The truth about teams

Words: 447
Reading Time: 1 min. 29 sec.s

There is a lot of confused thinking about getting the best from teams. A good case in point is Duncan Brodie (http://goalsandachievements.com) who says:

“To get the best from a team you clearly have to bring out the best in each individual and get them all playing to their strengths.”

Only to say, just a few lines further on:

“The truth is that team success is largely down to a group of people who are committed to a common purpose and are willing to work collectively and support each other to get the result they desire.”

Setting aside whether you agree with either of these points, both cannot be true at the same time.

Bringing out the best in each individual is just a likely to give you a group of individuals, each pulling in a different direction, rather than a team.

Having a group of people committed to a common purpose and willing to work collectively to get the result they desire will give you a team, but will not necessarily bring out the best in each individual; that may need to be sacrificed to the common good.

Superior teams are most likely when the members share a common aspiration for the team rather than themselves and the team makes use of each individual’s strengths. That does not mean having the best individuals, since they may not place the team above themselves. It does involve each team member identifying moment to moment how the team as a whole can best deliver.

Sport is often chosen as an analogy for business, but business is rarely like that. Business is not about delivering at your peak for 48 minutes, 90 minutes, 20 overs or 5 days. It is about effective, appropriate effort delivered under all circumstances for months and years.

Business suggestions:
1) Be clear about the outcomes;
2) Be clear about how you will know if and when you have them;
3) Get buy-in from all members of the team;
4) No stigma should attach to not buying-in and being properly excluded;
5) No-one fails in a team, everyone takes responsibility;
6) Teams do not work automatically, they need work themselves;
7) Changing team members changes the whole team, earlier phases will need revisiting;
8) Ball-carriers and supporters change over time; make sure everyone knows who is who;
9) You need both ball-carriers and supports to succeed;
10) You cannot lead a team; either you are part of it, or you are not. Who leads at any one time will change with where the team has got to;
11) When the job is done celebrate the success and disband the team;
12) Different jobs need different teams.

Ability before age

Words: 418
Reading Time: 1 min. 24 sec.s

The whole idea of retirement is a recent by-product of the factory-led economy.

In societies before the industrial age there was no set age at which folk ceased to seen as productive. Only illness and infirmity might mean someone was supported by the community. Even then, their experience and wisdom was valued, so most individuals continued to contribute to the community in some way.

With the dawn of the factory age came the debilitating demand that everyone work at the same relentless pace. It was man as part of the machine. Anybody not able to match that pace was inevitably seen in the same way as a component that could no longer meet the burden place on it. At that point the component person was scrapped.

The idea of retirement has been largely sold and accepted as the just reward for years of toil at a thankless task. Of course, it is no such thing. To industry retirement is simply preventive maintenance – get rid of the component as it approaches its MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure).

The fact that ageism persists in the workplace, even when the task is not physically demanding and would benefit from long experience, just shows how deeply engrained this paradigm has become. Few even think about it anymore; it's received wisdom.

65 years old? Finished - get an apprentice in for a fraction of the cost.

Fortunately, for those of us running our own businesses, there is no fixed point at which we absolutely must stop enjoying ourselves and go sit in an armchair. This is one of the many points where small business will always triumph over big business. We can favour ourselves and our customers, rather than favouring the insentient corporation.

If business in general could learn to recognize ability instead of age, ability instead of favouritism, ability instead of appearance, ability combined with attitude, it would gain immeasurably. And that applies at both ends of a working life; but I’m not holding my breath.

For those who are listening, there are a number of things you could do.

Business suggestions:
1) Scrap any fixed age for retirement;
2) Reward contribution rather than length of service;
3) Recognize the value experience has;
4) Make sure experience does not hinder innovation;
5) Reconnect with the talent you’ve scrapped;
6) Check that people enjoy, rather than endure, what you ask them to do;
7) A business is only as good as the people who are part of it;8) There is no functioning business without people.

Marketing aspects of the grocery hunt

Words: 445
Reading Time: 1 minute 29 seconds

Suddenly you can’t find your favoured brand of breakfast muesli? Of course not; it’s deliberately been moved to confuse you. The conventional wisdom used by the non-thinkers that run supermarkets is that moving products around to confuse customers has a tendency to increase sales.

Thus it is that eventually I found cling film with the pet food this week; kitchen towels in the “seasonal” aisle and chilled puff pastry next to the butter. Where else?

The trouble with the way this rule has evolved is that there is no effective control group. It is impossible to have two stores on the same site at the same time, one relocating goods, the other not, to give any true comparison.

So sales go up on the confusingly located product, or the one that took its place – would they have done so anyway? There is no way of knowing. And what about related products sales; how have they been affected? Brainless in marketing has no idea because what constitutes a related product is peculiar to each shopper.

This received dogma, this unexamined conformance to an out-of-date rule ignores some basic commonsense contrary indicators:
1) If this rule is so great at increasing sales, why are all the soup tins together? Why not put some with the cereals, some with the cakes and some with the soap powders? Why not simply throw all the products onto the shelves in a totally random and haphazard manner? That would really bump up the volumes – not.
2) Familiarity increases spending. I personally spend more in stores where I feel more comfortable and less threatened by the child-level psychology in use and for which, I suppose, the retailer pays handsomely.
3) Confused customers become frustrated customers. They will take out their aggression on your staff, leading to higher staff turnover. Confused customers will also give up the hunt, even abandoning goods they have already put into the trolley, and go elsewhere. Total sales go down.

Sometimes stuff has to be moved around for good reasons of space and changes in product mix. We know that. In which case:
1) Provided handy, current, printed store guides at the entrances, so that we can still find stuff;
2) Make the aisle signs reflect what is on the shelves – or simply take them down;
3) Place a bright, eye-catching (you know how to do that) re-direct label on the shelf-edge at the old location, directing us to the new location.

Isn’t it about time our retailers stopped treating us – their customers – as dim-witted cattle and accorded us a little respect?

It would certainly improve their image among the general population.

What would that do for sales?

Who else would decide to wait?

Words: 211 Reading time: 0 minutes 42 seconds

At Christmas 1914 soldiers from both sides climbed out of their trenches and played football in No Man’s Land. For just a brief time those engaged in killing each other realised that war was not what they wanted and that there was probably a better way.

This spontaneous act at a human level was somewhat frowned on by those in higher command and next day they all went back to a prolonged and bitter conflict.

On a personal level, with much less dire consequences, we repeat this self-destructive cycle. We realize that what we are doing is not yielding the results we want, we know there is a better way, we may even try it for a short while, but in the end we revert back to what we were doing previously, because that’s what’s expected and it doesn’t disrupt the pattern of received wisdom.

By 1918, four years later, the protagonists eventually got round a table and arrived at a settlement. The cost would have been much less four years earlier, whatever they may have agreed at that stage.

The simple lesson learnt at such cost to everyone is: if you need to change something, do it sooner rather than later; it will be so much better for all concerned.