Tag: Teams

When sick where do you go?

Hunter Dean

The other day for the first time in my life I could not breath while I was going to sleep, I had been to the swimming pool that day and the chlorine was incredibly strong in the children’s pool where I’d been. My symptoms were almost exactly like that of an Asthmatic shortness of breath and no matter how hard I tried no air was getting in?

At the time I though wow – that’s interesting, then what am I going to do, not wanting to wake my partner I got up and Google’d the symptoms. Amazingly I found at least 5 websites with some really serious detailed and well researched answers.

One of these explained a breathing technique which it said worked wonders, having nothing to loose I tried it and within minutes was back to sleep. A couple of days later I was speaking with a client about this and he said wow so did you go straight to the hospital and or a doctor?

I said no actually, I turned on the Web and did some research found some answers and alls well!

You might be asking so what, how does this relate to me and my team? Well have a think about it, you think the people in your team are either good or bad, average or superb.

But maybe they are just missing some of the crucial links they need in order to perform at their roles. Often we go running to the doctor or the hospital when sometimes the best possible thing to do might actually be to sit down with some of the smartest people in our own business or teams and ask them questions or log into the web and start google’ing for answers. How do you identify and manage talent in your organisation?

By then linking up the answers your team finds to expert knowledge based information systems often you can then deal with the same problems 100’s of times faster.

Ironically often we rush off to places for solutions when they lie right at our fingertips, what’s your organisational change process and who do you have internally to role it out.

Intelligence Transfer & Performers

Hunter Dean

Over the past 12 months it’s been more important than ever to be able to take the very best of the best and be able to box this and replicate it in organisations. Reading up yesterday in the Investor Daily about how many Financial Services Employees had been made redundant from some of the biggest banks in country.

It reminded me of a client that had a person who was right at the bottom with regard to his results. He took the time to speak with some of the very best in the business and had a look at in detail what it was that the very best people had been doing with their clients to get specific business results.

Interestingly enough he also had three things over and above this which I believe should be present in order for any change to occur

  1. He was motivated and wanted to get different results
  2. If he did not get them his job may have been on the line
  3. He did not hurry the process but worked methodically to change just a few small things

Often managers in organisations “Tell” their teams what’s expected but don’t give the “How” around how to make the change. Funnily enough this is often because they don’t believe its their job to “Know” much about the details.

I would argue that you need to be able as a leader and manager to know, what it is exactly that are the things that your best people are doing to make the difference. Often this is not known and we just dump the people who “Don’t work”. The person above went from being right at the bottom to being consistently in the top three performers.