Could your team have a better track record? Chamber’s book club looks at how

This blog will appear in The Mercury's business section (www.pottsmerc.com) on Nov. 30 as an article. If you're reading it before then, you saw it first!

What do you get when you combine a best-selling business book, a business psychologist and a room full of businesswomen?

The result is a lively book club discussion, as was proved at a recent meeting of the Women of the Workforce luncheon meeting at the Spring-Ford Country Club, Royersford. The Nov. 16 meeting was sponsored by the TriCounty Area Chamber of Commerce.

Ross S. DeSimone, managing director/business psychologist at Corporate Psychological Resource Center, Royersford, facilitated the discussion of “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable” by Patrick Lencioni (Jossey-Bass Books, 2002).

DeSimone, a member of the chamber’s board of directors, bravely admitted to the group of about 25 his initial reluctance to lead the book club discussion as he “can’t stand to read ... but I don’t mind reading technical stuff.”

Lencioni’s book appealed to DeSimone as a discussion topic because he’s been working with teams in a professional capacity for nearly three decades. For the sake of the discussions, teams were defined as various work groups or departments.

“Al of you are on a team or in a business to do well,” DeSimone told the group. He added that “It’s more interesting to look at what’s dysfunctional rather than what works.”

DeSimone said Lencioni’s book has some good how-tos about how to fix what’s dysfunctional in a team. He assigned each table of women (and one man) to outline one of the five key arenas of team dysfunction from Lencioni’s book, which are:

1) Absence of Trust — a lack of confidence among team members that their peers are well-intended.
2) Fear of conflict — an avoidance of passionate and productive debates.
3) Lack of commitment — little or inconsistent buy-in to decisions and visions.
4) Avoidance of accountability — a lack of willingness to call out other team mebmer for underperformance or the behaviors that adversely impact the team.
5) Inattention to results — loosely defined outcomes for self-judgment/measurement; loss of achievement-oriented employees; focus on individual goals.

Each group was assigned the task of pointing out the impact each dysfunction has on the overall team/work unit.

Heather Chandler, CEO of Gilbertsville-based Sealstrip Corp., and treasurer of the chamber's board, gamely took down the suggestions of one table assigned to define what a lack of trust does to a team.

Others sitting at the table, who included a loan officer, an inventor, a banker, a journalist (me!) and a nonprofit leader, called out: “Fear of failure ... poor listening ... guardedness ... insecurity ... lack of communication ... low performance,” among other examples of what happens when trust is lacking on a team.

DeSimone added, “Also: Undue competitiveness, disinterest in team meetings, low morale and high, sabotage, absenteeism, and unwanted turnover.” (which is when employees you don’t want to leave move on).

Another group tackled the dysfunction “lack of communication.” Amy Wolf of Wolf, Baldwin & Associates law firm in Pottstown, shared the group’s findings.

“The staff feels unappreciated, there’s low morale, people ignore policies and procedures, people want to know ‘what’s in it for me?’ ... it all can lead to system breakdown,” she said.

DeSimone added, “So, dysfunction contributes to a company’s bottom line relative to productivity. Also, there’s ambiguity about prorities and second-guessing other teams.”

Other tables at the luncheon proceeded to dissect the impacts of the other three team dysfunctions.
DeSimone said avoiding accountability is the biggest problem of the five in his experience.
Chandler agreed: “Teammates want to do a good job, but are not held accountable for reaching the next goal, Every person on a high-performing team is truly accountable. That’s important for a team to become high-functioning.”

The luncheon attendees by consensus agreed that Lencioni’s book was a fun, easy read on a topic that one might otherwise not pick up a book about. Told in the style of a fable, the book shows you what the team dysfunctions are in a way that makes them memorable.

To learn more about “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” visit josseybass.com. If you have a dysfunctioning team that needs help, contact DeSimone at 610-792-9050 or visit www.psychforbusiness.com.

The next WOW luncheon and book discussion will be held on Dec. 15, from 11:30 to 1:30 p.m. at Brookside Country Club in Pottstown. The chamber-members only event will be led by Karen Stout, president of Montgomery Community College. The book discussion will follow “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” by Geoff Colvin. To register, visit tricountyareachamber.com

Want to read Lencioni’s book? I'm giving away my brand new copy, donated by Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. Just post a comment with your mailing address or email it to me at mkaras@pottsmerc.com. One person will be picked from among the entries to "win" the book.

How 'bout running your family like you run your business?

Could your family benefit from being run like a business?

That's the premise behind author Patrick Lencioni's latest, "The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable ... About restoring Sanity to the Most Important Organization in Your Life," (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, 2008, $24.95, 208 pp.) (I favorably reviewed Lencioni's book "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" in January 2008 -- check that review out here.)

While this book is labeled in the "family & relationship/parenting" category, it certainly doesn't hurt to look at it from a business perspective.

Much as he did in "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job," Lencioni uses a simple tale to communicate what might be to some a complicated business concept -- or in this case, an idea for improving family time.

A father of four and business consultant/bestselling author who's often on the road, Lencioni said he tested out his model in his own home. After all, if your family is the most important organization in your life, why wouldn't a business executive apply the tools they use at work to improve the way his/her family functions?

"Family chaos is just a part of life, and so we accept levels of confusion and disorganization and craziness at home that we would not tolerate at work," Lencioni states in the book's introduction. Less chaos, for most families, including a few extremely busy young families I know, would be good.

Lencioni said he and his wife have found benefits to applying a few simple strategic concepts to managing his own family.

"The vast majority of families I know - including my own - wold admit that one or more of the following adjectives apply to them: reactive, scattered, frantic chaotic, stressed," he writes. "And if you were to ask them if they were living their lives with the sense of purpose and intentionality that they want, every last one of them would look at you like you were mocking them and say 'Are you kidding?'"

And so Lencioni has come up with this easy-to-understand fable about a couple who are struggling to keep on top of three kids, school and church obligations, sports and other extracurriculars, and simply finding time to hang out as a family.

The book opens with a frustrated husband, Jude making the following (rather loaded) statement to his stay-at-home wife, Theresa: "If my clients ran their companies the way we run this family, they'd be out of business!" After taking some time to get over her initial indignation, the wife proceeds to investigate that claim.

It all boils down to these three questions a family can live by to restore sanity and clarity. I'll tell you the questions, but it will be in very simplistic and out-of-context form. They're better illustrated by reading this little fable, which you could easily do in a night or two (no matter how busy you are).

1) What makes your family unique? Basically, what makes you you and differentiates you from everyone else on the block.

2) What's your family's top priority (aka rallying cry) right now? That would be your main goal over the next 2 to 6 months, and it could be something like carve out more family time or it could be something like moving to a bigger house. It's the main thing that drives you as a family at this time.

3) How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions? What are you doing to implement the first two questions. Holding weekly family meetings? Keeping a spreadsheet?

How did Theresa and Jude answer these questions and implement the answers? They're "rallying cry" was to spend more time together as a family. That meant Theresa had to said no to taking on a time-consuming post at church. Jude and Theresa decided to cut back on their kids' extracurriculars. They cut back on social activities as well as TV-watching. They made family vacations a priority. And, lastly, Jude decided to cut back in his business travel for the overall benefit of the family.

Then they met weekly for 10 minutes to keep up with it all and adjust as needed. They kept a whiteboard in the kitchen as a reminder of the "rallying cry" and what was needed to achieve it. And, lo and behold, it worked. And they were on to their next "rallying cry," which had to do with helping one of their kids with an attention deficit.

To further illustrate the concept, Lencioni goes through several other "families" and their experiences with the "three big questions." He also notes that his own family is far from picture perfect:

"Well, I have to tell you that the Lencioni family continues to experience its fair share of stress, and we don't expect that to go away anytime soon. But I am glad to report that by answering the questions laid out here, we have begun to channel that stress in a general direction and obtain a sense of progress," he writes.

A good deal of chaos remains, he admits, but "we're being more purposeful now about which chaos to tolerate and which to squash."

I really like his wife's comment at the end of the book:

"When something is part of a bigger goal that I know we're going to be talking about every week, it's harder for me to let it get pushed aside by those pesky, tactical, and artificially urgent things that distract us from what really matters. Now I can let some things go that I would have felt guilty about ignoring in the past when everything was equally important."

Working together toward a pre-determined common goal: Not a novel concept, but one that might help some stressed out family-type folks I know.