Excerpt...

Chapter 1  commitment

A work team, like a winning sports team, needs to agree on its mission, values, and goals for achieving success. Team members must be willing to put aside their own personal goals for the good of the team. Otherwise, the result is a collective of great performers, not a team. Imagine five basketball players who each decide to follow their personal instincts about winning the game. One player might decide to emphasize defense, another offense; one might experiment with new plays, another might stick to old standards. Chaos would reign.

With a clarity of purpose and values that are aligned with the organization, a team can visualize its connection to organizational success, see its role in the big picture, and realize that it has the power to influence something bigger than itself. Only then does a team really commit to performance goals and measurable objectives. When members make such a commitment to move toward the same goal, energy is directed and the group creates a synergy—a force greater than the combined energy of its individual members. Strong team commitment holds groups together and allows them to stretch for collective excellence. With commitment, everyone seems to be heading down the same track to an agreed- upon destination.

How to Recognize Strong Commitment

When a work group develops a high level of commitment among its members, several things become apparent. Members are able to articulate the team’s purpose and how its performance affects the success of the larger organization; that is, they can describe what they do and why their work is important. Also, they can list the important values which guide their decisions and translate those values into everyday behaviors or practices. Team members are focused on specific goals, know what measures indicate success, and, when they hit their targets, celebrate as a team.

One way to assess a team’s level of commitment is to assess the clarity of a team’s mission and values. Ask group members to describe why the team exists—its real purpose. For instance, suppose you were to ask a hospital emergency room nurse about the purpose of his department and he answered, “Well, basically, we’re here to save lives. We hope to do that by providing the best medical care as quickly as possible, while making the patient as comfortable as possible.”

Would that response indicate a clear understanding of purpose? Probably, since most of us would agree that the primary purpose of a hospital emergency room is to provide the best medical care as quickly as possible, while keeping the patient comfortable. The nurse’s response would not only demonstrate a clear understanding of team purpose, but also of core team values—care, speed, and comfort—all critical to emergency room success.

Contrast the nurse’s response with this example:

You request a paper cup from a young restaurant clerk so that you can take your coffee with you. She answers, “I’m sorry. I can’t give you a take-out cup. You’ll have to go to the take-out window.” After a brief exchange, you ask her what she considers to be the most important part of her job. She says, “Well, I don’t really know...waiting on the customers, I guess.” You can’t help thinking that although the young woman is not slow or discourteous, she is also not committed to a vision (e.g., satisfying the customer) or any guiding principles (e.g., doing whatever it takes). For the young waitress it seems that commitment to waiting on the customer is not a commitment to service excellence. Yet, in the restaurant lobby, a framed service statement reads, “Our Commitment: Satisfy the Customer...Whatever It Takes.”

Another way to assess level of commitment is to assess clarity of team goals and objectives. When asked how his team’s mission translated into specific goals, suppose the nurse mentioned earlier answered without any hesitation, “We need to follow treatment protocol, reduce average patient wait time, eliminate X-ray retakes, and improve patient satisfaction.” That response would indicate that a picture of success was broken down into performance priorities which directed day-to-day work behaviors. Contrast that response with this example:

A manufacturing company recently committed to increasing the involvement of its employees in the management and operations of the plant. Although the company had embarked on a job redesign project in which the workers were trained in team processes such as group decision making, shared leadership, and meeting management, employees were unclear about priority goals. When asked what their performance objectives were, none could answer, except in very general terms. One individual said that improving productivity was a group objective, although she had no idea how it would be measured. Another said that keeping the customer satisfied was a priority, although he did not really know how satisfied customers were at the present time. A third indicated that improving safety in the plant was important, although she didn’t know why, since she knew of no safety problems.

When team commitment is high, goals and measures are not vague. Members can readily explain how purpose translates into priority goals, specific objectives, and performance measures.

Focus on Team Purpose and Values

To be effective as a team member, you need to be clear about your team’s basic purpose...its mission. As Stephen Covey discusses in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it is important to “begin with the end in mind.” In a sentence or two you should be able to clearly state why your team exists and what organizational values guide decision making in your group. Whether you are a member of a task force, a department, or an intact production team, your commitment will be higher if you know your team’s primary purpose, how that purpose impacts your organization’s success, and how it fits with your personal vision of success.

To determine how well you understand your group’s purpose, briefly try to describe why your team exists. Then list the core values for your team. If you have difficulty doing so, ask to discuss your team’s mission and values at your next team meeting. If the group also has difficulty describing its shared mission and important values, arrange for a facilitator to conduct a meeting where you can clarify both as a group.

Team Purpose and Values

1. Briefly describe (in a sentence or two) your team’s primary purpose.

2. List three to seven behaviors that you value most in other team members.

3. Given your team’s purpose, values, and objectives, what “ground rules” would help your team succeed?

Clarify Your Own Purpose and Values

Even if you have not given much thought to your primary purpose in life or to your personal values, you may have given thought to what kind of person you hope to become and what you hope to accomplish before you die. Perhaps you have visualized what success means to you. For many people the ultimate success is achieving their goals while living by their own standards or values. Unfortunately, many individuals speak of empty successes because they achieved goals but did not live by values that were important to them.

If your own purpose and values are compatible with those of your work team it is more likely that you will be committed to your team’s priorities. But before you can address the issue of compatibility, you will need to do a little soul searching.

My Purpose and Values Statement

One way to clarify purpose is to focus on what you hope to accomplish, how you hope to lead your various life roles, and which values you hope are reflected in your life.

1. List the major things you hope to accomplish in your lifetime (e.g., develop a business, write a book, teach people to teach better).

2. What roles are most important to you and how would you like to handle them (e.g., parent you can count on, loyal friend, boss that develops others, sibling who stays in touch)?

3. What values do you want others to associate with you (e.g., integrity, pursuit of excellence, humor, patience, risk taking, flexibility)?

Consider How Your Purpose and Values Fit With Your Team’s

If your team’s purpose is compatible with your own purpose, you are more likely to feel in step with your group. If not, you may feel pulled in two directions. It is important, therefore, to analyze how worthwhile you find your team’s purpose. Is it a purpose you can believe in? Is it aligned with your personal mission? Do team values fit with your personal values? If there is not a perfect fit, you may be able to create ways of satisfying both. For example, if you really value direct communication, and your team places a strong value on peace and harmony, you might feel like a fish out of water much of the time. But you could resolve such conflict by learning to be more tactful in your verbal exchanges, which would preserve both harmony and honesty. You could also ask your team to support your value of honesty by adopting a few ground rules about disagreeing agreeably.

Before you can address any differences, however, you will need to identify them.

Checking the Fit Between Individual/Team Purpose

1. To what extent is your team’s purpose compatible with your own purpose?

2. Which of your strong personal values are also important to your team (e.g., honesty, hard work, creativity, helpfulness)?

3. Do any team values conflict with your personal values? (e.g., you value honesty; your team values harmony...
You value independence; your team values group input on everything)

4. Could any conflicts be worked out? How?

Keep the Team’s Mission Statement Visible

Just as many large organizations develop mission statements which clarify purpose and values, teams should develop their own. While each team’s mission should evolve from the larger organization’s mission, it should be specific to that team and reflect its unique contribution to the larger organization. In addition, the values reflected in a team statement should be consistent with the organization’s stated values and translated into behaviors or practices specific to that team. Once a team mission statement is developed, it should be kept visible and referred to regularly for team direction.

If you do not have a team mission statement, ask each team member to complete this sentence individually.

Our team’s main purpose is to…

After each person shares his/her statement, discuss what phrases are consistent in the group. List those common key elements.

Now, craft a sentence that incorporates the essence of the key elements.

You now have the skeleton of a mission statement. Ask a subgroup to wordsmith it a bit, then discuss it one more time as a group. You may need another round of fine tuning to secure everyone’s buy-in.

[Training Program for Teams at Work Activity 1:“Clarifying Your Team’s Mission” provides detailed instructions for developing a team mission statement.]

Develop a Shared Vision of Success

If you have a team leader or a trained group facilitator, ask one to lead your group in a visioning exercise. This activity should include discussing your team’s vision of success (the broad picture of what you’d like the team to look like in two or three years) based on your purpose and core values.

If you do not have a trained facilitator available, try following these steps:

Step 1: Ask each team member to jot down five to eight broad goals he/she hopes
the team will accomplish in two or three years. Consider at least these elements: service/product quality, image within constituency, value to the organization, and team work climate.

Step 2: Ask members to share their thoughts with the large group.

Step 3: List on newsprint all the broad goals mentioned and pare the list down to five or six elements the group agrees are critical to the team’s collective vision of success.

[Training Program for Teams at Work Activity 2: “Developing a Shared Vision of Success” provides detailed instructions for creating a vision statement.]

Translate Your Vision Into Goals and Objectives

Translating generalities into specifics is not easy, but it is essential for enhancing commitment to a team and ensuring that everyone is on the same track. Consider this example:

As part of its vision statement, a travel agency states that it wants to become the agency of choice for most corporate clients in the area.

Suppose you were a travel agent with that organization—how would you determine how to increase success? Increase the number of new corporate clients? Increase the satisfaction of old clients? How would you work toward that goal on a day-to-day basis? And how would you support team members to achieve the group vision?

It is important to translate your group’s vision into a few priorities and then to translate those priority goals into specific, measurable objectives. To enhance commitment in your work group, focus on a few priority goals and list specific objectives that will help you achieve each goal.

Goal 1:

Goal 2:    

Goal 3:

[Training Program for Teams at Work Activity 3:“Translating Team Goals Into Objectives” provides detailed instructions for team goal setting.]

Commitment means “walking the talk.” And this is where many work groups fall flat on their collective faces. They verbally commit to a shared vision, but they don’t know how that commitment really affects everyday work behaviors. Here is a case that illustrates the point:

A marketing group from a pharmaceutical company developed a vision that included a “collaborative work environment.” That sounds simple and sensible, doesn’t it? People working together for the good of the department. However, this group did not agree on what behaviors constitute collaboration. Each team member left the visioning meeting expecting different collaborative behaviors. So, three weeks later, team members began grumbling that some people were not honoring the group’s commitment to collaborative behavior. Complaints ranged from, “People are not answering phone calls promptly,” and “We’re not sharing client information,” to “Only a few are attending our Friday lunch meetings.”

Do these comments indicate that those individuals were not committed to collaborating with their colleagues? No, but they do indicate differences in perceptions of what constitutes collaboration. General commitment to an ideal is not enough to move the team forward; a team needs commitment to specific behaviors. The pharmaceutical marketing group might have discussed whether sharing information, attending each other’s presentations, and celebrating each other’s successes constituted collaborative behaviors. With such specific behaviors in mind, each member would have been able to commit to increasing those behaviors. Also, the group would have been able to measure frequency of these behaviors, indicating whether collaboration was going up or down.

As a group moves from agreement on principles to identification of specific practices that embody those principles, commitment climbs.

Agree on Measures of Success

Once your team has clarified its vision and developed related goals and objectives, it is important to measure team success and conduct regular performance feedback sessions to clarify just how much progress is being made toward group goals. Individuals need to know the impact of their efforts if they are going to continue investing energy. Since feedback on performance is both motivating and directing, it not only sparks energy for change, but also focuses that energy on which improvement areas are most likely to yield a good return.

As a work group, you need to determine what information will tell you if you are on the right track or if you need to move in another direction. For example, if improving customer service is a goal for your group, consider these sources of information as measures of your success:

If you are not sure which measures will indicate how well your group is doing, try to identify measures at your next team meeting. Remember to consider information that is already being collected as well as new data you might collect. When you have a good listing of possible measures, review the list. See if any measures duplicate one another or are too costly or time consuming to implement.

[Training Program for Teams at Work Activity 7: “Measuring Team Success” provides detailed instructions for developing performance measures.]

You might also spend time discussing how to chart measures in a visible place so that all team members can see – at a glance – how the team is doing in relation to its goals.

Be sure to include on the poster, both your big picture targets (e.g. annual team goals, related quarterly and annual corporate goals) and your performance history (e.g. last month’s performance, last quarter’s performance, even last year’s performance). You might use different colors for different time periods and different typeface or lettering for team vs. whole organization goals.

The important thing is to keep accomplishments visible to all and to provide evidence of improvement to keep morale high.

Celebrate Success Milestones

Celebrating team successes, no matter how small, is important to building commitment because it enhances confidence in team goals and provides evidence that efforts are paying off. If celebrations of success are too far apart, team members will begin to wonder if the goal is achievable at all. No one is motivated to work toward unattainable goals. Most of us need to see that we are making progress, that our efforts are paying off and that continued commitment will result in success. Individuals are most motivated when they believe two things: that they can succeed, and that such success will result in a valued reward.

Celebrations may serve as rewards in and of themselves (e.g., camaraderie, self-pride, peer recognition), or indicate possible future rewards (e.g., promotion, job security, more influence). In any case, celebrations are always important to group commitment.

If your work team does not celebrate often, it is possible that your colleagues do not see the value in celebrations. Perhaps you could bring up the importance of milestone celebrations at a future team meeting. Be sure to share your thoughts on which milestones would make good celebration points.

For instance, if you are working toward productivity improvement, you might celebrate when you reach a 10% improvement level. If you are concerned with customer service, you might celebrate the first 95% positive response rate. If improved methods are important, you might celebrate when your last team member completes an important skills course. Discuss team goals, determine appropriate milestones, and then celebrate.

Consider a few of these ideas for acknowledging accomplishments and celebrating team success:

To brainstorm more ideas, discuss celebrations at a team meeting.

[Training Program for Teams at Work Activity 8:

“Your Team’s Way Of Celebrating” provides detailed instructions for increasing team celebrations.]

Chapter 1: Commitment Summary