Appleton Greene – Team Development
Boosting Team Productivity
Appleton Greene If you are looking to boost your productivity (and who isn’t?) working in teams allows for the workload to be shared equally among members and distributed according to each member’s skills and strengths. Some jobs simply cannot be done alone –and require teamwork and trusted colleagues in the workplace to effectively complete the task at hand on time. With more hands on deck, tasks are completed faster and more efficiently, thereby increasing productivity. Our service focuses on new teams and existing teams to identify where they are in the team performance curve and providing tailored exercises, education and discussions to help them get to the next level(s) increasing your productivity. Whether it’s clarity around the team’s common purpose, role clarification, interpersonal differences, approach to the task or resolving conflict, we engage teams in interactive sessions to resolve and improve. Watch your productivity improve while at the same time gaining employee engagement and satisfaction with their work. For further information, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Effective Onboarding of New Leaders
If your objective is to effectively onboard new leaders, please read on. When teams get a new leader, lots of things can happen if not managed properly or if it is a bad hire. While the financial impact is quantifiable, chief financial officers actually rank a bad hire’s morale and productivity impact ahead of monetary losses. Why? A bad apple spoils the bunch, so to speak. Disengagement is contagious, which may be why employers can’t seem to defeat it. This is why our New Leader Integration service is so critical. The service is designed to be conducted within the first 60 days of a New Leader’s Onboarding. It is designed to help the new leader and the existing team get to know each other better, dramatically shorten the “start-up” time—the time it usually takes for people to learn enough about how things are going to work to get back to a reasonable level of productivity, prevent many of the early problems new managers and leaders create by over or under-managing their team, help team members understand the new leader’s management style, how the team can best work together and what is expected of them on the job. By the time the new leader and team have completed the process (typically one-two days), they will have developed a greater understanding about each other—about how the new leader wants to manage, about what he/she feels the team members’ responsibilities are, and about what the team wants and needs from the leader. It has been reported that as much as six months of “settling in” time can be eliminated by actively pursuing this process. For more information, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Change Management
If your organization is poised to undergo change, you need to prepare the organization. The ultimate goal of change management is to drive organizational results and outcomes by engaging employees and teams and inspiring their adoption of a new way of working. Whether it is a process, system, job role or organizational structure change (or all of the above), a project is only successful if individual employees change their daily behaviors, interact differently and start doing their jobs in a new way. This is the essence of change management. A whole system of people in the organization support employees and teams in making this transition. From the highest levels of leadership to frontline team leaders, managing change well relies on a coordination of actors all moving in unison and fulfilling unique roles. A growing body of data shows a strong correlation between the success of a change initiative and how well the people side was managed. Change projects with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives and outcomes. One lever that many companies fail to engage is team leadership. They don’t emphasize enough the power that team leaders hold in unlocking culture changes at the lower levels of the organization. Find out how to successfully engage employees, team leaders and their teams in your cultural transformation. For more information, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Building or Re-Shaping Culture
If your organization is poised to undergo a culture change, you need to prepare the organization. When it comes to culture change, executives must lead by doing. Otherwise, all their talk about new values and behaviors becomes just “corporate wallpaper.” The problem arises when the new culture requires behavioral changes that are both foreign and challenging for the executives themselves to adopt. A culture transformation can require them to move away from, if not completely abandon, those very behaviors that made them successful on their path to leadership. To help leaders adopt new behaviors, many companies have used peer coaching and peer-to-peer learning. The objective is to provide a safe environment – “we’re all in the same boat”– in which executives can share their difficulties and best practices for how they overcame those obstacles. Reverse mentoring can be effective when the desired skills and behaviors are more commonly found in millennials. In this scenario, leaders are coached by younger members of the organization. The ultimate goal of culture change is to drive organizational results and outcomes by engaging employees. Learn how the power of teams works in an environment where reshaping the culture is paramount to success. For more information, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Competitive Advantage
Here’s a promise, according to an unnamed CEO/entrepreneur who built a $1B company: “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” Effective leadership requires the ability to develop and sustain high-performing teams. Yet what behaviors make a team high performing remains open to interpretation. We believe that high-performing executive teams set organizational direction, make strategic decisions, execute clear roles, fully leverage unique member talents, and focus on team success versus individual agendas. Additionally, high performing teams are fully engaged and committed, share a common vision and team values, successfully deliver clearly defined business results, and role model team collaboration throughout the organization. This type of teamwork – both powerful and rare – allows a company to maintain the “ultimate competitive advantage” says author Patrick Lencioni, in his best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. How do C-level leaders create and support this positive, productive team experience? It can be difficult– let’s face it, human beings have strong survival instincts, and exposing vulnerabilities, embracing conflict, holding self and others accountable, and foregoing individual recognition for team success is not easily done – especially in a competitive employment environment where it often feels like there is little room for mistakes. When appropriate we use Lencioni’s model to develop and sustain high performing teams. When simple yet vital steps are mastered and put into practice day after day. Lencioni’s model provides a step-by-step framework for building a highly functional team. And we believe this is a competitive advantage that can drive your business successfully into the future. For more information, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Working in a Matrix Environment
Who’s the Boss? In its strictest definition a matrix organization structure is where people have more than one boss. So we could define a matrix team as a team where individuals on the team report to more than one boss. It is also commonly used to describe managing cross functional, cross business group and other forms of working that cross the traditional vertical business units. These teams are even trickier to get them to work most effectively. Matrix team members often suffer from the problem of divided loyalties where they have both team and functional goals that compete for their time and attention, they have multiple bosses and often work on multiple teams at the same time. For some matrix team members this may be the first time they have been given accountability for results that are broader than delivery of their functional goals. Some individuals relish the breath and development that the matrix team offers and others feel exposed and out of control. The secret of matrix team successes is in the skills and ways of working that evolve to be successful in this complex environment. Contact us to discuss our experiences working within matrix team environments, especially in the pharma and biotech communities and how we have helped matrix teams reach success. Appleton Greene
Employee Development
If your organization wants to focus on developing employees, what better way to develop employees than to have them work on teams? Teamwork has many advantages: A greater variety of issues can be solved by pooling expertise and resources, problems are exposed to greater diversity of knowledge skills and experience, the team approach boosts morale and ownership through participative decision making, recommendations are more likely to be implemented when they come from the team. In order to do all these things successfully, employees must learn and develop a multitude of skills such as: joint problem solving and decision making, conflict management, influencing skills, how to give and receive feedback, developing strong interpersonal skills, and appreciating differences and diversity of thought. When properly managed and developed properly, teamwork improves processes and produces results quickly and economically through the free exchange of ideas, information, knowledge and data. It is an essential component of any organization in building trust, improving communication and developing a culture of interdependence, rather than one of independence along with the development of each employee. For more information, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Vision, Mission and Values Creation
If your organization or critical teams do not have a vision and mission statement or if they need to be updated or improved, continue reading. A company’s mission statement determines the company’s direction. Smart business owners use this statement to remind their teams why their company exists because this is what makes the company successful. The mission statement serves as a “North Star” that keeps everyone clear on the direction of the organization. It has been found in studies that organizations that have lucid, coherent, and meaningful vision and mission statements return more than double the numbers in shareholder benefits when compared to the organizations that do not have vision and mission statements. Some benefits of having vision and mission statements are as follows: above everything else, vision and mission statements provide unanimity of purpose to organizations and imbue the employees with a sense of belonging and identity. Since they define the reason for existence of the organization, they are indicators of the direction in which the organization must move to actualize their goals. The vision and mission statements help to translate the objectives of the organization into work structures and to assign tasks to the elements in the organization that are responsible for actualizing them in practice. They help in the translation of objectives into actionable cost, performance, and time related measures. And finally, vision and mission statements provide a philosophy of existence to the employees, which is crucial because as humans, we need meaning from the work we do and the vision and mission statements provide the necessary meaning for working in a particular organization. To discuss how we have helped organizations and teams with their vision and mission statements, please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Improved Earnings & Profitability
If your organization has an objective to improve earnings and profitability, we know that skilled and motivated employees work harder and better. Productivity will improve. Extra effort will be made to close sales and a positive impact will be seen on the bottom line. Working in teams promotes a wider sense of ownership for your organization both collectively and individually making team members more responsible and enthusiastic. We teach accountability in our sessions so that team members take ownership for their goals and objectives, readily provide and accept feedback, look for alternatives to solving problems, and continuously ask each other, “what else can we do?” We use the Oz Principle definition of Accountability: “A personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving key results”. Ensuring that key results to improve earnings and/or profitability are clear and communicated is also an essential part of the process. Then each employee’s job is to work toward those results vs. stating their job title. Another critical key part of this concept is understanding Above the Line and Below the Line behavior and making commitments to remain Above the Line. Call us for more information on this critical topic. Appleton Greene
Employee Engagement and Motivation
If your organization has an objective to improve earnings and profitability, we know that skilled and motivated employees work harder and better. Productivity will improve. Extra effort will be made to close sales and a positive impact will be seen on the bottom line. Working in teams promotes a wider sense of ownership for your organization both collectively and individually making team members more responsible and enthusiastic. We teach accountability in our sessions so that team members take ownership for their goals and objectives, readily provide and accept feedback, look for alternatives to solving problems, and continuously ask each other, “what else can we do?” We use the Oz Principle definition of Accountability: “A personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving key results”. Ensuring that key results to improve earnings and/or profitability are clear and communicated is also an essential part of the process. Then each employee’s job is to work toward those results vs. stating their job title. Another critical key part of this concept is understanding Above the Line and Below the Line behavior and making commitments to remain Above the Line. Call us for more information on this critical topic. Appleton Greene
Innovation
Innovation projects are said to fail 90% of the time. Why is this? Part of the answer lies in the special “innovation teams” who are mandated with finding breakthrough growth in large corporations. Setting these teams up for success is vital, yet corporations often fail when doing this. Successful innovation teams start by selecting a diverse group who are analytical and creative in equal measures and have networks that are as broad and as deep as their skill sets. They function best within an environment that utilizes specialized working practices such as “safe space” and clear performance goals. Finally, the best innovation teams, as with all successful teams, are fully committed and invested in their collective success. There are several tips to help Innovation teams be successful. The first is selecting the right people. The best way to start the selection process is by understanding the actual work the team will do and then optimizing the personnel around these key activities. With these activities in mind, assembling a group of people only capable of thinking “outside the box” clearly won’t be sufficient for success, as the generation of the idea is only one part of the process. We believe that a better staffing goal is to bring together a team that has the “biggest box” possible. A big box is helpful for many reasons, especially because it increases the likelihood of forming new cognitive connections between all of the team members, commonly known as the “a-ha” moments that spur great new ideas and identify undiscovered possibilities. To explore more of the tips, call us to discuss how we help you form successful Innovation teams. Appleton Greene
Improved Problem Solving & Decision Making
It is a known fact that teams who demonstrate effective interpersonal skills and apply a logical sequence to problem solving and decision making make much better decisions and solve problems more quickly than any one person working on the same problem. There are several benefits to the organization who has teams with these skills. Teams skilled in problem solving and decision making will lead to better business outcomes because the team can bring more resources to bear against a challenge and there is more oversight to reduce risk of any mistake an individual contributor might make. When teams work well together they accomplish more than individuals can alone. This helps a company save money while being more competitive in their market. We teach a Synergistic Problem-Solving Method that identifies the key factors that contribute to effective solutions and decisions. One set of factors that promotes high quality solutions is the resources available to the group and the task skills and knowledge of its members. Another important set is the quality of members’ rational and interpersonal skills and processes that emerge as they collectively approach the problems. We put them through a scenario where they must solve a problem together (after solving it individually) and reach consensus on their solutions. We observe and provide feedback on key factors for success. It is always an eye opening experience for participants and team leaders. For more information, please please click on our Consultant Information Guide, complete a form, or request a complimentary phone call. Appleton Greene
Ms. Matteson is an approved Senior Consultant at Appleton Greene and she has experience in management, finance and human resources. She has achieved a Bachelor of Science, is a Board Certified Coach and is an Adjunct Consultant. She has industry experience within the following sectors: Pharmaceutical; Biotechnology; Manufacturing; Healthcare and Chemicals. She has had commercial experience within the following countries: United States of America, or more specifically within the following cities: Princeton NJ; Philadelphia PA; Minneapolis MN; Wilmington NC and Boston MA; and. Her personal achievements include: design & conduct team development workshops; coach executives to reach goals; shape corporate culture change; improve team performance and relationships and facilitate vision and mission statements. Her service skills incorporate: team development; executive coaching; expert facilitation; performance management and management training. Appleton Greene
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