Why Understanding Your Team’s “Why” Matters

Fostering Meaningful Work to Drive Team Performance

 

Your team is like an orchestra where each member brings their talents and unique contributions to help create a harmonious, emotionally resonant musical experience that moves the audience. A powerful performance happens when every musician understands the collective interpretation of the musical piece and how their parts contribute to creating that unified performance.

If some members have values or motivations that do not align with the orchestra’s (e.g., wanting to be the stand-out lone star, feeling that their part is unimportant, or just wanting to get through the day and receive the paycheck), the collective performance will be significantly affected.

One key driver for exceptional team/employee engagement is team members feeling “My work is meaningful!” Research1 has found that ‘meaningfulness’ matters more to us than other aspects of our work. When employees feel their work is meaningful, their performance improves by 33%!2

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4 Underlying Factors Driving Exceptional Team Engagement

Go Beyond Buzzwords and Unlock True Employee Engagement

 

If you live in my country or my region of the world, you might be familiar with bands that play at Chinese funerals. Those bands play familiar tunes but in a cringe-worthy way. Even kids know that members of these bands are there to go through the motions, not to give great performances.

Your team is like an orchestra. Each member is a talented musician playing an instrument with unique capabilities. For the orchestra to perform a beautiful symphony that moves the listeners, every musician must be fully engaged, harmonised, and committed to the collective performance.

An orchestra with musicians who are not fully engaged or, worse, disengaged will produce music that is, at best, technically correct but lacking soul and, at worst, discordant and unpleasant!

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Your Team Has an Implicit Contract, and You Might Not Like It

It Hinders Your Team from Doing Great Things!

 

Your team is like an orchestra. Each member, who are talented individuals, brings their unique talents and contributions to the team.

Imagine an orchestra with members who have different understandings of how they should play together. A beautiful piece of music can quickly descend into cacophony! This is the danger when a team allows itself to operate under implicit contracts.

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Why Your Team Needs a Contract Now

A Simple Step to Stop Team Dysfunction

 

“We want to start working together instead of discussing how we should work together.”

The new team leader I worked with told me the above when we were planning how they could use their first team meeting time meaningfully.

When my daughter started working, the team she joined briefed her on all the technical and ‘business’ stuff but said nothing about how the team works together. They expected her to figure it out as they went!

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Two simple principles!

“We know it has to be done, but it’s hard to do so without it being perceived as personal!” said Jess.

Do you occasionally face a similar situation?

In Jess’ case, it was just a simple thing: removing a former member of the team from the team’s chat group. But it was hard because they had a good relationship with the former team member.

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