Myth on Teamwork

These days when organizations are introducing several ways to foster team spirit amongst employees, in an endeavor to ensure that all team members are on the same page in terms of work, is it true that one poor performer can actually hamper the performance of the entire team as opposed to the rest?
The strength of the chain is determined by its weakest link. Yes, if poor performance on part of a team member is not caught upfront and corrective measures taken, it will bring down team performance. Team members tend to accommodate, step in and compensate for any weakness and that spreads the burden within the team. Systems should be put in place to provide leading indicators on non-performance to enable the organization step in support and take corrective measures.
One poor performer is, legitimately said to destroy the performance of an entire team only if the poor performance comes as a complete surprise. Otherwise, the team should be able to plan around its weak link and should not use the poor performer as an excuse for poor results. To take a sporting analogy – if you pass the ball to your star bowler in the last over and he bowls only wides and no balls and full tosses, that could destroy the team’s chances. But, if you know the bowler is weak, you would never put him in such a position.
Of course, it does especially if the poor performer is handling a task in a bottlenecking position. It becomes imperative in such situations for the team leader to distribute work in such a way that adequate redundancy planning is in-built into the team. To that extent, a leader needs to think “negatively” what all can go wrong with whom, and plan accordingly with alternative back ups to ensure that nothing goes wrong and the task is successfully completed.
The solidarity or cohesiveness of a team is an important indicator of how much influence the group has over its individual members. The more cohesive the group – the more strongly members feel about belonging to it – the greater its influence. If the members of a group feel strongly attached to it, they are not likely to violate its norms.
Team cohesiveness also plays a role in small companies. Team cohesiveness is critical in helping the individual feel good about his or her contribution to the effort. When TQM was introduced at Kane, teams of between five and eight employees were set up to deal with specific problems and demonstrate the impact that teams could make. They also made sure that all employees understood that no improvement is too small. Over a period of time, they can make a major difference. The first team the Job Information Team, worked on improving the clarity of forms used to process orders. Once the project was completed the team’s recommendations were accepted and immediately implemented. Kane continue to emphasize the importance of every team and very employee to TQM.
Highly cohesive teams often have less tension and hostility and fewer misunderstandings than less cohesive groups do. Additionally studies have found that cohesive groups tend to produce more uniform output than less cohesive groups, which often have problems with communication and cooperation.
The Software Reusability Department of ARINC Research Corporation discovered that trust is the key to cohesiveness in teams. What this means is that cohesive teams cannot tolerate extremists, positive or negative. One of our most difficult realizations, recalled Risa B Hyman director of the department, was that some talented individuals cannot flourish in a team oriented environment. If team cohesion is not to be eroded, management must recognize such a mismatch and address the problem before team goals are jeopardized.–
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Miracles of The Human Mind

Remember that your mind can defy the laws of the universe in one crucial way. It can go backward. Time can’t, nor can events – but your mind can. Let’s say you go into your office, and the first thing you notice is that an important report you needed was not written. The incomplete report tends to put in a less than resourceful state. You feel mad. You feel frustrated. You’re ready to go out and scream at your secretary. But screaming won’t produce the result you want. It will only make a bad situation worse. The key is to change your state, to back up and put yourself in a state that will allow you to get things done. That’s what you can do by rearranging your internal representations.
You are a sovereign, being in control, running your own brain. Now you are seeing the way to do it. In just some few exercises one can see that one has the ability to totally control your own state. Think what your life would be like if you remembered all your good experiences as looking bright, close, and colorful as sounding joyous, rhythmic, and melodic; as feelings soft, warm, and nurturing. And what if you stored your bad experiences as fuzzy little framed images with almost inaudible voices and insubstantial forms you could not feel because they were far away from you? Successful people do this unconsciously. They know how to turn up the volume of the things that help them and turn off the sound of the things that don’t.
It is suggested you ignore problems. Some things need to be addressed. We all know people who can go through a day in which ninety-nine things worked out right and come home totally depressed. Why? Well, one thing went wrong. They may have turned the one thing that went wrong into a big, bright, blustery image and turned the others into small, murky, quiet insubstantial ones.
Lot of people spend their whole lives like this. There are people who keep telling, “I’m depressed”. They almost say it with pride, because it’s become so much a part of their world view. Well, many therapists would begin with the long, arduous task of unearthing the causes of that depression. They’d let the patient talk for hours about his depression. They’d rummage through the patient’s mental garbage bin to uncover seminal experiences of gloom and past emotional abuse. Of such techniques are very long and very expensive therapeutic relationship s made.
No one is always depressed. Depression is not a permanent condition like losing a leg. It is a state that people can pop into and out of. In fact, most people who are experiencing depression have had many happy experiences in their lives – may be even as many or more than the average person. They just don’t represent these experiences to themselves in a bright, large, associated way. They may also represent happy times as far away instead of close. Take a moment now and remember an event that happened last week and push it far away. Does it seem as recent an experience to you anymore? What if you bring it closer? Doesn’t it now seem more recent? Some people take their happy experiences of the moment and push them far away so they seem like long ago, and store their problems up close. Haven’t you ever heard a person say I just need to get some distance from my problems? You don’t have to fly to some distant land to do this. Just push them far away from you in your mind and notice the difference. People who feel depressed often have their brains filled to capacity with big, loud, close, heavy, insistent images of the bad times and only thin, gray wafers for the good times. The way to changer isn’t to wallow in the bad memories; it’s to change the sub-modalities, the very structure of the memories themselves. Next, link what used to make you feel bad to new representations that make you feel like taking the challenges of life with vigor, humor, patience, and strength.–

Tips on Conducting Performance Reviews

Companies invested their time, money, and all their energy into building their business. But no company can function for very long without a team of productive employees supporting it. It’s important not only that your employees feel appreciated, but also that they feel they're progressing steadily in their careers.
One of the best ways to ensure this level of job satisfaction is by holding employee performance reviews at least once a year. However, as essential as these reviews can be for the growth of the company and the well-being of its employees, many small business owners remain uncomfortable with the entire process.
To make your performance reviews as productive and as painless as possible, follow these 10 tried-and-true suggestions:
1. Be prepared. First of all, make sure you are fully prepared before sitting down with the employee. Decide both what you're going to say and how you're going to say it.
2. Lead with the positive. It’s important to reaffirm the employee’s strengths at the beginning of the review. Since job security is the number one concern of most people, the performance review is a good time to tell an employee how much you value their contributions to your business.
3. Don’t be confrontational. It’s also important not to criticize the employee in general terms. The goal is to evaluate job performance and not the person. A performance review that turns into a gripe session misses the opportunity to raise employee morale.
4. Keep it real. Human resource professionals recommend that you avoid detailed reviews that are too complicated and mechanistic, which can leave the employee feeling like a drone rather than a human being.
5. Be consistent. Make sure to handle performance reviews in a consistent manner. Top performers should hear affirmations from you regarding their exemplary efforts; weak performers need to hear that their performance requires improvement. A simple approach to review criteria is to evaluate work based on quantity and quality relative to the job requirements. Secondary considerations might be employee attitude, willingness to help other personnel with their work when appropriate, and the ability to get along with others.
6. Make it a two-way conversation. An effective performance review requires an interactive discussion with an open agenda. Try to formulate questions that seek the employee’s ideas and input. Remember, this will help the employee feel you value his or her opinions. The review should also be a forum for employees to voice their concerns.
7. Address what’s important to the employee. Since job satisfaction is the most important factor affecting an employee’s attitude (and therefore his or her level of performance and value to your company), an effective review should delve into areas that include issues most important to that employee.
8. Discuss work/life balance. The performance review is a good opportunity to show your concern for the employee’s work/life balance, and to jointly discuss solutions to improve that balance. It’s also a good time to create a plan for the employee’s career advancement and discuss what future opportunities might exist for him or her.
9. Be a good listener. Remember to be an active listener and to pick up on your employee’s verbal and nonverbal cues.
10. Review regularly. Reviews should be done proactively with the purpose of improving employee morale and productivity. When you conduct them on a regular basis, you avoid reviews prompted solely by the need to document an employee’s poor performance. This in turn can imply that the information is being collected as evidence to avoid litigation, should the employee ever be terminated.
The sign of a successful performance review is an employee who leaves the meeting feeling motivated and excited about his or her job. If the employee’s job satisfaction needs are unmet, it’s less likely they will be motivated to focus on your goals for the company. But if an employee feels acknowledged, appreciated, and fairly rewarded for past efforts, he or she will indeed become a valuable asset to the future success of your company.

Fostering Team Spirit

These days when organizations are introducing several ways to foster team spirit amongst employees, in an endeavor to ensure that all team members are on the same page in terms of work, is it true that one poor performer can actually hamper the performance of the entire team as opposed to the rest?
The strength of the chain is determined by its weakest link. Yes, if poor performance on part of a team member is not caught upfront and corrective measures taken, it will bring down team performance. Team members tend to accommodate, step in and compensate for any weakness and that spreads the burden within the team. Systems should be put in place to provide leading indicators on non-performance to enable the organization step in support and take corrective measures.
One poor performer is, legitimately said to destroy the performance of an entire team only if the poor performance comes as a complete surprise. Otherwise, the team should be able to plan around its weak link and should not use the poor performer as an excuse for poor results. To take a sporting analogy - if you pass the ball to your star bowler in the last over and he bowls only wides and no balls and full tosses, that could destroy the team's chances. But, if you know the bowler is weak, you would never put him in such a position.
Of course, it does especially if the poor performer is handling a task in a bottlenecking position. It becomes imperative in such situations for the team leader to distribute work in such a way that adequate redundancy planning is in-built into the team. To that extent, a leader needs to think "negatively" what all can go wrong with whom, and plan accordingly with alternative back ups to ensure that nothing goes wrong and the task is successfully completed.
The solidarity or cohesiveness of a team is an important indicator of how much influence the group has over its individual members. The more cohesive the group - the more strongly members feel about belonging to it - the greater its influence. If the members of a group feel strongly attached to it, they are not likely to violate its norms.
Team cohesiveness also plays a role in small companies. Team cohesiveness is critical in helping the individual feel good about his or her contribution to the effort. When TQM was introduced at Kane, teams of between five and eight employees were set up to deal with specific problems and demonstrate the impact that teams could make. They also made sure that all employees understood that no improvement is too small. Over a period of time, they can make a major difference. The first team the Job Information Team, worked on improving the clarity of forms used to process orders. Once the project was completed the team's recommendations were accepted and immediately implemented. Kane continue to emphasize the importance of every team and very employee to TQM.
Highly cohesive teams often have less tension and hostility and fewer misunderstandings than less cohesive groups do. Additionally studies have found that cohesive groups tend to produce more uniform output than less cohesive groups, which often have problems with communication and cooperation.
The Software Reusability Department of ARINC Research Corporation discovered that trust is the key to cohesiveness in teams. What this means is that cohesive teams cannot tolerate extremists, positive or negative. One of our most difficult realizations, recalled Risa B Hyman director of the department, was that some talented individuals cannot flourish in a team oriented environment. If team cohesion is not to be eroded, management must recognize such a mismatch and address the problem before team goals are jeopardized .-

Self Managment

Your mind can defy the laws of the universe in one crucial way. It can go backward. Time can’t, nor can events – but your mind can. Let’s say you go into your office, and the first thing you notice is that an important report you needed was not written. The incomplete report tends to put in a less than resourceful state. You feel mad. You feel frustrated. You’re ready to go out and scream at your secretary. But screaming won’t produce the result you want. It will only make a bad situation worse. The key is to change your state, to back up and put yourself in a state that will allow you to get things done. That’s what you can do by rearranging your internal representations.
You are a sovereign, being in control, running your own brain. Now you are seeing the way to do it. In just some few exercises one can see that one has the ability to totally control your own state. Think what your life would be like if you remembered all your good experiences as looking bright, close, and colorful as sounding joyous, rhythmic, and melodic; as feelings soft, warm, and nurturing. And what if you stored your bad experiences as fuzzy little framed images with almost inaudible voices and insubstantial forms you could not feel because they were far away from you? Successful people do this unconsciously. They know how to turn up the volume of the things that help them and turn off the sound of the things that don’t.
It is suggested you ignore problems. Some things need to be addressed. We all know people who can go through a day in which ninety-nine things worked out right and come home totally depressed. Why? Well, one thing went wrong. They may have turned the one thing that went wrong into a big, bright, blustery image and turned the others into small, murky, quiet insubstantial ones.
Lot of people spend their whole lives like this. There are people who keep telling, “I’m depressed”. They almost say it with pride, because it’s become so much a part of their world view. Well, many therapists would begin with the long, arduous task of unearthing the causes of that depression. They’d let the patient talk for hours about his depression. They’d rummage through the patient’s mental garbage bin to uncover seminal experiences of gloom and past emotional abuse. Of such techniques are very long and very expensive therapeutic relationship s made.
No one is always depressed. Depression is not a permanent condition like losing a leg. It is a state that people can pop into and out of. In fact, most people who are experiencing depression have had many happy experiences in their lives – may be even as many or more than the average person. They just don’t represent these experiences to themselves in a bright, large, associated way. They may also represent happy times as far away instead of close. Take a moment now and remember an event that happened last week and push it far away. Does it seem as recent an experience to you anymore? What if you bring it closer? Doesn’t it now seem more recent? Some people take their happy experiences of the moment and push them far away so they seem like long ago, and store their problems up close. Haven’t you ever heard a person say I just need to get some distance from my problems? You don’t have to fly to some distant land to do this. Just push them far away from you in your mind and notice the difference. People who feel depressed often have their brains filled to capacity with big, loud, close, heavy, insistent images of the bad times and only thin, gray wafers for the good times. The way to changer isn’t to wallow in the bad memories; it’s to change the sub-modalities, the very structure of the memories themselves. Next, link what used to make you feel bad to new representations that make you feel like taking the challenges of life with vigor, humor, patience, and strength.

The way to do this is through a process we call the swish pattern. It can be used to deal with some of the persistent problems and bad habits people have. A swish pattern takes internal representations that normally produce states of un-resourcefulness and cause them to automatically trigger new internal representations that put you in the resourceful states you desire. When you find out, for example, what internal representations make you feel like over eating, with the swish pattern you can create a new internal representation of something else that is more powerful and would cause you, if you saw or hear it to push food away. If you link the two representations, whenever you think of over eating, the first representation will instantly trigger the second and put you in a state of not desiring food. The best part of the swish pattern is that once you implant it effectively, you do not have to think of it ever again. The process will happen automatically, without any conscious effort. Here is how the swish pattern work.
Step # 1: Identify the behavior you want to change. Now make an internal representation of that behavior as you see it through your own eyes. If you want to stop biting your finger nails, imagine a picture of you lifting your hand, bringing your fingers to your lips, and biting your nails.
Step # 2: Once you have a clear picture of the behavior you want to change, you need to create a different representation, a picture of yourself as you would be if you made the desired change and what that change would mean to you. You might picture yourself taking your fingers away from your mouth, creating a little pressure on the finger you were going to bite, and seeing your nails perfectly manicured and yourself as well dressed, magnificently groomed, more in control, and more confident. The picture you make of yourself in that desired state should be disassociated. The reason for this is that we want to create an ideal internal representation, one that you will continue to be drawn to rather than one you feel you already have.
Step # 3: Swish the two pictures so that the un-resourceful experience automatically triggers the resourceful experience. Once you hook up this triggering mechanism, anything that used to trigger biting your nails will now trigger you into a state where you are moving toward that ideal picture of yourself. Thus, you’re creating a whole new way for your brain to deal with what in the past may have upset you.
Here is how to do the swish: Start by making a big bright picture of the behavior you want to change. Then, in the bottom right hand corner of that picture, make a small dark picture of the way you want to be. Now take that small picture, and in less than one second, have it grow in size and brightness and literally burst through the picture of the behavior you no longer desire. As you do this process, say the word “wooosh” with all the excitement and enthusiasm you can. Most individuals may realize this may sound a bit juvenile. However, saying “wooosh’ in an excited way ends a series of powerful, positive signals to your brain. Once you’ve set up the pictures in your mind, this whole process should only take about as long as it takes to say the word “wooosh”. Now in front of you is a big, bright, focused, colorful picture of how you want to be. The old picture of how you were has been smashed to smithereens.–