A VETERAN OWNED SMALL BUSINESS | Call or text now for a FREE consultation: +1 (770) 765-3692 | 
Creating Teams
Performance within groups typically does not just happen. For a group to really perform well it needs practice. The group needs to understand the best way to organize itself for performance. This concept is commonly understood by sports teams and the military. They clearly see the need to give groups opportunities to practice. Boot Camp for the military and pre-season workouts for sports teams are the norm.
It is interesting to note in business that there is far less interest or appreciation of group development and the need for practice. Team practice, for the most part, is not factored into the business or corporate world. We form groups in business and march them into the corporate battle zone expecting them to perform and when they fail we are surprised.
This whole process was once again revealed to me as my business, CMI, went through the process of putting together a high performance work team. In 2008, we expanded our organization by one. A full 25 percent change growth in our employee numbers. This growth caused a change in our work mix and demands. In essence, we needed less administrative work and more research and marketing.
As we went through the expansion process, some basic truths about teams, groups, and performance helped me traverse this territory.
Hi there! This article is available for free. Login or register as a StrategyDriven Personal Business Advisor Self-Guided Client by:
Subscribing to the Self Guided Program - It's Free!
About the Author
Since growing up in his family’s boating business to founding his company CMI, Bruce Hodes has dedicated himself to helping companies grow by developing executive leadership teams, business leaders and executives into powerful performers. Bruce’s adaptable Breakthrough Strategic Business Planning methodology has been specifically designed for small-to-mid-sized companies and is especially valuable for family company challenges. In February of 2012 Bruce published his first book Front Line Heroes: Battling the business Tsunami by developing high performance organizations (Volume 1)
. With a background in psychotherapy, Hodes also has an MBA from Northwestern University and a Masters in Clinical Social Work. More info: [email protected], 800-883-7995, www.cmiteamwork.com.
Management observation programs generate a wealth of individual and workgroup performance data. All too often, workgroup managers view their employees job functions as being singularly unique and so don’t consider pooling their observation results with peers. Doing so, however, creates the possibility of identifying broader organizational trends that may be culturally driven and more economical to resolve with a single integrated initiative.
Robustly implemented management observation programs offer many benefits to the organization and its managers. At their core, each of these benefits is derived from aggregation and analysis of the performance data gathered during the observations. Enabling required data synthesis necessitates the documentation of observed occurrences and conclusions. Desired behavior reinforcement and performance improvement, not to mention manager and observation program credibility, necessitate the employee be briefed on the observations made and conclusions drawn. As with all formally documented performance appraisal instruments, the documented observation should be signed by both the manager and employee.
Business performance assessments aggregate huge amounts of data in order to provide a very few high value insights. (See Figure 1: Data Refinement and Consolidation Model below) As an assessment progresses, evaluators often feel increasingly overwhelmed by the volume of data they must sift through, organize, and analyze. Time seems to slip away and pressure to find the key insights mounts; making the objective appear to be that of finding a needle in a haystack with only a moment’s notice. To be successful requires thoughtful, deliberate preparation.
Philosophically speaking, no one, including managers, should ever be afraid to have ‘the boss’ know or observe what he or she is doing. Being human, we naturally feel self imposed pressure to perform well especially when we are being watched. Subsequently, management observations will always make the conscientious employee at least somewhat nervous. When then does a manager announce that he or she will be observing an individual’s performance? In most cases, shortly before the observation begins.
Business Programs