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Managers Top 10 Resolutions for a Better Team

1. Lose Weight

It’s time to get lean and efficient. If 2009 taught us anything it’s that we have excess. And excess is nobody’s friend – for end of year bottom line or seeing my bottom in jeans.

Get real about the projects and initiatives you serve. Do a circle check of your team and business and invite those people and things that aren’t adding value to find a new place to do so. Even in tough economic times we aren’t doing people any favors by keeping non producers in jobs that they are not energized about – it also demoralizes energized staff. While you’re at it, look around look for:

  • unneeded monthly subscriptions to trade publications or online services
  • things that drain your energy or eat up your time – do an assessment of how you spend your day and cut out inefficiencies
  • stationery expenses – are you printing things that can be shared online, do you still have costly sales tools that could be digital, etc.,
  • travel costs that may be streamlined with virtual tools or by grouping face-to-face travel events
  • communication costs you can trim by using VOIP, Skype, or IM – all can save time and money

Instead of carrying that extra weight, set the excess free. By eliminating that extra weight you’ll tighten up your bottom line and that’s just good financial hygiene.

2. Get Organized

Open your first team meeting by finding out where people are with current projects. Have them do an analysis of three things prior to the meeting: Have Lots, Nice to Have, and Gotta Have. Members will list what resources, skills, and knowledge they possess or their work unit possesses in that area – including personal, professional, and corporate.

  • Have Lots are things that your team has more than adequate amounts of resource in (i.e. skills, knowledge, resources etc.)
  • Nice to Have are things that your team could really use to improve their efficiency or effectiveness
  • Gotta Have are the things that they can’t live without

Once you have your lists, see if you can identify resources that people can share. Instead of just organizing effort organize effectiveness. It’s a more sustainable use of time and resources.

3. Spend Less/Save More

Stop communicating in excess this year. Instead of using email or long meetings to communicate and collaborate on ideas with your team, find and use a virtual tool. There plenty out there from Agile to Survey Monkey to Facebook to SharePoint — depending on what you want to collaborate on.

Walk your team into the 21st century and take advantage of the great cloud of communication possibilities. This will help you spend less time in delivering the messages, keep everyone in the conversation, and move team initiatives forward in real time There is nothing more frustrating for team members then being “out of the loop” or feeling that there are a “chosen few” who are. By using collaborative software, everyone gets to have the opportunity to weigh in on things that matter to the team equally.

Looking for some metrics to share with your controller to access some of these tools? Consider this: Harvard Business Review posted that Tech Giant CSC reduced errors by 75% using collaborative software to build code. How much do errors cost in lost wages, customer service satisfaction, or even downtime.

4. Stay Fit and Healthy

Sick time is down time. Down time costs money. Nobody likes to hemorrhage money. Make it a “team” event to get together and get healthy. Some easy things you can do to improve wellness include:

  • At team meetings adjust your meal plan. Stop serving sweets and soda – instead offer up healthy choices like fruit and juices.
  • Challenge the team to walk around the world, pick up some pedometers and track their steps on a map (if you want to get really fancy Nike + IPod have an app and tool for that).
  • Treat your staff to an onsite massage visit and have the therapist release the stress from the neck and shoulders of your team members.
  • Buy bulk gym memberships for team members and include some fitness trainer incentives.
  • Take your meeting to the streets. Have “walking” meetings with your team members, bring your smart phones collect the data there and email it back to your workstation, and have a meeting while you walk the streets.
  • Buy some full spectrum lighting and install them at your team members’ desks.

5. Learn Something New

Start a book club with your team. Books are an inexpensive way to build knowledge resources within your team. Have members download a title of mutual interest like David Chilton’s The Wealthy Barber Returns, then read and discuss the concept of personal finance.

Share in multigenerational work team successes, learning, and more about the topic of the book, in this case financial success. How can you learn from each other? How does that learning apply to better team functioning?

Don’t overlook this simple, inexpensive, and powerful tool to help teams come together and learn to communicate in a collaborative and developmental way. (The fun thing is that those skills then spill over into your meetings and projects!)

6. Stop Smoking

Connect better with your teams and stop smoking. It’s OK to get heated up and passionate about things during a meeting, but it’s not OK to continue that smoking after the meeting. Agree with your team to disagree. But also agree to continue to grow after the disagreement. Leaders especially CANNOT smoke and fume about what happened in a meeting with other team members after a meeting.

Some ways to make sure that people (including you!) don’t smoke are:

  • setting up a group behavioral contract like the Full Value Contract
  • doing a learning session on personality styles and how to communicate with those with differing styles
  • starting a laughing club at work

It’s OK to disagree and discuss passionately, but it’s not OK to carry that into dislike or distain within the group as a result of team members feeling devalued… that’s a lot of “D” words : )

7. Help Others

Everyone hates performance reviews. Enter … Rypple.com, the most amazing online way of doing everything from 360 Feedbacks to Goal Setting. The time you spend with your team members helping them to achieve better results is time well invested.

Setting up a program like Rypple.com (from which by the way we receive no financial remuneration) helps managers and leaders connect with people in real time. That means employees can grow in the now, which is pretty progressive. And did you know that 45% of new employees will take a lower wage job at a company that embraces the use of social tools like IM, LinkedIn and others? And these new employees, will work for less money if their employers offer these tools… Can you say win/win?

8. Give More

Work casts a bigger shadow over people today than ever before, and leaders and managers are under great scrutiny from both sides of the management hourglass.

The solution is to get your hands dirty… really dirty. Be a manager and leader who actively helps (not meddles) to achieve team outcomes. Your direct reports will see a manager who works diligently towards real business goals and they will see a leader willing to collaborative and be a part of the solution. Cast a shadow that is large as you become “uberactive” with your team in working toward business success.

9. Fall in Love

Getting energized about work is usually results from a couple things. Primarily if a work culture is fun to be in, it’s a place you look forward to going because the people (and leadership) are authentic, caring and fun. And teams that fall in love with what they are doing get excited by the opportunities that a day may bring.

That means reframing the top down objectives in your organization. Don’t just work with only the large goal in mind. Set immediate and short term goals that fire up your team. Celebrate achieving those goals and adjust as the culture and needs change… We live in a very fluid business world where things change fast. Create a team that is able to change along with it.

10. Spend More Time with Family

Great teams are built by people who understand that there every person has two very unique and special families – our work family and our home family.

Leading teams in today’s world (especially multigenerational ones) requires that leaders/managers see and appreciate the stressors and benefits of family – new employees with “young families” and more seasoned employees with “aging parents”. Encourage and reward your team members with things that improve families.

For example, give flowers to a partner who has shouldered the family load while a team member gave 110% to a project, give a sales bonus of “sending a kid to camp” (grandkid, niece/nephew, your own), or hold a family bbq and games day. Connecting like a family creates long term retention and increases engagement.