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Acknowledge the Importance of Other People

February 20th, 2012

 

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. –William James

 

Most people have one defining need that very rarely gets satisfied.  Many of us will move Heaven and Earth to satisfy this need.  This one attribute is the single most motivating factor that leads to success.  It is the need, the want, to feel important.  The person who can satisfy this need in others, the person who can sincerely make other people feel important, can be very influential and is typically regarded by others as a good leader. In fact, you can tell a lot about an individual by what makes him feel important.  My dad builds houses, and one of the most satisfying things to him is to complete a building and have others admire his work.  Al Capone got his feeling of being important from power and control.  Mother Teresa got her feeling of importance by helping the helpless.  There are usually two reasons why people do things.  The reason we tell others… and the real reason.  When we give money to charity, do we really do it to help others or do we do it because of the satisfaction we get from helping others.  We feel important because we feel like we made a difference in someone else’s life.

We you look around your office, you will see people from all walks of life who crave this feeling of importance.  If any one of those people all of the sudden stopped doing their job, it would cause a lot of challenges for your company.  Every single job that they do is important to the success of the company – to your success, because without them you couldn’t do your job effectively.

When was the last time that you told them how important they were to you?

One of my class members about ten years ago decided to use this principle with his sales assistant.  She was the assistant for five different salespeople, and her job was to put together marketing materials and, ultimately, their contracts when they sold a big deal.  During the class, this salesman decided that the work that this woman did for him was critical to him closing deals, so on his way into the office, he bought her a big container of popcorn and just put a sticky note on it saying how important she was to him and to his success.

When he gave it to her, she was shocked and surprised, but awfully grateful as well since he was the first person in years to treat her like an equal in the office.  When he came back to class the next week, he told us that she had taken the sticky note off the can and stuck it under the plastic protector that covered her desk so that she could see it every day.

I saw this man a couple of years later and asked him about the sales assistant.  He told me that she is still there and still doing a fabulous job.  He said, though, that she now has over a dozen of the sticky notes on her desk.  She keeps every one.

Great leaders use this aspect of human nature to make people feel important.  One way to be a great leader is to find some way every day to make the people around you feel important.

 

Team Building Principle #15: Acknowledge the Importance of Other People

Add Fun to the Work Day

February 14th, 2012

Do you really want to have fun at work or just add fun to an ordinary work day? Below are a few simple team building tips that will help you have fun while building the team.

Go to Lunch

Have Fun at WorkOne of the most overlooked team building activity is the lunch. Really… Just a simple lunch out of the office. Quite often, coworkers will run to get a bite to eat with each other, and they will likely group together when they do. Every once in a while, if you are the boss, invite yourself to the group. “Hey are you folks going over to Chili’s for lunch? Mind if I tag along?” If you have never done this before, you will likely get some subtle resistance. (I mean, who wants to eat with the boss, right?) However, when you pick up the tab at the end of the meal, the whole group will be appreciative. You are likely during the meal to really get to know your team on a more personal level, as well. It is easier to communicate with your team when you they like you and trust you, and food is a great conversation starter.

Share Success Stories

When you get a compliment from a client or a project runs very efficiently, make sure and share the story behind the success with the whole team. Most managers think that just telling the result is good enough, but the team will only get to see the complete picture if they get access to the whole story — the story behind the numbers. For instance, instead of “We hit our goal by the skin of our teeth. Good job, everyone,” tell the team what put us over the top. “On Thursday afternoon, we were still $25,000 under goal and had just one day to get the generate the last bit of revenue. John was able to go back to an order that was shipping on Friday and called the customer back to offer to double the order in exchange for a 2% discount. That was just enough to put us over the goal!”

By the way, most of the people that work for a big company do their job very well without ever knowing how their work affects the bottom-line. They are the part of the team who need most to hear about the success stories that occur at the end of the project. They will feel more of a feeling of accomplishment as they hear how their activities led to the success.

Make Time to Play

One of the big mistakes that I see big companies make is that they try to re-create a team culture from another organization. For instance, a lot of high-tech companies have started creating gourmet meals for their employees for free and bring in pool tables for recreation because Google does it. Or they try to add comedy to their announcements because Southwest Airlines does it. Remember that it took years for these organizations to create their culture, and if you take what works for them and insert it into a different culture, you’ll likely get a lot of resistance and confusion. Instead, start slow and build on the team culture.

A good way to start is to and a small fun activity. It could be a goal for the group to accomplish like a sales goal or customer retention goal, or it could be an outing where you shut down the office early on a Friday night and go to a ball game or go bowling. In reality, it doesn’t really matter how you start as long as you build on the first step. You can’t do something fun once and then stop. Instead, get creative an add fun activities to your culture in a step-by-step fashion.

So if you want to build a team culture and have fun at work, go to lunch with your team from time to time, share success stories, and make time for play. If you do, you’ll begin to build your team culture.

Team Building Activities Support Best Places to Work

February 8th, 2012

Team Building Activities Support Best Places to Work

How do team building activities help your company become one of the best places to work?  Fortune Magazine recently released its annual list of the 100 best workplaces and while the perks are nice, that’s not what really motivates employees to do their best.

Fortune 100 Best Places to Work 2012More and more decision makers are turning to charity team building workshops as a way of keeping employees engaged.  You might think that the best workplaces on the Fortune list have fantastic perks and lots of fun every day – and that’s part of the formula.   Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard Business School, and her research team analyzed nearly 12,000 work diaries from professionals in seven different companies.  “Sure, the techies at Google love the free gourmet food, and Zappos employees get a kick out of playing Nerf Dart war. But all of that misses the most important element of employee engagement: helping them succeed at work that matters.”

Team building activities are an important tool for setting the tone with new employees and reinforcing the message to those with tenure.  Instead of reading about the company values in the employee handbook, the message is much more powerful when delivered in a team building workshop.  For example, Nestle Purina subscribes to the servant leadership model, so including team building activities like the Build-A-Bike where they can serve their local community is a natural fit as part of their meetings.

According to Amabile, “The single most important thing that can keep workers deeply, happily engaged on the job is moving forward on work they care about — even if the progress is an incremental ‘small win.’ Your bosses — and how they manage you — make all the difference.”  When you have a quarterly or annual meeting it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your corporate culture through interactive team building activities.

The best managers in the Harvard Business School study set clear goals and gave people autonomy in meeting those goals. As a result, their employees stayed committed, productive and creative. Top performers have to be clued into and bought into a shared vision in order for company results to remain strong.

Sure, cool perks are nice. But many businesses see an inspired workforce as key to creating a great place to work – they go hand-in-hand.  Consider adding team building activities to reinforce your corporate culture and engage your employees…and create a great place to work!

This article was written by Colette Johnston. Colette is a Corporate Team Building Consultant with The Leader’s Institute headquartered out of Dallas Texas. You can reach Colette at 800-872-7830.

Build Morale when Times are Tough

January 26th, 2012

Times are tough, and as a result, morale can suffer. So what can the leaders of an organization do to help team members feel more confident and at ease? Below are a few simple tips:

  1. Give Sincere Compliments: When times are tough, we can easily be distracted (sometimes just trying to stay above water). That is the time that your team members need reassurance, and a sincere compliment can go a long way in helping your team feel more comfortable.  Remember that the team member doesn’t have to be perfect — just improving.
  2. Share Information: People fear the unknown a lot more than reality in most cases. If your team knows what’s wrong, they can often help you fix it. Often, leaders will try to protect the team by keeping negative information to himself/herself, which just makes the team wonder what you are hiding. Fear causes people to react aggressively, so share information, and your team will help you.
  3. Set a Goal: A shared goal can help the team work together toward a common result. A number of small successes can improve morale dramatically.
  4. Brain-Storm: Challenges are often opportunities in disguise. When challenges develop, get your team together and brain-storm solutions.  One big idea can open up additional revenue streams.

Get your team working toward a common goal by praising them and working on tough challenges together. Your team culture will grow, and you will be way ahead of the game when things turn around.

Can Team Building Increase Productivity in a Recession?

January 1st, 2012

When the economy is slow, company managers and leaders have to be very cautious with every expense. As a result, we will often put off hiring new employees until more certainty in the marketplace develops. Although natural efficiencies will develop in a downward economy, can team building activities help increase productivity so that we can avoid the expense of adding on new personnel? The answer to that question is… “Well… It depends…”

Don’t Confuse “Morale” with “Productivity”

Team Building Increases ProductivityTeam Building is almost a generic term that is used for both “morale building” activities and “productivity building” activities interchangeable, but if you confuse the two activities, you can make some costly mistakes. Morale building activities can include anything from going out to a movie together to an office holiday party to entertainment style activities at annual meetings ans conventions. These activities provide a shared-experience that builds temporary camaraderie and provides a fun relief to the normal day-to-day rat-race. Productivity building activities are training events or innovations that help teams do more with less. Although people will often call both of these types of activities “Team Building”, the activities themselves get totally different results. Both are needed to create a team culture, but quite often, managers and leaders will schedule one type of activity hoping to get the needed result from the other type of activity and be sorely disappointed.

Although productivity will often improve (sometimes dramatically) when morale improves, an increase in morale doesn’t always cause a team to be more productive. For instance, if a manager came into the office and announced that the entire team would get the whole week off and still get paid, morale would skyrocket, but productivity would drop to zero for the week. Morale building activities like team outings and company parties are extremely important, but they can’t entirely replace productivity building events and activities.

Since the team atmosphere created by morale building activities can be temporary, you’ll want to schedule activities like this regularly so that the individual team members get to interact with each other in a more fun way to build camaraderie. Charity team building events at annual meetings or conventions can be a great way to insert a morale building activity. These team building functions are very economical, because the company can generate great public relations without increasing the cost of conducting a convention or annual meeting. For instance, most conventions are going to have some type of entertainment or at least a company outing of some kind. Many companies are replacing these activities with a charity bike build or a team scavenger hunt where team members build gift baskets for soldiers. The investment in each activity is fairly similar, but the results of the charity activities often provide impactful, lasting memories that build great camaraderie between team members.

Build Teams by Training Team Members Together

In addition to morale building activities, a team also needs to develop new skills in order to keep them productive. Many years ago, a mentor of mine told me that “You can’t build a team by training individuals, but you can build a team by training individuals together.” I didn’t really understand the power of this advice until I started my own business, but I understand it more and more as my company grows and grows. For instance, many big companies offer tuition assistance for higher level degrees for their employees, but what often happens is that a company will invest a ton of money into the development of an employee only to have the person leave the company and start working for a competitor. This happens because the individual employees is growing, but the team as a whole is stagnant.

Oddly enough, any skill development activities will work to build the team culture in an organization if the skills developed gives the team a competitive advantage in the marketplace. For instance, Apple decided to eliminate cash registers inside their Apple Stores and replace them with the ability for any employee in the store to be able to use their smartphones to ring-up items for purchases on their smartphones. Because Apple is doing something that no one else is doing, the employees who have been trained in this new technology feel like they are a part of an elite group that is different from other retail stores. Whether they are or not doesn’t really matter, because the team believe that they are ahead of the curve. Customers can find an Apple employee and within seconds create a purchase and have the receipt sent to the customer via email and be on their way. A dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in cost while creating more of a team atmosphere among employees.

“Soft-Skills” Team Building Training is Most Productive

The most effective team training to increase productivity comes from “soft-skills” training, though. While Hard-Skills are ones essential to doing individual jobs within a company — for example hard-skills for an engineer might be calculus and physics — soft-Skills are skills that improve productivity no matter what specific role that a person has within an organization. Soft-skills would include communication skills, presentation skills, the ability to persuade people, the ability to coach and mentor others, etc. If the engineer improves in any or all of these soft-skills, then he or she will likely improve their individual success as well as the overall success of the team.

When teams train together in these soft-skill areas, they automatically develop that same type of team culture that Apple developed with the technology change. Team members know that they are a part of a unique, elite group that is different from most organizations (because most organizations don’t train this way).

For example, a few years ago, I was hired by a commercial construction company to help them deliver high-level sales presentations better. Companies that build skyscrapers or have groups of construction projects often bid out these huge projects in one big contract, so they will often ask for huge proposals and have each qualified contractor come in and do a presentation to narrow down the field. The company that hired me was closing about one out of six of these presentations, but wanted to increase their numbers. So we conducted a series of presentation skills classes with the teams of presenters. Because they trained together, they developed a team culture that showed up when they conducted their presentations. Quite often, at the end of their presentations, the board members who were in the audience would say, “We chose this group because they just seemed to work very well together.” The team culture showed, because the individuals within the group had been trained in soft-skills together, so they saw themselves as having an advantage over other presenters (and they had one.)

Presentation skills, people skills, coaching, mentoring, and other soft-skills training can really help teams become more productive as long as the teams are going through the training as a team. I remember my college football coach telling us, “You don’t fight for records or awards, you fight for the guy who is next to you in the trenches.” When teams train together, they build a rapport that lasts.

Can Team Building Increase Productivity in a Recession?

January 1st, 2012

When the economy is slow, company managers and leaders have to be very cautious with every expense. As a result, we will often put off hiring new employees until more certainty in the marketplace develops. Although natural efficiencies will develop in a downward economy, can team building activities help increase productivity so that we can avoid the expense of adding on new personnel? The answer to that question is… “Well… It depends…”

Don’t Confuse “Morale” with “Productivity”

Team Building Increases ProductivityTeam Building is almost a generic term that is used for both “morale building” activities and “productivity building” activities interchangeable, but if you confuse the two activities, you can make some costly mistakes. Morale building activities can include anything from going out to a movie together to an office holiday party to entertainment style activities at annual meetings ans conventions. These activities provide a shared-experience that builds temporary camaraderie and provides a fun relief to the normal day-to-day rat-race. Productivity building activities are training events or innovations that help teams do more with less. Although people will often call both of these types of activities “Team Building”, the activities themselves get totally different results. Both are needed to create a team culture, but quite often, managers and leaders will schedule one type of activity hoping to get the needed result from the other type of activity and be sorely disappointed.

Although productivity will often improve (sometimes dramatically) when morale improves, an increase in morale doesn’t always cause a team to be more productive. For instance, if a manager came into the office and announced that the entire team would get the whole week off and still get paid, morale would skyrocket, but productivity would drop to zero for the week. Morale building activities like team outings and company parties are extremely important, but they can’t entirely replace productivity building events and activities.

Since the team atmosphere created by morale building activities can be temporary, you’ll want to schedule activities like this regularly so that the individual team members get to interact with each other in a more fun way to build camaraderie. Charity team building events at annual meetings or conventions can be a great way to insert a morale building activity. These team building functions are very economical, because the company can generate great public relations without increasing the cost of conducting a convention or annual meeting. For instance, most conventions are going to have some type of entertainment or at least a company outing of some kind. Many companies are replacing these activities with a charity bike build or a team scavenger hunt where team members build gift baskets for soldiers. The investment in each activity is fairly similar, but the results of the charity activities often provide impactful, lasting memories that build great camaraderie between team members.

Build Teams by Training Team Members Together

In addition to morale building activities, a team also needs to develop new skills in order to keep them productive. Many years ago, a mentor of mine told me that “You can’t build a team by training individuals, but you can build a team by training individuals together.” I didn’t really understand the power of this advice until I started my own business, but I understand it more and more as my company grows and grows. For instance, many big companies offer tuition assistance for higher level degrees for their employees, but what often happens is that a company will invest a ton of money into the development of an employee only to have the person leave the company and start working for a competitor. This happens because the individual employees is growing, but the team as a whole is stagnant.

Oddly enough, any skill development activities will work to build the team culture in an organization if the skills developed gives the team a competitive advantage in the marketplace. For instance, Apple decided to eliminate cash registers inside their Apple Stores and replace them with the ability for any employee in the store to be able to use their smartphones to ring-up items for purchases on their smartphones. Because Apple is doing something that no one else is doing, the employees who have been trained in this new technology feel like they are a part of an elite group that is different from other retail stores. Whether they are or not doesn’t really matter, because the team believe that they are ahead of the curve. Customers can find an Apple employee and within seconds create a purchase and have the receipt sent to the customer via email and be on their way. A dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in cost while creating more of a team atmosphere among employees.

“Soft-Skills” Team Building Training is Most Productive

The most effective team training to increase productivity comes from “soft-skills” training, though. While Hard-Skills are ones essential to doing individual jobs within a company — for example hard-skills for an engineer might be calculus and physics — soft-Skills are skills that improve productivity no matter what specific role that a person has within an organization. Soft-skills would include communication skills, presentation skills, the ability to persuade people, the ability to coach and mentor others, etc. If the engineer improves in any or all of these soft-skills, then he or she will likely improve their individual success as well as the overall success of the team.

When teams train together in these soft-skill areas, they automatically develop that same type of team culture that Apple developed with the technology change. Team members know that they are a part of a unique, elite group that is different from most organizations (because most organizations don’t train this way).

For example, a few years ago, I was hired by a commercial construction company to help them deliver high-level sales presentations better. Companies that build skyscrapers or have groups of construction projects often bid out these huge projects in one big contract, so they will often ask for huge proposals and have each qualified contractor come in and do a presentation to narrow down the field. The company that hired me was closing about one out of six of these presentations, but wanted to increase their numbers. So we conducted a series of presentation skills classes with the teams of presenters. Because they trained together, they developed a team culture that showed up when they conducted their presentations. Quite often, at the end of their presentations, the board members who were in the audience would say, “We chose this group because they just seemed to work very well together.” The team culture showed, because the individuals within the group had been trained in soft-skills together, so they saw themselves as having an advantage over other presenters (and they had one.)

Presentation skills, people skills, coaching, mentoring, and other soft-skills training can really help teams become more productive as long as the teams are going through the training as a team. I remember my college football coach telling us, “You don’t fight for records or awards, you fight for the guy who is next to you in the trenches.” When teams train together, they build a rapport that lasts.

Jazz Up Christmas Banquets and Year End Meetings with Quality Team Building Activities

December 13th, 2011

Want to jazz up your Christmas Banquet, holiday event, or year end meeting this year? A quality team building activity can add some fun and enthusiasm to the meetings and support a charity in the process. Charity team building events are still a fairly new invention, but these activities are growing in popularity by leaps and bounds every single year. These activities combine fun (and funny) exercises to build camaraderie to either build something or accumulate something that will later be donated to a charity on behalf of the sponsoring company or group.

For example, the grandfather of all of the charity team building events is the world-famous Build-A-Bike® team building event where participants work together to accumulate pieces of bicycles to build brand-new bikes for underprivileged kids in the area. This event is still the most popular, with good reason, because it combines fun and energy with an emotional appeal of helping kids. The big ending for these events is when kids come rushing into the room, and each individual team gets to donate their individual bike to a single kid. This leaves every participant feeling that his/her contribution was important to the success of the activity. Lots of fun!

Golf team building for a cause is the newest charity team building activity, and it is quickly becoming a popular choice because of the new economy that we are working in. This activity has participants accumulate non-perishable food items that are used strategically to design a custom golf-course for the group. Of course, once the course is dismantled, all of the food items are donated to a local food pantry. These food pantries are really struggling to keep up right now, because the number of families coming to them for food each week is increasing while donations are really low because of the economy. So they directors of these pantries are extremely grateful for these big donations (most often over 1000 lbs of food).

Another good choice is to do a scavenger hunt where participants race to accumulate items that are used to create care packages for soldiers who are away from their families. Especially around Christmas time, these care packages are a welcome to soldiers who are stationed in foreign countries.

For information about a charity team building event, call an event specialist at (800) 872-7830.

Team Building in Cities Outside the Major Metroplexes

November 24th, 2011

Just because your city has under 20 million people doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to schedule one of the best team building events in the world! Because of the size of The Leader’s Institute® Team Building company and because our team building instructors are based in cities across the United States, we can deliver team building events in just about any city in America, Canada, and Europe.

The following is a list of cities where we offer teambuilding programs and team building activities.

We offer over a dozen different programs including philanthropic events, workshops, seminars, and breakout sessions. For details about all of the options that are available in each location above, click the Team Building Events link in the tool bar at the top of the page. We look forward to working with you on your next program!