Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Ellie Breakwell, APM Branches Coordinator, and thank you for joining us today at this APM Branch webinar. Please be aware that this webinar is being recorded and you are in listen-only mode.
There will be some interactive elements to today's webinar, so please have your phone or another web browser ready and go to menti.com and use the code 19183688. This will also be displayed on the screen with each question. Today, we are joined by Nick Fewings. If you have any questions for Nick, you can submit these via your control panel, and time permitting, I'll read these out to Nick at the end of the presentation. Thank you again for joining us today, and without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to hand over to you, Nick.
Thank you. Great, thanks very much, Ellie, and good afternoon to everyone. It's a delight to be presenting a webinar to you today, and I'm just going to get the webinar up. turn off my webcam because then you can concentrate on the webinar itself and the contents of it.
And hopefully you can see on the screen, I've entitled today's webinar, The Who and the How of Achieving High Performance Teamwork. And throughout the session, I'm going to share with you some hints and tips based on my knowledge and based on my experience. So without further ado, let's crack on with the...
the session. So first of all, for those of you who may use LinkedIn, or some of you may be connected with me on LinkedIn, I call myself teamologist. So that's a person who studies the dynamics of teamwork. And I've been doing this for 20 years.
And I use this knowledge and experience then when I work with teams to help them become even. more effective and achieve greater success. So that's why you'll see on LinkedIn, if you're there, the word teamologist after my name.
So for those who don't know me, a little bit of background before we get into the session. I'm a behavioral psychologist. So I first got accredited when I used to work for Barclays Bank, which was over 25 years ago.
I've worked with many of the well-known named brands both in the UK and also abroad globally. And when I'm not working with teams, the other thing I do is speak at conferences all about teamwork. And I've been blessed to have spoken at over 500 conferences during the last 25 odd years. And they've stretched from as far as Bali right across to North America and the United States.
When I'm not working with teams or speaking at conferences, one of the other things I did was created a model called Team Dynamics that helps teams to measure how effective their teamwork is. And as part of the... webinar today, I was sharing parts of that model with you.
And last but not least, just over two years ago, for those of you in the UK, as you know, we all went into our first lockdown in March 2020. And of course, nobody wanted a conference speaker and nobody was able to undertake team development work, especially face-to-face. eventually I did team development work via Zoom and Teams however initially all that completely stopped so it was at that point that I said to my wife I can't just sit here twiddling my thumbs so I undertook the project of writing a book based on my experience and it was a book that had been asked for for many many years after I've done team development work or spoken at the conference, a lot of the times individuals will come up and say, have you written a book? And I just didn't have the time. So in March 22, so a few months back now, I published Team Lead Succeed, which immediately became an Amazon bestseller and has been... positively received by both team members and also team leaders and the audience that I wrote it for was right across the spectrum so operational project management project teams and also leadership teams and not just for those leaders in in teams it was also for team members to understand more about their teamwork So what am I going to cover in today's session?
Well, I'm going to cover some extracts from the book. We're going to first of all look at exploring KPIs, key performance indicators, and teamwork. Then look at the importance of knowing who is in your team. Then understanding the value of knowing how effective your teamwork is. And finally, I'm going to provide you learning.
and food for thought and ideas that you can apply almost immediately within the teams that you belong to. So first of all, question for you, using Mentimeter. This is the first question that I'd like you to answer. What percentage of teams achieve high performance?
So what percentage of teams do you think achieve high performance? 50%, 30%, or 10%. Okay, there's some great responses coming in already.
And just one person, 50% and 30% and 10% are about neck and neck at the moment. I'll give you a few more moments to put your thoughts in using Mentimeter because we've got over 160 people on the webinar today. Okay, so we're getting up just under half of you have responded on Mentimeter. That's great.
Let's leave it at that, Elise, if I can come back to my screen. So the majority of people there said 30%. So let's have a look at what the results of this were. Okay, and this is... based on data that I've gathered over the last six years from those teams that have used the model that I've created, Team Dynamics.
And those results suggest that 10% of teams are high-performing. So well done to those of you that spotted that correctly and said 10%, which was quite a number of you. Then... 50% of teams are average. They're okay, working not too badly.
But frighteningly, that leaves 40% that are either dysfunctional or, if you want to use another word, challenged, which is, for me, quite frightening statistics. And I wanted to get underneath this and understand, you know, what was going on, why. only 10% of teams were achieving high performance.
And I started looking at KPIs, key performance indicators. And another question for you on Mentimeter, I'd just like to understand what are the key performance indicators do you measure in your teams? So a free choice question using Mentimeter. So please pop in.
your thoughts what KPIs do you measure in your teams okay interestingly somebody's come back with none unknown customer project satisfaction not sure we do we don't none milestones tasks achieved great milestones project profitability you A lot of people coming back with don't know or none. Productivity, deliverables, speed of delivery, project management performance, service level agreements, milestones. Milestones seems to be a big topic here.
Cost time, quality, fantastic. No surprise that that one's eventually come up. Great, Ellie, if you could hand back to me, that would be fantastic. There's... Lots of different things there that we measure as KPIs.
Let's have a look at some. This may be sort of familiar with you, key performance indicators relating to project teams. And quite often, based on project methodology, those key performance indicators look at three different things.
They look at time, so timeline for... how long you've got available to implement the project. It also looks at costs, so the budget that you've got available to you, and obviously the quality of the end result, the service or the product that your project is going to deliver. And we saw some of those things coming out in the Mentimeter results just earlier on. However, what I found is that KPIs are actually directly impacted by who you have in your team and how effective your teamwork is.
Because ultimately, if you think of those KPIs that we've talked about, people drive those KPIs forward. But it's who you've got in your team and how effective your teamwork is that will therefore have a direct correlation to how successful you are in terms of delivering against your KPIs. And this is where I think a lot of teams are missing a trick and not actually measuring or understanding the right stuff about their teams. So first of all, let's have a look at who is in your team. And another question for Mentimeter here.
Each and every one of us brings two high-level generic skills to our teams. So the high-level, the generic. So each and every one of us would bring these two high-level skills to our team. So pop your... thoughts into Mentimeter and what do you think these two high-level skills are?
So we've got time management, organization, leadership, yeah great, experience, communication, technical skills, communication again, communication time management, diligence, prioritization, planning, comms and leadership, communication, lots on communication. which communication falls into one category of the skills, the high-level skills that I'm talking about. Somebody's put behaviors, fantastic.
Empathy and capability. Yeah, communication is coming up time and time again. Okay. Just think about we've got a lot around one generic set of skills.
There's... What skill sets do you bring in terms of being members of APM? What's one of the things that you would bring to your team as being a member of APM? Knowledge. Yeah, somebody's put knowledge.
Technical skills. Great. Fantastic. We'll stop Mentimeter now. There's been some wonderful stuff.
That's right. We're getting down to technical skills here and planning. So let's have a look at... what we bring to our teams.
We bring our technical skills and somebody on Mentimeter mentioned technical skills. That's great. We bring our technical skills and certainly if you are a member of APM, you will no doubt be either studying or have got a project management accreditation. So this is what I would call a technical skill. You might have a degree in accountancy.
So again, that would be a technical skill that you might bring to your team. You may be very proficient in certain software. So technology skills are another technical skill that we bring. So we bring our technical skills and we also bring our people skills.
And this is the majority of things that people were talking about when they put their answers into Mentimeter. People skills are things like communication, empathy, decision making processes, accountability, leadership skills. All those are what we classify as people skills. So we have our technical skills and our people skills. And if.
everybody brings those to our teams. So last question in terms of Mentimeter for this session. There's been some research completed about which brings the most financial success to an organization. So the two percentages here add up to 100%.
So let's have a look at what percentage out of 100% relates to success generated from people skills. is it 35 65 or 85 Okay, we've got a reasonably good response on Mentimeter there from those that are online. So the majority has gone for 85%. So if we can clear that and hand back, great.
Let's have a look at what the actual study said. And this was from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. And the result was 85-15. So well done for all those people who chose 85%.
And, you know, when we look at those statistics, heavily skewed towards people skills. And if you think about it, yes, we do need our technical skills and we need our technical knowledge. However, if you reflected on your work day, an average work day, and actually made a note of all the times that you interacted with people, you would probably find that it took off. large proportion of your day so having robust people skills is invaluable so let's have a look technical skills going back to technical skills who's in your team we can get this information from many many sources we can get it from our colleagues CVs Although we might have to check out their technical skills against their CVs because some people may not be as honest as we'd like them to be on their CVs.
So if they've got some technical skills that they've said they've achieved from a previous organization, a previous company, we might want to see their project management certification or any other certification. that might be available so we can get it from certification. We can also get this information from HR.
HR will often keep details of people's technical skills, the courses that they've been on, and really importantly, the courses that they've been on whilst they've been at your company or organization. So that's another way we can find this information. And...
Last but not least, we can talk to them and find out what they do, which is really surprising that quite often not a lot of people in teams do. They don't talk to their colleagues and find out what their technical skills are. So many areas where we can pick up this information about technical skills. In terms of who's in your team, the people skills, the most obvious place to go is personality profiling. And this is, again, another area where I've found that teams are not making use of information that's readily available to them.
I spoke at a conference in Singapore a few years back, 600 delegates, and asked the question, how many of you use personal behavioral profiling to understand who's in your team? Only 25% of the audience. use behavioral profiling. So I think certainly teams are doing themselves an injustice and disfavor in terms of getting some real valuable data to help them achieve high performance. Now, there are many profiles out there, you know, some that spring to mind, Insights, DISC, Clarity 4D, MBTI, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
All really, really useful and valuable, and I'm sure some of you may already have used these or come across these. The majority of them are based on the psychology of Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist. And he talked about us all having different behavioral preferences. And he identified three different preferences that we use to varying degrees and we use to varying combinations.
And he talked about introversion and extroversion, which is where we get our energy from. Introverts get their energy from within themselves. Extroverts get it from other people.
He talked about how we make decisions, thinking and feeling. And finally, the third area he looked at was sensing and intuition, which is how we make reality of the world around us. So sensei choose their five senses to make reality of the world around them. And intuitives, they tend to be what we call the blue sky thinkers, and they will create stories around what they see visually or what comes into their senses. And we have all these three pairs of preference within us, but just to varying degrees.
Behavioral profiling is able to give you an indication of who you are and what your preferences are. So an example here, this person has got a lot of what we call extroverted feelings. So probably very talkative and they will focus on feelings and relationships and harmony in those relationships. So... Profiling enables individuals to understand themselves better and it also helps a team to play to the different strengths of individuals so those people for instance who use behavioral profiling and have what we call this red extroverted thinking these are the people that I will call the strategists the results focus they're decisive they're assertive their motto is be brief be bright be gone you They want to get things done.
They want to get things done at pace. Then we have the extroverted feeling preference, what I call the communicators. They love communicating verbally.
They tend to be upbeat, very persuasive, and very engaging. So if things are going wrong in your team, the communicators are the ones that will give the positive boost. Then the green, what I call the diplomat, they're very supportive. they listen, they're loyal, if they believe in what your project is trying to achieve, they will crawl across broken glass on their hands and knees to make sure it happens and that the project is delivered to the levels that are required by your stakeholders.
And then last but not least is the blue, which is what I call the expert. And these people are fantastic. They're great planners. They love the Excel spreadsheets.
They write out the plans, the milestones. They gather data. They gather facts and information and they're really good at analyzing things.
So again, a lovely skill set that is invaluable to any team, whether it be a leadership team, an operational team or indeed a project team. So profiling works on two levels. It's very, very good for the individual themselves because it gives you some wonderful information about yourself, what your strengths are, quite often what your challenges are as well. It looks at communication.
Most profiling tools will have pages about communication and things to do and not to do when you're interacting with that individual. And also it gives some lovely insights into what different people bring to a team. So whether you're a leader or a team member, the beauty of profiling is it gives you this great rich amount of data and information about who else is in your team from a behavioral skills perspective. Here's an example on screen and immediately. You know, you can see that there is not much of this introverted thinking, this blue energy, which may cause this team problems.
You know, they may not spot risks. They may not be great planners because they haven't got somebody who's really focused on that planning area. And there's a lot of extroverted energy, the red yellow. So it may be that this team will move forward very, very quickly. without reflecting about what they've done in the past.
So profiling is a wonderful tool to enable you to understand who's in your team and also play to their strengths. So what I would suggest that you consider for your team, if you haven't done it already, is to... Create and share a technical people skills matrix. So here's an example on the screen.
So get your team members to share what are their technical skills, what are those wonderful skills that they bring to the team. Certainly make sure that you only include technical skills that would be useful for your team. So there's that element to who's in your team, the technical side.
But also really importantly, get them to write down what are the gifts they bring in terms of their people skills. Because this information will give you an opportunity as a team to achieve even greater success. So as I said, if you don't do it already, it's well worth spending a little bit of time with your team to capture this information. And importantly, share it.
share it with your team and if you get new members coming into the team make sure that you share it with them and that it gets updated on a regular basis so in terms of who's in your team It's really important to think about the technical and people skills. Now, I don't know if you've heard of the phrase that there are no eyes in a team. Well, I totally disagree with that.
I think there are many eyes in a team, as you'll see here, many eyes in a team, and they are called individuals. And these individuals have valuable and unique technical and behavioral skills. And what we've got to do is if we are to achieve success in our teams, we need to value and appreciate these and utilize these wonderful skills that each and every one of us brings to our team. So that's a little bit to get you thinking about who's in your team and maybe getting some more information and sharing information about your technical and behavioral skills that you have available to you.
The second thing to think about is... how effective is our teamwork? And I asked this question again when I was in Singapore, how many of you measure how effective your teamwork is? So here we're not talking about KPIs, we're not talking about costs and time and quality, we're talking about the interaction between team members, how effectively you work together as a team. And frighteningly, only 1% of people in the audience had some sort of way of measuring how effective their teamwork was.
And as I mentioned right at the start of this webinar, a few years back, I created a model that measures 16 areas of teamwork, which you can see on the screen. And this enables teams to understand. both what's working well and maybe what needs to be changed.
So for those of you linking it back to the colour and behavioural model that I shared with you just now, you will see that there are four elements of teamwork that relate to what I call the red energy, and four to yellow, four to green and four to blue. And teams who measure their effectiveness using this model, are able to understand how effective their teamwork is overall, and also how effective they are in the 16 different areas of teamwork. It also enables you as a team to look at, is there a balance or an imbalance between task and relationship? Again, which is really, really important. There are eight different areas of teamwork that relate to task.
related areas and eight that relate to our relationships with other people. And we can certainly start to find out going back to that slide of how effective different teams were. We can easily then identify which teams are high performing, which teams are in the average category and which teams are challenged or dysfunctional and therefore need to to maybe do some work on their teamwork.
Now as I said there's 16 areas in this model and certainly I haven't got time to go into all those different 16 areas. However, I thought I would get you thinking about you and your teams and look at an activity that I think is really important and again a lot of teams don't undertake and it could provide you with a real catalyst and a real shift and move forward in your teamwork. So as you can see on the screen, 16 areas of teamwork.
The four at the top are the most important that you need to get right if you are to achieve high performance teamwork. So you need to understand what is the purpose of your team. You need to develop and build trust between individuals.
You need plans that are alive and are updated on a regular basis. And you need to be able to collaborate effectively. So sharing those wonderful behavioral and technical skills that everyone brings to a team.
So I just thought I'd focus on the number one important one, which I believe is team purpose. Some people will say that trust is the most important thing to get right in a team. yes it's in the top four but I don't think it's the most important to start off with and if you think back to yourselves and when you've decided that you want to apply for a job role you actually apply for the job role based on the objectives and the responsibilities of that job role and does it appeal to you does it motivate you and that's why you're going to go for that job You don't go for a job because you're sat there thinking, will I trust the other people on the team?
That comes as secondary. So it's purpose is why you do things initially. So team purpose is the understanding of what the team exists to do, what that enables, and also the benefits that it delivers.
And frighteningly, based on my research, Four out of 10 team members say that their team purpose and team objectives are not known, which I think is absolutely frightening because it means that if you're in a team of 10, it's likely that four people don't understand what your team's there to achieve and therefore would go off and do their own thing and could waste a lot of time, money and effort. So... When I work with teams, one of the first things I do is get them to create a team purpose statement.
And the team purpose statement has three elements. What does our team do? What does this enable? And what are the benefits?
Very, very straightforward, not complicated at all. What you come up with should be motivational. It should take you one minute to share with somebody else.
You shouldn't use jargon in it, especially if you're going to share it with other people outside of your team or your organization. And therefore, it should be understandable. So those are the three elements of the team purpose statement. And I'll share a brief story with you.
I was working with a team in finance. And this was eventually what they told me was their purpose, to produce monthly accounts that are as accurate as possible as quickly after month end. And they were known by everybody in their organization disparagingly as the bean counters.
They had a very low self-esteem and so did other parts of the organization. So we set about creating a team prepper statement, which included these three elements. And this is what they came up with.
The finance team exists to ensure the timely delivery of value-adding financial data and information to our global business units, which enables them to make informed investment decisions. And that results in tangible benefits to our customers, staff and organization. So within about an hour, we've got a team purpose statement that was motivational.
They could tell people within one minute and people could get it because they didn't use any jargon. And therefore it was understandable. Within three months of them creating the team purpose statement and sharing it with other parts of their organization, the disparaging moniker, their name of the bean counters was dropped. And suddenly people in the organization and the team themselves started to recognize and appreciate the value that they added to the organization. So sometimes...
Spending time reflecting on your team purpose and what you do can have extremely positive results. So thinking about achieving high performance teamwork, maybe you need to be thinking if you don't already do so, is rather than just having your key performance indicators available to you, you should also be thinking about teamwork indicators. So who have I got in my team behaviorally? And also from a technical skills perspective, we mustn't forget that.
And then secondly, well, how can we measure our team effectiveness and find out how effectively we are working together, sharing our skills, sharing our knowledge and collaborating? So you need to think about who's in your team and then how effective your teamwork is. So food for thought for you from the webinar session.
If you don't use profiling in your teams, consider it. It may be that other parts of your organization are using it already, but really it's a worthwhile and beneficial tool. to understand the behavioral strengths of everyone that you've got in your team. Because once you understand that, you can play to those strengths. Ensure everyone in your team knows the technical skills of others.
As I said, it's frightened me the amount of teams I've worked with over the years where people who are sat beside each other in the same team do not know the technical skills of their colleagues. Think about how you and your team can measure your team effectiveness if you don't already. Again, your KPIs are a product of how effectively you work together as a team. And then number four, as a minimum, ensure everyone knows the purpose, your team purpose, what your team exists to do, what that enables and what are the benefits, what are the results. And importantly, last but not least, don't be afraid to speak up when you feel your teamwork could be better.
Each and every one of us has a voice when we're working in a team. So if something's not working effectively, feel confident to speak up and share your concerns, because then that enables you to get into discussions with your colleagues. And if there is an issue. that goes across the team.
It gives you the opportunity to come up with practical ideas to actually change things and move things forward and make your teamwork better. So just some food for thought there at the end for you to think about in your teams. So thank you for all coming on board and spending some time with me. We've got some time now for...
Any questions that have come up during the session? And I believe that Ellie's been keeping an eye out for any questions throughout the webinar. So Ellie, if you can share some of them and I will answer them openly and honestly.
Of course. Thank you, Nick. That was very, very interesting. And the first question we have is from Ashok. And he asks, what do you mean high performance?
In some fields like coding, you can get 50%. and better performance very quickly? Yes, the high performance I'm talking about is high performance in teamwork.
And this is something, as I said, that a lot of teams don't measure. And, you know, even some of the teams I've worked with, I classify a team that's achieving high performance as one who's got a team effectiveness of more than 85%. And... But even with those teams, there always is an opportunity to squeeze more juice from the orange. You know, I don't think you'll ever get 100% effectiveness in your teamwork.
So, yes, sometimes we can get to 50% quite quickly. However, it's the additional 50% that you're trying to move up the scale to make sure that you are as effective as possible and utilizing the skills. that you've got within the team to maximum effect.
Thank you. The next question from Dave is, is the performance of teams based on project teams or operational business-as-usual teams? And depending on that answer, what is the split between business-as-usual and project teams? To answer the question, the statistics have come from both.
project and operational teams. And being perfectly honest, I haven't got the split data available to me. But I certainly I know that I've worked with the team effectiveness team dynamics model on both operational project teams.
And also there are some leadership teams that have used it as well. So I can't fully answer that question, Dave. but certainly project teams are included within that data set. Thank you. How often would you team profile?
Team profiling, I recommend that people re-profile between 18 months and two years, because we do change as individuals. We change based on our experiences, we change based on what we've learned off other people, and sometimes we change based on a new job role. So I... It's no hard and fast rule, but I suggest to people, it's a bit like having your car MOT'd.
So I usually suggest to people, 18 months to 24 months is the time that you should reread your profile if you're not using it on a regular basis. And if it's not starting to not ring true, then it's worthwhile getting refreshed. Thank you. And what...
are the main challenges of virtual teams and how do you overcome this? I think the main challenges of virtual teams that I've come across and that I've been exploring with different organisations is that building trust is very, very important and more difficult when you're actually working remotely. Communication is another big thing.
That it's more of a struggle when we're using Zoom or Teams or other software, video conferencing software, because our communication is made up of three different elements, our body language, our tone of voice, and the words that we use. And the biggest of those three is the body language. So therefore... seeing people on Zoom in Teams, you're not seeing the whole aspect of their body language.
So those have been the biggest areas I've had come up on a number of occasions with Teams. It's the communication and it's the building trust. And therefore, those need to be discussed within Teams to... Again, come up with solutions, come up with ideas that are practical that you can employ.
You know, I don't say you need to do X, Y and Z because I don't know the culture, the environment or the organization that your team works for. But if you focus on communication and trust and bring those up as topics to discuss, if they're not working well in virtual teams, then we can start to. come up with ideas to overcome any challenges. Thank you. Can you recommend any free available profiling tools?
I wouldn't do so. And again, that's why I shared different profiling tools on the webinar. It's not professionally right of me to do so.
There are free profiling tools. If you search on the internet if you if you do a google search and all i would say is that you get what you pay for so uh some i've seen a very generic some i've seen that are free uh and not worth the the paper they're written on there if you want if you want to really double check that you're getting value for your money in your investment The British Psychological Society has a list of different profiling tools and they do an overview and a synopsis of which ones they accredit as being good ones. So, you know, you get what you pay for. You know, if you want to go on the internet and get free ones, then there is a caveat.
Just watch out. Thank you. What do you believe is the leading cause of a dysfunctional team? The leading cause of a dysfunctional team, it can vary. You know, I've worked with many, many teams looking at the team effectiveness.
And, you know, it can be any area whatsoever. I was working with a team the other day where accountability was the big cause of concern because The team members weren't holding up their hands and being accountable for different parts of their job and their responsibilities. So I've seen many, many things in different areas go horribly wrong.
You know, trust quite often is one that comes up. Communication. One of the big ones that I mentioned, purpose. People not understanding what the team exists to do. and what we're here to achieve.
So there tends not to be one specifically that comes up time and time again. It just depends on the team and the circumstances that they're working under. Thank you. How important is it to monitor a team's performance and motivation over time?
Some team members can be high achievers today, then average achievers tomorrow due to a change in their circumstances. Yeah, I think there's two elements to that. I think as a leader, you've got to regularly check in on a one-to-one basis.
So doing performance appraisals on a regular basis. you know as a minimum once a quarter personally i think it should be less time than that and therefore you hopefully can nip any performance issues in the bud or you can have discussions and find out what's going on with that individual and therefore start to come up with ideas to agree well what's the best way moving forward so i think there's There's the individual perspective of performance. And certainly with teams that I've worked with that measure their effectiveness using team dynamics, I'd recommend that they remeasure every six months to look at what changes they've implemented, what's the impact on their team effectiveness. And therefore, if you remeasure, you can see. the distance moved during that interim period and if any things have become better but equally have there any other things that have become a little bit worse so yeah individually I would recommend checking in with people on at least a two-month basis and with teamwork itself I would say once every six months.
Thank you. Are there any interactive in-team exercises that you can recommend to build a team purpose statement? You know, the one you can find a suggestion, certainly there's a suggestion of an activity in the book that I've written.
I mentioned Team Lead Succeed. What I tend to do when I work with teams and they tell me that they're a team. I immediately give them a piece of paper and get them to just simply write down, well, what do you think your team exists to do?
And after that, they've all written that down. I get them to share it. And I would say nine times out of 10, you will get different people writing down different things. So then that gets me into the realms of.
helping them to work out what their team purpose statement is. So, you know, in terms of interaction, that would be the interaction. If you want to get the ball rolling is get them to individually write down what they think the team exists to do and then get them to share it. So there's some interaction and then suddenly you get the fact that, wow, we don't really have a commonality, a common understanding of what we exist to do.
Thank you. Project people often operate in a matrixed environment that involves being a member of two teams, e.g. a project team and a functional team. Can you share any views on how best to get the best and the most out of this situation, please? I think both in terms of a project team and an operational team, you're working between both.
I think the key thing for individuals is... being able to switch hats, if you like, and really focus on the team that they are working for at that particular moment in time. I think in terms of the operational and the project teams, they both have very, very similar challenges. So I think that's down to individuals being able to switch and diversify into, OK, I'm working with the project team now.
So these are the objectives I've got to achieve and then being able to switch back to their operational duties. So I think that comes down to individuals and how you manage yourself. Thank you. Should all team leaders have a high percentage of green, therefore, rather than the red I see in my organisation?
I've seen leaders that lead with all the different four color energies. So I've seen them lead with red, yellow, green, blue. I've seen leaders from all those behavioral preferences do it extremely badly.
and I've seen others do it extremely well. The ones that do extremely well are those that have a very good understanding of themselves. They tend to be very authentic.
They tend to recognize that tasks are delivered by people, and therefore they spend the majority of their time. developing individuals and developing the team uh in my in my book there's a chapter chapter 21 is all about leadership and in there i've got the comments and thoughts and observations of 11 different leaders that i've worked with who their team members and organizations have recognized as being exemplary leaders so so certainly the there's a chapter there that will give you an understanding of those different leaders and their different styles but you will pick up a theme that they all focus on their people because they recognize that those those those team members are going to be the ones that bring bring home the results thank you do you think it's possible to have a high performing team with a fully part or part-time remote work mode um i think any team can be high performing you know, whether it's full-time or part-time. I think the key thing is that teams that are high-performing teams, they work on their teamwork. They recognize that they've got to spend time out from doing their day-to-day tasks or their project tasks, and they take time out to actually work on their teamwork, understand.
and challenge each other. You know, is our communication going well? Is our working environment positive?
You know, do we know who's accountable for different things? So those teams that tend to be high performing, they recognize that great teamwork doesn't just happen. It happens in teams that work at being great. So, you know, as the phrase says on the screen. So it's about taking time out and pausing and reflecting on how you are performing.
Thank you. And what is the best way to kickstart a brand new team? The best way to kickstart a brand new team is getting them out of the office, getting them to create your team purpose statement.
The leader should be saying that these are the things that we need to do. our objectives these are the responsibilities this has got what we've got to deliver so let's create a team purpose statement and then secondly let's start finding out about each other let's start finding out about each other behaviorally from a technical skills perspective and also developing what i call appreciative trust so you Finding out about individuals, what are they like outside of the work? You know, what do they do?
What are their hobbies? What are their passions? What are they trying to achieve in their lives? So certainly I think for me, the two key things is get your team off site, wherever it is. You know, it could even be just a coffee shop, but get them out of the normal working environment because that tends to help.
Make sure you create your team purpose statement based on your objectives and then start to find out about individuals, who they are, what motivates them. So getting under that appreciative trust, because that's the key thing about trust when you're moving forward. There's two types of trust.
There's operational trust. You know, I trust you not to. steal the computer.
I'd trust you not to take all the stationery. I'd trust you to write down your overtime hours correctly. So that's what I call operational trust.
But the one that really helps is appreciative trust. I trust you and appreciate you for being who you are. So that's two things that I would do. Thank you.
And what are the big barriers to effective teamwork? Probably the biggest barriers to effective teamwork are, as we said, hybrid teams or virtual teams working in remote sites. That does cause its issues where you're not in the same environment as other people. So I think that's the biggest one.
The second one is leaders who don't. value and appreciate their team members and therefore leaders who their way is the only way and therefore they expect people to do things rather than to listen to their views and their ideas so those leaders that think they know all the answers I think that's another big area where teams have barriers and thirdly teams that actually don't stop and just reflect on what they're doing and just take time out to say what's working well let's keep making sure that we do that but importantly is there anything that's not working well that we can actually make changes to in a positive way thank you and just a couple more questions one is that there is a colloquial saying that it's normally 20% of the people that do 80% of the work. Have you got any thoughts on this? Certainly, it's an interesting phrase. You know, the 80-20 rule is used in many different areas.
Certainly, if it's 20% of people that do 80% of the work as a leader, I would be extremely concerned. you know ultimately it's if you're going to achieve your goals it's all about teamwork and therefore if I was leading a team where it was 20% of the people doing 80% of the work that would be ringing alarm bells for me and I would be looking to raise that with the team to see what was happening thank you and the last question for today is I work on multiple projects delivering science-enabling engineering projects, and I can't see the scientists and engineers going through an exercise of identifying personality types, but I do feel that these teams would benefit from increased team spirit. Any recommendations?
Yeah, it's interesting. There are particular behavioral types, and you've talked about some engineers, IT, that. again, based on the behavioral preferences, sometimes can be quite skeptical about behavioral profiling.
I think it's a case of, in those situations, selling the benefits in a way that meets their needs and gives them the understanding. So certainly if it was me and there was some reticence and I knew that that reticence was coming from a particular behavioral group of people, I would communicate the benefits in a different way. So ultimately we're talking about those people that have a lot of blue energy.
So therefore I would be giving them the facts, the data, the information. What are the benefits? Because those sort of things will then resonate with them and get them to understand this could be a beneficial activity to undertake.
Thank you, Nick. And thank you, everybody, for all your questions today. That does bring us to 1.30, so we'll close out now.
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