I remember a time when I worked in Buffalo, New York. Our office
participated in a competition against the other 140 offices around the
world. The contest was statistics based with a caveat that the offices
competed against themselves, based on the previous week's performances.
Small offices could compete with large offices. Our office sputtered for
years and was never really a player. I wanted to get the game going, so I
started working with some of the staff to meet some of their goals. Our
standings in the first few weeks of pushing to meet goals improved. We
normally swam around the bottom. You know, with the ones who normally
imploded.
After three weeks and getting even more staff involved, we hit our first
number one week. It was a great accomplishment. We kept up the pressure and
did it again for the second week in a row. And getting nearly all the staff
involved, we hit number one three weeks in a row. Then the pressure of our
drive for improvement blew a gasket. Sputtering, we ended up about fourth
place in week four, but we won our first month, in years. Unfortunately,
that gasket which blew took us out of the running for nearly half a year.
The gasket was a key staff member who we though was onboard with drive to
improve. When we scrutinized every statistic to find ways to improve them,
we found issues with this one area. Looking deeper into the issue we found
the logged performance was a sham, and had been for years. With our team
doing poorly, this staff member normally shined, and now we knew why. Under
stress and scrutiny, the truth getting out, this fellow transformed from a
top performer to a perpetual problem child who eventually had to go.
Pushing for higher levels of performance, we tightened our ship. We also put
on the pressure for everyone on our team. That increased pressure exposed
our weaknesses, and worse, our unknown flaws.
The time to find those flaws is before the pressure is increased, as the
higher the pressure, the larger the gasket that will blow when a member of
the team cannot take it any more. That they did not know what they were
doing and were hiding behind the general mayhem of the office, or that they
were never really onboard with the project and were just faking it until the
stakes got too high and they bail unexpectedly.
Looking back to this experience in the 1980, knows what I know now, I would
have interviewed each team member every week to focus on them instead of
what stats they could accomplish. This would have more likely routed out the
issue before it tore our ship apart.
When your team ramps up efforts, that is the best time to reconfirm
everyone's true intentions to support the team or not, which can be done
through one-on-ones and other similar meetings.
As everyone has a limit to how much pressure we can take, it makes sense to
understand when it is before it is too late.
Enjoy!
Sanford Berenberg
Sanford@berenberg.net
http://www.berenberg.net
http://learnandgrowdaily.com ←-Click here to order: "Learn And Grow Daily!"
http://sanfordberenberg.blogspot.com/
Follow Me on Twitter! http://twitter.com/sberenberg <---- NEW
502-533-9336
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment