31. Ensure your team works intensively, without interruptions, for about 50 minutes in each hour; has a break of 10 minutes doing something different to cool down the brain, before starting another intensive 50 minutes
Ensure they don’t respond to emails during the 50 minutes, and that all calls go to a silent answerphone (to be checked in the 10 minutes break).
If the work is a rapid response type of work, the 50 minutes includes receiving communication and responding to it.
The person in this type of work still needs the 10 minutes break in each hour to do something completely different.
Adopt these principles to your own work patterns.
32. Encourage your team to practice “Intelligent Behaviours”
You can do this by holding short Intelligent Behaviour sessions, where one behaviour is practised.
This can be repeated at intervals (throughout the day?) using different behaviours, until your team has embedded Intelligent Behaviours in their routine.
33. Ensure the physical environment in which your team is expected to work is fit for purpose
It should aid concentration, be ergonomic, and technology should be effective in maintaining individual concentration.
Performance is only achieved when individuals can willingly concentrate on their tasks.
Open plan and ‘hot desking’ staff should be able to concentrate on their work and not be easily diverted.
34. Ensure that any mechanical and technical failures are fixed immediately
The whole point of using technology is to aid the individual in completing tasks effectively.
Any breakdown means performance breakdown and should be fixed immediately to enable concentration to be regained and performance continued.
35. Ensure your meetings are fun
Meetings are expensive, but provide an opportunity for social interaction (and even entertainment).
They can be pressure release valves, as well as achieving matters of significance, in ensuring the future success of the organisation.
36. Ensure each of your meetings has an agenda that is either a single or several questions to be answered
This enables those attending the meeting to understand their contribution and why they are there.
It ensures that meetings have a valid purpose.
37. Ensure you can sell tickets to your meetings.
If you can’t sell tickets, then, obviously, no one thinks the meeting is worth the money, and should be cancelled.
38. Ensure your team learns something every day
Come together at the end of the working day to go over what has happened.
Remember to reinforce the culture that all failures are successes waiting to happen.
39. Ensure your team plans for tomorrow
Review today and make a list of key things to do tomorrow.
Encourage your team to put the list away and get some rest when they go home.
Emailing each other should be forbidden, except in a genuine emergency or to help with arrangements for tomorrow if something has gone wrong overnight.
40. Encourage your team members to identify how their organisation can be more successful tomorrow compared with today
Remind them to think like a chief executive.
Support your team members when they make critical comments about anything by challenging the validity of the observations and helping them sharpen their observations
See below for other parts in this series.
Taken from our Leadership Masterclass October 2016.