Great Team

I like one quote that says“ Your competitor can copy every advantage you’ve got – except one, the business of building team leaders”(Antoine de Saint-Exupery).

Many years ago, my mentor told me that the word “T.E.A.M” stands for “Together Everyone Achieve More”. She says that if everyone in an organization can work together to achieve the common goals, the synergy effects will be 1+1 > 3. I truly believe it.

Last 2 years another mentor told me that T.E.A.M means “Trust, Encourage, Appreciate, Motivate”. Wow! This is very cool! It touches the “feeling” part of a team. When every single member can trust each other and praise their colleagues when things went great (I support you!), giving encouragement when things went wrong (I know you can be better), appreciate the goodness of others (Thank you because ….) and motivate each other towards a desired destiny(Today we are …..next year our aim is to achieve …..) , then you are nurturing a great team!

Trust – When members have trust in the team, they feel the sense of belongings. They will find ways to work through disagreements, take greater challenges, stay in the team longer and contribute better ideas. I like to say that this is the fundamental of a team. My mentor advised me that we should trust a person first rather than waiting him to prove he can be trusted. Do you agree with me?

Encourage – every members in a team or organization must learn to encourage each other during the hard times or good times. I discover that instead of doing this, many people tends to through complains, criticize others, blaming other mistakes and gossiping. If we promote encouragement with positive words in an organization, I am sure the working atmosphere will be great. One of my friends likes to end his words with “gambate!” (Japanese word which means “add oil”), cool right?

Appreciate your team members – If you take the effort to appreciate your members when they did the right thing at work, you will “touch” their hearts. To retain our talents in organization, we need to fulfill their monetary needs as well as non-monetary needs (appreciate them through words on their achievements). Recently, after completed my seminars, one participant came to me and ask if he could give me his feedback. Of course, I love to hear about it. He told me for the first 2 hours, he had compared me with another overseas speaker and felt bored with my training. However, after getting into the mode, he told me he enjoyed my training. He appreciate my passion in training and complimented “You are charming on stage!”(你有舞台的魅力!). He makes me float!

Motivate – when you want to motivate someone, please state his current state and lead him to a higher state. For example, if you want employee A to improve his work, you must state clearly that you want him progress from “average” to “good” after discussing the 3-5 key strategies that both mutually agreed.

Please rate yourself from 1 -10 for the 4 aspects mentioned above. How did you score in each item? What can you do to improve each?

Watch out for my next article, the new definition of T.E.A.M in 21st century.

Talent Retention

When I ask my clients about their view about next year economy situation, I got different opinion about it.

Some said that their business slowed down and sales turnover reduced at least 15-20%. So, they foresee the situation will be worse in the coming 6 months. So, every single cents must be recorded clearly in the spreadsheet.

On the other hand, I had clients that told me Malaysia is not very badly hit compared to 1997 financial crisis. However, the confidence level had dropped. Most people "believe" it will be worse so they started to be more careful in spending their money. Fortunately, they still think that developing their people at this critical moments is that right thing to do, because once the economy begin to thrive, their people are ready to grasp the market. Grreeeat!!!

Through public media we read about many giant companies started to practice retrenchment, cost cutting exercise, recruitment freezing etc. I think the worst is starting to get "panic" by throwing hasty comments to non-performers, pushing them extremely hard for sales achievements, letting go of good staffs even though knowing that this is not the right move. Sad!!!

It has been long known that one of the most respectable company, General Electric decided to manage her talents during critical moments using the quadrant showed above. It is important to keep the right people at this moment rather than merely going for headcount reduction. As for me, I will definitely encourage companies to use the 4R methods in decision making.

By the way, which category you falls if you are an employee now? If you are under "remove" or "re-train", my advice is to talk to your employer on ways to improve yourself so that you can keep your job. Or if you are an employer, what is the distribution looks like in your company? Do you have all the "A" star employees?

New Year Aspiration

Recently I heard a few friends talking about their 2009 aspiration. I wonder if the year 2008 plans had been accomplished. For me, I remember every year when I did my new year aspirations, I was very excited at that moment, then forget about the goals for the rest of the months....too common for many people yeah?

Now I do not set new year aspiration goals anymore. Last year when I decided to start my own business, I did my 5 years goals. I think it gave me stronger motivation and drive to pursue it when I can see my route clearer to the future. Ultimately, I am passionate about what I am doing now, helping individual and teams to challenge for excellence, reengineering organization on human capital for creating abundant results.

I created this table so that some of you might want to ask yourself which category you are currently in. Maybe you would like to share with me what do you think about your goals. I love to listen to your exciting goals because sometimes it gives me more strengths to pursue mine. So, gambate and let's dream!