
What kind of a legacy have you left? Most likely, your team views you as unappreciative and rude. They worked very hard on that plan and might even be feeling resentful of you right now. Your relationship can suffer permanent harm.
According to a seminal 2001 study, our memories of negative experiences last longer than those of positive ones and are processed more intensely by the brain. The authors came to the conclusion that “Good can only match or overcome Bad by Strength of Numbers.”
How much good can triumph over evil? One negative experience is about equivalent to five positive ones. This five-to-one ratio, which John Gottman, a psychologist and relationship researcher, found in the 1970s, is still relevant in today’s business. No matter how nice you think you are, every unkind word or angry tone that escapes your lips undoes five times the amount of good your kind words and actions may have done. This was revealed in a 2005 study that measured employees’ moods at work and found that when they reported a negative event, it “affected their mood five times as much as if a positive event had occurred.”
Who Is to Blame and Why?
It’s only natural to desire to defend ourselves when something goes wrong and we feel threatened. We can find ourselves trying to locate a scapegoat or place the blame somewhere else.
Because we worry that accepting responsibility for mistakes or errors will reflect poorly on us or harm our careers, we may try to distance ourselves from a problem.
However, this strategy offers no solutions. You won’t be able to reach that deadline if you assign blame, and the issue that caused the delay won’t be resolved either.
When a team is engaging in a blame game, it can sometimes be all too obvious. But it can also take place in subtler ways.
The following are some red flags to look out for:
• Marginalization: One or two team members are frequently left out or ignored. They might be “weaker” than the others (either in position or character), or they might not be included in the conversation.
• “Finger pointing”: Team members point fingers at one another. A good example might be, “Jack was supposed to check those figures before the presentation.”
• Denial: People make excuses or refuse to accept responsibility. They can say things such, “That’s nothing to do with me, no one showed that information to me!”
• Negativity: No solution to the current problem has been found. People, on the other hand, become preoccupied on finding fault. They find it difficult to move on and just think negatively.
What Is At Fault?
According to Gottman, the attitudes that cause the most harm in a relationship are contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. We’ve come to the conclusion that the most dangerous conduct is really blame because to our work in helping firms develop stronger cultures of accountability. The four actions mentioned above all fall under the category of blame, which is what we should focus on initially in our view.
The removal of blame involves two significant obstacles:
People Are Hardwired To Find Fault
We are all predisposed to blaming other individuals or external factors when something goes wrong. These tendencies are psychological in nature and are caused by a phenomenon known as the fundamental attribution bias. Instead of taking into account that there can be other elements (social or environmental) impacting a person’s conduct, we frequently assume that what a person does is a reflection of who they are.
This is why “human error” is frequently the first, and in some cases only, explanation given when significant workplace disasters are reported in the news, omitting the systemic causes of the failure. It also has the most fulfilling feeling. If someone else is to blame for our issues, then they should alter their behavior rather than ourselves.
Additionally, there is a biological justification for our propensity to place blame. Recent brain imaging study from Duke University demonstrates that the prefrontal cortex takes some time to understand pleasant occurrences and has a tendency to believe that wonderful things happen by accident. On the other hand, the amygdala, which regulates our fight-or-flight response, processes negative events. The amygdala typically draws the conclusion that unpleasant things happen on purpose, and it does so quite quickly. It happens so quickly that we don’t even realize we’re assuming anything; all we know is that the person who is closest to the issue must have done it on purpose!
More Than We Realize, We Blame
This brings us to the second issue with blaming: we are unaware of how frequently we do it. Even the greatest CEOs I work with admit that they first believed that their teams needed to hear my “don’t blame” message more than they did. They were surprised by how frequently they caught themselves doing it once they started keeping track of how frequently they attribute difficulties on other people or external factors.
Unfortunately, this behavior sends their teams into a downward cycle. Similar to how they interpret a physical assault, our brains process blame. Our prefrontal cortices essentially shut down when we receive criticism, and we focus all of our efforts on defending ourselves, which, ironically, hinders our capacity to address the issue for which we are receiving blame.
Blame also destroys responsible, constructive action. If people believe that accepting responsibility for issues will result in punishment, they won’t do it. Furthermore, in environments where blame is tolerated, learning and problem-solving are completely out the window. Employees who have been given criticism often try to cover up their errors.
What then can we do?
Case Study
Etsy believes a “post-mortem” debriefing should be considered first and foremost a learning opportunity, not a fixing one. All too often, when teams get together to discuss an event, they walk into the room with a story they’ve already rationalized about what happened. This urge to point to a “root” cause is seductive — it allows us to believe that we’ve understood the event well enough, and can move on towards fixing things.
Etsy believes this view is insufficient at best, and harmful at worst, and that gathering multiple diverse perspectives provides valuable context, without which you are only creating an illusion of understanding.
Team Culture Of Blame Must Be Eliminated
Here are two straightforward changes you can make to encourage a blame-free culture on your team, especially as a manager, now that we have a better understanding of the psychology of blame.
Change Your Perspective To “We’re All Still Learning,” And Be Open About Your Errors
Everybody makes mistakes occasionally. It contributes to our humanity. Blaming and shaming each other for our flaws serves no useful purpose. Allow others to learn from their mistakes as you have in order to benefit from them. Do not shame students for having difficulty or making mistakes. Discuss your personal errors and the lessons you learnt from them if you are a manager. By doing so, a psychological safe haven is created, which will inspire others to imitate you. Coworkers will be more likely to cease blaming each other and take responsibility when a problem arises.
For instance, you may hold frequent lessons learned debriefs with your team at the conclusion of a project to determine what went wrong, what is responsible, and how you will use that knowledge to go forward with a stronger approach. This is how you instruct others to address issues with kindness and compassion. Keep in mind that one negative statement can cause you to take five steps back.
Think On The Things You Can Change
People are not changeable. In fact, attempting to do so will simply make them more adamant in their resistance. When we pass the buck, we encourage others to do the same, which kills accountability in both of us and makes us passive victims of our own problems.
Consider a systemic approach to your issue before assigning responsibility, which entails identifying the issue in terms of the overall issue as a whole rather than in terms of its component elements. Strong leaders would use a systems approach and question, “Where did the process break down?” as opposed to weak leaders who could ask, “Who’s at fault.” Examining what’s wrong with your systems rather than what’s wrong with your personnel will be more likely to lead to the solutions to your company’s problems.
Even though we may not be the sole cause of some of our problems, our past choices and inactions frequently have an impact on the ones we face in the present and are most likely to attribute to others. Ask yourself this question whenever a problem arises, even if you are positive that someone else is to blame for it: “How might I have contributed to this situation? How can I think generously about this circumstance, this person, and myself? Asking these questions will give you suggestions on how to stop this issue from happening again and how to approach it in a way that fosters trust rather than fear or contempt.
Eliminating blame can boost team morale and wellbeing and encourage compassion (since who wouldn’t want to work for an approachable manager?). By implementing these two tactics, you can make your company a place where empathy, trust, and people may flourish.
Exercise 8.11: Blame Cycle
Time: 10 minutes
Course Manual 12: Dissemination
How To Communicate Information To The Team
There are many different information-sharing technologies and techniques, but your team may not benefit from another organization’s strategy. But how will you know if your method of information sharing is effective? The following seven steps underpin every successful information-sharing strategy.
1. Define Your Communication Style
The days when team members could only speak to each other face-to-face are long gone. Everything has changed thanks to virtual communication platforms, especially as fully remote teams are more common. In-person teams also employ digital communication tools, so it’s not like face-to-face communication is sitting there all antiquated and out of current.
The key idea is that different information-sharing strategies are not mutually exclusive. It all comes down to employing any methods and resources at your disposal to create a steady flow of information sharing among your team. Establishing which types of information are conveyed over which channels is the first step in doing this.
Here are a few communication techniques and the kinds of information teams most frequently share using them as examples.
Virtual communication:
• Chat apps like Slack and Google Chat. For fast project updates and questions that are simple to address, IM platforms are useful.
• Email. Email can be used to communicate the same updates to your entire staff at once.
• A business wiki. Company wikis, a more recent method for workers to share information, can be a wonderful place to outline your policies, protocol, and more.
• Google Docs (and substitutes for Google Docs). These tools enable you and your team to continuously improve any kind of crucial information in real time.
Personal interaction:
• Standing sessions. Daily stand-up meetings for project and task updates are possible.
• Team conferences. You can present a variety of facts and expertise at team meetings to assist everyone in working together to solve any challenges.
• General meetings. In order to communicate as much information as you can with as many people as you can, your organization has these special meetings where everyone attends.
2. Be Truthful
Everyone, especially you, should always be transparent in order to foster an environment where knowledge sharing occurs naturally. After all, the individuals of your team frequently imitate your behavior. Why would they trust you to be direct and honest if you can’t? And it becomes even more difficult to provide information if you aren’t honest and straightforward.
Instead, regularly exchanging crucial information fosters trust and increases the likelihood that team members will speak clearly in the future. Transparency can also demonstrate to your team that your company values their ideas, opinions, and sentiments. And that’s a fantastic strategy to encourage workers to feel more vested in their jobs.
Case Study: Wells Fargo: Recognize Your Accountability
It’s always a good idea to be adaptable in business and prepared to switch to a crisis communication strategy when necessary. The second-largest bank in the US, Wells Fargo, experienced the same thing, and they only managed to dig themselves a deeper hole that made it more difficult to recover.
It all began in 2016 after potential fraud was brought to the attention of authorities, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Employees at local branches opened up to two million fictitious bank accounts in customers’ names without their permission in order to meet harsh customer quotas that were demanded from above. The bank faced a $185 million punishment.
Potentially just as damaging to the banks’ reputation as the initial scandal was Wells Fargo’s leadership response:
• The corporation made no attempts to acknowledge fault or provide an apology in its initial public pronouncements. They instead played down the deception. Only after being called to testify before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee did the CEO issue an apology.
• 5,300 low-level employees were sacked after being accused by the leadership.
• The month before the probe started, the CEO sold $61 million worth of his Wells Fargo stock.
3. Speak To Your Team In A Style That Works For You
Age can affect a team member’s preferred form of communication. Team members may prefer phone conversations over instant messages (IMs) depending on their age. Your entire squad may have a particular bias depending on how many members of that age group there are. Use that channel for significant updates if they do. This straightforward method of information dissemination aids in keeping as many eyes on the material as possible.
4. Making Communication A Circle Rather Than A Line
Every level of your organization should be covered by effective communication techniques. They should design it so that what one person says spreads to another, then to another, and so on until it boomerangs back to them. When it comes back, it ought to be packed with fresh knowledge that the new person can use to perform to the highest standard. Consider it a feedback loop. It can result in excellent cross-functional collaboration amongst several departments if done correctly.
5. Keep All Information Readily Available
To get everyone on the same page, have meetings and distribute information through the means of communication that your team uses the most. However, there’s always a chance that someone will overlook the memo. And if they do, they could try to catch up during the brief hours of their workday. That hurts their ability to produce. If you make all of your information accessible, you can stop it.
Making crucial information simple to locate and access for future use enables everyone to stay informed even if they occasionally miss meetings. Taking meeting notes and archiving them on your online file storage platform is a fantastic example of excellent knowledge management. Sending team members who skip meetings a recap email could serve as another illustration.
6. Ask for opinions
Little things can still go overlooked even if you go through all of your information-sharing techniques with a fine-tooth comb. Your strategy probably isn’t ideal, whether it’s due to gaps in the knowledge your team can access or unnoticed inefficiencies in the information-sharing process. It can be difficult to identify these issues before putting your strategy together, so you should do it after. This calls for getting input from your team on how well your information-sharing strategies are working for them.
The folks on your team that require information the most are them. They will therefore have a lot to say on how to properly communicate information with them. Getting in touch with them is also simple: You can schedule time in your meeting agenda during meetings for all team members to offer you advice. You can utilize a feedback tool to gather anonymous feedback on ideas and issues outside of meetings.
To collect precise, tangible, and useful feedback in your subsequent meeting, use this free feedback meeting agenda template:
7. Know When To Use Specific Channels (And When Not To)
You should consider when you should and shouldn’t use each of your available channels in order to effectively exchange information through them. Here are a few instances:
• Text. “Text” has two meanings in this context. You could text your team to provide information, but it’s generally not a good idea to do this after hours. The written word is another option that is excellent for both parties. How written information is shared thus becomes a concern. Younger team members can generally get by with an online document, but older team members may prefer printed hard copies.
• Producing a video. Short, educational videos have become quite popular thanks to social media; your company can follow suit. Using visuals to introduce new technologies or goods can be a terrific approach to capture your team’s full attention. Smaller updates, however, typically don’t match the format. There is no need to spend so much time on making a movie when a short IM will suffice.
• Make a phone call – Phone calls are ideal for detailed explanations that would be far too complex to put in writing. They’re also fantastic if you’re worried about coming across poorly. Email tends to lose a lot of the intricacies that make communication more than just the words we use. Calls bring the tone of voice back into the conversation. If you make use of a conference calling service, they can also be effective for team meetings.
• Graphics and images. There’s a good chance that certain team members learn better through images than from words. You may get both with stock photos and infographics. To capture your team’s attention and offer them a complete understanding of all they need to know, you can combine eye-catching visuals with numerical data and facts. Everything will be available on the page. To further personalize your deliverables, you can alter the background of a photo or add artistic effects.
Make Ineffective Information-Sharing Techniques Obsolete
An organization has the best chance of producing excellent work if knowledge is shared within it like an efficient machine. Communication and information are the grease in this well-functioning machine, thus you should always make sure your staff members are satisfied with both. Team meetings are a fantastic way to get everyone talking and on the same page.
Case Study: Enron
A academic analysis of the issues that contributed to Enron’s demise identified a number of “communication-based leader responsibilities” that senior managers had neglected to fulfill, including “communicating appropriate values” and “maintaining openness to signs of problems.”
Exercise 8.12: Breaking Down Miscommunication in the Workplace
Objective:
Materials Needed:
Markers
Handouts
Instructions:
Project Studies
Project Study (Part 1) – Customer Service
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 2) – E-Business
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 3) – Finance
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 4) – Globalization
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 5) – Human Resources
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 6) – Information Technology
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 7) – Legal
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 8) – Management
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 9) – Marketing
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 10) – Production
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 11) – Logistics
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 12) – Education
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the Debrief Part 1 process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Mission Focus
02. Mindset & Attitude
03. The Approach
04. Mission Clarity
05. RAPTOR Debrief Part 1
06. RAPTOR Debrief Part 2
07. Driving Factors
08. Tough Topics
09. Way Forward
10. Memorialize Results
11. Absence of Blame
12. Dissemination
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Program Benefits
Production
- Work measurement
- Labor efficiency
- Constraints management
- Workload balance
- Methods standardization
- Manufacturing reporting
- Changeover completion
- Personnel assignment
- Cost reduction
- Capacity utilization
Operations
- Interactive research
- Project execution
- Quality management
- Continuous improvement
- Performance analysis
- Cost effective
- Time effective
- Process improvement
- Performance improvement
- Process decentralization
Human Resources
- Improve engagement
- Improve retention
- Mitigate burnout
- Foster wellbeing
- Human flourishing
- Inclusive environment
- Recover morale
- Inspire workforce
- Reduce absenteeism
- Employee satisfaction
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.