How To Overcome Your Team's Inertia

Managing employees and teams in today's business environment is one of the toughest challenges a company has to face. With fewer resources and less time, and an atmosphere of job insecurity and pervasive change, the workplace often becomes a battlefield.

Maybe your budget has been cut by a third. Maybe you've been told to become 15 percent more productive, or else. Or maybe your company is facing competition from several foreign competitors in the industry. These scenarios, and others like them, are the norm these days in business and will only continue to grow.

The companies that succeed and prosper are the ones who constantly measure what is important, and what is the most important are satisfied customers. You must be able to anticipate customer's constantly changing needs and respond to them quickly. Measuring your service internally and externally is the best way to keep your company constantly operating at peak performance.

An example of internal measurement would be measuring the performance of new hires and tracking the performance of those who have remained with your company for one year or longer. This information would reveal if you've matched the best job applicant's skills with the job requirements.

External measuring would involve asking your customers some key questions, such as: How are we doing? What are we doing right? Are we easy to buy from? How can we change the way we provide products and services to make life easier for you? What added support do you need from us?

In the Industrial Age you could graduate from school and get a job for life. Those days are gone. In the Information Age employees have more of a shared relationship with their companies. They invest in the company, and the company invests in them, but without job security people view their jobs with more worry and fear of failure.

Many employees also feel today that they've hit their performance limit, and mounting pressures make them look for safe comfort zones where they can hide out and work with blinders on. The result is often deteriorating commitment and effort.

Do your employees or team members leave work right at 5 p.m. and often decline requests to work overtime? Do they often act overwhelmed by small challenges and often complain about assignments? Are they often unwilling to help each other with projects or problems? Do they give lots of reasons for not taking on new assignments or wanting to learn new skills?

If the answer is yes to one or more of these questions then, your employees or team members lack what it takes for your company to compete in today's market. You need to inspire them and create a sense of urgency.

I often use a technique with my corporate clients where I'll have a group interact directly with another group that has just experienced staff or budget cuts caused by the same lackluster performance that's taken root in the current group. Then, I have them hold brainstorming sessions to develop ways to avoid a similar fate.

When you benchmark your team's performance to other teams inside or outside the company it creates a sense of urgency. You need to understand that your team is a group of professionals. So, stop protecting them from the truth about their performance problems. They may be hesitant to change the way they do things because they don't have the facts.

Why not let your employees or team meet directly with customers to find out what must be improved and why? Or lay performance problems right on the team's doorstep for everyone to see. Safety nets are like training wheels. Once you can keep going without them, self-confidence rises, and you tend to give your best.

What would happen if you temporarily removed your team's safety nets? For example, could your company maintain its current workload despite vacation periods? Could your team function with fewer resources? Safety nets inhibit your employees from giving top performance. Take them away, and everyone will be pleasantly surprised by the results.

To succeed and prosper in the Information Age, you and your team need strategies to recharge the batteries, especially when your employees are feeling lost or beaten down, and the best time to put these strategies to work is right now.

Copyright©2007 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and success coaching programs. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in career coach training. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many businesses around the world, on the subjects of leadership, achievement, goals, strategic business planning, and marketing. Joe is the author of three books, Starting Your Own Business, Finding Your Purpose In Life, and The Guerrilla Marketing Workbook.