Management Methodology of Technical Personnel (4) - Team Building Part 1

Posted on 2023-05-21 Edited on 2024-11-19 In Sundry Waline:

What makes a good team?

Good performance
- Direction: Manage the planning phase, define what constitutes good performance, and plan the team to match it
- Lead people: that is, the team building stage, continuously improve the team’s ability to achieve performance, including individual ability and team ability
- Work: task management stage, how to implement the plan through good control and produce results
High efficiency
- Look at the direction: the clearer the goal, the higher the efficiency
- Lead people: The stronger the individual ability of team members, the higher the level of cooperation among team members, and the higher the team efficiency
- Work: The more efficient the processes and rules, the more skilled the operation, the higher the efficiency of work
Sustainable
- Look at the direction: the rationality and effectiveness of team planning
- Lead people: perfect layers and mature team culture
- Work: The tenacity of the team is honed, and honed cannot be separated from continuous work

Team building elements

Capacity

Components of capacity
- Capability three core
  - Knowledge
    Knowledge and understanding of information, generally measured in breadth and depth
  - Skills
    The skill and ability to perform and perform a job, generally measured by proficiency
  - Talent
    - Spontaneous high-frequency patterns of thought, action, and feeling, including character traits, etc
- Three dimensions of work ability
  - Professional competence
    - For technical people, it generally refers to technical ability, which is different for different teams. Can be measured in breadth and depth
      Breadth: Represents how large-scale things can be done
      Depth: Represents how complex things can be done
  - General ability
    Such as: structured thinking ability. Teamwork ability. Project management ability. Quick learning ability
  - Personality strength
    Personality strength usually refers to a person’s stable attitude and performance in the face of a certain situation, such as facing difficulties, perseverance, and positivity.
    These personality forces are sometimes crucial to the ability to get something done, but they are not cultivated overnight. They often come from everyone’s long-term life and work experience, and once formed, they are difficult to change.
    But hard to change doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. In order for team members to tend to a certain common temperament, managers need to unequivocally advocate the character that the team promotes.
Objectives of capacity building
It is best to focus on learning goals, rather than scattered knowledge points
- For example
  - Professional competence perspective
    Prior Art Series
    Core technology thematic learning:
    Architecture topics
    Storage topics
    Front-end topics
    Security topics
    Operation and maintenance topics
    Automated Testing Topics
    Expand new technologies
    New technologies needed for business development
    Technology in the field
  - General ability perspective
    Project management capabilities
    The ability to bring people
    Communication skills
Standards for capacity building
What is the original intention of improving employee capabilities? Different original intentions decide what standards to develop, and then write this standard into the employee’s personal development plan and agree with them
- Avoid unclear expectations leading to high expectations or poor results
- Reasonably arrange the energy input of managers, and reasonably allocate the energy invested in different training objects
Methods of capacity building
7% rely on work practice, 2% rely on mutual communication, and 1% rely on listening to lectures and reading books for self-study
Employee Willingness to Learn
How to stimulate the motivation and willingness of employees to learn?
- Push: give pressure, push him to learn
  Provide clear job requirements
  - Establish learning mechanisms. Such as mandatory compliance with learning rules and completion of learning tasks
- Pull: Give direction and guide him to learn
  - Set an example
  - Equipped with tutors
  - Develop a skills map for the team to grow
- Let go: give room to play and learn independently
  - Give employees the opportunity to shoulder heavy responsibilities
    Give employees space to think independently
  - Give him confidence and patience, allow him to make mistakes and take detours
Two beliefs in ability development
- Believe in the diversity of employees’ abilities, that is, see the differences and value the richness
  In the era of knowledge economy, the creativity of employees can bring greater value to the team, and creativity often comes from the collision of differences
- Believe in the system of team capabilities, that is, appreciate differences and value complementarities
Motivation
Individual combat effectiveness depends on two elements: individual ability and willingness to use ability
- The challenge of employee motivation
  Upward communication, employee motivation and team cohesion are the three most challenging management themes in managers minds
  - Incentive cognitive non-system
    Understand some motivation skills and methods, but do not understand the overall picture of motivation, nor the reasons behind it, so there is no systematic incentive plan
  - Lack of incentives
    Real material incentives are not controlled by managers, and the spirit of “painting a pie” motivates employees without buying it, so there are few incentives available
  - Incentives don’t get the point
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Does this theory apply to China? Is there anything that needs to be changed according to local conditions?
Three Stages of Employee Motivation Development
- Instinct
  Mainly derived from the desire for survival and security, the hierarchy of needs is at the bottom of the “Maslow Hierarchy of Needs Model”.
- Outside drive
  The underlying philosophy is “seek reward, avoid punishment” - carrots and sticks - a widely accepted form of motivation in the industrial age for nearly 200 years. Its central purpose is to make employees “obey”.
  At the same time, Taylor’s “scientific management theory” believed that workers were like parts in a machine, they just needed to do the right thing in the right way at the right time to ensure that the machine worked well. In the industrial age of assembly lines, workers were required to do “obedience” rather than ingenuity
  - Existing problems
    - For most managers, material incentives are beyond the control of managers except for the pie
    - Lead to the disappearance of intrinsic motivation and reduce employee self-motivation
    - Causing a decline in performance
    - Kill creativity
    - Suppress good deeds
      For example, when a team’s rewards for excellence are not obvious, but the penalties for mistakes are severe
    - Encouraging fraud, shortcuts, unethical tactics
    - Addictive, making employees addicted to external incentives
    - Breeds short-sighted thinking
    - Will gradually be immune, “Those who are good at using authority will not be easily angry, and those who are good at using grace will not give indiscriminately”
  - Non-material incentives
    Such as praise and positive feedback, the negative harm of external incentives is low, and it is a commonly used external means
    - Specific principle: the content of praise should be specific
    - Disclosure principle: public recognition
      - Give praised employees more incentive
      - Tell everyone in the team what behaviors and values the team agrees with and advocates
    - Timely principle
- Inside drive
  - Three aspects of internal drive
    - Take control of your own life, i.e. “autonomy”
    - Extend your abilities, i.e. “specialization”
    - Make life more meaningful, i.e. “purpose”
  - Using internal drive to motivate employees is an unavoidable choice
    - Choice of times
      In the era of knowledge economy, the creativity of employees can create more value for the company, and creativity requires autonomy and difference, which is almost the opposite of the concept of the industrial age.
    - People’s choice
      With the development of China’s economy and culture, material rewards and punishments and the evaluation of others have become less important than before. Many professionals have their own unique work values, especially whether they are willing to do it
  - How to excite
    - Increases employee autonomy, that is, gives employees a certain degree of autonomy and control
      - The first is the freedom to work when and where
      - Secondly, the degree of freedom of work content
        Employees can choose their own work content to a certain extent
    - Improve the precision of employees, so that employees continue to grow
      Specialization here does not emphasize setting goals to become an expert, but emphasizes the process of self-involvement, creating conditions for employees to be willing to self-invest
      - Clear work objectives
        The clearer the requirements for the employee, the more willing he is to put in the effort
      - The goal should be slightly challenging
        Demanding too much from employees can lead to anxiety, and too little can lead to boredom
      - To be able to use its advantages
        Everyone is willing to do what they are good at, and if a job can give full play to the unique advantages of employees, employees will definitely be enthusiastic.
        Advantages can have many levels, we may not be able to meet the work content expected by an employee, but we can also consider the behavior mode and thinking mode, such as letting it do some communication
    - Improve the sense of meaning and mission of work
      While not rejecting benefits, pursue maximizing “value” and hope that the work you do is meaningful and valuable
      There is always a group of people who leave because their work is worthless. They are not hypocritical, but really need their work to be valuable
- Employee happiness
  Total Sustainable Well-being (PERMA)
  Not just emotional happiness, but a flourishing state of life that Martin Seligman calls “blooming.”
  - Positive emotions
    What kind of team atmosphere are you creating? Are team members trusting each other, cooperating happily, helping each other or complaining and accusing each other?
  - Human relationships
    What have you done to improve your employees’ sense of belonging and inclusion? Are there activities and mechanisms involved to make employees more willing to support each other, such as more commonly, have you assigned a designated mentor to each employee?
  - Put in
    Whether the conditions are created for employee autonomy, such as setting clear goals, giving them appropriate challenges, and supporting them to play to their strengths
  - Achievement
    Meeting challenges and achieving success is something that most engineers enjoy, but it requires a premise, which is our characterization of achievement.
    Make daily work projects and milestone large-scale projects
  - Meaning of life
- Design of incentive schemes
  - Incentives
    Is the incentive plan aimed at an individual, a group or the entire team?
  - Incentive purposes
    Clarify the effect that the incentive plan wants to achieve
  - Incentive type
    Mainly to distinguish whether the plan focuses on short-term effects or long-term effects
  - Incentives
    Choose what motivational elements to work on, each element of the three phases of the drive, all five elements of PERMA can be considered
  - The situation of the incentive object
    To be motivated to have a sufficient understanding of the object, such as the object of the incentive base line is what, only significantly more than the base line has the incentive effect, if below the base line, there will be obvious negative incentive
  - Reasonableness assessment
    - Consider the cost performance ratio from the cost
      Risk: that is, who will create obvious negative incentives
  - Incentive timing
- Responding to employee motivation challenges
  - Cognition of motivation: upgrade from a single incentive dimension to a three-dimensional incentive system
  - Incentive efforts should be used in peacetime, rather than relying on some temporary stimulation programs
  - Understand the elements to consider when designing an incentive program and be able to operate

Division of labor

The purpose of the division of labor
Many people’s first reaction is to improve efficiency. However, if efficiency is pursued, the division of labor should be reduced, because the more people cooperate, the lower the efficiency, so some teams’ performance will increase after layoffs.
In order to achieve scale, the division of labor is not for efficiency, but for scale
- Collaboration: Division of labor is the means, collaboration is the end
- Achieve specialization
Common organizational structure
- Matrix structure
  Employees team up according to their roles and are divided into different role teams, each team has its own person in charge. When you want to do a project, there will be a special project manager to apply for manpower from each team leader.
  - Pros: The professionalism of the team in each role is high
  - Disadvantage: The project is relatively inefficient to execute
- BU type structure
  All personnel and resources for a business are deployed in a unified manner. No matter whether the business department is large or small, it has a full range of roles.
  - Advantages: High cooperation efficiency
  - Disadvantage: Redundant resources
Common division of labor issues
- Blurred division of labor
  This is the most common misunderstanding, and even some managers in order to let everyone complement each other, take the initiative to undertake, enhance mutual assistance, but also to blur the boundary, the so-called “de-boundary”.
  However, it should be noted that any blurring of boundaries that is not premised on a clear division of labor will backfire. Because:
  Only a clear division of labor can bring a sense of belonging and be willing to take the initiative to give more. As long as you understand what you should do, you can know what you do is “proactive”
- Division of labor stability issues
  Only stable division of labor can reflect the value of division of labor
  - The continuous adjustment of the business will cause the division of labor to change constantly
  - Long-term stable division of labor, while bringing expertise, will also bring limitations and laziness, fragmented vision
Virtual organization
- Advantages
  - Efficient execution
    The organization of virtual teams is generally for dedicated people, focused goals, and efficient execution
  - Reasonable allocation of resources
    For many tasks, it is not worthwhile to form a dedicated team, but from time to time new projects need to be set up. Virtual teams provide a solution for such needs. Everyone can come together to do things, but not as a team with an independent budget
  - Maintain a sense of belonging
- Principle
  - Specialized people, not too many
  - Recognize employee value
    Now that you have agreed to your employee’s participation in this virtual organization, you must recognize his value regardless of whether the performance is what you value most.
    Many managers often depress employee performance on the grounds that employee output is not of great value to their team, which is a typical example of letting employees bear the consequences of managers’ decisions
  - Clear goals and responsibilities

Collaboration

The direction of effort is: tacit understanding like a person

How to improve the level of collaboration

- Overall coordination

  - Evaluate the level of collaboration and identify work priorities

    For the level of collaboration, it is difficult for us to give a measure, but the level of collaboration is excellent and medium, which can be roughly felt.
    Mainly to answer a question: what are the main problems in the current collaboration, and what can be done to significantly improve the level of collaboration

  - Advocate and promote various tasks

    Implement the concept of "collaboration is important" to team members, and promote some measures for employees to switch height to promote collaboration

  - Overall coordination, provision of arbitration

    Collaboration is a dynamic process. There will definitely be differences and frictions among employees in the process of collaboration. Managers should take resolving differences as an opportunity to improve collaborative relationships.
    Resolving differences and contradictions in cooperation is precisely the most effective means to improve the level of cooperation

- Establishment of mechanisms

  Employees don't work well together just because they are proactive, and managers need to provide templates and guidance to avoid confusion and overwhelm.
  How employees should collaborate is not naturally clear, and managers need to establish some mechanisms to guide everyone.

  

- Enhance mutual trust

  - Deep and solid mutual understanding
  - Targeted team building activities
  - Increase opportunities for cooperation and face challenges together

- Keep practicing