Managing During The Economic Crisis – Part Twelve

This is the twelfth in a series of posts about leading/managing during the economic crisis.

The content of these posts will include unedited transcriptions from a recent webinar addressing “How to Optimize Teams’ Effectiveness in Difficult Economic Times”.   The webinar contained questions from the attendees.  The questions are answered by  the following five management and leadership experts:

Jerry Houston, Carol Bergmann, A.J. Hiltenbrand, Ed Oakley and See Luan Foo.

The rest of this post contains an unedited transcription of one of the questions asked and answered during the webinar:

Ed:  Let’s go to another question.  We’re rapidly running out of time, I don’t know if that we’re going to get all of these questions but I will attempt to look for different ways to respond to them.  We’ll talk about that at the end.  This is from Rosy, and Rosy has three different questions.  I’ll start with the question here.

“What do you feel are the most important principles ensuring that a team operates effectively?  Who would like to give a shot at that?”

See Luan:  I like to try to offer a suggestion.  The key principles would be how to build up trust because without trust no business is possible no personal relationship, interpersonal relationship is possible.  Then with regards to the current environment, I think it’s important to have positive attitude that things can get better because people can relate to them rather than focused on loom and doom and doing somebody else says.  Then certainly a “Can do” attitude is very important for a team to operate effectively.  And of course the other things which would be very important would be having EQ skills, having communication skills, [0:01:41] conflicts for would be also very important.  Thank you.

Ed: Anybody else like to address that?

Jerry: I would just add in that in our vision statement there’s a line in that vision statement that says that we are going to operate in an atmosphere of mutual benefit respected trust, and it ties back to what See Luan was saying that if there are some benefit for all of the team members, and benefit might be that your opinion is heard, that we tried your idea.  Also the word respect, even if don’t agree and total agreement as many people understand that team is necessarily a good thing.  We want some divergent points of view so there needs to be respect for those points of view even if you don’t completely buy in to the concept of the other person.  Then finally that word trust which there isn’t a relationship in the world personal or professional that works when trust doesn’t exist.

Ed: And to me one of the ways you build that trust is asking people to share and this might sound a little touchy for some people, but it’s got to happen one way or the other if you’re really going to build trust and that’s learning to appreciate each other and the special talent of each of an individuals.  And a very powerful way to do that is to literally have a meeting opener in which a person is on the honor seat for that meeting and go around the room let people just share what they appreciate about that particular person.

And that’s the thing you want to let them know in advance what you’re going to do, and then in the next meeting, someone else gets to be in that honor seat and when you do that, you always hear things that you would not imagine people to say.  If you knew that next Monday that Susan was going to be on the honor sit, no matter what kind of relationship you have with Susan, you’re going to be thinking about what you really do appreciate about Susan because even though maybe you have a little bit of friction with Susan, chances are there are some things you really do appreciate if you think about it.

But you aren’t focus on those things if there is this natural friction.  What this causes you to focus on what do you really appreciate because you don’t want to look stupid and you want to be sincere.  You know that you want to be able to say something that’s truly honest and when you do that it would be very powerful.  That’s just a little idea.  Anybody else on that one?

A.J.: This is A.J., am I still on?

Ed:  Yes sir.

A.J.: I have to come back to Ed’s basic principles in leadership made simple.  If Rosy has not read that then I suggest she go back and dig in to it because through entire hour and a half, we have come back to ways that that framework in the text answers the questions and it worked so effectively for us for ten years in leading management in a seminar so I would go back to Ed’s book on “Leadership Made Simple on the Framework”, it will answer your question most completely.

Ed: Yeah, thank you.

That was the end of one of the questions and answers in the webinar.  My next post will contain another question and the answers.  I plan to publish this series of post every two days.

You can find more leadership ideas at my web site:

http://www.enleadership.com/lmd/lmd_dmil.html

Best Regards,

Ed Oakley