ExeQserve and CheQ Systems hit the beach in Iba Zambales last June 20 and 21. At that time a storm was brewing up north and the waves were crazy. I'm just glad that the decline in that area was gradual. That was because nothing stopped us from playing in the waves. We had the time of our lives which convinced me that going on a company outing on a rainy season was not such a bad idea at all. Let me tell you why:

1. Playing and swimming in the rain is so much fun. Need I say more?

2. Most of us Filipinos don't need to get tanned. Going to the beach under an overcast sky or in the rain rid us of the fear of getting sunburned.
3. No overcrowded beaches. The one we went to was practically empty. No need to worry about bothering others with our rambunctious horse playing.

4. The hard rain during the night could drown out the off-key singing (no guarantee).

5. Because it is off-season, you can negotiate a good low rate with the resort and the bus rental company. More money for booze and food.

6. Have you tried drinking booze in the rain? (just make sure the rain water don't mix with the liquor) It's great! Binge eating too.

7. If you go to a resort with a more relaxed house rules,( not one of those tight b*tt resorts that make you pay for just about every little thing and ram a barage of rules down your throat) you can come up with a wild party like we did i.e, sing at the top of our lungs, dance like we were drunk (wait, we were drunk!), played crazy games and pour beer and water (whicheve is available) on each other. Because there is practically no other guests, the resort staff just made sure we don't pour water or beer on the karaoke machine.

If you haven't gone to the beach, it ain't too late. If you have, you can always consider doing this next year.

One requirement for having fun, take people who are fun-loving and not those who hit the sack right after dinner or those who will not go out in the rain to swim when it's raining because they are afraid they might catch a cold. :)

In my opinion, the reason why many efforts to build teamwork go to waste is because managers fail to manage the change. I often get inquiry about team building and when I inquire back about how far they want to go with it, I get silence.

Many managers are convinced that they need to improve teamwork but are unwilling to do the necessary work to have it. They think (or wish) that a one or two-day off site will create some magic that will suddenly turn the backbiting off. That it will suddenly make people more committed to the goals and do their fair share in improving organizational performance. Sadly, this rarely happens or if it does, the improvement is short lived.

No wonder some people are skeptical about it and have lost hope that a team building intervention will help a team work better. I know at least one person who declare that team building is for suckers. I can't blame all those who think the kind of solutions that proliferate out there are not real solutions. I'm of the opinion that a lot of the things people learn from a decent team building workshop are valid. The problem lies in how the whole thing is set up and how follow-through is given.

Building Teamwork is pretty much about managing change. Let's listen to what Change Management Guru John Kotter has to say:He said first "Create urgency". This to me means make a case for the change. Do you need it? Or do you need an excuse to go on a company outing? Be sure that you need it and are willing to go towards great lengths to achieve it.

Kotter then said, "Form a powerful coalition". This means that the journey from no-teamwork to with-great-teamwork is bought into by the leadership of the organization and are committed to championing the change. Since we are talking about building teamwork here, they should also be committed to modeling the way by showing teamwork among themselves.

The third step is "create a vision for change". This is important. We don't have a common understanding of what it is like to have teamwork. For some it's unbridled collaboration and empowerment, for others it's allowing the boss to herd the rest of the team like cows. So what do you really want to see into the future when the team succeeds and becomes a high performing team? This has to be expressed in vivid terms.

Next, "communicate the vision. This can be part of the preparation for an off site activity or can be done in the early part of the event. I prefer the former. I think everybody should be clear about why they are camping out. I tell you I've had more than enough of participants mistaking the offsite activity for company outing and the team building activities mere parlor games! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! ( Sorry, got carried away there)

The fifth action is to "remove obstacles". This is why people go out for a two-day off site team building. This is so they can identify what get's in the way of teamwork and decide how to overcome them. Patrick Lencioni identified five dysfunctions that get in the way of teamwork and prescribed some ways to overcome them. I use his prescription in my workshops.

You can't go home from a team building event without doing Kotter's 6th step and that is "create short-term wins". You need to identify the things you can do right after the workshop that will pave the way for building a stronger, more cohesive team. These quick-win activities should be clear, specific, actionable and observable.

This will be the subject of step seven, "Build on the Change" Which is following through on the norms set in the workshop and see to it that they all happen. Managers should not let up until all the agreed changes in behavior become habits and that quick wins are pursued and achieved.

The last stage is "anchor the change in the corporate culture". Let it grow roots. Build your policies around strengthening and rewarding teamwork and discouraging, even prohibiting the absence of it.

See? You build your team building effort around John Kotter's 8-step model and I tell you, there's hardly any reason for it to fail.

Here's one more thing. I'll be more than happy to help you use this model to facilitate an organizational culture change for your company if you let me. Forget the one-day or half-day sessions that lead practically to nowhere.

If you want teamwork, manage the change.

The Funny thing is, despite the economic downturn which some people say lead to loss of jobs, companies continue to find it hard to find good qualified people in the Philippines. There is a tough competition for talent and experience. Mostly the latter than the former.

Many companies prefer to hire people with the right exposure, the right experience in the business they are in, the kind of clients they handle and the technology they are using. This is understandable. It is quite expensive to develop people to have all these and much riskier if the people they are hiring are managers. There is of course the risk of losing an employee after painstakingly training them because other companies who are unwilling to train, are more willing to part with their big bucks eating the cake that another company baked.

In a grander scheme of things, I am of the opinion that this situation is hampering productivity and profitability on a national level. Why? Because the war for talent is jacking up the market rate of hard to find jobs and causing some companies not to afford them. The war metaphor clearly indicates that there are winners and losers here. The price losers pay in the war for talent is stunted growth and mediocre performance. On the other hand, we have an over abundance of talents with no training (and college education, don't get me started with that!) and experience who are left to get whatever work is available. This is why we have business majors who are sweeping floors, engineering graduates working as data entry operators and other jobs that leave them with very little return on their college investment and very little purchasing power to buy the products and services that the industries are churning out. No wonder the economy is bad.

I think both government and industries need and must focus on human resource development. Companies must put up a human resource development plan of their own that will address the competency needs of their businesses. They should be able to hire younger, less experienced people and hone them well enough to succeed incumbent highly skilled people when they move on. Companies should develop their own career development and succession planning program. The Philippine government must look into giving more tax incentives to ALL companies who invest heavily on human resource development. This should ease the burden of finding qualified people and increase the opportunities of young professionals for career growth. I believe in the end, everybody will win.

Note: Not all Filipinos are passive or have the tendency to avoid conflicts or confrontations but most are. In this blog, I'm talking about most Filipinos, not all.

There's not enough of it in most Filipino work places. We Filipinos are not big on saying it as it is.We are non confrontational. We are specially timid around bosses. Geert Hofstede's research on power distance index puts us at top 4. That means that we are among those who have the most tendency to avoid contradicting or challenging a boss' opinion. This go both ways. I've seen managers go ballistic at small hints of challenge. We don't expect to be corrected by subordinates. We see it as an upfront, an uncomfortable, ego busting upfront.

The world is changing. The amount of education and information being absorbed by team members and their talents and intelligence would easily go to waste if they are not given the chance to speak up and speak their minds as freely and whenever possible.
I propose, that we change the way communicate in the workplace. Let us encourage candor and assertiveness. There are so much benefit for doing so. It will help managers make more informed decisions. It can save us from making expensive mistakes. Most importantly, it can increase engagement and teamwork.

Here's the difficult question, how do we go about it? How do we turn around ages of programming? How do we make unassertive people, assertive? How do we change a workplace that subscribe to hierarchical relationship?

This is what I tell my employees.

"I can't possibly be right all the time, hence I appreciate being corrected. Whenever you feel that I am making a bad decision, try to stop me. But don't expect me to just change my mind just because you tried. I'll put up a fight and I expect you to do the same. If I see you taking the coward's way out, I will call your attention until you realize that it pays to have a healthy exchange of ideas with me."

Let me tell you however, that saying those things is not enough. You cannot have that litany and then expect things to change right away. Leaders need to put their money where their mouth is by putting people to task about being open with their ideas, feelings and opinions.

That too however is not enough. Two interventions are necessary to establish a culture of candor and assertiveness. One requires establishing team cohesiveness by building trust, open communication, commitment, accountability and focus on result. The other one requires building the team's including the managers' assertiveness. They should be able to shift from passive or agressive to assertive style of communication.

There are dozens of available interventions out there on team building and assertiveness training. They will help you build a highly interactive and high performing team. If you need my assistance, call me at (63918)939-9294.

Aside from the fact that I am a Filipino working in a Filipino setting, I observed that Filipinos are different in many ways from people in the west and even from neighboring countries. This is of course not to say that we are totally different. It is the concoction of similiraties and differences that we need to take good look at and build on as we establish a completely engaged team. Here are my recommendations:

Equip Managers to Lead Teams
Many Filipino Managers are young, lacking in proper leadership training and inexperienced in leadership. Many of the new managers I've encountered are mostly task managers concerned mostly with getting things done. They have a very vague concept of teamwork, much less the dynamics that go with it. Many companies go to team building workshops without addressing a key ingredient to making teams work-- Leadership.

A Team Leadership workshop should address important team leadership issues as understanding the difference between management and leadership, the role they play in team development, what can get in the way of teamwork and what they can do about it. It should also offer coaching tools in large servings.

Train Your Employees To be Assertive

Filipinos are some of the least assertive people in the world. A research made on Power Distance Index place us one of the countries with the highest tendency to defer to authority. What does this mean? It means that most Filipinos are unlikely to challenge a wrong decision coming from a boss. Let me go further by saying that we are mostly non confrontational. We will hesitate to call the attention of a fellow worker whose doing a poor job for fear of ruining the personal relationship. we can do this to the point of damaging the performance of the whole operation. When this happen, we tend to be less engaged because we don't like the fact that the boss is not seeing or not addressing the performance issues.

An assertiveness training will help team members assert themselves when they need to speak up to the boss or to their team mates. This will allow the team to have more available information, quality decision making, and more engaged team members. Training them however is one thing, encouraging them is another. I have always find it a challenge to get team members to speak up to me about issues and I'm trying. What more those who discourage it?

Build Norms around trust, communication, goals, behaviors and results.

This one is universal.I think all teams in all over the world need this. I'm coming from a book written by Patrick Lencioni on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team. If you've been reading me from sometime, you'd know how I feel about this thing. My teambuilding workshops uses a lot of Patrick Lencioni's proposal on how to build cohesive teams. Let me know if you want to hear more from me about this.

Establish Opportunities for Teamwork

Give your employees a venue to practice teamwork. Equip them with tools. Things that come to mind are quality circles, six sigma teams, business process improvement exercises, etc. You can give them training on problem solving and decision making and other process improvement based tools that go with the programs I mentioned. Institutionalize process improvement. I've seen a lot of process improvement training that went for naught because of lack of a program to sustain it.

You probably know that I am very passionate about this I have created a complete team culture building solution that focuses on the things I've mentioned here. If you are serious with building a team culture for your company and I do think you should, please call me at (639)18-939-9294 or email me at ecebreo@exeQserve.com

Addendum I recently put together a new holistic team building program inspired by the proposal I wrote here. If you want to see it, just click this link:

I don't get it. Why would a manager not empower their employees? I didn't think I even have to talk about the benefits of empowerment. In fact it took me long to write about this subject matter because I thought it was too elementary.

What changed my mind? I've been encountering too many situations lately where lack of empowerment is causing some companies to slowdown, make wrong decisions or lose good people. Let me cite some instances.

In one company, a Country Manager micro manages everything including work performed by very junior managers. As a result, bills are not paid on time, some decisions that can be made at certain levels are refered to him causing delay and frustrations. It causes managers to leave the company, sometimes soon after they accepted the job.

In another, American bosses situated on the other side of the earth make decisions for their Philippine operation while very senior managers who have better understanding of the culture on this side of the planet are accountable for results but do not have enough authority to make things happen.

I could go on and on about some companies' lack of nimbleness that can be attributed to absence of empowerment but that's not the purpose of this blog. My purpose is for managers like me to recognize the power of empowerment and utilize them in the workplace as much as they can.

What is empowerment? If you Google it, you'll come out with so many answers so let me share the description that I know and the one I am referring to in this topic.

Empowerment is the delegation of responsibility, accountability and authority necessary to succeed in one's work. Now, a lot goes into making that happen. That is because just delegating per se won't cut it. The person giving the empowerment may cause the one being given power to fail if that person is not ready for empowerment. Factors like ability, readiness and willingness are critical to success of delegating responsibilities, accountability and authority. It starts therefore in hiring the right person, ensuring that, that person has the tools to make things happen and providing that person all the necessary support to gain confidence in what she is doing. This includes allowing the person to make mistakes and learn from them. This is tricky because we all know how expensive some mistakes can get.Sometimes we just can't allow them to make those mistakes so we become more controlling. The only way however, for the people we are leading to not make mistakes is for us managers to make the mistakes ourselves. If we are leading a lot of people, that would be a lot of mistakes on our part. This is why a lot of failures can be traced back to the inability of top leaders to make right decisions or their failure to make right decisions on time. I've seen it in my recruitment business. We've lost quite a number of great candidates because the top manager had to decide on the employment of people several rungs below him when the prospective immediate superior could have made that decision. By the time the top manager becomes available to interview a candidate, he has already accepted a job offer elsewhere.

I have seen the power of empowerment in my own team. I am able to do what I'm able to do because I've spread problem solving and decision making among my team members. It has a lot of benefits. People understand their responsibilities, are accountable for them and know that they can do whatever is necessary within the bounds of the company resources to make things happen. It frees me to focus on strategizing and more development works. It also frees me to coach. If you are doing a lot the decision making in the company, I assure you, it will very difficult to coach.

I enjoin you to look at how much empowerment you are giving your employees and resolve to ready them for empowerment. It makes their job more meaningful and yours less cumbersome.

As a team building facilitator, I am blessed with so much life learning each time I go out there and facilitate. There are a number of precious moments when participants would share important realizations or insights that would blow me away. There are also moments when I learn more than I expect to and I am sharing those moments with you today.

Argue and then Commit.

A couple of years ago, I was facilitating this learning game called spiderweb where participants would be asked to go through a web without any parts of their body touching the web. It's quite a physical game that cannot be completed on time without collaboration and commitment among team members. At that time, I have already facilitated this game a number of times and I already have a canned idea of what should be learned in this activity. This one was going to be more powerful than the previous experiences. The size of the group was too big so I decided to split them into two. Accidentally, all the formal leaders went to one group. I worried about the group with no leader because I was concerned that they won't be able to finish on time but I was wrong. The group without formal leaders finished very early while the group with leaders failed to complete the task after several attempts. What happened? In the group with all the leaders, the most senior called all the shots. Assigned tasks to everyone and took command of the group from step one. Unfortunately, his strategy was wrong and I supposed a lot of the members know this. They however kept mum and just followed the instructions. Each time somebody makes a mistake, the leader would scold that member and come up with a new instruction. They ran out of time before they could finish. The scene was totally different with the other group. They started by arguing about the best way to solve a problem. Somebody played the role of a leader but only to facilitate the implementation of the idea. When someone in the team thinks that one strategy is going wrong, she would speak out loud and the rest would listen and maybe argue. Each time they would execute however, even the ones who initially do not agree with the strategy would do her best to pitch in.

When we sat down to share the experience, the two groups recognized the stark difference between their approaches and then revised their ideas of how to assimilate a leadership role. They realized that leadership is not about taking control, planning and giving instructions. It's realizing the team's full potential by optimizing team talents. The group without formal leaders finished the game first because they had real leadership that allowed members to passionately share their ideas, argue and then commit. The leader of the team swore to me after the session.
about changing his style.

Let's Learn from Our Mistakes

In another spider web activity where the CEO of the company participated, the team was getting stuck with analysis paralysis. They were spending too much time planning every step to the point of wasting it. The CEO who intimated to me that he planned to lay back and allow the other members of the team to take charge ran out of patience and stepped in. He said, we need to stop overanalyzing things and start testing our ideas and if we are to make a mistake, let's learn from them and move on, and this they did. The CEO started asking the members which idea they think they should start testing. The group picked one and then they tested it. The first idea bombed. They talked about it a bit and came up with a better strategy and this one worked. They completed the task in no time. During the debrief, the participants realized two important things. One, it helps to have a leader that allows people to try out their ideas and then learn from mistakes when they make them. Second, that fear of mistake can paralyze a team. If the first one does not exist, the team can only have the second one.

Great Results follow Great Relationship

After a two-day management teambuilding, one of the senior managers of a multinational company spoke as a reaction to the workshop. He said "Every year we focus on setting our financial goals straight. We've talked about KRAs and KPIs but we never really covered relationship. It has always been too soft a topic for us. We fail to realize that the only way we can achieve all those goals, those key result areas and key performance indicators is if we work effectively together. And we can only work well together if we have a good working relationship strengthened by trust and open communication." They realize that good working relationship is followed by result. In that workshop they resolved to work on building a more cohesive relationship. They asked me to see to it that they followed through and we did follow through. They hit their targets that year and improved overall employee satisfaction.

Each of these experiences build on my appreciation of teamwork and guided me in leading my own team and improving my program. The amount of learning I receive from participants humbles me and make me look forward to learning more. I know they make me a better leader and a better team building facilitator.

I've always been a boxing fan. And as a fan, I am fascinated with the current pound for pound best boxer today, Manny Pacquiao. There is one boxing personality however that interest me more than Pacquiao. That is his coach, Freddie Roach.

I want to coach like Roach.

While I believe in Manny's talent, he couldn't have achieved his full potential without Roach. It is Manny's Attitude and Roach's coaching that allow the champ to get better every time. Let me point out some of the things that Roach do that make him worth emulating by anyone who is responsible for growth and success of another.

Presence.

Roach showed that one cannot coach in absentia. One has to be there in person to observe, give timely feedback, cheer the player on, or in some instances throw in the towel if necessary. In order to do all those, a coach like Roach has to be in the thick of the action. During practice and in the fight night. As a manager I need to be there for my team. I also need to be in the thick of the action. I should be ready with my feedback. I should be ready to cheer them on and make my call whenever necessary. I need to be there.

A Step Ahead

Everytime Pacquiao faces a challenge, Roach knows what to do. He looks ahead. He scouts the opponent by watching his previous fights, looking for chinks in the opponents armor. He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent and identify opportunities that his ward can capitalize on. He works on his game plan and then work with Paquiao on execution, way ahead of the fight. As a result, success is almost always assured.

I regret that I'm not always a step ahead as much as I want to be. As a manager and as a coach responsible for the success of my employees, I need to do more of stepping ahead, scouting for possibilities and laying the ground work for my team members to succeed.

Clarity of Purpose

Roach's purpose as a coach is clear. To help Manny succeed. The boxer's success is his success. In order for Pacquiao to succeed, he needs to become a better fighter. In order for that to happen, he needs to understand Pacquiao's strengths and weaknesses so that he can capitalize on the boxer's strengths and work on his weaknesses. Knowing his ward's strength help him pick the right fights for him. Not all coaches are as clear about their purpose as Roach. In fact some have it the other way. They need to succeed and the players are stepping stones towards that success. This method produce at least one loser and atmost, two losers - the player and the coach. I understand from Roach that the way to succeed is to help others succeed. That is the way to go.