Everyone wants great team players. What can you do to be a better one? Try answering these questions and you’ll generate your own personalized tips:

1. Think back over all your job experiences – both paid and volunteer work. What kinds of things really made you feel good? Make a list. Can you find some similarities between them? There’s an excellent chance that you will ‘team best’ when doing work that involve the same types of tasks, responsibilities, and/or work environments.  Consider asking for the opportunity to add or ‘swap’ some of the listed items into your current job.
2. You don’t have to be a manager to help your teammates. Does someone need a hand with something that you can offer? Go for it!
3. There’s really no better ‘growth gift’ than honest, caring, respectful feedback. Is there someone you trust to give you some?  If so, go ahead and ask. In fact, your first question should be for feedback on your teamability!
4. You probably have a good sense of how you make your best contributions to group efforts. But you could be mistaken if you assume that others know this about you. Can you think of some of ways to ‘advertise’ your readiness to take on job challenges that really ‘fit’?
5. Learning doesn’t stop when you graduate from school, finish training, or reach a goal. There are always opportunities to develop a new talent, skill, ability, or interest. Are you seeking out the ones that will benefit you while bringing benefits to others?

What will your future look like? With greater teamability, you’ll have broader options, plus the flexibility and support to see them through to a successful conclusion!

If you are used to thinking of ‘Role’ as a person’s job title or function, then let me explain. Every kind of organization has overarching needs – a reason for being, a plan for the future, a means for surviving and growing, and so on. Most people have within them a desire to contribute to their group – their ‘team’ – by serving one or more of these big-picture needs. Some people are not very much aware of it, but for those who are, it can feel very much like their mission in life. This is what I mean when I speak of Role with a capital ‘R’.

One of those Roles is called the Explorer. It’s somewhat unusual, because where most Roles are focused on what’s going on within the team, Explorers are always looking – and often traveling – away from the group, in search of assets that can be of value to their team. Think of someone you know who does this kind of thing. They could be search consultants, salespeople, business developers, or researchers. All are ‘treasure hunters’ of a sort.

Explorers can be very good with people, but their ‘mission’ makes them seem like loners. And because of their outward-bound experience, they are often more comfortable on their own than in the midst of group activity. So despite the fact that they serve a essential group need, Explorers often feel they are not a ‘team’ person. And, unfortunately, they can also be perceived that way by their own teammates, who may not show proper respect for what the Explorer ‘brings to the table.’

What happens then? They tend to go off in search of a more appreciative group! Many an organization has failed to see the great value of an effective Explorer until too late.

Here are three keys to ‘team’ well with an Explorer:

1. Take note of what they bring back,
2. Make an effort to understand its potential value to the organization, and,
3. Take time to affirm that value, and to express appreciation for it.

When this happens, an Explorer will really ‘feel the love,’ and will redouble his or her efforts on behalf of the team.

A great modern-day Explorer, Matthew Lesko, was at my office today to interview me (as an entrepreneur) and Lynn Ozer, my SBA banker at Susquehanna Bank. You may know Matthew as the ‘Answer Man’ – the guy who’s been finding and telling people about sources of free and useful stuff for well over 30 years. He’s pretty unforgettable, even aside from his brightly-colored suits, which are covered with question marks. Fitting, since he brings answers with real educational and monetary value.

Need a school loan or scholarship? He can help. Starting a business? Matthew has a whole website for that. Trying to survive in a down economy with no job? Matthew feels your pain and supplies information about public and private sources of food, heat, shelter, education, and on and on. But he’s not going to sit by your side and hold your hand for hours. He serves his team by assembling and presenting his ‘finds’ in ways that help you make your own life, or business, better.

I’ll be posting the link to today’s interview as soon as it’s available, but in the meantime, you might want to check out www.lesko.com. Don’t think of it as a place where all of the exploring has already been done. That’s not the case at all!  Matthew is such a *master* Explorer that he’s assembled a veritable treasure trove of information. It’s more than enough to keep a person of any Role busy – even a fledgling Explorer – wandering in fields of gold.

• Expressing yourself in a tweet forces you to remove anything that is not absolutely essential to communicating your thought.

• The impact of a tweet is measurable by RTs, and overall value by follows, except when people are ‘gaming’ the tweeconomic system.

• Having a lot of follows does not equate to leadership. You are judged on the merit of what you tweet.

• One tweet will never change the world, but a whole lot of them can create, or reinforce, a true seismic shift.

• Metatweeting is its own reward.

It was on the puzzle page as I was cooking dinner and multitasking.

Very apropos, I think. Been a week of planting.

Being a Founder is like being a farmer. You need to make sure the soil is tilled in time, get the seeds to go in the right places, and do the whole mess before the sun goes down.

Oh yes, and leave the rest to Heaven.

Here’s what he said:

“As a customer, it can be a confusing consumer world out there.  Was that item on sale this week or last?  Is this the promotion code I need? What’s the special name this company uses for this item?  Summary?  Report? Credit?  Debit?  Phew!

“As a customer service professional, we are the gatekeepers.  When a customer calls or walks in to our location, we are the face they see, the voice they hear, and the make-it-or-break-it guy/gal.  When we have a bad day or we skip a training class or our manager is breathing down our necks, there is a strong possibility that we will relay those emotions into our work.  It’s only natural because we try to associate with others.

“Try instead to walk a few steps in that customer’s shoes.  Here are a few pointers that can make this a great Customer Service Week for us and our customers:

1 – LISTEN!

Sometimes what a customer says and what they mean is not aligned.  There are plenty of reasons for this.  Your industry may have particular lingo or the customer is angry and they just want to vent.

2 – Empathize with the customer.

Imagine yourself in the customer’s exact situation.  If you had to call someone 5 times before a problem was resolved, would this set of circumstances annoy you?

3 – Empower the customer…just a smidgen.

We can’t give away the house, but we can definitely ask, “What can we do for you to help solve this situation?”  I was asked this once at a Hyatt hotel when a mistake was made and the question really surprise me.  I felt like I could ask for anything and then allow the company to respond to my request.

4 – Solve it!

Empty promises, missed calls, faulty reasoning…there’s plenty of that in our experience.  Let’s reverse it by committing to a great standard of fixing the problem.  Customers don’t like being shuffled around, so take care of it as best as you can.  And if you can’t, get someone who can.  Working with the customer sure is easier than working against them and this can lead to great loyalty and perhaps even customer advocates.

5 – Be rewarded.

Celebrate yourself.  Go get a smoothie after work.  Order lunch in for your customer service team.  Hand out gold stickers.  As a manager, you have amazing superpowers that allow your team to love you.  Don’t squander those powers on territorial squabbles and fear.  Do something that celebrates your team and reduces your turnover.  After all, your team is your customer as well!”

Isn’t that how you – as a customer – want to be treated?

What Paul is saying is no big secret to the people who know him, but I’m going to tell it here, just in case you’ve never met him:

Customer Service is a Team Sport.

If you can’t team with your customer, you’ll never serve them – or your organization!

PS: Yes, Paul is a Communicator!

So the question was, What are the top 10 interpersonal skills found in great leaders?

I was drawn to answer because of that key word: interpersonal. I didn’t even check to see who asked it.

Here is my answer (and the first one should come as no surprise):

1. They are team players.
2. They are coherent (neither rigid not diffuse) in all their interactions with others.
3. Depending on what they are leading, they are either highly inspirational, in which case people are drawn to follow them and their vision, or they are excellent at shepherding people toward the goal. Occasionally you find people who are good at both.
4. They take initiative, especially in innovation companies – they seize the moment, and go for the opportunity.
5. They clearly get that other people have a point of view that may not be an exact mirror of theirs. (They might not like it, but they definitely get it.)
6. They aren’t consumed by greed. Their ambition and desire to win extends to their team, organization, stakeholders, and especially their customers.
7. They aren’t know-it-alls, even though they are generally smart.
8. They know how to be able depend on other people – their trust is highly desired and valued.
9. They respect all living things. (That includes silicon-based life forms.)
10. They openly express their faith in their team, that together they can achieve the vision.

After I posted it, I had to question myself, as I often do: How do I know what I know?

And I realized that there is no easy path to leadership. That it can only come from surviving the great trials and challenges of life. That it cannot be described as a series of traits or bits and pieces of experience because, indeed, it’s a team sport. And it is the team that is the teacher.

My friend’s plight made me flash back to that classic article in Fast Company that caused HR people to cringe. Remember the banner headline “Why We Hate HR”? My friend has never forgotten it, and to this day will not touch a copy of that magazine.

It’s time to call a ceasefire! When it comes to building, promoting, and protecting the human infrastructure of any organization, HR and the rest of us need to be partners!

Here are a few things we can do to build productive synergy, even though we may be traveling at very different speeds.

• First, create ongoing conversations across departmental lines. When you do, you learn more about how other people think, how they do what they do, where you share needs and interests, and the business impact of your mutual efforts.

• Second, consider how YOUR focus might bring some clarity to that of other departments. Do you think about the message behind your communication, and how it will be received by the other side? Is there a simpler way to solve a problem, or get things working better?

• Third, keep score! This is a bit tricky, because you need to be doing this for the right reasons. Some people keep score for their personal zero-sum game, in which one wins and one loses. What I’m talking about is keeping score of the give-and-take, just to make sure you are giving at least as much as you are getting. This approach will always produce positive outcomes.

Those are my kind of metrics!

If you look at labor as strictly a financial issue, you see people as interchangeable cogs, just units of cost. But if you do, you are missing the real value: the measurable effects of synergy. You only get this when you have a coherent ‘human infrastructure’.

The term ‘infrastructure’ denotes organizational structures that are essential to the operation and sustenance of an institution or a society. In ideal practice, science, engineering, management, and finance will guide the operation and maintenance of infrastructures in a coherent fashion. These disciplines have evolved over time, and now a similar evolution must come to the ‘people function’ within organizations.

As demographic, social, and technological changes accelerate, fewer and fewer people are serving increasingly integral and complex functions in nearly every field of endeavor. As a result, humans are functioning more and more like a mission-critical organizational structure; less and less like consumable ‘resources’ or replaceable ‘capital’ – labor.  The rapidly expanding dialogue on ‘human infrastructure’ attests to this fact.

Within the context of a dynamic human infrastructure, a person’s most valuable quality is their ability to successfully and productively ‘team’ with others. Therefore, given roughly equal ‘talents’, the person who is a better ‘team player’ will always add more value. But you must respect them as part of your team, and that means treating them as such. Not as labor.

I’m not suggesting we stop celebrating what has come to mean the last weekend of summer for so many people. I’m just suggesting that if we are to celebrate anything, it’s time to change the name of this holiday to “Teaming Day”.

And to the great team players on the TGI team, I hope you are enjoying today. I look forward to being together tomorrow, because, for me, that is truly when we celebrate teaming.

—

Notice that I am making a statement, not asking a question. There is no question about it. Interviews suck. And it doesn’t matter if you are the interviewer, the interviewee, or someone else who’s been sucked into the process.

There are three simple reasons.

First, interviews are very much like blind dates. Both sides get a lot of hype upfront, and most of it is inaccurate or misleading. Think back to the last time you bought-in to: “…and he’s so good to his mother” or “…but she has a wonderful personality.” Is that any different from “…he’s an undervalued property” or “…you’ll really grow with this company”? The bottom line is that interviews are a form of assessment, and no matter how structured or ‘fair’ you think you are being, they are neither standardized nor objective. Even if you are using ‘behavioral interviewing’ techniques, the information you retain about each candidate will still have been filtered through your personal frame of reference and unconscious biases. And just like the date who seemed like a perfect ‘fit’ – until their quirks, or their temper, or some other ‘undocumented features’ began to show up – there are people who have become experts at getting hired by NOT being themselves during the interview process. (Did you know there are dating coaches and interview coaches that drill people in how to ‘get lucky’?)

Second, for various reasons, the scales tend to tilt in favor of people who are least likely to be great team players. Poorly defined job scope? Insufficient resources? Unrealistic performance expectations? A great team player will raise relevant issues for discussion. A bad team player will tell you just what you want to hear. To make matters worse, all parties to the interview process have the same desired outcome, which no one will openly admit: they just want to get it over with!

• For HR or a staff recruiter, the harder the hiring manager is to deal with, the stronger this desire becomes.
• For an external recruiter, the desire to close and move on is variable: retained search, “No problem”; contingency, “Excellent choice! When will my check be mailed?”
• The interviewer(s) will push for rapid progress to the ‘right’ decision, despite the fact that the same process has proven faulty in the past.
• And lastly, the candidates (depending on their employment status, how shaky they think their present situation is, and any number of other factors) want a job, a great job, the perfect job, or at least one that they can survive until they land somewhere else. All this pressure favors candidates who are easy to ‘fall in love with’ instead of the people who are the most capable of adding value to the team.

Third, the very best person for the job rarely gets picked. Why? Let’s go back to dating for a moment. Did you know that the surest way to hook up with the wrong person is to look for someone who matches your personal ‘want list’? (This is a fact based on research, not folklore.) Think about it: can a list of experiences, skills, and physical attributes predict the quality of interpersonal behavior? Certainly not! In order to get a positive I.D. on a ‘good team-player’, you need to know something about how the person will behave when working with others to overcome obstacles and achieve common goals. Unfortunately, that’s not what we get from interviewing.

First there are the interminable screenings to match candidates to a ‘job req’, i.e., the ‘want list’. And since screening is rarely done by the person doing the hiring, persons with slightly different – yet truly unique and excellent – qualifications usually get kicked to the curb. The longer and more complex the interview process, and the more people involved, the more likely the process will produce a lowest-common-denominator selection. (Example: we know of a senior level executive who worked for well over a year to convince a competitor’s top salesman to ‘jump ship’, only to lose this guaranteed star player in an off-target and humiliating (for the candidate) intra-departmental ‘stress interview’.) Bottom line: interview survivors may be the ones who best tolerate non-productivity, who thrive on petty corporate politics, and/or who blow the biggest smokescreen.

As the saying goes, “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got.” If you want productive teams, you need to be able to identify the best team players. Now there’s a way to do that BEFORE you make big investments in a questionable interview process and risk a long-term commitment to the wrong person.

Some aspects of interviewing may always suck, but the outcomes will be a lot better if you limit it to the candidates who really know how to ‘team’.

BTW, since I wrote this, I discovered a fabulous source for women’s businesswear, so if you need something that fits well and says professional for an interview, check out www.bluesuitsonline.com. If you’re on the jobhunter side of the equation in this economy, you need every edge you can get. Good luck!

Psych was asking Product if he could get her a copy of the Gallup Q12 – a set of questions that test for ‘employee engagement’* so she could use it to survey people in her company.  Product pointed out that the Q12 is copyrighted material, and went on to lecture Psych about the value of such attitude surveys – or more accurately, the lack thereof.  He must have taken great notes in class.  He cited chapter and verse from product marketing literature, summing it up by stating categorically that although people might give you rave reviews, if they aren’t buying your product, who cares?

Psych was not convinced.  She had been given an assignment by her boss, and was determined to follow through.  I felt sorry for her.

If you are – or know – someone who feels compelled to measure ‘engagement,’ especially if the assignment has career-altering consequences, here’s a set of questions that you can offer without exposing them to copyright infringement litigation.  Why am I doing this?  Well, I’ve done 30 years of study and research on what makes great teams great, and I know there is a big difference between a person’s attitude about their place on a team (their level of engagement, if you will) and the underlying factors that influence ‘teaming’ behavior. The former will tell you about existing conditions. The latter will tell you why, and what you can do about it, thereby bridging the gap between attitudes and business results.

The technology we created, TGI Role-Based Assessment, measures the how and why of team synergy. If you’d like to know more, go to the Contact page at www.TheGabrielInstitute.com, say you read this, and you’ll get a special offer.

If you just want the survey questions, here they are. Tell people to rank them on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).  If you want to credit Dr. Janice and send her a link to your results, you’ll be making her very happy. She might even send you something extra special.

The TGI ‘Team 7’:

1. I know the vision, purpose, and/or goal for everything I do at work.
2. When problems arise – of any kind – they are usually resolved in a reasonable and efficient way.
3. My job responsibilities are aligned with my desire to serve my team and my organization.
4. I get respect and recognition from others in a manner that is meaningful to me.
5. My manager ‘gets’ me – consistently listens to me, values me, and encourages me to grow.
6. My coworkers feel like a real team to me. We share the load, we support each other, we have fun together, and we get the job done.
7. I may not have the most important job in the company, but I know that I make a significant contribution.

I’m sure you know what you want, so I don’t have to tell you the ‘right’ answers.

Oh, and just in case you are wondering what happened between the two young professionals in the hot tub…

I just heard they are getting engaged.

* An “engaged employee” is described, variously, as one who is fully involved in and enthusiastic about his or her work; who acts in a way that furthers the organization’s interests; who will ‘go the extra mile’ for colleagues and customers.