10 Team Building Tips To Take Your Team From Great to Extraordinary

Whether you are an organisation, or a professional responsible for facilitating the team building process of a team or group, the following tips are ensured to give you some new ideas on how to accelerate your team building initiatives:

1. Create Common Vision

A common vision for all team members is essential for team building and organisational success. Spend time visioning as a team – what you want to create and where you want to go. This visioning time should also enable you to celebrate your current successes!

Ask Yourself: How clear is our vision? Do all team members hold the same vision?

2. Develop Common Goals

Ensure that your organisational/project and program goals are understood and supported by all team members. All team members need to understand how their efforts are feeding into the larger objectives.

Ask Yourself: Do all team members know what role they play in supporting our larger team/organisational goals? Is everyone clear on what those goals are?

3. Clarify Roles and Responsibilities

One of the main challenges for organisations and groups to move ahead to where they really want to be is due to a lack of clarity on individual roles and responsibilities. Clarifying these roles can help in supporting and achieving your common vision and goals.

Ask yourself: “How clear is our staff in understanding their specific roles? Their specific responsibilities? Where do roles and responsibilities overlap between individual team members? Where do roles and responsibilities overlap with other departments.

4. Ensure Management Support

Supervisors and managers play a key role in “keeping the learning alive”. Ensure that supervisors, managers and owners are following up with staff regarding what their needs are, and how team building efforts can be enhanced. Managers also play a key role in ensuring that the learning from team building initiatives is brought back to the office.

Ask yourself: What systems do we currently have in place to ensure that the learning is sustained? Can we discuss this in staff meetings? Do we have a coaching program in place?

5. Use Engaging Exercises

Team building can be fun and challenging, supporting teams to reach their highest potential. Ensure that participants are engaged and challenged through the process. Consider bringing in an experienced external facilitator to support your efforts, and even run a train-the-trainer program with your staff.

Ask Yourself: What types of activities or exercises would work best for our team members? What are the topics of relevance for them?

6. Take it out of the Office

Holding team building sessions in the office can be disruptive and distracting. The lure of email, voice mail and urgent items often take precedence to a full team in-office experience. Reduce everyday distractions by holding team building sessions outside of the office.

Ask Yourself: What type of environment would our staff team benefit from? Some organisations prefer a more “corporate” formal team building session, while others embrace nature and the outdoors.

7. Create An Action Plan

Create an action plan to make the team building part of your everyday work or life. Often retreat days or team building programs have few links with everyday business or organisational objectives. Ensure that when designing the program you create links to the organisation or to everyday life so that participants can “bring the learning home”. This can be done by building into the program formal action planning time, and having managers follow up during regular staff meetings. Coaching can be leveraged to keep the “learning alive” after team building events. Research whether individual, team or group coaching will work best for your organisation.

Ask Yourself: What can we do to support and sustain individual and team action planning? What current systems do we have to revisit the action plans? Some examples may include staff meetings, manager check-ins, internal/external coaching.

8. Spend time learning what your team members need

Creating a group or organisational context where communication is open, and individual team members feel comfortable bringing their needs up, will make teambuilding efforts more focused and productive.

Find out exactly what team members are looking for to enhance their work and efforts before the team building event. This can be done by the facilitator and/or the team building committee, through email questionnaires, focus groups, or individual meetings.

One of the most common pitfalls of team building initiatives is that it does not match the needs of the team. Ensure you invest enough time before the event itself to assess what team members really want.

Ask Yourself: What are the top three priorities for our team members? What is the best way to find this out from individual members?

9. Keep it regular

Once a year team building programs can do a lot for boosting morale on the short-term, but ask yourself, “What would it be like if we did something more often?”. Imagine the results!

Using the same facilitator over successive programs can often give added traction to the event. Trust and understanding of the team is usually higher each successive event, when using the same facilitator.

Ask Yourself: What amount of time can we commit to team building efforts in our organisation this year? What will that look like?

10. Have Fun!

Most importantly, team building initiatives should be fun and engaging for all staff members. They should be relevant and meaningful for the team. Design with the facilitator(s) what structure and topics will give your team the most leverage.

Ask Yourself: What would fun look like for us, given our organisational culture and philosophy?

Look to integrate some of these ideas and systems into your next team building initiative, whether it is a retreat, team coaching, or a workshop, to build a more extraordinary, sustained, productive team.

Jennifer Britton.

For more information, please visit us at: 
The “Biz” Toolkit Blog: http://biztoolkit.blogspot.com

Team Coaching: http://www.groupcoachingessentials.com/pages/team-coaching
Teams365 Blog: PotentialsRealized.com

Email: jennifer@potentialsrealized.com

What my kids have taught me about management

After more than 20 years in business, as a follower, employee, manager, leader and business owner; and being the father of three great kids, with one on the way this fall, it has become painfully obvious to me the parallels between managing and parenting. Rising into the management ranks at an early age, I was constantly asked by direct reports starting out their budding careers what they could do to gain the experience and practice necessary to advance up the corporate ranks so fast. I always told them the same thing: “You want practice and experience being a manager? Go have some kids.” Here are a few of the take-a ways I have experienced over the years: 

1. How many times does it take to get the point across? Everyone has his or her own learning curve. Some are quick studies and grasp new things like a sponge. Others take longer to learn the same things. Remember back to when we were in school, learning something new for the first time? Maybe you were the one that got it right away, it was intuitive for you. Maybe you were the one that could not understand how the Pythagorean theorem worked to save your life. Expecting everyone to grasp concepts on the same timeline is unrealistic. Understanding how people learn is the first step to helping get the point across.

2. How do they learn? Every child (or employee) has their own learning style and their own way of communicating effectively. Managers want to lead, teach and coach in their own natural learning style. This works great if your child or team member always shares your learning style. If they do not, you are in for a dysfunctional relationship unless you can figure out quickly how to effectively communicate with them in their own style. And yes, as the manager just like a parent, it’s up to you to adapt, not the other way around.

3. How best to discipline? My two year old is a typical terrible two. Do not get me wrong, she is a great, sweet little girl, but she is ornery and stubborn. When her brothers were her age, I could yell at them for getting out of line and they would straighten up quick. The oldest is a pleaser and he just wants to make you happy. You treat the little one that way and she melts down in a puddle of tears. Real tears, not the fake kind kids are so good at producing. Learning discipline styles and what works for your team is just as important as learning what motivates them. Everyone needs a boost or kick in the pants from time to time, but do it the wrong way and you will lose them. Learn how to coach them and you will have an ally.

4. How are they motivated? Everyone is motivated differently. Some people love being the center of attention and nothing will motivate them more to bust their butts everyday for you than praising them for a job well done in public, especially in front of their peers. Others cannot stand being in the spotlight, and so private acknowledgement works best for them. Many people could care less about benefits or special rewards for a job well done, while others thrive on those little extras or bonuses. Learning what motivates best is the quickest way to learn how to get the best out of those you are working with.

We are all different. Taking a step back and objectively comparing yourself to those you know should tell you that this is true. If we were all the same, this managing thing would be easy. Leadership would be a breeze. Just do everything the way I would expect it to be done and we would operate like a well-oiled machine. Unfortunately, this is not how it goes and anyone that has ever had to lead a group, manage a team, reason with young children or argue with teenagers can attest to the same thing. Trying to apply the cookie-cutter approach will never work. Ultimately, we have to accept the fact that to be a truly effective parent, leader or manager comes down to the same underlying premise: You have to get to know and understand the individuals you are working with to truly be able to lead, teach, coach and mentor them to success. 

Posted by:Matthew Motil

The Myth of the Bell Curve

Josh Bersin

Principal and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte

 

There is a long standing belief in business that people performance follows the Bell Curve (also called the Normal Distribution). This belief has been embedded in many business practices: performance appraisals, compensation models, and even how we get graded in school. (Remember "grading by the curve?")

Research shows that this statistical model, while easy to understand, does not accurately reflect the way people perform. As a result, HR departments and business leaders inadvertently create agonizing problems with employee performance and happiness.

Witness Microsoft's recent decision to disband its performance management process - after decades of use the company realized it was encouraging many of its top people to leave. I recently talked with the HR leader of a well known public company and she told me her engineer-CEO insists on implementing a forced ranking system. I explained the statistical models to her and it really helped him think differently.

Does human performance follow the bell curve? Research says no.
Let's look at the characteristics of the Bell Curve, and I think you'll quickly understand why the model doesn't fit.

The Bell Curve represents what statisticians call a "normal distribution." A normal distribution is a sample with an arithmetic average and an equal distribution above and below average like the curve below. This model assumes we have an equivalent number of people above and below average, and that there will be a very small number of people two standard deviations above and below the average (mean).

As you can see from the curve, in the area of people management the model essentially says that "we will have a small number of very high performers and an equivalent number of very low performers" with the bulk of our people clustered near the average. So if your "average sales per employee" was $1M per year, you could plot your sales force and it would spread out like the blue curve above.

In the area of performance management, this curve results in what we call "rank and yank." We force the company to distribute raises and performance ratings by this curve (which essentially assumes that real performance is distributed this way). To avoid "grade inflation" companies force managers to have a certain percentage at the top, certain percentage at the bottom, and a large swath in the middle.

This practice creates the following outcomes:

• First, we ration the number of "high performance ratings." If you use a five point scale (similar to grades), many companies say that "no more than 10% of the population gets a rating of 1" and "10% of the population must be rated a 5."
• Second, we force the bottom 10% to get a low rating, creating "losers" in the group. So if your team is all high performers, someone is still at the bottom. (The "idea" behind this is that we'll continuously improve by lopping off the bottom.)
• Third, most of the people are always in the middle - rated more or less "average." And implicit in this last assumption is the idea that most of the money and rewards go to the middle of the curve.

Does the World Really Work This Way? 

The answer is no. 

Research conducted in 2011 and 2012 by Ernest O’Boyle Jr. and Herman Aguinis (633,263 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes in a total of 198 samples). found that performance in 94 percent of these groups did not follow a normal distribution. Rather these groups fall into what is called a "Power Law" distribution.




A "Power Law" distribution is also known as a "long tail." It indicates that people are not "normally distributed." In this statistical model there are a small number of people who are "hyper high performers," a a broad swath of people who are "good performers" and a smaller number of people who are "low performers." It essentially accounts for a much wider variation in performance among the sample.

It has very different characteristics from the Bell Curve. In the Power Curve most people fall below the mean (slightly). Roughly 10-15% of the population are above the average (often far above the average), a large population are slightly below average, and a small group are far below average. So the concept of "average" becomes meaningless.

In fact the implication is that comparing to "average" isn't very useful at all, because the small number of people who are "hyper-performers" accommodate for a very high percentage of the total business value.

(Bill Gates used to say that there were a handful of people at Microsoft who "made" the company and if they left there would be no Microsoft.)

Why We Have Hyper-Performers
If you think about your own work experience you'll probably agree that this makes sense.

Think about how people perform in creative, service, and intellectual property businesses (where all businesses are going). There are superstars in every group. Some software engineers are 10X more productive than the average; some sales people deliver 2-3X their peers; certain athletes far outperform their peers; musicians, artists, and even leaders are the same.

These "hyper performers" are people you want to attract, retain, and empower. These are the people who start companies, develop new products, create amazing advertising copy, write award winning books and articles, or set an example for your sales force. They are often gifted in a certain way (often a combination of skill, passion, drive, and energy) and they actually do drive orders of magnitude more value than many of their peers.

If we're lucky we can attract a lot of these people - and when we do we should pay them very well, give them freedom to perform and help others, and take advantage of the work they do. Investment banks understand this - that's why certain people earn 10-fold more than others.

Today's businesses drive most of their value through service, intellectual property, innovation, and creativity. Even if you're a manufacturer, your ability to sell, serve, and support your product (and the design itself) is more important than the ability to manufacture. So each year a higher and higher percentage of your work is dependent on the roles which have "hyper performer" distributions. (I would argue that every job in business follows this model.)

What About Everyone Else?
The power law distribution (also called a Paretian Distribution) shows that there are many levels of high performance, and the population of people below the "hyper performers" is distributed among "near hyper-performers" all the way down to "low performers."

As you can see from the example above (and this chart varies depending on population) you still have a large variation in people and there will be a large group of "high-potentials," a group of people who are "potential high-potentials," and a small group who just don't fit at all.

The distribution reflects the idea that "we want everyone to become a hyper-performer" if they can find the right role, and that we don't limit people at the top of the curve - we try to build more of them.

Companies that understand this model focus very heavily on collaboration, professional development, coaching, and empowering people to do great things. In retail, for example, companies like Costco give their people "slack time" to clean up, fix things, and rearrange the store to continuously improve the customer experience.

How the Bell Curve Model Hurts Performance
Right now there is an epidemic of interest in revamping employee performance management processes, and it's overdue. I just had several of my best friends (generally in senior positions) tell me how frustrated they are at their current jobs because their performance appraisals were so frustrating.

Here are the reasons the current models don't work:

1. No one wants to be rated on a five point scale.
First, much research shows that reducing a year of work to a single number is degrading. It creates a defensive reaction and doesn't encourage people to improve. Ideally performance evaluation should be "continuous" and focus on "always being able to improve."

2. Ultra-high performers are incented to leave and collaboration may be limited.
The bell curve model limits the quantity of people at the top and also reduces incentives to the highest rating. Given the arbitrary five-scale rating and the fact that most people are 2,3,4 rated, most of the money goes to the middle.

If you're performing well but you only get a "2" or a "3" you'll probably feel under-appreciated. Your compensation increase may not be very high (most of the money is held for the middle of the curve) and you'll probably conclude that the highest ratings are reserved for those who are politically well connected.

Since the number of "1's" is limited, you're also likely to say "well I probably wont get there from here so I'll work someplace where I can really get ahead."

Also, by the way, you may feel that collaboration and helping others isn't really in your own self interest - because you are competing with your team mates for annual reviews.

2. Mid level performers are not highly motivated to improve.
In the bell curve there are a large number of people rated 2, 3, and 4. These people are either (A) frustrated high performers who want to improve, or (B) mid-level performers who are happy to stay where they are.

If you fall into category (B) you're probably pretty happy keeping the status quo - you know the number of "1's" is very limited so you won't even strive to get there. In a sense the model rewards mediocrity.

3. Compensation is inefficiently distributed.
People often believe the bell curve is "fair." There are an equal number of people above and below the average. And fairness is very important. But fairness does not mean "equality" or "equivalent rewards for all." High performing companies have very wide variations in compensation, reflecting the fact that some people really do drive far more value than others. In a true meritocracy this is a good thing, as long as everyone has an opportunity to improve, information is transparent, and management is open and provides feedback.

Many of the companies I talk with about this suddenly realize the have to rethink their compensation process - and find ways to create a higher variability in pay. Just think about paying people based on the value they deliver (balanced by market wages and scarcity of skills) and you'll probably conclude that too much of your compensation is based on tenure and history.

4. Incentives to develop and grow are reduced.
In a bell curve model you tend to reward and create lots of people in the "middle." People can "hang out" in the broad 80% segment and rather than strive to become one of the high-performers, many just "do a good job." This is fine of course, but I do believe that everyone wants to be great at something - so why wouldn't we create a system where every single person has the opportunity to become a star?

If your company focuses heavily on product design, service, consulting, or creative work, (and I think nearly every company does), why wouldn't you want everyone to work harder and harder each day to improve their own work or find jobs where they can excel?

(By the way, internal mobility is a critical part of this model. If I find I'm not very good at the job I'm in now, I would hope my manager will help me move to assignments or jobs where I can become a superstar. Companies that simply rate me a 3 may not give me that opportunity. If we create a more variable and flexible process of evaluation we have to enable people to move into higher value positions. So having a talent mobility program is critical to success.)

Time to Re-Engineer Performance Management
As I go out and talk with HR leaders about this process I'm finding that almost every major company wants to revamp their current approach. They want to make it simpler, focused on feedback, and more developmental.

But in addition to considering these practices, make sure you consider your performance philosophy. Does your management really believe in the bell curve? Or do you fundamentally believe there are hyper-performers to be developed and rewarded? If you simplify the process but keep the same distribution of rewards and ratings you may not see the results you want.

Look at how sports teams drive results: they hire and build super-stars every single day. And the pay them richly. If you can build that kind of performance management process in your team, you'll see amazing results.

Posted by:Josh Bersin

Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great

by Michael E. Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed 

 

Much of the strategy and management advice that business leaders turn to is unreliable or impractical. That’s because those who would guide us underestimate the power of chance. Gurus draw pointed lessons from companies whose outstanding results may be nothing more than random fluctuations. Executives speak proudly of corporate achievements that may be only lucky coincidences. Unfortunately, almost no one provides scientifically credible answers to every business leader’s basic questions about superior performance: Which companies are worth studying? What sets them apart? How can we follow their examples?

 

Frustrated by the lack of rigorous research, we undertook a statistical study of thousands of companies, and eventually identified several hundred among them that have done well enough for a long enough period of time to qualify as truly exceptional. Then we discovered something startling: The many and diverse choices that made certain companies great were consistent with just three seemingly elementary rules:
 
1. Better before cheaper—in other words, compete on differentiators other than price.
 
2. Revenue before cost—that is, prioritize increasing revenue over reducing costs.
 
3. There are no other rules—so change anything you must to follow Rules 1 and 2.
 
The rules don’t dictate specific behaviors; nor are they even general strategies. They’re foundational concepts on which companies have built greatness over many years. How did these organizations’ leaders come to adopt them? We have no idea—nor do we know whether the executives even followed them consciously. Nevertheless, the rules can be used to help today’s and tomorrow’s leaders increase the chances that their companies, too, will deliver decades of exceptional performance.
 
Beyond Truisms The impetus for our research was the increasing popularity over the past 30 years of “success study” business books and articles. Perhaps the most famous of these are Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) and Jim Collins’s Good to Great (2001), but there are many others. The problem with them is they don’t give us any way to judge whether the companies they hold up as examples are indeed exceptional. Randomness can crown an average company king for a year, two years, even a decade, before performance reverts to the mean. If we can’t be sure that the performance of companies mentioned in success studies was caused by more than just luck, we can’t know whether to imitate their behaviors.
 
We tackled the randomness problem head-on. Finding what we assumed would be weak signals in noisy environments required a lot of data, so we began with the largest database we could find—the more than 25,000 companies that have traded on U.S. exchanges at any time from 1966 to 2010. We measured performance using return on assets (ROA), a metric that reflects strong, stable performance—unlike, say, total shareholder return, which may reflect the vagaries of the stock market and changes in investor expectations rather than fundamental company performance. We defined two categories of superior results: Miracle Workers fell in the top 10% of ROA for all 25,000 companies often enough that their performance was highly unlikely to have been a fluke; Long Runners fell in the top 20% to 40% and, again, did so consistently enough that luck was highly unlikely to have been the reason. We call the companies in both these categories exceptional performers. For comparison purposes, we also identified companies that were Average Joes. (See the sidebar “Finding the Signal in the Noise.”) 

Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Services LP, and Mumtaz Ahmed is a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP and the chief strategy officer for Deloitte LLP. They are the authors of The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think, forthcoming from Portfolio.

Leadership: Trust your best people. It works.

MICHAEL SHERAR

A decade ago, I was given a great career boost from my boss and mentor. He placed his trust in me, and stepped back.

I was given the opportunity to lead a large regional cancer program. This was quite a bit beyond my previous experience, a couple of stations above what I had done before. And the first job was to lead the transfer of this program from one organization to another. There were quite a few unhappy people. My mentor, who was my new boss at the time, came to visit me early on as I settled into the role to see how I was doing. He said to me as he left that meeting: “If you ever need my help, you know you can just pick up the phone. …I don’t expect a call.”

To some that might be seen as a heartless sink or swim directive. But for me, it was the opposite and it gave me an immediate lift; this person had trust and confidence in me that I could do this job and do it well. And that feeling is something I strive to instill in the people I lead.

The memory of that management moment came to mind recently when I saw the work of two mid-level employees at Cancer Care Ontario.

Each year we bring together the hospital CEOs and regional vice-presidents who are responsible for quality in our regional cancer programs to discuss progress against the Ontario Cancer Plan, our roadmap for quality improvement in the cancer system in Ontario. Cancer Care Ontario works with hospitals, doctors and other healthcare professionals to develop and implement the plan. As you can imagine, these meetings often involve lively debate around the pace of change and the challenges hospitals and providers face to improve quality in an environment of rising need for health services amid financial constraints.

One of the projects we discussed at the meeting was health system funding reform, which is changing the way hospitals are funded from global budgets where a lump sum is provided with few strings attached, to per-patient funding where the funding is tied to the quality of care provided. Cancer Care Ontario plays a central role in this health system funding reform, in the areas of cancer and chronic kidney disease. (Cancer Care Ontario oversees payment for and quality of services for chronic kidney disease as well as cancer). Changing the way hospitals are funded is complicated and difficult to implement. It’s a big job.

At this key stakeholder meeting, the task of presenting the ins and outs of the funding model to this senior group of executives was not assigned to me, or to a vice-president, or even to our director responsible for this work. Instead, it was entrusted to the two staff who had been responsible for much of the technical work behind the new funding models. These were the people who knew the details most intimately and who could answer questions in the most meaningful way.

My best management moment was spent sitting and watching. I sat there, silent and proud, while my two colleagues gave a truly excellent presentation, and then expertly handled questions from the hospital CEOs. A complicated subject had been distilled to a clear and concise picture for some of our most important partners. And they clearly understood the implications and expectations that would be placed on them. After the meeting, one of the hospital CEOs told me how unusual, but refreshing it was to see more junior staff being given the opportunity to present such challenging and strategically important material, and at such an important forum. He also said what an outstanding job they had done.

We have about 850 employees at Cancer Care Ontario. Our success depends on every one of them being able to strive to do outstanding things. The two staff who presented at this meeting are helping to transform and improve healthcare in Ontario. They are representative of our future leaders.

This idea of having trust in our employees’ ability to deliver excellent results, to enable them to stretch themselves and occasionally to allow them to make mistakes is at the heart of this story, and a key quality for leadership.

Michael Sherar is president and chief executive officer of Cancer Care Ontario (@CancerCare_ON), a provincial government agency that manages the quality of services and patient care for those with cancer or chronic kidney disease.

How To Build A Boundaryless Organization

Jacob Morgan, 

The first and most important truth any leader must understand is that the human beings who work inside every kind of organization possess unlimited potential. They have the ability to solve any problem and the adaptability to respond to unforeseen circumstances. It may be the most overworked truism in the business world, but employees are indeed the most valuable resource and asset that any company has. 

The problem: most organizations today are unable to tap into that limitless human potential because of a series of self-imposed boundaries. Unlocking this potential means challenging the many assumptions that we have about work today: the incontestability of hierarchy, the importance of putting in time in the office, semi-annual employee reviews, valuing the voice of the customer but not of the employee, and the restriction of vital information to preserve rank.

Organizations and their leaders must strive to break three common boundaries in order to unleash all of the talent and contribution lying in wait. The first is role-based: communication and collaboration is restricted by seniority level. How could a lowly entry-level employee possibly engage with a senior manager or worse… an executive! The second type of boundary is around departments and function. Marketing folks stick with their peers in marketing, sales with sales, product development with product development and information and potential opportunities for innovation remain stuck within silos. The third most common type of boundary is geographic—employees in one office or location simply don’t “see” their peers in another.

Escaping these persistent and pernicious boundaries to communication, contribution and collaboration requires three key shifts:

From management to leadership
Lifting boundaries isn’t a matter of executive direction. It’s about re-thinking management and shifting perspective from telling people what to do to getting them excited to want to do it. We don’t need more managers, we need more leaders. Today, any employee can become that leader. Yet the norm in most organizations is to bring in more and more managers to oversee people and then more managers to look after those managers. The goal of all of this, of course, is to get a tighter grip on the organization, to enforce control. The original goal of management was simply to make sure that employees showed up to work on time to do their tasks, to not ask questions, to not cause problems, and then to leave and do that over and over again. 

Management wasn’t focused on innovation, the voice of the employee, engagement, or creativity. That was the case 100 years ago—and it’s still the case in too many organizations today. This is why it’s so crucial to create leadership capacity in every aspect of the business.

The leader challenges common assumptions around management and mentors employees to help them become successful. The leader has followers not because he commands them, but because he has earned them.

From “need-to-know” to collaborative technologies
The range of collaborative technologies emerging today allows employees to connect with each other and information, any time, anywhere, and on any device. While many leaders look at the onslaught of devices and apps and new technologies as a problem to be solved, the most effective leaders today aggressively support any tools that enable employees to connect, contribute, choose, and create. It needs to be easy for an employee in California to find a co-worker in Beijing. It needs to be easy for an entry-level employee to start a dialogue with an executive, even though they may have never met face to face.

Collaborative technologies are also crucial in developing leaders. In the new world of work, leaders create themselves. They share their ideas, content, and feedback in a public way, which attracts followers within the organization. Anyone can become a thought leader or subject matter expert.

From controlling management to boundary-breaking work
At every turn, leaders must ask themselves, “How does this support our vision of breaking down boundaries?” How can employee onboarding be changed? What about talent management?

Perhaps when employees are brought on board they are taken through a collaboration scavenger hunt where they must find and connect with colleagues around the world; something telecommunications company TELUS does for new recruits. What if instead of semi-annual reviews, you go with a system of real-time feedback on a collaborative platform? Why not create a company leaderboard around health and wellness so that different geographic regions can see how they compare to one another. What if employees “narrated” their work in a public way so that everyone and anyone can see what they are working on? Every built-in management process is an opportunity for unleashing more human potential. The job of leaders and managers is to fundamentally rethink and re-design that core.

Unlocking human potential is the new competitive advantage. But it’s not as simple as expressing good intentions at the top. And it’s not enough to proclaim, “our people are our most important assets.” Every leader must do the hard work of breaking down boundaries and rethinking the most deeply held assumptions about work. It’s the difference between winning and losing in the future.

What are you or your organization doing to break down the boundaries that constrain human potential?

The 7 Things I Learned When I Got Fired (Again)

Ok, my exit from running the wealth management businesses of Bank of America was called a restructuring. But it sure felt like I was fired. I learned a lot of lessons the first time I was fired. (See “What I Learned When I Got Fired…The First Time.”)

Here are the lessons from the second go-round:

Lesson Number 1: If it feels too good to be true, it probably is. Were you ever offered a job that seemed to be tailor-made for you? When I was asked to join Bank of America to turn around its Merrill Lynch and US Trust wealth management businesses, I couldn’t have scripted a more perfect opportunity: one that was challenging but that I believed was do-able. It was so perfect that when I received the offer, but was not allowed to meet any of my soon-to-be peers (to maintain confidentiality) or anyone on the Board (because that was never done), I shrugged it off. What could go wrong?? (I know, I know, cue deafening alarm bells.)

Lesson Number 2: The power of culture. Happily, my bet that the Merrill Lynch Financial Advisors retained a culture of underlying client focus was correct.

Unhappily, my implicit bet that the parent company culture was one I could navigate effectively was incorrect. Heck, I thought, I had managed to do well at Smith Barney and at Sanford Bernstein, and those two corporate cultures had little in common, besides an openness to energetic debate. But in fact, at this new shop, there was a melding of several cultures brought together through acquisition and changing through a leadership transition; thus, while I was learning the culture, it was itself shifting and changing. I asked for, and was given, lots of advice from lots of people on how to navigate it, sometimes conflicting.[1] I'm no shrinking violet, so I knew there was no real alignment of values when I found myself second- and third-guessing my comments in management team meetings before I made them.

Lesson Number 3: Face time still matters. I was based in New York, the company’s headquarters were in Charlotte, the real center of power was in Boston and other senior managers were based in California. And most of the management team spent a good deal of time traveling.

As the new kid on the block, I found it hard to achieve a camaraderie with the team; it’s hard to be part of the inside jokes when you’re not there or you aren’t having the few minutes swapping stories while grabbing a coffee between meetings. I was never part of the meetings-before-the-meeting, or the meetings-after-the-meeting, or the “real” meeting; I was just part of the official meeting (which in some companies can be the least important meeting of them all). And, no, Telepresence and all the other technology didn’t help a bit with this.

Lesson Number 4: A sponsor matters even more. And in part this was because I didn’t have time to develop a real sponsor at the company. The CEO who hired me had told me he would stay in his role for at least two more years; he announced his retirement less than two months later. This left me without the person who was most invested in my successful transition to the company, and with significantly changed marching orders. While I asked (and asked and asked) for feedback on how I was doing, I lacked a real sponsor at the senior leadership table….and my peers who were also negatively impacted in the restructuring were similarly “square pegs.” This was in contrast to prior jobs, when I’ve had people who invested a lot of time in me; in some cases, this took years off of my career trajectory.

Lesson Number 5: Business results are not everything I am not 
a dumb woman; I realized I wasn’t part of the “inner circle.” But I mistakenly believed that if my team delivered strong business results – and, as I repeatedly told the team, if we were the business no-one had to worry about – we would be successful. But on the day I left, the business was ahead of budget and gaining share.

The Good News: A strong outside network helps a lot. I was fortunate that I have maintained a strong outside network over the years. While my internal network faded pretty quickly (many, many fewer holiday cards from former BofA colleagues that holiday season!), I was touched by how helpful people outside of the company were.

Research has identified networking as the number 1 “unwritten rule of success” in business. It also shows that one's next professional opportunity is more likely to come from one's extended network than from friends. And, in fact, my recent investment in 85 Broads (itself a professional woman’s network) was the result of a string of nine business introductions, one contact leading to another, starting with a conversation with a seatmate on an airplane a few years ago and resulting in the announcement a few months ago.

The Best News: Gratitude helps even more. I don’t want to get too "new age-y," but I am grateful. Even on the day I was fired, I was grateful. Not to take anything away from all of the hard work over the years, but it's pure dumb luck that I had the good fortune to be born into the extraordinary circumstances of this day and age, and that I have had the opportunities I have had. It could have easily gone another way.

Oh, and a big glass of wine (or three) the night I was chucked out didn’t hurt either.....

(1) The classic was when I was told by a Very Important Senior Person that Merrill Lynch needed to be "led, not managed" within days of being told by another Very Important Senior Person that Merrill needed to be "managed, not led." (Cue music from "Jaws.")

Posted by:Sallie Krawcheck