In the recent Winter Olympics, the USA ice hockey team played in the Championship game against Canada. The Canadian team was composed of the “Who’s Who” of Canadian ice hockey stars. The USA team included no superstars, and the team was selected with certain criteria in mind: camaraderie first, then size, speed, and toughness. Some of USA professional hockey’s “notables” were absent from the team, because the coach didn’t want “divas”, he was truly building a balanced team. Their phenomenal team performance got them to the finals and almost won them the Gold Medal.
Are you building or managing an executive team, a project team, a customer team, or any other of the many teams required to compete in business? How do you unleash the potential of your team?
The Profiles Performance Indicator™ — Individual, Manager, and Team Reporting System
You have assembled an expert team of workers who fit their jobs well and are aligned with organizational goals. They are high performers, and you could not be more pleased with each of them individually.
Yet something important is off. One of your team members almost never appears satisfied with answers to his questions, feedback from his team leader — with anything, really. He is impatient and often grumbling, and his dissatisfaction is rubbing off on others. Yet he is extremely skilled at his job.
His manager, consistently ensures her team is performing superbly by meeting deadlines and communicating well with internal and external clients. But there is friction between these two key players, and you have big plans for the team: a project that they will spend most of the year developing before presenting to external clients. You have a nagging feeling about their chronic inability to get along because you have seen small irritations between two people fester and grow until culminating in a huge blowup that threatens the entire team.
So right now, before you involve this team in the new project, step back and ASSESS… Literally… Take a few minutes to examine the source of the friction and figure out how to dissolve it before it dissolves this high-performing team. Profiles Performance Indicator (PPI) and its Individual, Manager, and Team Analysis Reports are the prescribed methods of finding the underlying cause of conflict on your team and improving communication. Its reports may help you form a new team, or figure out how to enhance your manager’s leadership skills so that this, and other potential, friction disappears.
Organizations appreciate PPI’s aid in motivating and coaching employees and resolving performance issues. It measures a worker’s motivational intensity and actions related to:
- Productivity
- Quality of work
- Initiative
- Teamwork
- Problem solving
- Adapting to change
- Response to conflict, stress and frustration,
and helps a Manager work with each of the Individuals on their team.
The Team Analysis Report will help leaders:
- Form new teams
- Reduce team conflict
- Improve team communication
- Improve their ability to anticipate problems
- Enhance team leadership skills
PPI takes about 15 minutes to complete, and the manager will know the results immediately. So will you — before handing that new project to the team. Let me help you get these two players working together again so you can unleash the potential of this team, and unleash the potential of all of your business teams.
(the article above is excerpted from the Profiles Advantage Newsletter dated April, 2010)