Best Teamwork Give Success In Your Small Business

Well-functioning teams can collaborate and drive innovation, which is a competitive advantage. In today’s world of business, we all understand the value of teams. Without innovation, many companies wither and die. Some failed iconic brands are examples of companies that were unable to adapt quickly enough to the changing competitive landscape. Now you can bet that these companies understood the importance of innovation and had teams focused on the future, but what went wrong? From my experience, three things derail teams — poorly designed incentive systems, internal competition, and groupthink.

• Having new ideas is very important for your business success. But, it’s not enough to achieve that success.
• As an entrepreneur, you are responsible every day to put in place new ideas.
• You will install many of your ideas, but the question is – do they bring the results?
• It’s not about any results, but results that you want from their implementation to bring.
• To be sure, and base your decision on facts, you will need to start using business experiments.

Groupthink

• In order to manage and break groupthink, a leader needs to listen more than talk during meetings where strategy and innovation are the focus.
• He/she needs to have dissenter(s) on their teams and encourage and support the dissenters.
• While team members generally do not like dissenters, they are often the ones who care the most and have the courage to dissent.
• Leaders often have strong opinions, which can lead to groupthink.
• Groupthink discourages perspectives from being challenged and narrows thinking, stifling innovation and organizational competitiveness.
• As a leader of a team, is your team at risk of groupthink?
• You can do a quick assessment by asking for feedback from team members on your listening skills.
• When do team members get the opportunity to speak in meetings?
• What questions are you asking that will lead to exploring alternatives and processing information objectively?
• Who are the dissenters on your team? How much time do you spend listening versus talking?
• And how do you support and encourage their views and suggestions?
• Now that you know the derailer of teams, it is time to take action and define goals that drive collaboration across the company, reward teams for working collaboratively and encourage the dissenters on your team.

 

Incentive Systems

• When the metric for sales commission is revenue, you will have your sales team looking for any sales opportunity.
• But, if you compensate your sales team by gross margin dollars, your sales team will bring you only profitable sales.
• With incentive systems, remember what you incentivise and reward others for, will drive their behavior and results.
• The classic example is sales commissions.
• Compensating sales by gross margin dollars may increase profits but it doesn’t help solve the problem of internal competition amongst sales and other departments.
• What behaviors do you need to increase your sales and profits while focusing on collaboration and innovation?
• For one technology company, there was one value that all employees within every department lived by that helped drive company growth and profitability — listening to and solving customer problems.
• So, company leaders proceeded to develop firm goals around listening to customers and driving innovative solutions.
• Then each department created specific objectives, which linked to the goals and were dependent on the other departments’ cooperation.

Advancement

• For many people, their perception is their reality.
• But when it comes to leadership and advancement in the workplace, a recent study illustrates how people working in the same office, even sitting next to each other, can have two highly divergent views.
• This is especially true when it comes to ideas about the gains that women have made in the working world.

• Female workers are 18% less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts, according to a report.
• However, in addition to the disparity in compensation and promotion between men and women, there is also a sizable perception gap between the genders, the researchers found.
• It is important to fill this gap in order to achieve a sense of happiness among employees.

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