team performance

Your ego loves ‘this’ not ‘that’

April 13, 2022By Mike Hohnen

It’s got to be like this. And if it’s like this, it obviously cannot be like that. This is the world your ego loves.

We have been exploring the difference between to be above the line and below the line in a number of blogposts now. The concept of ‘this’ not ‘that’ relates back to my original video in this serie about how we get trapped in wanting to be right. When we get trapped in ‘this’ not ‘that’, then we also are trapped in right and wrong and black and white and all the rest of it. And that’s fine. As long as we are operating in a simple world: that car is blue, that horse is moving or appels are fruits.

Video and Soundcloud versions below

‘This’ not ‘that’ works when things are simple

But as soon as we start moving out of very simple situations and into something that starts getting more complicated or even more complex, we start getting into trouble.

Just to recapitulate, computers are complicated. They are difficult but once you figure them out then you know how they will respond. A bowl of spaghetti on the other hand is complex. You have no idea how its is ‘configured’. If you pull a strand what happens next? It is unpredictable and the next bowl will behave differently.

That’s the beauty of complexity. Things are so interconnected and there’s so much randomness in the system that we don’t really know how things will evolve, respond or perform. In a complex world ‘this’ not ‘that’ is pretty useless. It doesn’t work.

Of all our fears, the fear of the unknown is the greatest

So why do we get trapped in wanting to be right? Well, you’ll see what happens is that most of us get scared when faced with complexity. We have nothing to hold on to, no rules to live by and our little ego freaks out and looks for something to cling to: And there is it is ‘this’ not ‘that’. The moment it does, it drags us below the line. It’s the end of open mind, we no longer see possibilities, we are not open to perspectives. We are fighting for ego-survival. It’s ‘this’ not ‘that’!

In order to stay above the line, we need get comfortable with complexity and we need to be okay with our ‘not knowing’. Complexity means dealing with the grey tones, resisting the black and white solutions. In complexity, we need more options, because we can’t possibly know beforehand which options will actually work out.

That is the world that we’re operating in.

In a complex world this not that no longer works

Great team leaders are not afraid of complexity

And in case you were wondering, anything that involves human beings is not only complicated, it is also very complex. That means the big error we keep on making is, we think we can reduce all those questions regarding our teams and people to ‘this’ not ‘that’. If we do ‘this’, they are going to do ‘that’. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. It just depends. “If we give them a bonus, they will do this”. Maybe, some people will, sometimes. Maybe they won’t. To be a great team leader is also to become a master of complexity.

Here are the previous post in this series

Leadership skills every team leader needs to master

As a leader do you have the courage to examine your mindset model?

Feeling right you are probably wrong

Great team leaders do not get sucked into drama

Because you will drift you need to learn how to shift

Mike Hohnen, MBA is a coach, trainer, author and public speaker who supports leaders, managers and their teams in implementing the principles of the Service Profit Chain.

Would you like the people around you to take better decisions?

June 29, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Probably.

The better decisions they take, the easier your life becomes. That is the bottom line.

So how can you help them do that?

It’s all about awareness as we discovered in last week’s post. They need help to raise their awareness about their own decision-making process.

How often do you review decisions taken by your direct reports together with them? Other than maybe telling them that whatever they decided was in the good/bad category?

As you may remember, this is a point I have made several times in this blog. We don’t automatically learn much from our experiences. If we did, we would never make the same mistake twice, would we? We only learn from our experiences when we take the time reflect on them.

But in a busy service environment, reflection is not top of mind. Fire-fighting is more the mode we are in. The mantra seems to be: Do something if it works fine; if not, try something else. It puts out the fire most of the time but we don’t learn a lot from the process.

So instead of getting frustrated next time one of your people makes a less than perfect decision, try sitting them down for a chat. Make it clear that this is not a reprimand but a learning session. Use a reverse GROW process as the framework for the conversation.

What were you trying to achieve? (Goal)
What was the reality of the situation? (Reality)
What options did you have? (Options)
What did you decide? (Will)

In my personal experience, the two key points in this discussion are:

1) What was the reality of the situation?
Did they jump to conclusions, or confuse their assumptions with facts? Often it turns out their decision was based on everything but the reality of the situation.

2) What options did you have?
As humans, we have a tendency to stick with the first solution that pops into our head. “Ahha got it, I will do this”. Maybe the first solution is the right one, that flash of inspired insight. But more often than not, that first idea that pops up has overlooked other possibilities.

This is where it can be helpful to explore with them what other options were actually available. It will help them understand that next time, it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment and try and come up with a few more alternatives.

When we do this, we help our colleagues see how their decision-making process operates. Now they have a basis for getting better.

This works well in one-to-one sessions. But we can use exactly the same review process to consider decisions that we have taken together. The key here is to avoid blaming any individual but looking at the collective decision-making process in order to learn from it.

This the fourteenth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? You can read other posts in this series on Mike’s blog.

Building capacity is at the heart of the Service Profit Chain. If you are not familiar with the intricacies of is model, don’t forget to check out Mike’s online courses where you will find a lot of great tools, resources and knowledge on Leadership Development and The Service Profit Chain.

The secret to faster team development is a shorter year.

June 3, 2017By Mike Hohnen

Seriously.

Let’s first deconstruct how do you know what to work on in order to ensure that you and your team are developing?

One way to get a grip on that would be to ask yourself: “If I was doing this reflection one year from now and looking back on the year that has passed, what should have happened during this past year in order for me to feel that I and/or my team have made serious progress?”

Because as Peter Drucker famously said: “What managers manage is change. The rest is admin.”

So that is the project.

That is what needs to change in order for you and/or your team to feel that you are actually developing. And as I have written about earlier, development is not only important because it means that we are making progress, it’s a key to our well-being, motivation and job satisfaction

But a whole year’s worth of change is a lot of change. So what typically happens is that we undershoot the runaway and don’t get to where we wanted to be. It was a nice dream.

We fall short of our own expectations.

The problem is not that we are being over ambitious, we need to be ambitious. The problem is that we are trying to chew off too big a bite.

So now ask yourself the same question but reframe it to just 3 months, the magic 90 days: If I was doing this reflection 90 days from now and looking back at these 90 days that have passed, what should have happened during these 90 days in order for me to feel that I and/or my team have made serious progress?

This is a horizon that is within our reach, we can almost see the contours of the finish line as we get going. It’s not that far, we can do this. We have set a goal that we can see ourselves completing within a reasonable time frame.

So personally I have given up yearly goals and targets. I have a long-term plan, which is more a direction that I am heading than it is a measurable goal. With that direction in mind, I work in 90-day sprints. It gives me a completely different sense of accomplishment.

Try it out for yourself.

And if you need more resources to get you going, here are my favourite tools:

Best self 90-day planner – This is at the core of my productivity.

If you would like to study this 12-week-year principle more in depth, here is a great book that originally inspired me:

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months

This the ninth blog post in a series where Mike is exploring: Why is it important to develop not just yourself but also the people around you? If you would like to read other posts in this series, don’t forget to check out Mike’s blog.

What the h… went wrong?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Driving home, Peter kept on asking himself this question.

What a disaster! This was an important day. He had put together a cross functional team of ‘experts’; supposedly some of the most competent people in the company. He had taken great pain (and expense) in organising the best possible location offsite. There, he had given them a very clear brief, explaining exactly what needed to be done and what he expected from them. The deadline was 4pm – tight but doable.

And the result?

…. was a monumental f… up to put it mildly.

What was wrong with these people?

There was nothing wrong with these people. What was wrong was that Peter was not managing the states and states of the team in a skilful way. He was ignoring or maybe totally unaware of the basic mechanics of human interaction.

In my previous blog posts, I have explain this concept of states and stages in more details, you may want to read this first.

The four fundamental questions

Once we understand that this ‘instability of organic systems’ is what is going on, we need a basic tool or more accurately, to understand and master the basic process that is needed in order for groups of human beings to collaborate effectively with each other. From behavioural psychology, we learn that whenever humans are put in a new situation, a new project or a new workgroup or maybe just a new workday, they ask themselves 4 fundamental questions:

Why are we doing this?
Who am I going to do it with?
What are we going to do?
How are we going to do it?

And they ask them in exactly that sequence because they need the answers in that sequence. The questions help us make meaning of what we are doing. If it is not meaningful to us, we don’t get much done. It is as simple as that.

The first question is quite subconscious, a sensing. The second question is more of a feeling and the last two questions are more thinking questions. But it is hard for us to move meaningfully forward to the next question if the previous question has not been answered clearly for us.

From process theory, we know that processes follow an oscillating pattern. They move in regular ‘Waves’ from one extreme point to its opposite and then back again. Human group processes the two extremes, which are often insecurity/uncertainty to security/certain.

The High-performance team model

When we combine these two, we get the Drexler/Sibet high performance model and it looks like this:

Why are we doing this?

The first step is all about orientation. Establish a clear purpose and meaning with whatever it is we are about to do.

Who is on this team and do they know each other or not?

If not, we need to find a way to break the ice and let people get to know each other. We are wired in our brains to be slightly distrustful of people we do not know. It is a basic survival precaution that dates back to our cave origins. If we are going to collaborate on a job/project, we need a minimum of trust. We start to build trust as we get to know each other. It is very simple.

If we know each other on the team, we need to check in. Just a quick round. How are we all feeling in general and what are maybe our expectations for this job or venture or day? This is all about, what Blanchard (Situational Leadership) would call, our psychological readiness level.

What are the goals and roles?

Then we need to agree on the goals and roles. What are we trying to achieve and what roles do we each have that will contribute to us achieving this?

How are we going to approach this?

And finally, we need to have a discussion and establish agreement, so how are we going to approach this?

Once we have been through these first four fundamental steps, we arrive at the bottom of the V model a point where we all have clarity and certainty about what we are about to embark on.

As the leader, you have now done 90% of your work. You have set direction, alignment and commitment. Lean back and let them decide the details of (tasks and timeframes, etc.) how they are going to do it. That will be quite easy if we have done the ground work well.

Observe and offer guidance only if needed as they execute, and only when they are done do you step back in and facilitate a reflection, so how did it go? What did we learn and what would we do different next time? You can see my previous post on goal grids and learning for more on this.

In my next online training, the Team leaders’ Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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This post is one of a series where we are exploring the notion of leadership and how this is different from management. Our starting point is the Service Profit Chain and the understating that the management part of our job will only take us so far. If we really want to create an organisation that is capable of delivering outstanding customer experiences, we need to develop an organisation that delivers outstanding employee experiences – and that requires leadership. You can check out other articles of the series below:

Do you understand the stages that your team goes through?

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team

Last week, we took a deeper dive into understanding how the mental states of each team member has an influence on the whole team – and that the team leader probably has more influence on this than anybody else. If you did not read that post, you might want to start there first.

The mental state that team members are in also produces a certain collective behaviour, especially as there are states that are typical for each stage of the life cycle of a team.

When we put a bunch of people together in a team, they typically go though certain stages. This was first described by Psychologist Bruce Tuckman who came up with the memorable phrase “forming, storming, norming, and performing” in his 1965 article, “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups.”

team-phases-pic-001

So this is not new. On the contrary, it is well established framework and many of you have probably heard the expression “forming, storming, norming and performing” before. The words that describe the basic stages that small groups experience. In theory, this is a linear process that starts with forming and then goes step by step through all four stages. But the challenge in this is that most teams do not naturally follow this path – they need some help or else they get stuck.

What stage is your team at?

So what is important is for the team leader to recognise the stages as they unfold in the team and to act skilfully in helping the team through each stage. Part of this team leader’s awareness also means understanding that the team is basically an unstable system, and that from time to time it will regress from the current stage and take a step or even two steps back to previous stages. And it requires skillful action on the part of the team leader to get the team back on track.

Less experienced team leaders often have an aversion to conflict. They feel it is all important that we all get along and have a nice time. So when the initial phase, the forming stage, is coming to an end and the first signs of friction become apparent, the typical reaction is to reorganise the team in order to stop the conflict from escalating. The deep fear is that this could get really ugly.

The quick fix is to shuffle positions or tasks, maybe even transferring one or more team members away from the team to other teams or whatever. The shuffle causes the team process to reset and a new period of forming starts. And it creates the illusion that the conflict or problem is solved.

During the forming stage, everyone is doing their best to fit in and not rock the boat too much. They are also trying their best to adapt to everyone else. But after a while, the friction invariably starts again. It happens because after a while, each of the team members have had enough, they are tired of not voicing their need and constantly trying to bend over backwards to keep everyone happy and they start to voice their dissatisfaction.

Conflict is just a symptom.

Friction is not a bad thing as such; it is just a symptom that we need to align whatever we are doing better with each other.

The way we do that is that we start a number of conversations about how the team is functioning and what we need to do in order for everything to work better for all. This may mean some heated meetings and possible disharmony, but eventually the skillful team leader will help the team come to an understanding that enables them to move forward – typically by establishing some rules of engagement or a team manifesto. As they do, the team moves out of the storming into the norming stage and after a while it becomes (high) performing.

You need to work on the fluffy stuff.

As the team leader, it is important for you to understand that it is hard to get to any level of (high) performance without investing time and energy in what is often seen as the fluffy stuff. You need to have the necessary conversations; conversations that aim on developing better relations and not just on task accomplishments. Handling this in a helpful way that keeps everyone on the bus and heading in the same direction is not something we are born with – it is learned skill.

In my next online training, the Team Leader’s Toolbox, I will go into much more detail on how to actually do this in practical terms. Because it is not rocket science, it just requires you to be aware of some basic principles about human behaviour and the importance of relationships.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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Teams are organic systems, and therefore, by definition unstable.

December 27, 2016By Mike Hohnen

Team member

As we continue to explore team leadership as different from team management, we now need to look at another aspect of the team.

A team is also a system. And when we look at it from that angle, we need to recognise that systems come in many forms. One way to look at them is as either mechanical or organic. Mechanical systems are things like computers, cars and factories. Mechanical systems are by definition stable. You may feel that your car is moody – but that is probably more about you than the car. The car works or it does not work. If you stress it, it continues to work up to a point and then it snaps and is kaput.

Human beings – the core elements of your team are organic systems, as are cats, cauliflower or caterpillars. And organic systems are by definition unstable. They are always in transition from one state to another. Humans, go from happy to excited to sad. From wide awake to drowsy. From enthusiastic to reluctant and back again, on and on it goes. The only constant is change.

If we try and handle this instability with just management tools, we quickly get into trouble. The whole principle of management is that we can set up rules, and ways of doing things that can be replicated every day no matter what. Great idea if you are working with a stable system – quite tricky if you are working with an unstable system. Add to that, the complexity that these team members are not transitioning from one stage to another in an orderly and synchronised manner. While A is happy, B is frustrated, and C is indifferent. And tomorrow that may well be the other way round. It just depends…

The instability is not completely random. We typically shift to a new state as a result of some stimulus. This can be a change in weather, a remark from a colleague, a difficult task etc. the list is endless. Here you see the big difference with mechanical systems. Your car does not get sad when it rains, happy when we are going downhill – or frustrated by all the bigger cars on the road today. It just does its car thing in the same state no matter what.

Now all this may seem obvious to you. But in my day to day work as a coach, I keep running in to leaders who are assuming that everyone on their team is operating like a car and therefore have two states ‘off’ and ‘on’.

First step is to acknowledge and accept that this is what is going on. Learn to live with the fact that everyone around you is basically unstable – including you.

Second, if you are the kind of leader who is highly volatile or moody or otherwise prone to dramatic shifts in your states, you need to learn to manage your own states (I will be giving an online course on that in beginning of the New Year).

Thirdly, now that you are aware that this is what is going on, you need to help your team members better manage their states.

We will look at that in next week’s post.

Enter your email address below and we will notify you when we launch the Team Leader’s Toolbox!

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Direction, Alignment & Commitment in 4 easy steps

January 26, 2019By Mike Hohnen

Last week, I introduced you to DAC (Direction, Alignment and Commitment), the leadership concept developed by The Center for Creative Leadership and we looked at how that can be a useful way for the first time managers (FTM) to understand what they need to focus on from a leadership perspective. In fact, this does not just apply to First Time Managers, a lot of seasoned managers could benefit from applying this thinking as well. But that is another story.

So just to recap, DAC stands for Direction, Alignment and Commitment. If you did not read my previous blog post, you can find it here. This framework is not something that one person (the leader) tells everyone to do; on the contrary, establishing DAC is a process. It happens as a result of a two-way exchange with everyone on the team. It is co-created so to speak, but often initiated by the leader.

So that is the theory we covered in the previous blog post, but if you are a newly appointed manager, you may very well be thinking: “This makes sense but where do I begin?”

It is actually not as tricky as it may seem at first. There is a tool for this. And if you can integrate it into your basic approach to leadership, you will go far. I promise.

The high Performance Model

The tool or approach is called the Drexler/Sibet high performance model; named after the two gentlemen who created it. The idea combines two schools of thought: Behavioural psychology and process theory.

From behavioural psychology, we learn that whenever humans are put in a new situation, a new project or a new workgroup or maybe just a new workday, they ask themselves 4 fundamental questions:

Why are we doing this?
Who am I going to do it with?
What are we going to do?
How are we going to do it?

And they ask them in exactly that sequence.

When we combine these two, we get the Drexler/Sibet high performance model and it looks like this:

The first step is all about orientation. Establish a clear purpose and meaning with whatever it is we are about to do.

Who is on this team and do they know each other or not?

If we know each other on the team, we need to check in. Just a quick round. How are we all feeling in general and what are maybe our expectations for this job or venture or day? This is all about what Blanchard (Situational Leadership) would call our psychological readiness level.

Then we need to agree on the goals and roles. What are we trying to achieve and what roles do we each have that will contribute to us achieving this?

And finally, we need to have a discussion and establish agreement, so how are we going to approach this?

Once we have been through these first four fundamental steps, we arrive at the bottom of the V model a point where we all have clarity and certainty about what we are about to embark on.

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This is the fourth article in a series on how to lead as a first time manger. If you would like to know more, check out other articles of the first time manager series:

I have a new online training out on this: The Team Leaders Toolbox – check it out