Motivating Staff Through Business Success

Friday 29 September, 2006

by Graham Haines

There cannot be a CEO or a Divisional Manager anywhere who doesn't believe that the performance of their organisation would reach new levels if only their employees displayed a greater sense of teamwork and motivation.

Yet having accepted that it is they who need to take the initiative to bring this about, enthusiasm can quickly wane as they grapple with other issues and the management of the business itself.  Developing and implementing team building programs is like draining the swamp when up to the neck in alligators. 
Furthermore, most managers regard teamwork and its development as a separate issue to business management.  They do this because when they think of teamwork the things that come most immediately to mind are the interpersonal factors that characterise teams and team members - high levels of motivation, respect for and trust in one another, constructive conflict, innovation etc.  And so the logic goes that to develop such characteristics requires a separate program to be run in parallel with the "normal" program of running the business.  Consultants are hired, programs are devised, large sums of money are spent - but with what result?
Often such team building programs lead to the establishment of pseudo teams, workgroups that display the appearance of teams but not the substance.  And in the final analysis, it's the substance - improved organisational performance - that is the only worthwhile result.
It's a chicken and egg issue. 
Conventional wisdom has it that by focusing on the interpersonal aspects of teams and teamwork, team performance will be enhanced and that will benefit organisational performance. 
It rarely works that way for it demands charismatic leadership, enormous persistence and willingness on the part of employees to accept revolutionary change.
There is another way.  It's virtually guaranteed to work but it involves putting the egg first rather than the chicken. 
Let me explain.

Step 1 - Develop the strategic business plan

Business success is a combination of doing the right thing and doing things right.  Doing the right thing is fundamental.  It means deciding on the activities, markets and products that your company is involved in - now and in the future - and the development of a competitive strategy.  If you don't do the right thing now and continue to do the right thing in the future, then you will not succeed, no matter how well you do things right.  It's akin to sailing the ship brilliantly - but in the wrong direction.

Step 2 - Align all company employees behind the strategic business plan

I came across a quote the other day from the founder of a billion dollar company.  "If you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time."
I would add - "providing you do the right thing" - but this quote illustrates the power of organisational alignment - in this CEO's mind at least.  The diagram below depicts this graphically.

Organisational Alignment

So organisational alignment can be summarised as follows:

• Agreement on where the company is now
  
• Agreement on the future direction and goals
  
• Agreement on the strategies to get there
  
• Every employee understands his or her role in the journey

Stage 3 - Structure the organisation around workgroups

I use the term "workgroup" generically to describe any small group of individuals who work together with a common purpose.  If one imagines workgroups as a continuum, at one end of the scale there is the "group of individuals" and at the other the ultimate expression of the workgroup the  "high performance team".  No matter where on the continuum each workgroup lies, if it has any aspirations to develop beyond a group of individuals, there are three fundamentals that it must satisfy.

1. It must have a defined workgroup purpose aligned to the organisational purpose
   
2. It must have a defined workgroup performance goal aligned to the organisation's performance goal
   
3. Each workgroup must develop a common approach to working together

Once those fundamentals are in place, there is a need to acquire the functional and process skills necessary to achieve the performance goals.  There is also a need for each workgroup to appreciate what other workgroups do and to understand the needs of its customers whether internal or external.
Note at this stage that there is no specific mention of the interpersonal skills, behaviours and relationships that most of us associate with teams.
The acquirement of interpersonal skills to facilitate team "togetherness" can be accelerated through training but will also develop naturally as a consequence of an unerring focus on the achievement of specific team performance goals.
In their book "The Wisdom of Teams - creating the high-performance organisation", the authors Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith selected Hewlett Packard as one of the case studies for their research on teams.  They were somewhat taken aback by the comment of Dean Morton, Executive Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of HP when he replied to their research request by saying:  "We don't really think that much about teams here - I'm not sure that we have that many that would be of interest to you".
However, as the authors were to discover, HP has dozens of teams but they don't think of themselves as such.  Instead there is a deep seated performance oriented culture at HP and staff naturally function as teams - particularly cross-functional ones - because that's the most effective way to achieve team and company performance goals.  And the spin-off is of course a highly engaged workforce who take pride in saying that they work for HP.    
Katzenbach and Smith demonstrate convincingly that the egg - team and organisational performance - gives birth to the chicken - engaged and motivated employees with a high quality of working life.
The following summary of the new perspective on teams is adapted from a table taken from "Managing Teams" by Lawrence Holpp.

	Teams then	Teams now
Rationale	Quality of working life and participatory democracy	Structural and business performance reasons for teams
Purpose	To get along better	To improve work performance
Measure of effectiveness	How do we all feel?	Have we achieved our goals?
Training	Team building groups, interpersonal skills, personal growth	Team skills, quality tools, communication skills, process skills
Performance appraisal	Individual	Team

 

Summary

Teams then: Individual quality of working life - spin-off is team performance
Teams now: Team performance - spin-off is individual quality of working life
The impact of this new perspective on workgroups and teams should be music to the ears of CEOs because it heralds the convergence of the two management disciplines - managing the business and managing people. 
The rationale can be summarised as follows:

• Doing the right thing in a strategic sense remains essential to business viability. Being able to adapt one's business to changes in the environment is the critical business skill. This is the key responsibility of the CEO
  
• The process of natural selection has weeded out competitors who failed to adapt. Thus, whilst doing the right thing is central to survival, it's the implementation or doing things right that is central to success
  
• Organisational alignment at a company, workgroup and individual level is the foundation of effective implementation
  
• Potentially the most effective structural unit is workgroups (teams)
  
• The basis of effective workgroups is a common purpose, a common goal and a common approach
  
• Training in functional and process skills (listening, communicating, problem-solving etc) should precede team-building activities
  
• The more goal and performance oriented workgroups become, the more they will begin to display the attributes that we associate with teams
  
• Engaged and motivated employees will result with high levels of individual job satisfaction. Managers who can manage people as well as businesses will emerge
  
• The virtuous circle starts - the better you manage the implementation of your business strategies, the more success you will achieve and the more motivated your people will become which will result in higher performance and even more success

Developing people and teamwork has another major benefit.  In an aligned organisation, as your employees and workgroups become more performance and goal oriented, so they will become more aware of the strategic context in which the company operates.  Rather than taking the line - "business strategy, that's not my responsibility", your people will want to be involved in debating the future direction of the company.  Their input is invaluable in making sure you continue to do the right thing.  
By integrating business and people management this way, everybody wins.

• Individual employees win because working in teams results in a stimulating environment and a high quality of work life
  
• Your customers win because every employee understands his or her role in delivering customer satisfaction
  
• The company wins because it out performs its direct competitors

It's one of the paradoxes of business these days that the more IT replaces people, the more important people become.  They are the source of your competitive advantage.  They are your company's greatest asset.  But the way to engage them, to develop them and to retain them is to organise them into teams with the mandate to manage the business by achieving specific performance goals.

Source:ceoonline.com