Here are my choices from the sticky notes of the Top 10 Things that Make a Great Team:

1. Team trust
2. Management that actively engages with the team
3. Clearly-defined and reachable goals
4. Communication
5. Buy-in of all members on the purpose (mission)
6. Diversity of approaches to problems
7. Proper training
8. Defined roles
9. Mutual accountability
10. Friendship

Thousands of books have been written on this topic, post-graduate degrees earned, and experts abound to address it.  Our “ah-ha” moment came as we deliberately stepped out of the rush of daily business to mindfully think about the teams we’re in and  what makes them effective.  We found that some of the items on our list changed or had greater importance depending on the team we were on.

In business, productivity, as one “hard” metric of business success, absolutely needs to be paired with a measurement of the “soft” metrics of our people –their interactions, how we’re formed as groups.  At DecisionWise, we find that in benchmark after benchmark effective teams correlate directly to effective companies.

Help us add to our whiteboard…what would you write on your post-it notes?

Three Scenarios

1. Take, for example, the assembly line employee who is satisfied with her job. Her job means steady employment. She feels satisfied with her pay (at least it’s better than most of the jobs she could find down the street). She starts at 7:00 am and gets off in time to pick up her seven-year-old from school. It meets her needs, but she is not engaged. She would not say that she looks forward to coming to work each day, nor is she motivated by her work environment to perform at her best. It’s a job.
2. Her co-worker enjoys coming to work each morning because he has recently been given the responsibility to ensure the assembly line is producing at record capacity. He is motivated by this challenge, and has been able to meet, and even exceed, effectiveness targets. Yet his manager rarely recognizes him for this, and his pay is not reflective of his contribution. In fact, he is so dissatisfied with his pay and lack of general recognition that he has recently interviewed for a similar position with a competitor.
3. Another employee who works as a programmer recently joined the company. Lack of motivation is certainly not an issue, as she has been excited to come to work each day and to put into practice the skills she recently learned in college. She’s very satisfied with her job. She considers herself fortunate to have landed such a good job straight out of school. Yet, every day she runs into the same problem—the one that her boss has been telling her (since the day she began) would be taken care of as soon as the budget request came through. Her computer does not run the applications she needs in order to effectively use her time. In fact, she estimates that as much as half of her day is wasted. She is not effective.

While each of these employees possesses two of these components, a critical third is missing which prevents them from being engaged.  Satisfaction, Motivation, and Effectiveness provide managers with a simple framework for identifying the underlying causes of engagement or disengagement of their employees.

What do you think? How have you seen Satisfaction, Motivation, and Effectiveness impact employee engagement in your organization?  Are there other broad factors that you would add to the list?

Want to learn more? DecisionWise Director of Consulting Services, Dr. Paul Warner, will share his research on this topic during a 30-minute free webinar on The 3 Essential Components of Employee Engagement.  Register here.

See a Sample Emplyee Engagement Survey and Report. The Leadership Intelligence Employee Engagement survey is based on over 15 years of research with hundreds of companies. This survey accurately measures overall engagement as well as the drivers that contribute to it.

Even those of us who work with feedback everyday of our lives and know its value—that feedback is truly the gift of information based on others’ perceptions—may still experience some reluctance to hear it. And, we may have difficulty accepting and digesting it when it comes. We stress; we worry.

The reason? Perhaps it’s the label. In natural conversation, we don’t usually receive acknowledgement of positive behavior prefaced with the ominous phrase, “I have some feedback for you.” Reinforcement of good behavior or stellar performance is typically conveyed like this: “Good job! I liked the examples you used to illustrate the points you made in your presentation,” or, “Thanks for taking the project and running with it; I was surprised you made such quick progress.”

Another reason we may recoil from feedback is we don’t like hearing that we engaged incorrectly with a customer or that we didn’t think through a problem well enough before jumping to a conclusion. The feedback may be inconsistent with our self-image or at least with how we hoped others perceived us. It’s difficult to deal with the truth that we’re not perfect in others’ eyes.

So what can we do about our discomfort with feedback? We already know that continual feedback is useful; it makes sense to give and receive it frequently rather than only during quarterly or annual performance reviews. Feedback allows us to make good decisions about where to focus our attention and how to moderate our behavior. We can improve or become more clued in only if we can glean relevant feedback from our environment, including about how others see and experience us.

My recommendation is to “get ‘em while they’re young,” which is something I’ve been thinking about in the context of GE’s practice of recruiting high potentials while they’re college sophomores, juniors and seniors. GE annually hires interns when they’re young and impressionable—smart, ambitious, energetic, and ready to tackle any challenge. And then GE keeps those who perform and fit well within the organizational culture. Fully 70 percent of GE’s full-time leadership program hires come from this group, says Steve Canale, manager of global recruiting and staffing services, in the March 2012 issue of “Talent Management.” Starting young is the strategy.

It’s a brilliant strategy, one that is effective in growing a generation of leaders who can give and receive feedback with integrity and grace.

I currently mentor a handful of young leadership students from a local university, and one of their initial leadership forays is to participate in a 360-degree feedback survey process. They receive feedback from supervisors, classmates, professors, family members, and friends about personal leadership skills and abilities. Each student receives a printed report and has a debrief session with a coach or mentor. With help, the student identifies strengths and areas for development, and starts to work to make improvement in the areas that matter most.

The process is both enlightening and empowering, and from it the students learn how to keep feedback conversations going long after the reports are created, delivered, interpreted, and discussed. Before they have a chance to get entrenched in their ways, they have the opportunity to experience the value of feedback—why people are willing to give it, and what to do with it after it is received. The students are able to apply their natural curiosity to the situation, seek additional input, and make behavioral changes now that will pay off in the future. Whether the development opportunity is in interpersonal skills, time management, teamwork, confidence, promises keeping, or personal performance, the student can make the choice to improve.

As a result of early exposure to 360-degree feedback, their appetite for feedback grows and they tend to become eager, unflinching seekers of feedback rather than avoiders.

He works from a prepared slide deck, which is about four times as big as it should be, but his intentions are good and everyone seems to listen with rapt attention. At the end of the formal presentation, he explains that every employee needs to learn how to engage in effective dialogue, based on the technology introduced and popularized at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

That’s my cue. I take the floor, teach the methodology, and then we practice our dialogic technique. Amazingly, the process unfolds without a hitch, and employees are excited to be able to talk about issues that have been previously off limits. They listen to each other intently, add their thoughts and impressions, and after an hour, we’re seeing the benefits; the conversation becomes increasingly authentic and somewhat raw. Still, we all stay in it, and we experience a real breakthrough in open communication. We close the exercise and get ready to pack it in for the day, but before we do, the CEO is willing to entertain questions.

The questions are slow to come, but then one veteran employee, newly emboldened by our dialogic session, suspends his typical politically appropriate cautious demeanor to ask frankly about organizational strategy and if the CEO will please explain what it means, in practical terms, here on the ground in Australia and New Zealand.

The question hits a nerve. The CEO’s response is quick and adamant, “I’ve explained the strategy before. If you don’t know by now, you shouldn’t be working here!” We hear a collective gasp from the employee audience, and the now red-faced employee immediately sits down. So much for organizational transformation—traveling at the speed of light, the story spreads globally through the electronic grapevine, and although we continue on our worldwide employee tour to promote the benefits of open dialogue, the positive results are limited in scale. The CEO has lost his credibility.

In this case, the CEO’s hostile response to an unwelcome employee question let employees know that it was unsafe to communicate or question openly. No more hard-hitting questions or candid comments. The shamed employee, who happened to be a highly regarded and top-producing sales person, tendered his resignation and went to work for a competitor.

Not Unusual

In my 25 years working with executive teams, I’ve seen similar scenarios unfold again and again. The executive’s intentions are honorable, he or she is well prepared in terms of content, there’s a sincere desire to create an open and collaborative environment, and the time and financial commitments are made. But then someone says something disagreeable or ignorant or even disrespectful. The carefully architected cultural transformation is unmasked as a façade–a pretty program that temporarily covers fundamental beliefs, values, attitudes, and deeply entrenched behaviors that prevent the transformation from actually occurring.

Recommendation

Before launching a program to transform organizational culture, the executive team needs to undertake the critical work of examining its complicity in creating and sustaining the current culture. Each executive needs to identify the values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors he or she needs to shift or modify in order to achieve the desired organizational results. Then, the leaders need to establish feedback systems that allow them to adopt new attitudes and beliefs. They need to give themselves time and space to learn and then demonstrate the changes in themselves that they want to see in others.

Employee engagement surveys correlated with individual leader 360-degree feedback are excellent tools for facilitating executive self-awareness and accountability as a precursor to large-scale organizational change. Here are my recommendations:

1. Start with the data
2. Proceed with self-reflection
3. Establish open communication channels and continuously test for candor
4. Identify areas for development and apply strengths to achieve immediate results
5. Track success or change
6. Verify and validate
7. Create and execute a plan for expanded organizational transformation

In the words commonly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” It may be the only way to truly effect that change.

At the time this ad campaign ran, this statement encapsulated Apple’s vision, but 15 years later, it rings true as a Steve Jobs’ epitaph. Jobs, who founded and grew Apple for 9 years, was ousted and in exile for 15 years, and then returned to lead the company on a 14-year campaign to glory, cuts a contemporary heroic figure. Fearless, focused, and flawed—Jobs is a study in leadership.

In the April 2012 Harvard Business Review, biographer Walter Isaacson summarizes the keys to Jobs’ success:

-Focus
-Simplify
-Take responsibility end to end
-When behind, leapfrog
-Put products before profits
-Don’t be a slave to focus groups
-Bend reality
-Impute
-Push for perfection
-Tolerate only “A” players
-Engage face-to-face
-Know both the big picture and the details
-Combine the humanities with the sciences
-Stay hungry, stay foolish

You’ll notice obvious omissions such as treating others with respect, coaching and developing others, personal integrity, flexibility and adaptability, teamwork, effective negotiation, and interpersonal relationships.  Had he taken a 360 Feedback Survey, his results would have been very interesting.

In fact, Jobs was well known for his lack of emotional intelligence—if he was self-aware, he did not use that awareness to self-regulate and to build collegial relationships. Instead he shamelessly manipulated others, threw tantrums, screamed insults, and provoked controversy.

How, then, was he able to build a loyal cadre of highly intelligent and capable followers—those who feel they were the luckiest alive to have had the chance to work with him? Why do his business rivals hail his success while nursing their battle wounds? How can his wife and children pardon his perpetual neglect?

In the end, should Steve Jobs a role model for other leaders? Why or why not? What have you seen happen with and to aspiring leaders who have exhibited his worst behaviors?  Have their intelligence and uncompromising push for excellence compensated for the deficiencies?