The following symptoms may indicate that lack of commitment and effort is rapidly becoming a critical management issue for your team:
• Your members leave as soon as possible after quitting time each day and refuse to work overtime when needed.
• Members doubt their ability to perform. They feel overwhelmed by small challenges and routinely gripe about the lack of fairness in assignments.
• Members seem to feel that “it’s every person for herself.” They are unwilling to help each other on projects or to assist each other in problem solving.
• Whenever you ask members to take on new assignments or skill areas, their first reaction is to offer excuses why they can’t be expected to handle these new job challenges.
• You feel that your team is performing well below its maximum performance potential.
Strategies
The first strategy is to overcome inertia. An engineering friend once explained that 90% of a locomotive’s energy is expended during the first few minutes of start-up as it attempts to move the train from rest. Once the engine overcomes its massive inertia and the train is running at high speed, relatively small amounts of energy are needed to keep it in motion. In much the same way, the first job you must tackle will be to overcome your team’s initial inertia and get it started along the track. In this section we offer strategies for overcoming inertia by creating a sense of urgency, removing yourself as a buffer, conducting a performance analysis, and creating competitors.
The second strategy is to challenge the limits of your members. This strategy involves encouraging your members to raise their self ¬expectations, redefining performance, modelling limit-busting, cloning superstars, and using incremental successes and celebrations.
The last strategy is to get out of the way of team members. This involves removing any roadblocks that you may be unintentionally placing in their path. Managers get in the way whenever they hamstring a team’s authority and its control over its own work, send inconsistent messages about desired performance, or create conse¬quences that actually work against desired performance. As part of getting out of the way, you will discover how to strategically empower your staff, send clear messages about your performance expectations, and create consequences that support desired performance.
