Tag Archives: teams

Turning Around Your Team

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In Team Turnaround, Dan Leidl and Joe Frontiera introduce their concepts in part by telling the story of the turnaround of The Philadelphia Eagles by the then new owner Jeffrey Lurie, who purchased the team back in 1994.

Although he knew their record, he bought the team sight-unseen for $185 million. Once he began to tour the facilities and talk to the people, he realized just how much work needed to be done. Although the facilities were in rough shape, the dynamics of the team and staff were even worse. He found that the Eagles were fighting an illness that had permeated the whole organization, and the dysfunctional interactions were symptoms of an unhealthy culture.

The principles he used to turn around the team, and that have been used by many teams, companies and organizations are captured by Leidl and Frontiera under their six stage model of team turnaround.

Stage 1 – Leading past losing

Stage 2 – Committing to growth

Stage 3 – Changing behaviors

Stage 4 – Embracing adversity

Stage 5 – Achieving success

Stage 6 – Nurturing a culture of excellence

If you’d like to hear what Lurie did to turn around the Eagles, plus success stories from many other teams and companies, we invite you to join us on July 24th for our Free Soundview Live webinar Transforming Underperforming Teams. You can also ask your questions of Dan and Joe during the webinar.

Meetings: The Bane of Our Existence…Or Not

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Meetings – we can’t live with them and we can’t live without them. They are a necessary evil of business life. If this is the way you feel about meetings, then read on.

There was a great article in the Wall St Journal on June 16th titled Meet the Meeting Killers. In the article we are introduced to five meeting killers; the Jokester, the Dominator, the Naysayer, the Rambler and the Quiet Plotter. Each of these types of people has their own way of making meetings difficult, if not impossible. Thankfully, the writer rates these meeting killers as to their level of nuisance, and provides ways to circumvent their negative effects.

For those of us who run meetings there are techniques to making a meeting run more smoothly such as having a “no-device” policy or having periodic “tech breaks” for people to catch up on communications. Stand up meeting can quicken the pace and keep people on task, and some issues can be dealt with in advance if a leader knows the people and their concerns well.

But there are also other types of people who can make meetings difficult, whose intentions are not to sabotage, but who simply have a different perspective on business issues. Les Mckeown introduces three such types in his book The Synergist.

The Visionary – the bold dreamer, this person has big ideas but little interest in execution.

The Processor – the pragmatic realist, they want to put every detail through a system.

The Operator – the systems designer, this person’s main focus is to get the meeting over with so they can get back to the “real work”.

Mckeown offer a solution in the form of a fourth type of person – the Synergist. Their job is to take the strengths of the other three types of people and knit them into a dynamic, well-rounded team. Because businesses need all three of these types to be successful, the challenge is how to get them to play well together. The synergist has the skills to make this happen and the good news is that anyone can learn how to be a synergist, recognizing the vital signs of ineffective teamwork and making the right interventions at those pivotal moments.

Les McKeown will be joining us on May 31st to explain in-depth the skills and techniques of the Synergist, and how they can harness the skills of the personalities in the room to become an effective and productive team. Lead Your Team to Predictable Success is a Free webinar open to everyone. Join us and learn how to transform your meetings.

Three Key Tips for Soundview Live

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Tomorrow’s Soundview Live event with Howard Guttman, “Building Great Business Teams,” is generating a lot of interest. I’ve received a few messages with questions about tomorrow’s event. I thought the best idea would be to provide a few tips for anyone attending the Webinar.

1. Don’t forget, tomorrow’s event starts at 2:30 p.m. Eastern. This is a change from our usual start time. Try to log-in to the event early and don’t forget to test your system to make sure it’s compatible with the Webinar player.

2. As we state at the outset of every event, the best Soundview Live Webinars are driven by the questions that are submitted by you, the audience. As the moderator, I can offer one very important tip: submit your questions as soon as you have them. We run into situations from time to time in which the audience waits until the final 10 minutes to submit their questions. The sad fact is that we’re often unable to address some fantastic questions because they were submitted with only seconds remaining. Soundview Live is your best opportunity to have a best-selling author directly address issues that your organization is experiencing. To help us make sure that your question has the chance to be posed to the author, please submit them early in the broadcast.

3. If you miss something during the course of the event, you will be sent an e-mail within a few days of the Webinar. The e-mail will contain a link to download an archived recording of the Soundview Live you attended.

If you haven’t signed up for tomorrow’s event, there is still time! To learn more, visit Soundview at Summary.com. Don’t forget, Soundview subscribers can attend for FREE!