On the Job by Anita Bruzzese How to Get Your Team on the Same Page

On the Job by Anita Bruzzese How to Get Your Team on the Same Page When you have acritical deadline approachingon a big project, as a manager you are hyper-focused on doing everything you can to ensure your team meets it. Then it happens. Your worst nightmare. You arrive for work one day expecting to get a status update that shows progress being made on systems and key details, but you instead discover: Several team members involved in asquabble over who is supposed to being doing what. At least a quarter of the team doing duplicate work. Half of the team focused on long-term work that isnt critical,putting the key project on the back burner. After reaching for your jumbo-sized bottle of Maalox you keep in your desk drawer, its time to assess why your team can never seem tofocus on what matters. Why do they always seem to be confused about what theyre supposed to be doing and why? Havent you written them a million emails?Sat in meetings for hoursoutlining whats to be done and when? Well, yes, you probably have. But that may be part of the problem. It could be that your teamisntfocused on what mattersbecause youre not presenting a compelling enough message and leaving them on auto-pilot for too long. If you want to get your team better focused (and quit the Maalox habit), heres what you need to do: Change the way you deliver a message.Those Zen presentations where you present a metaphorical image with a few words? The photographs, bullet-point presentations and other messages you convey to your team via PowerPoint? Not as effective as good old whiteboard visuals, findsresearchby Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Zakary Tormala. In an experiment, he found that participants were more engaged by a whiteboard presentation and retained more of the information later than other methods. An added bonus: the participants found the person giving thewhiteboard presentationto be more credible than if the same person gave a PowerPoint or Zen presentation. Craft a better narrative.While you may put a lot of thought into a big presentation to bosses or customers, you may just wing it when it comes topassing informationto your team. After all, theyre paid to listen to you, so what more do they want? According to Zach Friend, a former spokesman for the Obama campaign and a communications expert, they need to feel anemotionalconnection to your message. In other words, while youre presenting facts about a project (when its due, key components, etc.) you also need to frame it so that it strikes a chord with your team. For example, you may explain that your customer is a David versus Goliath story, and the teams efforts willenable a small businessto survive and help people keep their jobs. To craft a good narrative, Friend, author of On Message, suggests: Grabbing your teams attention with a challenge or compelling question. Giving your team an emotional experience by narrating the struggle to overcome that challenge or finding the answer to the opening question. In other words, allow each listener to put himself or herself at the center of the narrative. Galvanize your listeners response with a resolution that calls them to action. Touch base often. Managers must remember that no matter how much they may wish it to be so, teams dont operate on automatic pilot. Without frequent communications, they can quickly go off course, finds research by Alex Sandy Pentland, the director of MITs Human Dynamics Laboratory. Pentlandexplainsthat his research shows that in a typical team, about 12 communication exchanges per working hour may be about optimum, but more or less than that can cause the team performance to decline. In addition, everyone needs to be given a chance to talk, as dominant motor-mouth team members can l (read the rest here)