Here’s a great exercise to help re-energize your team:

Tell every member of your team that you want each of them to forget about everything that they are currently working on, and take the time to come up with what THEY think they should be working on. What THEY think should be their highest priority.

In addition, ask them to look at what every other member of the team is currently working on, and come up with what THEY think each person’s highest priority item should be.

Then, have a meeting to discuss all of these things, brainstorm and re-align your priorities.

People become numb. They become lulled to sleep, not willing to participate in the overall team effort aside from doing their individual tasks and calling it a day. They no longer have a drive to disagree, to be creative or to voice their opinions and ideas.

Why does this happen? In thinking about it, I’ve come up with the 5 dysfunctions of a team as I see them. (I know of Patrick Lencioni’s book with the same title, though I’ve never read it.)

1) Poor Leadership – Poor leadership causes everyone else to suffer. In reality, poor leadership is really the only thing to blame for poor team dynamics.  Leadership needs to recognize the signs of the remaining four dysfunctions, and fix them quickly.

2) Poor Process – Poor process will quickly lull people to sleep and drive teams apart. A poor process can be defined as: no process, a process that is clearly broken, or a process that changes all the time. A process changing and improving from time to time is one thing. However, if you have a fire drill every time a certain task needs to be completed, you have a poor process and you need to spend the time needed to fix it. A poor process just frustrates people.

3) Poor Relationships – Strong professional relationships are key. This needs to be fostered by leadership as well. One simple way to foster strong professional relationships amongst team members is to stress their importance frequently. Like most things, just bring it up. Tell your team that it’s important that they all have good relationships with one another, and that they feel comfortable providing constructive criticism and asking each other for help/input.

4) Lack of Shared Vision – If your team doesn’t have a shared vision for what you are trying to accomplish, how do you expect to accomplish it? Don’t expect that everyone will have the shared vision because you mention it once a year. It needs to be reinforced, brought up frequently, and you need to be evaluating the things that your team is doing to make sure they are furthering that shared vision. Without a shared vision, people can easily become disengaged and feel like they are doing busy work.

5) Lack of Ownership – This is vital for two reasons:

• Ownership motivates people to do their best. If you tell someone that something is “theirs” and that they “own it”, most people are going to do the best they can.  If no one owns it, it’s going to be mediocre.

• If no one owns it, there is no one to hold accountable when it doesn’t get done.  This also means that people will feel like someone else should have done something, which weakens relationships between team members.

Don’t let your team become numb.

One of the things I love most about working is having the opportunity to sit down next to someone else and work side by side with them on something. I literally go out of my way to work with people this way if at all possible. I learn so much, and it’s an opportunity for me to hopefully impart something worthwhile to the person I’m working with. Sure, there are always things that you simply need to just focus on and get done on your own. But when you need to interact with someone else on your team, why not work side by side with them whenever possible?

Working this way is a powerful tool you can use to help create a culture of innovation within your organization/team. Here’s how:

1) Preface your interaction/work session with something like this:

“My goal every time I work side by side with someone like this, is not just to accomplish the task at hand. I have two other things that I explicitly want to accomplish. I want to learn something from you – I want YOU to teach ME something. At the same time, I hope to share some bit of knowledge, or teach you something as well. So please, try and teach me something, I will try my best to do the same.”

It’s important to set expectations this way, especially if you are working with someone that reports to you. Some people will feel like you are micromanaging, so just be clear about your intentions and goals.

2) Recap – When your work session is over, tell your co-worker what you’ve learned and ask them what they learned. THEN, ask them if what you learned is what they were trying to teach you and vice-versa.

3) Encourage everyone on your team to do the same when working with one another.

4) Periodically talk about the things that you’ve learned over the course of a given week or month, and ask the rest of your team members to do the same. It’s probably good to vary the frequency of these discussions.

This accomplishes a number of great things:

1) It shows that you respect your team members, and that you don’t think you know it all.

2) It shows that you are not just task oriented, but that you have an interest in your team members’ development.

3) Knowledge sharing happens, respect for one another increases, and stronger relationships develop throughout your team.

4) Your team members learn, grow, and become more engaged.

All making your job as a manager/team leader that much easier, and helping to create a culture of innovation within your team.

I knew what was coming…

Starbucks recently launched a new site called mystarbucksidea.com, powered by Salesforce Ideas.

I love it when I see a company (especially a large name company like Starbucks), utilizing technology to listen to and involve their customers in more of what they do.

I thought it was cool that they were populating ideas that were brought up prior to launching the site, like this one:

“Please go back to your original idea of an European coffee house and get rid of the
extraneous items like cds, stuffed animals, countless foods and all that factory
holiday junk. I love the original Starbucks better. And Howard Schultz, I love you.

- An idea from our Annual Meeting of Shareholders on March 19, 2008 in Seattle”

Jeremiah gave some good quick thoughts here, and Jim Bruene over at NetBanker added some great thoughts here as well.

Great move Starbucks, and wonderful execution on the roll out of the site and marketing campaign. Now the challenge will become being agile enough to respond and execute on the top rated ideas as soon as possible. Do it now, as early as possible. It will really pay off.

I’d love to talk to the individual at Starbucks that was responsible for making this happen.

These are three things that I’ve found critical to have when trying to get things done. Really, this goes for personal productivity and team productivity.

Accountability – You need to have someone that holds you accountable to doing the things you commit to doing. This could be your spouse, a business partner, a friend, a co-worker, etc. Find someone that will hold you accountable.

Purpose – You have to have a purpose for doing things, and that purpose should be clearly defined and stated/published somewhere. Being reminded often of the purpose for doing something helps to keep you focused.

Priority – How important is something compared to other things you want to do? Without priorities, you’ll flounder and jump from half finished item, to half finished item.

Purpose and Priority are also good ways to evaluate whether or not you should work on something at a given time. It’s easy to let “something cool” or “something new” steal your attention. If the purpose for you doing something is not clear and it doesn’t take priority over other items, don’t work on it.

In trying to really stay focused and get more things done, these are a few of the things I’ve realized I need. I also have a new filing system I’ll share soon, that some of you may find useful as well.

You can simply type “track X”, or “track X Y Z” and twitter will automatically send you anything that anyone says that includes that word or combination of words.

Politweets is a great, and recent example of this awesome feature in use. It tracks what people are saying about all of the presidential candidates, and presents the comments side by side in a nicely designed interface.

Steve O’Hear gives a great overview of this over at ZDNet, as does Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb who also gives some other great examples of the power of the Twitter “Track” feature.

Just one more reason to start using Twitter!

Have you come across any other extremely useful Twitter mashups? I’d love to check them out.

For me, Twitter has been WAY more effective in helping me find and connect with individuals with similar interests than anything else. More effective than if I had actually been looking for them.

That’s part of the beauty of Twitter. It happens organically. I am constantly finding more people to follow that “speak my language”, and/or are interested in the same things I am.

There is minimal effort involved in the beginning, but once you start following a few people, you tend to just naturally find additional people to follow that add value. One thing I would suggest is to browse who other people are following, and check them out as well. I’ve found lots of great new people to follow this way.

I was definitely a naysayer at first, but this article was what caused me to give Twitter a second look and actually try it out:

Ten Questions with Chris Brogan – http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/09/ten-questions-w.html

Also, if there is one person I would suggest you follow to start, follow Chris Brogan. Check out his blog as well. Fantastic stuff. Definitely one of my favorite reads online.

Here’s an additional link to a good post about how twitter improved Truemors:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/10/how-twitter-mad.html

And a post with a link to a research report by Forrester on “microblogging” (PAID):

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2007/10/i-just-dont-get.html

Of course, you can follow me on Twitter as well at: http://twitter.com/kliza23

I’ve used Competitious on and off over the past year, and it’s a great tool. Though, as stated in this Competitious blog post,”Competitious is a great way to quickly list your competition, and start finding news and traffic stats about them, but RivalMap is focused on what happens next.”

RivalMap is definitely a much more robust and feature rich solution. It has a beautiful user interface, and it maintains the same level of excellent usability and simplicity amidst a great deal more features. Anyone familiar with Basecamp will be right at home with RivalMap, as it has a very similar look and feel.

The beauty of RivalMap is that is provides your team a central place for MANAGING competitive information, not just storing it. I’ve seen companies “manage” their competitive information by sending around emails of press releases to different people throughout the organization, or creating a wiki, or at the most sophisticated level, by setting up a project within their internal project management system where they post information about competitors. However, all of these approaches fall FAR short of what RivalMap allows you to do.

RivalMap serves as that central place for all competitive info, but it also provides you with the tools to actually organize, and manage competitive information and begin to formulate strategies to address competitive threats. It allows you to build comparison grids (company and product comparison), easily associate links to news articles, build out a full SWOT analysis, and lots more. It even lets you segment out the distinct verticals in which you compete, and track all the way down to your competitors’ individual customers!

The one thing I was disapointed to see missing was the ability for the software to search for, and suggest links and articles, that are related to ones competitors. This was a very nice feature of competitious. However, it was mentioned in the competitious blog that they are planning on adding a similar feature to RivalMap, and potentially integration with third-party information services.

I would also like to have the ability to have my google alerts and similar services automatically parsed, and applied to the appropriate competitor’s profile.

All in all, I’m VERY impressed.

Their website is also very good in terms of clearly stating the benefits and features of the product, and with a completely free account for up to 3 users, it’s a no brainer to at least try it out.

You can also check out the RivalMap blog, and there is a great discussion over at TechCrunch as well.

Keep up the great work RivalSoft!

For far too long, business applications have been built for businesses, not for the people in the businesses that use them.

Rather than approaching the design with the goal of enabling the best, most enjoyable experience for the individual, many ISVs have kept their designs inside the box, and focused solely on the needs of the business.

I may be missing something (and I’m sure I’ve not seen nearly everything), but I’ve yet to see an application that really breaks the mold. One that presents data in a totally new way, or enables a totally new experience for the user. Or one that incorporates some level of fun and enjoyment in the mundane tasks of creating service tickets, accounts, invoices, activity notes, meetings…etc.

If we look at sites/apps such as facebook, twitter, youtube and others, the sites that’s user bases have grown virally at an incredible pace, the three words that immediately come to mind are: personal, networked, and addictive

Personal – All of the above sites present information to the user that is personal and important to the individual user. This is similar to dashboards we see in many business apps. However, that is one single place in the application that is personal. Some applications also provide themes, but not to the extent that some of the social networkings sites provide customization of the overall look.

Networked – All of the above are web based applications, that leverage their network of users to create their core value. This is something I’ve written about in the past, and now Salesforce is just beginning to take this to the next level with their new Salesforce-to-Salesforce capabilities.

Addictive – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube… they are all addictive. They have something that makes people want to use them. However, that something can be different for different people, but I venture to say that what ever that something is, it is a direct result of those applications leveraging the network of users as the underlying core value of their offering.

Aside from Salesforce’s recent moves, another great example that is more on the design side is Entellium, and their Rave CRM product. Paul Johnston, Entellium’s CEO talks about the “Gamer Influenced Design” approach here on his blog.

Phil Wainewright also talks about Rave, and the concept of gaming elements applied to business software here.

I’d love to hear what others think, and if you can point me in the direction of some applications that you think are truly breaking the mold, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Reading it made me really excited. So much so that I immediately started talking to, and calling friends of mine, probably babbling because I was so taken up by it. I sat at home last night reading parts of the interview to my wife as we sat trying to relax in our living room.

It made me really excited because this is something I am very passionate about. It’s something that I have very strong feelings about, and in this interview I saw my own passions and positions clearly shared by others that are truly thought leaders in the space of management.

Innovative Management: A conversation with Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan

Please, take the time to read this interview and share with me your thoughts. If you aren’t a member at the McKinsey Quarterly this is more than enough reason to join. (IT’S FREE!)

The basic premise of the discussion is that there is an ever growing need for a new managerial model, that merits the gifts of creativity, passion, and initiative and leverages those gifts in each and every employee.

Here’s just a small sample:

“In terms of managing creative-thinking people, you have to separate the work of managing from the notion of managers as a distinct and privileged class of employees. Highly talented people don’t need, and are unlikely to put up with, an overtly hierarchical management model.

Increasingly, the work of management won’t be done by managers. It will be pushed out to the periphery. It will be embedded in systems. I think we’re on the verge of what I would call a postmanagerial society. The idea that you mobilize human labor through a hierarchy of overseers and bureaucrats and administrators is going to look extraordinarily antiquated a decade or two from now.”

Also, if you haven’t read my post from a few months back entitled: Creating a Culture of Innovation: The SANE Approach, I’m sure you will see many parallels.

John Moore posted a great overview of Gary Hamel’s new book, The Future of Management.

Tory Gattis of OpenTeams also posted some additional excerpts from the interview here as well.