Tag: Teams

What’s Your ‘One In A Million’ Long Shot?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn hope, Leadership, Life, Personal Excellence, purpose, Songs for Growth, Team ExcellenceLeave a comment

When You Put Your Heart In It – Kenny Rogers

As you listen to this song, reading the lyrics below if you choose to, reflect on those long shots you took, where you felt the chance of success was one in a million. Reflect on how those efforts played out.

Lyrics of the song:

We knew it was one in a million, It was such a long shot,

Somehow we’ve got here together, and who knows what will happen,

Anything can happen, If we keep getting better, And we keep on believing.

When you put your heart in it, It can take you anywhere,

Who’s to say that we can’t make it, It’s the same dream that we share,

When you put your heart in it, It can take you anywhere.

This road was so long and winding, It was such a hard road,

But we can’t stop once we had started, We were always getting closer,

Suddenly it happens, A chance in a lifetime,

Now we’re gonna take it, We can make it.

When you put your heart in it, It can take you anywhere,

Who’s to say that we can’t make it, It’s the same dream that we share,

When you put your heart in it, It can take you anywhere…

Measuring What Matters

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Business, Communications, Leadership, Learnings that Matter, success, Team ExcellenceLeave a comment

The Human Performance Index at Work

HPI is the sum total of the actions, interactions, behaviors and collaboration of leaders, teams and individuals at all levels of a business that have direct or indirect impact on business performance. HPI is the answer to measuring the quality of organisational cultures that is vital for performance improvement. It also works as a tool to help make strategic  decisions that enable creating a winning work culture.

A presentation by Ranjan De Silva at the Bangalore HR Summit 2011, titled HPI at work at Agora, the leading supermarket chain in Bangladesh.

The following process can be used to create a learning experience for your team using this video.

Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.

Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later

Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion

Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video

Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.

learnings-that-matter-1

People, Technology or Innovation?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Business, Communications, Leadership, Personal Excellence, Team ExcellenceLeave a comment

People, Technology or Innovation – A candid discussion between Kamal Munasinghe and Coach Kamrul Hasan.

Learn about what is required for business success; people, technology or business? Kamal, a CEO of a leading Apparel Manufacturer in Bangladesh talks about business using his own industry experience, responding to thought provoking question from Coach Kamrul Hasan. Gain a practical perspective from people who have been there, done that.

The following process can help you get good value from this video:

Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.

Step 2 – Show the video – let participants absorb, take notes and write down questions to ask later

Step 3 – Have a Q&A session and a discussion

Step 4 – Agree on actions to be taken based on the video

Step 5 – Participants to say how the session was useful.

Please send a message if you would like to receive a white paper that can help in your learning process.

I hope this learning process was useful in providing online learning to your team during the current down time so that they would be kept positive, motivated and sharp so that all of you would be geared to perform with excellence during the crisis and after.

Counting What Counts

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Business, Communications, Leadership, Personal Excellence, purpose, Relationships, Team Excellence1 Comment

Human Performance Index by Omar S Khan

Not Everything That Counts Can Be Counted – Sir Albert Einstein

Occasionally you come across ideas that excite you… and HPI is one of them! Most measures of human performance provide a ‘snap-shot’ in time. They measure engagement or learning hours or turnover. But what they don’t measure is how human assets combine with other company assets to deliver peak performance or not.”

In the first video below, Omar S Khan reveals why having a great strategy, simplifying your supply chain or optimising talent and building a winning culture will not give you the edge over you competitors if you don’t execute these in your distinctive way.

In the second video below he takes you through the 5 Step Approach Sensei International will use to remove unnecessary interferences that are keeping the potential and performance of a team, business unit or the whole company from delivering results.

The following process can help you get good value from this video:

Step 1 – A moderator (an expert from your company) to open the session, explaining the importance of the session.

Continue reading “Counting What Counts” →

Leading a Team is like Conducting an Orchestra!

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Communications, Leadership, Personal Excellence, Relationships, Team Excellence, Uncategorized1 Comment

image credits: nsight2success.com
image credits: nsight2success.com

Leading a team is like conducting an orchestra!

The quest for better leadership is still on and will continue to go on forever. One of the reasons for this is the ever-changing mindsets, expectations, challenges and demands presented by the ever-changing world around us.

There are many tools being used to create better Team Leadership and the next few blogs from me will analyse different tools and methodologies available to create better team leadership.

Let’s first see what is ‘Team Leadership’. Is it the same as or different to ‘Leadership’? Leadership can be used in many situations and ‘Team Leadership’ is an art of leading a team as against leading an individual or a set of individuals.

Team leadership has the following challenges that require the responses indicated.

1. Objectives of the team – The larger, more complex and the more challenging the objectives of the team, the type of ‘Team leadership’ differs. It will require skills such as making the team see the big possibilities, making the team believe in their collective ability to achieve the objectives, and it requires aligning the team under a common plan to achieve the objectives.

2. Size of the team – The larger the team is, the less time the team leader has to provide for each team member, the larger the team is, the more complex will be the relationship issues, the larger the team is, the more effort it will take to keep the team motivated. Appointing a few deputy leaders who take over responsibilities for smaller teams within the team and having more team interactions than individual interactions can overcome this.

3. Diversity of the team: The more diverse the team is, more the differences of opinions will be, more the potential conflicts will be and this will require more involvement of the team leader. Proactively helping team members understand each other through team building exercises and radical conversations, selecting the right mix of team members for various projects and investing more time on participative planning and briefing will help overcome this challenge.

4. Resources available (or not available): The resources available or not available for the team in relation to the tasks at hand can pose a challenge to the leader. The leader should use Continuous Improvement techniques such as Kaizen to get the team working together to make the most of existing resources.

5. Conflicts in the team – A team leader will lead different levels of conflicts in the team. Therefore it is important for the leader to be a good listener, mediator and counsellor using techniques from mainstream psychology, transactional analysis and Neuro Linguistic Programming to prevent, defuse or resolve such conflicts.

Continue reading “Leading a Team is like Conducting an Orchestra!” →

How great is your team?

On By Ranjan De SilvaIn Communications, Leadership, Personal Excellence, Relationships, Team Excellence1 Comment

You have just boarded a plane which is already 4 hours late after being given hope that it was going to take off earlier many times resulting in multiple visits to the boarding gate and back to the waiting lounge. Then you sit in the air craft for one more hour without the air conditioning working and no proper explanation from the crew for the reason for the delay. After one hour you are asked to de-plane as there is a technical problem in the aircraft. A further 3 hours wait biting into a sandwich provided by the airline with no clear apology for the delay. Attempts to find out about connecting flights falling on deaf years of annoyed ground staff. Back on the plane that thank fully moves. But it stops again. Pilot announces that we are waiting behind 7 other aircrafts to take off as we had missed our original slot. And finally the plane takes off after a 9 hour delay.

How some people think of teams
Image Credit: http://www.dilbert.com

 

In this situation why do you think things went wrong? Who could have fixed it? Check-in manager? Pilot? head of Engineering? The CEO? Perhaps not anyone of them! Could it be all of them, if they had worked as one team? There could be individual hero’s who would have tried to make the passengers comfortable, speed up the boarding process etc. but it takes a team to make the difference.

 

Therefore it is clear we need teams when it is difficult for a group of people together to deliver a goal.

If you see similarities of the above situation in your workplace, perhaps you need to assess the quality of team work. Given below are the qualities of a great team. Rate your team against each of these qualities on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being poor to 5 being excellent.

  1. We have burning Platforms that unifies team. Rating: _____

A burning platform is a critical task that needs to get done before a crucial dead line that requires real teamwork. EG: Getting the ERP system running before the beginning of the next financial year. Getting the new product into the market before the heavy buying season. John F Kennedy created a burning platform when he said lets get a man on the moon safely in a decade from now!

  1. There is clarity about our critical goals. Rating: _____

If our goals are clear we know what we should do and should not do. When the British rowing team was preparing for the Olympics and had to make a decision they asked the question, ‘will this make the board go faster?’ This helped them to turned down dinner invitations and even attend the opening ceremony.

  1. We have clearly agreed ways of working: _____

There are 4 possible ways of working based on the responsibilities and roles of the team. These levels include strategic, tactical, operational and interactive. It is important for the team to have clarity and alignment regarding this and to know which other related teams operates in which way with clarity of the interface relationships.

Continue reading “How great is your team?” →