Building Your Roster
Practical Applications in Servant Leadership, part 9
(Previous posts: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8)
I follow a lot of baseball. Because I’m interested in the business and economic side of it as well as the individual team, I follow it pretty much year round. The offseason and the trade deadline both produce interesting happenings to evaluate.
I love roster construction. It’s not just about finding the best players, but the ones that fit well with one another. When you’re adding players via the draft or free agency or trade you have to think four dimensionally about how they’ll fit in not just the current lineup of the team but how it affects players who are still in the minor leagues or your budget for players that are becoming free agents or available via trade later. The number of thought exercises that can go on are staggering.
The next question we’re looking at in the Q12 survey is related to each individual person’s assessment of the team she or he works with day in and day out:
Q9: My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
You may not feel as though you influence whether someone else does quality work. If you are at all involved in hiring, development or accountability, though, you do. You, as a leader, affect the culture of the team entrusted to you and you set the tone for excellence.
How do you organize your team? How is work distributed? Are there members of the team who end up cleaning up the mess for others? Is someone, or more than one person on the team regularly turning in lower quality work and being tolerated or essentially subsidized by others? When you’re hearing “disagree” or “neutral” from your direct reports on this question it means they sense what some have called “sanctioned incompetence.”
What’s your impression? Are your direct reports committed to doing quality work? If not, why do you think that is? There has been a lot of virtual ink spilled over the supposed trend of “quiet quitting” Your team members are going to be especially sensitive to co-workers who aren’t carrying their load being tolerated.
Remember the important thing is dealing with the leadership and cultural issues that drive the employee’s perceptions! What does a culture of quality look like and how do you build and sustain it? Here’s a few suggestions:
Set an example. If you’re phoning it in regularly or making excuses for mediocre work that you perform there’s no way it doesn’t trickle down to your direct reports. Make a regular habit of doing an informal 360 self-review on the quality of your own work. Ask your boss and your direct reports and peers to give you candid feedback on where you can improve in qualitative performance on tasks, reports, meetings, etc.
Create clear standards. If “quality work” isn’t objectively definable for everyone’s work it’s hard to hit the target. Communicate what the target is and make sure your assessment of completed work isn’t subjective. Very often our qualitative assessment is driven by mood, timing, sleep, personality conflicts or unconscious bias. If there’s an objectively communicated standard, it’s easy for your direct report to appeal to that even if your initial assessment is marred by subjectivity in the moment.
Create a Culture of Consistent Retrospectives. What you call it - a post-mortem or a retrospective- is less important than how your team surrounds one another with positive reinforcement on good work and kind candor where improvement is needed. You can read here a more in depth look at some of the ins and outs of a solid retrospective examination.
A culture of quality takes consistent diligence and open communication to maintain and it’s much easier to destroy than it is to build. Great baseball teams go from the World Series to last in the division quickly and it takes years to turn it back around. Don’t let your inattention to quality allow your team to slide down that slope.
What are some other ways you’ve successfully reinforced a culture of quality work around you? Jump in the comments and share your pro tips!