Want to motivate your team? Build high performance? Don't skip one important detail.

Every time I read the latest statistics from Gallup and McKinsey or whomever on employee engagement my eyes glaze over. I used to write the information down for reference when doing talks or teaching. I don’t anymore because it’s the same old, same old. Lots of people in most organizations are not engaged. The further down the organization, the worse it gets. I always get an earful when working with front line employees (yes, I know, there is always another side to their stories). The beat goes on.

But, here and there, employees are inspired to do their best. Take the paramedics that attended to my husband this month when he had a dizzy spell, fell off a stool. In the moment, they did what they had to do and eventually took my husband to hospital emergency for further checking. In the end, it was a case of low blood pressure from his meds.

What I found most unusual was the extent to which the senior paramedic checked in with me between other ambulance trips on my husband’s status. It was then that we talked about his job. This was a motivated guy who had recently finished a year of advanced training. I still shake my head at his degree of interaction with our family. I’m not used to this caring customer service in general!

Annual surveys of the best organizations to work for show that there are many great companies young and old. Southwest Airlines is a perennial winner. Newer tech companies due to their start-up mentality often get the nod. Small is helpful as a rule because of the family-like atmosphere. The more complicated and big the tougher it is for leaders to keep the culture engaging and exciting.

If you are in a big, complex organization and want to motivate your team what can you do? Certainly “leading by values” is a good way. Herb Kelleher, Southwest’s founder, makes a point of mentioning values such as “leaning toward the customer” (his insistence) as a must. Founders do set the tone. But when the organization is older with thousands of employees and the newness of a company’s reason for existence has long receded in memory, how do you keep the founder’s spirit going?

One factor always pops up by various authors on the subject – purpose (why am I here to do what?). That’s the first one mentioned by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in their new book “The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations”.  People are motivated by what is rewarding not what is rewarded. Knowing why they come to work every day – purpose – speaks to the rewarding part.

The best place to re-engage is at the team level. That’s where the real work gets done. The paramedics know they want to save lives whenever possible. Every leader/manager has more control over a team than the whole organization. Motivate a team and the infectiousness begins to rub off elsewhere as peers talk. Southwest’s fundamental success is due to teamwork.

Yes, there is much more to great teamwork than being pumped up by its purpose. Every day, every hour relating matters as the journey unfolds. Infrastructure to support team success matters. However, without a clear team purpose, the tasks at hand have no context for action.  

Don’t skip purpose – having the team openly determine the why of being together.

Subtle dynamics of teams make or break their greatness

As in a gentle Marine boot camp, I was madly climbing my way up to the top and over a “rope” mountain when the person behind me asked for help. My “boss”, who was much bigger than me, was having trouble. Naturally I reached out and provided a helping hand despite my angst toward him. Did this make any difference to our relationship in the long run? Not one iota.

We were attending one of those company retreats focused on making us a better team by putting us through a bunch of trust exercises (falling out of a tree to be caught/saved by my colleagues below, for example). Sound familiar? If only building a stronger team were so simple. But, at the least it was fun.

Back in those days, we had a bird’s eye view of teaming. Now, we have a better view from the ground.  With the aid of technology and because of technology and more research, we are able to sharpen our understanding of the inner workings of teams – for better or worse. The subtle human drivers of team basics such as having a clear goal, mutual accountability for the work product, diverse thinking and domain skills, etc., are now becoming clearer. These drivers are like the glue that binds the team basics.

Three such drivers caught my attention recently:

When culture and conflict don’t mix and a subtler approach is better

As teams become less mono- and more multi-cultural, conflict becomes a more sensitive issue. Erin Meyer’s research at INSEAD in France revealed subtle undertones in teams with a mix of cultures. While people from a French background typically view openly arguing as a means to uncovering hidden contradictions and to stimulating thinking, people from Asian countries consider such confrontation to be rude. This can also apply to certain personality types – introverts as less likely to embrace “conflict” than extroverts.

What can a team do to go with the flow of different ways of “doing” conflict”?

-If you are the team leader, consult with “quiet” members before a meeting.

-Enable people to prepare their thinking in advance of a meeting (for example a series of three questions on the matter at hand).

-Refrain from saying “I disagree” and replace with “could you tell me more about that?”


When the “how” of team communication matters more than “substance”

Alex “Sandy” Pentland of MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab captures how people communicate in real time using electronic sensors in the form of sociometric badges. He has found that when building a great team smart people matter less than we have thought and non-verbals count much more. These include tone of voice, gesturing, how one faces others in a group and how much people talk and listen. 

What do members of great teams do?

-Talk with each other many times during the day – a dozen or so exchanges per working hour. Call it ongoing consultation.

-Talk and listen to each other in equal measure, equally. Teams with dominant members, teams within teams, and those that either talk or listen but don’t do both are far less productive.

-Engage in frequent informal communication. Such “water cooler” conversations foster camaraderie and the exchange of valuable ideas. The best teams spend about half their time outside of formal meetings communicating.

-Go outside the team environment to explore for ideas and information. Like bees seeking pollen, outside sources do aid team results.


When work-life balance strategies “made by the team”pay off

In her book Sleeping with Your Smart Phone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work, Leslie Perlow describes how a team at the Boston Consulting Company (BCG) confronted the dangers of burnout. The team set a simple, modest goal: each team member would get a planned night off each week (PTO or “predictable time off”).

That single intention fostered conversations that may never have happened and those led to greater team altruism and empathy, higher job satisfaction and team member retention and better client satisfaction ratings. Looking out for one another engendered trust, a vital electrical current in any team.

This “reimagining” of work yielded a continuous flow of benefits for the team. Better conversations and new connections grew out of a goal to include personal needs in getting the job done.


If my boss and I had known these simple yet powerful ways to build great teams, would we have added more value at the retreat and thereafter back at the office? Probably. In looking back, at the least, I can be more forgiving of myself and my boss for not connecting. We did not know what we did not know.