Chapter 12: Summary--The Learning Leader Makes a Difference

Reviewing What You've Learned

Congratulations! If you have read all the chapters and used some of the tools, you should have learned some things and improved some skills. If you have completed the after-chapter reviews, you have a running inventory of your knowledge and your plans to use that knowledge. If you took the steps needed to activate your plans, you have had additional opportunities to learn through experience. To what extent are you now prepared to be a more valuable leader within a team concept organization? This final chapter provides chapter-by-chapter questions that will help you to review what you've learned.

1. The Need for Team Leaders at All Levels

   • What have you learned about leadership?

   • Do you appreciate the value of providing leadership by helping others help themselves ?

   • What are you doing to raise the awareness of members of the team(s) you are associated with?

   • Can you help people take an honest look at themselves and their situations without being judgmental?

   • Are you helping your team look at both the task and relationship issues as they arise?

   • Can you encourage people to think of alternative ways of dealing with their current challenges? Can you add options for them to consider?

   • Have you gained the patience and appreciation for having people make decisions rather than telling them what to do? Have you seen the value of gaining their commitment rather than compliance?

   • Knowing that team concept organizations need leaders at all levels, who are the general managers in your organization providing leadership at the top? Who are the key resource people providing coaching assistance to teams as they need it? Who are the team captains providing leadership by being willing to influence their peers?

   • What are you doing to develop yourself to serve as one or more of these sources of leadership in your organization?

   • How much credibility do you have as a leader? What are you doing to enhance your trustworthiness , competency, and enthusiasm ?

   • Are you taking a focused approach to your development as a leader rather than trying to be all things to all people?

2. Your Natural Leadership Strengths

   • Have you identified your natural strengths?

   • What do you do well without hardly having to think about it?

   • Do you have a plan for using your talents even more effectively?

   • Can you describe your personality and personal qualities?

   • Are you a Sensible Technician, a Sociable Facilitator, a Noble Funlover, or a Novel Transformer?

   • Are you now more aware of the tendencies associated with your natural preferences?

   • Have you used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator instrument to understand the personalities of your teammates and other leaders in your organization?

   • Have you attempted to use different strategies to communicate with others based on your understanding of their personality?

3. Effective Teambuilding

   • Has your company clarified which types of teams it wants to empower ?

   • What is motivating your company to try to use teams as a business strategy and structure?

   • Are you attempting to help work teams, committees , task forces, and/or leadership teams?

   • Can you state the seven key components that separate excellent teams from the mediocre ones?

   • Are you willing to try to be the X-factor in your team's efforts to achieve excellence?

   • Are you adjusting your approach based on the developmental stage of your team?

   • Have you identified or designed any team training sessions to meet the needs of your team?

   • Do you understand that team development is an ongoing process? What are you doing with this understanding?

   • Are you pushing team members to identify and utilize what they learned from the teambuilding sessions?

4. Knowing Why the Team Exists

   • Do team members know why the team exists?

   • Do they understand the goals they are to accomplish? Do the goals as written satisfy "SMART" criteria?

   • Have you helped members develop a team charter defining what is expected? As times have changed, has the charter been revisited and modified in order to adapt and evolve ?

5. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

   • What are you doing to share information more effectively with your team(s)? Are you finding ways to keep it interesting? Are you sharing enough information without overwhelming your teammates?

   • Are you a better listener now than when you first started reading this book? What specific things are you doing to be a better listener? Are these things making a difference?

   • Have you provided feedback to team members? Did you first describe what you noticed before you stated whether you thought the behaviors were "good" or "bad"?

   • What have you learned about providing feedback to others?

   • What have you learned from the feedback that you have received yourself?

   • How are your team's meetings going? Have you helped make the meetings become more effective and efficient?

   • Have you attempted any 1:1 communication sessions with team members? How about any dialogue sessions?

6. Problem Solving and Decision Making

   • Does your team take a disciplined approach to problem solving and decision making?

   • Do members take a wide range of issues into account as they reach decisions? Have they decided how they are going to decide? Are they attempting to reach consensus decisions?

   • Do you help team members recognize when they need to broaden their thinking with brainstorming techniques, and when they need to critique options and come to conclusions?

   • Are team members aware of the problems that may be interfering with their performance and their ability to work together as a team? Do they focus on one particular problem at a time?

   • Have you helped team members become more skilled at analyzing the causes of the problems they have identified? Do they concentrate on root causes that are within their own sphere of influence?

   • Do you help team members unleash their creative abilities and think of alternatives even if these options represent " outside-the-box " thinking?

   • Have you encouraged team members to choose options that are practical and within the parameters defined by the team charter?

   • Do you help team members help themselves by facilitating action planning sessions that clearly define who needs to do what with whom by when in order to implement the chosen alternative?

   • Have you encouraged team members to conduct an assessment of the actual impact of their problem-solving efforts? Is appreciation being expressed to those persons who helped the efforts succeed?

7. Resolving Conflict

   • Do you now better appreciate the advantages of having some conflict on your team(s)?

   • What is causing the conflict that team members are experiencing? Are they handling it constructively or dysfunctionally? Are they playing the blame game? Have you had some success turning the blame game into systematic problem solving?

   • Can you use all five basic approaches to conflict resolution? Which approach do you overuse?

   • What have you done to enhance your conflict resolution skills? Are you capable of facilitating a win-win approach?

   • Have you helped team members negotiate exchanges of behaviors so that their relationships do not interfere with the team's efforts to achieve excellence?

   • Have you been a behind-the-scenes X-factor resulting in constructive interpersonal relations?

   • Do you have any "difficult" people to deal with in your organization? Have you attempted to have a breakthrough conversation with them?

8. Motivating and Coaching Teams to Success

   • Do you understand that your team's performance is a function of its abilities, motivation, and opportunities?

   • Do the members of your team(s) clearly understand what is expected of them? Are they being held accountable?

   • Are you spending much time positively reinforcing actions consistent with expectations?

   • What are you like as a coach? You aren't a yeller or a nag, are you?

   • What are you doing now that makes you an even better coach?

   • Have you attempted to negotiate opportunities for individual members or for whole teams to capitalize on their talents?

   • Are you providing recognition and rewards in a manner that encourages collaboration rather than competition?

9. Leaders As Ambassadors of Team-Based Change Efforts

   • Have you told others about the progress of your team(s)? Do you emphasize the positive elements and keep team members' complaints private?

   • Have you been confident enough to encourage leadership to emerge within your team?

   • Have you found ways to connect team members with managers, union officials, and professional resource people in key positions in your organization?

   • Have you helped your team realize the importance of considering the impact of its actions on other teams and on the broader operations of your organization?

   • Have you been willing to serve as an ambassador for the change efforts advocated by top leadership in your organization?

   • What have you done when you have encountered people resisting change? Have you helped them see why they can't continue doing things the way they have been doing them?

   • Have you been able to help channel dissatisfaction with the status quo into actions that help make things better?

   • Have you taken efforts to ensure that members of the team and the organization have a vision of where they are headed? Are you doing what you can to ensure that actions taken are consistent with the move toward that vision?

   • Are you helping tip the momentum toward needed changes?

   • Have you identified connectors, mavens, and salespersons to serve as allies in your efforts to be an ambassador for teams and change?

   • Have you thought through your messages so that they stick in people's mind?

   • Are your team's discussions about change ideas conducted in a context conducive to the principles underlying the change?

   • How are you dealing with the stress associated with attempting to be a leader in a team-based environment?

   • Are you helping yourself and your team attempt to change the elements causing stress? Are you helping people gain a perspective on potentially stressful situations?

   • Have you learned how to better activate your relaxation response?

10. Monitoring and Reviving Teams

    • Does your team know the score? How is it doing this season ?

    • Have you helped your team(s) create a PPP scorecard that clarifies the extent to which they have been productive and to use effective team processes? Have you helped them to be satisfied and growing people?

    • Have you conducted sessions to help team members learn the lessons of their past?

    • Do they know what day it is in the life of their team?

    • Are members able to identify the team's current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? Have you helped them use systematic problem solving to address their weaknesses?

    • Have team members spent time anticipating what demands they may have to face in the future? Have they developed plans to deal with those new demands?

    • Are team members thinking strategically? What are you doing to help a team that is "stuck" or complacent?

11. Helping a Whole Team of Leaders

    • Have you been asked to help a team of leaders help themselves?

    • Did you get them to clarify whether they really want to think of themselves as a team? Have you offered them options depending on whether they simply want to get along together more effectively and have better meetings or to truly work as a team and produce something collectively?

    • Do you better understand why it is difficult for a group of leaders at the top of an organization to function as a team?

    • If your group wants to function as a leadership team, are their goals clear? Do they have the right people on the team? Do members understand their individual role on the leadership team?

    • Are members willing to use disciplined approaches to function as a team? Are they committed to generating constructive relationships among all members? Will there be any recognition for being team oriented?

    • How will the team avoid isolating itself and build key relationships with people and groups outside its domain?

    • Will the team be setting a good example within an organization claiming to be a team concept company?