A company has a system: if you work overtime at night, the company can reimburse the taxi fare, and you can also take a 1:1 day off the next day. At this time, some employees will take advantage of this system and stay for two hours after get off work. After paying the taxi fare, they can arrive at the company two hours later the next morning. The problem is that they are a service-oriented party B, and the client goes to work at 9 o’clock. When you look for them, you can never find anyone. You may say that there is a problem with the system design of their company. Indeed, they need to make up for the loopholes in the system. For example, control the amount of overtime approved by managers, and only take a day off after working overtime for more than 4 hours. But even so, the system can never be 100% perfect. At this time, no matter how much effort is put into the system, it will not solve the problem. At the same time, these problems have not risen to the level of values. If you use values to pressure people at every turn, it seems a bit of an exaggeration. So at this time, cultural construction is particularly important.
Team combat effectiveness formula: Team combat effectiveness = mutual trust x goal consistency x fighting spirit
The combat effectiveness of a team mainly comes from three aspects: because it is teamwork, we must trust each other; and everyone must work together, so the goal direction must be consistent; finally, the team must have fighting spirit.
So, how can we increase the trust, sense of purpose and fighting spirit of the team? Use three ways of team building to build culture. They are: team building of friends, team building of teammates and team building of comrades. Different team building solves problems of different dimensions.
1. Team building of friends
If the average score of the first three questions is less than 3 points, then your team is still in a state of official business, and there is no emotional connection between team members. Everyone is not familiar with each other, just like there is less lubricant between gears, and they often quarrel over trivial matters. The subordinates are about to leave, and the manager is often the last to know. If everyone wants to work together, they must first be able to play together. At this time, “team building of friends” should be used to solve such problems. Whether it is eating or traveling, it is not important. What is important is whether the activities can enhance mutual understanding and put the scattered employees on the right track. The best way is to start with an activity that most members are interested in.
Case 10-14
This is the first time I have managed a technical team mainly composed of programmers. They are generally ten years younger than me. I am not familiar with them and feel that I have nothing in common with them. By chance, I found that talking about football with them is particularly resonant. So, I rented a venue for everyone, bought team uniforms, organized football team activities, and played a game every Friday from 6 to 8 o’clock. I persisted in this for three years. One day I roughly calculated that the turnover rate of team members was nearly half lower than the average level. More importantly, many people have become friends with me who can talk about everything. When everyone encounters confusion in the workplace, they are willing to discuss it.
In addition to this daily relationship improvement, there is also a tool called “life map”. It can quickly present and understand each other’s past, so that the team relationship can be quickly heated up. You can take the members to a quiet place, sit in a circle, and then tell everyone at the outset: Today we are going to play a game of sharing “life maps” to help each other understand each other better. Ask each colleague to draw a horizontal axis along the fold line on a horizontal A4 paper, from left to right representing the time from the past to the present, and then write down the five most important things you have experienced in chronological order. Things that bring you happiness and happiness are above the horizontal axis; things that make you regretful and sad are placed below the horizontal axis. The farther away from the horizontal axis, the stronger the emotion.
Each person’s sharing time is about 15 minutes, so if it is a small team of ten people, it will take about three hours. Prepare more snacks so that everyone can eat and chat to relax. Through such a long talk, misunderstandings and hostility between team members can be resolved very well. At the same time, it can make subordinates realize that their superiors are also flesh and blood people first, and then their leaders. In the future work, the relationship between everyone will be completely different from the state of official business at work.
There is a boss whom I respect very much. She took us to play this game. We always thought she was too serious before. Why is she so strict? Why is she always nitpicking about our work? The atmosphere of the team was quite tense for a while. But in the sharing, she told us for the first time about a life-and-death separation she had experienced. The reason why she is so serious now is that she is very lucky to have survived the disaster. Therefore, she vowed to cherish all the remaining time and not to be careless about things and fool around. In this way, the whole team understood her attitude towards work and resolved the misunderstandings between each other.
2. Team building of teammates
If the average score of the three questions in the middle of the test just now is less than 3 points, “team building of teammates” is needed. The biggest feature of “teammates” is that the team must have a clear mission and vision. The reason for the above situation is that team members do not perceive the meaning of their work. Everyone just repeats the work at hand and does not regard the profession as a career. As a manager, it is to extract the meaning of your work and constantly preach and reach it.
Mission and vision sound very big. Organize a team discussion to align everyone’s understanding of these two things. “Mission” is altruistic. You need to find the service objects of the team and extract what value you have created for them? “Vision” is selfish. What kind of team will your team become after continuously solving these problems? For example, the technology team I mentioned earlier provides technical support for the data security of enterprises. This is a very meaningful thing, but managers have never communicated with the team. Everyone feels that there is endless overtime and endless work to do every day.
So, the management consultant helped them organize a workshop, bringing everyone together to explore the mission, vision and goals. First of all, the mission. The manager showed the team pictures of the completion of data centers of many enterprises, and asked several customers to record videos to express their gratitude to the employees. A customer said that his company encountered a serious data security incident. At that time, he felt that he was really going to go bankrupt. At the time of life and death, it was your company’s products that saved us. Only then did the employees realize that we had helped the company solve such a complex data security problem, and we had really created value for the society. Suddenly, they felt that their work was much more meaningful. Then they discussed together, what would it take for the team to be successful? For the first time, everyone imagined the future together. The manager proposed that we are currently only the third in the country, and we hope to become the first company in this field in three years. This vision was also the first time for the team members to understand that their company was so powerful and that they had the opportunity to become members of the first company in the industry. This is definitely a great plus for their careers. Although the workshop took everyone a whole day, the mental state of the team members improved significantly after they went back.
3. Team building of comrades
For the last three questions of the “self-assessment list”, if the team’s average score is less than 3 points, it means that many employees have work fatigue and feel that they are repeating the same work day after day. At this time, “team building of comrades” is necessary.
To transform the team from teammates to comrades who share weal and woe, it is inseparable from fighting big battles, because it takes one victory after another to give the team a sense of freshness and accomplishment. Team managers must learn to define victory and create a state of winning the team. If we only regard “becoming the first” as a sign of victory, it is very difficult in reality. Even a championship team like the Chinese women’s volleyball team cannot win the championship every time. Coach Lang Ping’s interpretation of the spirit of the women’s volleyball team is very accurate: “The spirit of the women’s volleyball team is not just to win the championship, but sometimes we know that we will not win, and we still try our best.” In the case of a bad environment, many teams will face the challenges of weak growth and operating losses; on the road to achieving missions and visions, stumbling is common. Many members fell behind at this time, which is a pity. For example, the competitor’s negative growth was 10 points, and our negative growth was 5 points; last year our team lost 1 million yuan, and this year it lost 100,000 yuan, all of which are considered victories. However, this requires managers to define victory, so that everyone can look at the problem from different angles and raise morale.
Case 10-15
We once withdrew an old product line. From the company’s perspective, this line is not profitable and is not a strategic direction, so it is inevitable to withdraw it. But nearly half of our team’s business comes from this line, and the performance is cut in half at once. My superior immediately told everyone how he would evaluate the team’s success this year: from all the data, the old product base was deducted so that everyone could go into battle lightly. In the assessment, the proportion of the key performance indicator (KPI) of the “forage” result decreased, such as the sales weight; the proportion of the process KPI of “fat gaining power” increased, such as the number of covered customers, conversion rate, etc., encouraging us to do a good job in basic skills. Moreover, whenever we made a breakthrough, the superior would write an enthusiastic email and copy it to other brother departments. In addition to praising our efforts, he would also mention the transformation difficulties our team is facing now, what kind of help is needed, and so on. Although we are always at the bottom of the company-level performance rankings, the morale of the team is higher than before. Because everyone has clear goals and a special sense of accomplishment. This is the importance of redefining victory.
In summary, in addition to the system, we must do a good job in cultural construction. According to the situation of the team, we must do a good job in “team building of friends”, “team building of teammates” and “team building of comrades-in-arms” so that the team has real cohesion and combat effectiveness.