Today, we offer you a simple answer to this question, coupled with a powerful graphic, that blows away the whole employee engagement conundrum.

So What is Employee Engagement, exactly?

As an employee or an individual, you can be said to be ‘engaged’ when 3 factors are at work together:

• Your Head is engaged on the task. In other words, you are concentrating on the task in hand and have a good understanding of it.
• Your Heart is engaged on the task. When your Heart is engaged you want to complete the task you are working on, and you want to do more tasks of that kind.
• Your Hand is engaged on the task. When your Hand is engaged on the task your body physically commits to doing that task, and often forms a habit of doing it repeatedly.

These three factors of Head, Heart and Hand explain what engagement is – simply! At this point you may find it helpful to download and view the graphic that illustrates the engagement process here.

Engagement: not a destination but a cycle

One mistake organisations make is when they consider employee engagement as a destination. It is nothing of the sort. The reality is that engagement is an ongoing cycle, and happens by the millisecond.

The good news is that employee engagement is really no more complex than the graphic attached. And, as long as managers ask themselves and their employees the right questions, then they can get a good handle on how engaged they may be at any one time.

What are those questions? We will cover this more extensively in a future post, so make sure you are subscribed to our free email updates that will keep Taking your Talent to a Higher Level!

Also let us know what you think about the Engagement Cycle graphic attached by posting a comment below! Helpful or not? Let us know!

Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

The training programmes below are our hottest sellers in Thailand and develop your people’s skills in the ‘core 5′ areas of Communication, Customer, Leadership, Talent and Teams.

Have a look – and if you’re interested in any of them – fill in the form below for details of our Special Offer now running for these 5 key management training programmes – with a 20% discount for all orders received before the 10th February 2012!

Special Offer Management Training Programmes (Thailand only)

	Communication – Presentation Talent! Presentation Talent! is an enjoyable and intensive two day presentation skills programme that takes your people through all the steps to make their presentations shine. * With video clips and exciting, hands-on activities as well as plenty of speaking assignments, Presentation Talent! is essential for those making management presentations and sales presentations alike.
	Customer – Customer Experience Maximisation Would you like your people to create an outstanding customer experience at every touchpoint? * If so, then you need Customer Experience Maximisation! CE Max gets communication and buy-in from multiple levels and functions of your organisation to innovate a blowaway customer experience!
	Leadership – The Leadership Challenge The world’s bestselling leadership training programme is now available in Thailand – exclusively through Talent Technologies If you would like your managers to learn and practise what it takes to lead across cultures as well as up and down your organisation, then The Leadership Challenge is for you! Make 2012 the year you join the world’s best. Run The Leadership Challenge in your company!
	Talent – Talent Factor Getting your team playing to their strengths is the #1 engagement driver in companies. But how do we identify those strengths? Using the world’s only objective assessment of talent (Highlands Ability Battery) Talent Factor enables you to identify not only your colleagues’ talents, but also a career plan and natural team roles – making this another must have training programme for 2012!
	Teams – Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team Don’t be misled by the title! Your team does not have to be dysfunctional to benefit from this, the world’s bestselling team development programme! Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team equips your team players with all the tools needed to create effective, engaged and high-performing teams – a much-needed management skill in Thailand!

So there you have our top management training programmes for 2012.

If you would like to take advantage of our Special Offer which must end on February 10th 2012, simply reply using the form below with ‘Special Offer’ in the ‘message’ box >>

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Please send me your Special Offer details > > >

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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It’s been a privilege to observe

The Start-Up Weekend is an opportunity for individuals in the Tech Space to bring their ideas and dreams to fruition, and work as part of teams to bring the latest ‘hot idea’ to market.

But I don’t want to dwell on the details of the event, which can be found here. Instead, here are some take-homes for participants in the teams which (I hope!) prove to be helpful. Please don’t shoot the messenger!

4 Key Take-homes

1. Focus on the Business Concept first!

It was great to see so many talented individuals give so much passion to their projects on the Weekend. However… in many cases there seemed to be a huge disconnect between ‘great tech idea’ (and development) to something the customer actually wants, will use regularly, and will pay for.

Take-home: Start with the Business Concept first and make sure it’s juicy (we will follow up with a failsafe tool that helps you do exactly that – don’t miss out by subscribing here).

2. Network in the real world as well as in your teams

Yes yes I know… you’re working flat out on your project, often till 11pm at night. But if you do get a chance to break out – have a look at the other teams – what are they doing? – and try to network with the wealth of ability and experience around you…

3. Web programmers and developers – communicate!

What stood out to me as an outsider was the overwhelming pattern that every table seemed to adopt:

- The Marketing Idea guys and Business Concept owners, as well as the Finance Guys, did most of the talking

- The Design guys did some of the talking

- The Programmers and Developers sat there and waited to be told what to do!

Take-home: Programmers speak out! We need to know what you think! We need to know what you can do! Can you do more? Something else? Something similar… or different? Share your perspective! Communicate more!

4. Get your presentation straight!

Yeah yeah, you can always go on Presentation Talent! to improve the odds (big time!) But if you don’t have the means or the money to go on the programme, at least do the following:

- prepare your presentation using our free presentation planner here

- practise your presentation using white cards as cues

- and please… Tech Guys… please make sure your technology works!

Take-home: So many of the presentations were poorly delivered including demos the wrong way up, tech that failed, powerpoints that shuddered, and speeches that juddered that those that did get their presentations right effectively had a ‘free shot’ at Gold. Focus on benefits and not features, and do the above, and you’re half way there. Really.

Don’t miss out on our Start Up ‘One Pager’!

Tech guys – I know, I really know, how you struggle with ‘white space’ stuff like ‘customers’, ‘business models’ and ‘validation’.

So as well as our Marketing Model (available for free download here), I’ve come up with a ‘One Pager’ which I’ll be posting before the year’s out.

To be sure you get it, simply subscribe here and you’ll be notified when it’s made available!

Happy Start-Upping!

Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

]]> http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/12/ais-start-up-weekend/feed/ 0 http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/12/presentation-skills-training-thailand/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=presentation-skills-training-thailand http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/2011/12/presentation-skills-training-thailand/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:51:49 +0000 admin http://www.talent-technologies.com/new/?p=7618 If you want to sharpen up your presentation skills in Thai or English, then this key skill needs to be at the centre of your repertoire.

The skill I’m talking about is the impact message.

It’s important because no matter whether you are making an internal presentation to management or a sales presentation to clients, being able to craft a memorable impact message makes it easier for your audience to follow what you are saying, and, more importantly, take the actions you would like them to.

What an impact message is

An impact message is an emotive ‘call to arms’ that sums up what you are saying in your presentation, and hammers home your message with persuasiveness and urgency.

Advertisers use impact messages all the time. They do so because they know that their audience have little time to dwell on details and… because impact messages sell.

Impact messages are typcially no more than 9 words in length and loaded with energy, colour and emotion.

Yet these short, lively messages can take quite some time to craft… but this need not be so…

How to craft your impact message

If you would like to craft a compelling impact message in a tenth of the time of advertising agency creative departments, then these are the steps you need to follow (we cover these with examples in our presentation skills training programme Presentation Talent! – more details here):

1.Perform your audience analysis – try to identify their interests, needs and obstacles they are facing. Identify their backgrounds if possible – what kind of factors appeal to them?

2. Write down 20 questions without thinking on your subject matter. This will draw out the topics you will speak on.

3. Map out your topics using a clustergram. Feel free to be as creative as possible, and avoid censoring your ideas.

4. Now cross our redundant ideas and concepts, and highlight recurrent themes.

5. Try to articulate a message in up to 20 words for those themes.

6. Now get a single, central theme of no more than 9 words, and load it with a powerful image, and…

…voila – you have your impact message!

Make an impact with your presentations – every time!

If you would like to discover the power of the impact message as well as the other essentials of delivering presentations that are concise, effective and that persuade, why not have a look at Presentation Talent! our 2 day presentation skills training programme delivered in Thailand and Asia – simply follow the link below!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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And the question is a very valid one, since companies are trying to upgrade the capabilities of their teams and leaders at the same time. But is there an order in which this should be done?

Often, clients will note that ‘leadership’ is the gap that needs most urgent attention in their companies, and thus prioritise training this specific skill set.

But so often, this ‘direct’ approach backfires in Asia. Let me explain why.

Leaders are only as good as their… teams

We’re probably all familiar with the movies where a charismatic leader is able to inspire his or her team to heroic efforts. And, given that most of these movies originate in America, it’s not hard to discern the very individualistic strain that runs through them.

The Anglo-Saxon concept of leadership tends to glorify this type of leader. Think of Maximus (played by Russell Crowe) in Gladiator, or Mel Gibson’s character in Braveheart. It’s easy to be seduced by such chest-thumping examples of leaders.

However research conducted by the world’s leading cross-cultural authority, Geert Hofstede, should serve as a caution to companies wishing to use Leadership as a starting point for their management training. This is because his very extensive research has discovered that most Asian countries don’t share this individualistic concept of leadership. In fact, they are as a whole more collective or ‘group oriented’ in character (those interested can see the difference between individualism and collectivism here, as well as the data for select countries).

What this tells us is that people from countries with high collectivist orientation prefer to move forward as a group, rather than as a number of individuals.

Why fight when you can flow?

Last week The Daily Reckoning proposed a new theory of government. It goes as follows – ‘I can’t lead. And I don’t want to follow.’

This struck a chord with us here at Talent Technologies, because it’s a mode of thought that is becoming increasingly prevalent here in Asia.

More and more professionals – especially those in the Gen Y category – don’t want to lead, and also don’t want to follow. Or rather, don’t want to follow in the traditional sense of following rules and regulations, and bosses etc.

Yet this group of professionals do seem to work more effectively as part of a team – when a team is formed. The problem is, as we saw in a previous post of ours here – teams are actually a rarity in Asia. ‘Groups’ predominate, but a group is not a team.

Given this, does it really make more sense to go from group to team, or group to leader, first?

Teams must come first…

From our experience teams must come first. This is not only because the step from group to team as opposed to group to leader, outlined above, is the more natural one. And this is not only because Gen Y tend to be serial responsibility-shirkers.

It’s also because the conceptual gap – i.e. the number of concepts and behaviours required to ‘change’ to ‘become a leader’ are so many that it’s no surprise that most leadership training programmes fail miserably to achieve their goals.

And most of all it’s because – and please note this carefully – that the medium of a strong team itself makes the work of leadership easy!

In other words, get the team right, and you won’t have to lead (so much!)

If you’re thinking of developing your team, then look no further than the world’s #1 team development programme here. And, once you’ve put your team through that, why not work on the stuff of leadership in this award-winning training programme – The Leadership Challenge?

Happy teamwork, and happy leading!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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นำเสนอทักษะอย่างมืออาชีพ เพื่อที่จะบรรลุความเป็นเลิศในการทำงาน โปรแกรมการฝึกอบรมการบริหารจัดการของเราครอบคลุม 5 หน่วยหลักของ ‘ทักษะเสริม’ ในรูปแบบที่น่าตื่นเต้นและมีปฎิสัมพันธ์

5 หน่วยหลัก >>

พรสวรรค์ – เพื่อบรรลุความเป็นเลิศรายบุคคล รู้จักจุดแข็งของคุณ จัดการการทำงานของคุณเพื่อให้คุณสามารถเล่นบทบาทกับจุดแข็งของคุณได้อย่างเป็นปกติและการสร้างการบริหารจัดการเวลาและระบบเพิ่มการทำงาน เพื่อช่วยให้คุณสามารถจัดการทุกๆวันของคุณได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ เพียงสามหัวข้อของหน่วยหลักของเราที่ช่วยให้คุณประสบความสำเร็จในที่ทำงาน — ทุกวัน โปรแกรมการจัดการพรสวรรค์ >>

ทีมงาน — การทำงานร่วมกันได้อย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ ความสามารถในการทำงานร่วมกันอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพในทีม การเป็นผู้นำและพัฒนาทีมและส่งเสริมพฤติกรรมการมีส่วนร่วม คือทักษะศูนย์กลางของหน่วยการฝึกอบรมของเรา นอกจากนี้ยังรวมถึงทักษะการบริหารจัดการข้ามวัฒนธรรมอีกด้วย โปรแกรมการจัดการทีม >>

การสื่อสาร – สร้างการเชื่อมโยง โปรแกรมทักษะการสื่อสารของเรา ช่วยให้เข้าใจรูปแบบการสื่อสาร พัฒนาความฉลาดทางอารมณ์ (EQ) ของพวกเขาและสื่อสารอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพในด้านบุคคลและในการเขียน โปรแกรมการสื่อสาร >>

ผู้นำ — การบรรลุเป้าหมาย การก้าวกระโดดจากผู้จัดการสู่การเป็นผู้นำเป็นหัวใจของหน่วยการอบรมนี้ นอกจากนี้ยังมีภาวะผู้นำยังสร้างทักษะในการฝึกและการจัดการต่อการเปลี่ยนแปลง โปรแกรมภาวะผู้นำ >>

ลูกค้า — การส่งมอบประสบการณ์ที่ดี สามารถออกแบบและนำเสนอประสบการณ์ลูกค้าที่โดดเด่นภายในบริษัท และพัฒนาทักษะการบริการลูกค้า ซึ่งถือเป็นสิ่งสำคัญของการฝึกอบรม โปรแกรมการจัดการลูกค้า >>

Contact us here for more details > > >

But increasingly, management training needs to be seen in a different light – one central for companies wishing to execute more effectively on their strategies. Here’s why…

Conceptual skills are what Thai employees lack the most!

Regulatory burdens and technical skills shortages are often cited by both Thai and multinational companies alike as being serious barriers to doing business in Thailand. However there is another factor (leaving aside English language skills for the moment) that trumps both of them.

That factor is ‘conceptual skills’ – the ability to be able to work using language, numbers, and abstract ideas as part of one’s work. We’ll explain what this means and why it is so important in concrete terms in a moment!

In its massive study of the competitiveness of Thai & Malaysian companies, The World Bank in its PICS report discovered an interesting thing. While Thai employees were ranked nearly 60% as effective in Technical Skills as their Malaysian counterparts, when it came to conceptual skills, this figure fell to below 25% when it came to conceptual skills. Put another way, the Malaysian employee was judged to be able to problem solve, use numbers, generate ideas, communicate concepts and define issues over 4 times more effectively than his or her Thai counterpart!

What conceptual skills are, and why they are so important

Have a look at the chart below. As you can see, the higher an employee progresses up an organisation, the more important conceptual skills (in the dark blue boxes) become.

This stands to reason. After all, front-liners are mostly ‘doing things’ or ‘making things’. The more one manages, though, the more one has to make connections between things – and that’s where those conceptual skills come in!

If your company needs or expects its staff to know or use the following words in any shape or form – then that means you will need your people to have good conceptual skills:

Teamwork     KPIs     Processes     Attitude     Leadership     Behaviour     Talent    Trust

Accountability     Issue Resolution     Customer Service     Customer!     Communication

Now, how many Thai companies routinely struggle with the above?

…That’s why Training is so important in Thailand!

This is not to suggest that Thai or Multinationals now need to go ‘all in’ on management training. However, it’s essential that they (in our opinion) address these shortcomings in a strategic and systematic way.

This means getting the very best programmes that turn these concepts into images and experiences and link to your business’ realities.

You can find a list of our management training programmes here that make understanding these concepts and then turning them into behaviours really easy.

Also, why not stay on top of developments in Thailand and Asia by subscribing to our newsletter Talent Talk here.

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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We’ve seen before the challenges of forming a team in Thailand and, while the group culture can be a challenge to some, it is not insurmountable. However the human resource challenge we are writing about in this post is very difficult to crack, and, unlike group behaviour, has few positive attributes.

What we’re talking about is Face.

Most managers will be aware of ‘face’ and the challenges it presents them with. In short, they are provided a list of ‘don’ts’ in their cross-cultural course and many leave it at that.

However, we do not think such an approach is that healthy given our experience in the Thai workplace, and the damage that ‘face’ does in a daily basis – not only to companies – but, it’s critical to understand, Thai individuals themselves.

What is ‘Face’?

Face is another way of saying ‘reputation’ – though it goes a lot further than that. In an interaction in Thailand, both sides will take care to manage the representation of themselves, so that neither looks ‘bad’.

However, in the rough and tumble or business life, where multiple players operate on a stage at any time, and where relationships can change in a nanosecond, maintaining Face is extremely difficult.

Also, change the ‘level’ playing field of friend-friend into the commercial one of manager-staff or customer-service-provider and the problems really start to come in.

The trouble with spending so much time managing Face is that it can leave precious little focus on other unseen players (think ‘customers’, ‘colleagues in another department’ and then mmore conceptually – ‘strategy’, ‘process’ and ‘standards’).

Another problem with Face – and one we do not think many Thais have adequately thought through – is when respect for another person is confused for the other person’s representation of themselves, until – chaiyo! – a relationship between two people suddenly becomes four. We soon enter a weird and wonderful world of make-believe, a hall of mirrors where it’s impossible to distinguish the Character from Personality, and where all players get totaly confused. What follows is so often a charade, where, mimicking actors in a Thai Soap, the players then create a persona that ultimately becomes untrue.

Why playing the game of Face is so damaging to business in Thailand

So what? We can almost hear our readers ask.

Well, playing the game of Face is creating huge costs to businesses in Thailand every day. Consider the following:

• A service rep will typically be more concerned of maintaining Face with a colleague than with a customer, thereby subordinating the customer to a low priority concern.
• When collaborating, all sides will seek to make sure that Face is maintained, and not only that, that the representation of Face is maintained. All uncertainty being avoided in Thai culture, this will typically lead to meetings that generate precisely nothing. But hey – as long as no-one has lost Face – we have achieved our objective, right?
• Peter Drucker said that the first role of the manager is ‘to define reality’. How easy is it for the Thai manager to do that, when he finds himself in situations that are so often only representations of reality, leading to…
• …the easy option. Thais will tend as a result to avoid anything that may give rise to conflict or uncertainty. This typically leads to managers not correcting their direct reports, and direct reports not giving feedback to their managers. In short, a void forms that severely impairs corporate performance and is characterised by under-management.
• When a serious mistake occurs, it is the (Faceless) group that must be held accountable, so that the individual concerned does not lose Face.
• Because Face engenders Fear, and Fear prevents Action, Face holds employees back from making decisions, trying new approaches, innovating, taking initiative, learning, growing, and developing themselves.

One piece of advice we would give to Thai and expatriate managers alike is that conflict is an essential dynamic of progress.

Conflict-avoidance and face-saving in advance only leads to bigger conflicts down the line – and these are the ones that really derail organisations. The key is to learn how to encourage safe conflict that achieves a team objective, as opposed to a charade of face-saving that only achieves individual ones. And not even that, as we shall see…

Why playing the game of Face is so damaging to individuals in Thailand

If we give our readers the feeling that Face is somehow self-serving in Thailand, then perhaps we should clarify ourselves.

Mental health admissions in Thai hospitals are currently soaring.

Now we are not so foolish as to attribute all of these cases to Face. But we would like to share a top psychiatrist’s explanation that many of his patients are ‘confused’. Sound familiar?

Face is the one great unspoken challenge not only for Thailand’s human resource capability, but also for Thai society. Ex-PM Abhisit Vejjajiva lamented that the problem with reconciling Thais lay not with practicalities but that Thai people ‘paint themselves into a corner’. We can see how avoidance, in this case, leads to polarisation and bigger problems down the line. Given this does being respectful of ‘Face’ really help anyone?

Face in our view harms Thai individuals in the following ways:

• An obsession with Face physically, leading to an almost neurotic obsession with looks. In our view this leads at first to vanity and in turn creates personal insecurities, feelings of dissatisfaction, low self-esteem and confidence issues.
• This insecurity in turn feeds the unhealthy conflicts that are happening we feel with greater frequency in Thai society. A typical cycle – which we see happen regularly in the workplace – is described by the Karpman Drama Triangle here.
• Face leads to such a need for recognition and fear of not receiving it in Thailand that we have advertising campaigns like that recently of Aum Patcharapa who suddenly has found the courage (being movie star and all) to ‘dare to be me’.
• More than anything else, we wonder whether Face, by denying reality and personal responsibility, is on a societal level heading towards a precipice?

What you can do to make sure Face doesn’t derail your organisation…

The good news is that all the above happens if managers don’t do their gardening!

And doing your gardening means implementing a structured training programme.

Two programmes we offer that specifically overcome the shortcomings of Face are Personality Factor – where participants discover their personality type and the types of others, enabling them to collaborate more effectively – and Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team – where, among other skills, participants learn how to master conflict.

You can find details of Personality Factor here and the world’s #1 team development programme Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team here. Or why not drop us a line with your specific human resource challenges using our contact page?

Lastly we hope this post has been useful and give you pointers how to make your organisation in Thailand more dynamic and harmonious – and deepen your understanding beyond that introductory cross-cultural course!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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Collaboration of course is critical – not only in Thailand but in any organisation that requires sustainable, long-term performance. And with the increase of complexity as the rate of change among industries accelerates, and the demands at work become ever larger, collaborating in teams is only going to become more important and more valuable for organisations going forward.

A Group is not a Team

The first, critical concept we would like to share with you – and one that trips up so many potential teams in Asia – is that a group is not a team.

Yet, being born and raised in a group or ‘collective’ culture, many Thais will find it harder to differentiate between what is a ‘group’ and what is a ‘team’. Accustomed to doing things together and collectively, many will assume that this is indeed ‘team’ behaviour.

And expats, many coming from more individualistic cultures (like America, Britain and many other countries in Europe), will also see this type of bonding as being very different to the individualistic behaviours they are accustomed to, and may also assume that this is evidence of team behaviour.

Within these two perceptions lie the seeds of team underperformance in Thailand (and, we would venture, in other collective cultures too.)

Define ‘Team’…

Most professionals would probably agree with Katzenberg and Smith’s definition that

“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable.”

Here’s where the difficulty lies in collective cultures. While many find it easy doing things together they may fall into to the following traps (especially in Thailand):

1. There is no structured process of discovery of what ‘complementary skills’ each team member may have. In reality, survival in a collective culture means that complementary personalities are more important.

2. ‘Commitment to a common purpose’ – This is the crux of the dilemma in collective cultures. The ‘common purpose’ is the group. This perhaps explains why Japan has spent so long (two decades now) in recession. It could never sort out its root problems because doing so would have upset various ‘groups’. The pain of loss has, in other words, been preferable to the pain of challenging these groups.

3. ‘Performance goals’ – Now we’re really in deep! What performance goals matter more in groups than popularity and ‘fitting in’? Yet, among teams, we know that there are always goals that transcend these – if we care to search, and dare to dream!

4. ‘Mutually accountable’. Wait a minute – groups are by their nature accountable, aren’t they? But to what, exactly? To answer this question we need to understand…

How not to fall out with The Group

…Remember Mr Bean?

He’s the one we all found funny because of his wild and whacky behaviours. But why are these behaviours so funny? It’s because of how we, as humans, have evolved and  survived since the time of Cro-Magnon man.

So if you don’t want to be like Mr Bean and you do want to survive in ‘the group’, you simply need to learn how to do three things:

1. Don’t break the ‘rules’ of behaviour.
2. Don’t be or appear to be incompetent or clumsy.
3. Don’t be or appear to be unattractive.

In these three factors we have the real ‘purpose’ of groups. However, this ‘purpose’ isn’t going to get your company very far, or deliver your company’s purpose of profits, sales, or market share.

To do so in Asia your people need to learn that…

To become a Team we need to sacrifice the Group

Don’t stare up the steps, step up the stairs!

You see that list above, of the three things we need to do to survive in a group?

These are deep, unconscious drivers that are at the very root of our evolutionary survival of which most of us are unaware. These drivers are extremely powerful.

However, as the saying goes what got us here won’t necessarily get us there.

Becoming aware of these factors are the first step for the group to becoming a team.

What are the other steps?

Well, following his research, Patrick Lencioni in his bestselling booking Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team identified them as:

1. Being able to gain and maintain Trust (a massive factor)
2. Being able to manage Conflict (note that Groups tend to avoid conflict)
3. Being able to gain and maintain Commitment to a shared vision.
4. Being able to embrace Accountability (note that Groups, in order to maintain ‘harmony’ will tend to escape accountability to avoid conflict).
5. Being able to define and manage Results (note that Groups won’t do this, because it again threatens the ‘harmony’ central to their existence).

The above are the five simple steps individuals need to take and reinforce to go from a ‘Group’ to a ‘Team’. (You can see a graphic of the model here).

But why not just stay as a Group???

Confronted with anything that looks like ‘hard work’ or ‘change’, many people will ask a very logical question. Why not just stay as we are? Why not just stay as a Group?

And it seems so easy to do so.

That is the choice that needs to be made. But the ‘easy’ choice is, longer term, usually the more painful one. This is because:

Groups survive, but Teams strive and thrive.

So if surviving is your thing, stay as a group. Repeat all the mistakes that groups make. Live in the pain of conflict avoidance and below-the-surface tensions. And enjoy the politics.

But if striving and thriving is your thing, then begin on the path to forming and growing a team. Because on this path lies personal fulfilment, enjoyment, excitement and real, meaningful achievement.

How to build a Team in your organisation

If you are bored of all the team problems and would like to collaborate more effectively in your organisation, then why not run the world’s most recognised team development programme Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of Teams?

The programme can be run in Thai and English and gives your colleagues the tools to step up the stairs, rather than staring up the steps.

You can see the programme details here or why not request full details by simply filling out our ‘Contact Us’ form here.

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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What is Talent?

‘Talent’ is the key to understanding how to motivate and engage, form teams effectively, and enable consistently high performance from colleagues – so answering the question ‘what is talent?’ is pretty vital to organisational success!

Of Cells and Synapses

To do so, we must start with the ‘brass tacks’ of what Talent really is – and here is the first subtle but major difference. A person’s ‘Talent’ is in effect a collection of talents (or abilities) that are partly formed in us from birth and complete their formation by the time we reach our mid-teens.

Most education systems put their emphasis on us acquiring brain cells – or knowledge – over these formative years.

And most hiring decisions put their emphasis on the type of knowledge we have acquired, and from which university or institution.

Yet as massive workplace studies have shown (undertaken, among others, by the Corporate Leadership Council and Gallup), this knowledge makes little difference to our motivation and engagement at work. It’s this engagement that directly drives corporate performance.

Instead, we should look to our synapses as the clue for this – yet how many people are aware of this subtle but vital difference?

How talents work

Synapses are not the cells – or stores of knowledge – in the brain, but the ‘information superhighways’ that connect them.

Cells will come and go. But these superhighways have been inherited from your parents and built over the first fifteen years or so of your life and thus change very little. They are fundamental to the structure of your brain and also what make you unique – your ‘talents’.

When these synapses connect, an electrical charge takes place which creates energy. The more connections that are made, the greater this charge. If a person is working to their talents then a brain scan will show these synapses lighting up like a Christmas tree… and in this state a person is naturally engaged and motivated.

It’s for this reason that understanding a person’s talents at work is really critical.

What talents really are

The connections these information superhighways make determine what we are best at.

For example, if you have a ‘great sense of direction’, then that is a talent. If you have a good ear for different tones, that also is a talent.

Those among us who lack these talents, will know that however much we work on our ‘sense of direction’, or ‘tonal listening’ will know that doing so is futile – they won’t improve. Instead we have to rely on ‘tools’ to help – for someone with a poor sense of direction, this would be a map.

There are 18 different talents as identified by the Johnson O’Connor Institute and tested in the Highlands Ability Battery, and when these traits combine in certain combinations, that’s what determines if a person is talented in one area or another.

It’s important to remember Peter Drucker’s saying at this point, that everyone has ‘peaks and valleys’ – if you have a ‘valley’ or a weakness, in one area, you are likely to have a ‘peak’ or a Talent, in another. Drucker incidentally debunked the myth some companies still harbour today that anyone can be a ‘well-rounded’ person, talented in every area. Studies undertaken by the Johnson O’Connor Institute with FMRi machines have shown it just ain’t so.

Putting your talents to work

Whether we ‘love’ or ‘hate’ our jobs often comes down to whether our synapses are ‘lighting up like a Christmas tree’ in the way described above.

To get this to happen, we need to discover where are Talent really lies – and if we can work in that area, then we will love our job more, be more productive and fulfilled, and more engaged at work.

For example, if you are naturally ‘strategic’ but spend most of your time dealing with lots and lots of little problems, then it’s likely you will be disengaged at work.

Or, if you are great at fixing ‘things’ but struggle with ‘people problems’, then that also can lead to you disliking your job.

Again, notice this has little to do with the ‘knowledge’ you may have in your role, but how that knowledge is deployed.

This is why it is critical to know what your Talent is, and what your strongest role can be.

Discovering this and working to it leads to higher engagement at work. If you can do the same with your team members, this can lead to even greater performance in your team.

It’s little wonder, for this reason, that Peter Drucker devoted a third of his landmark book The Effective Executive to the importance of knowing your talents and working to your strengths. Yet, as he lamented, few people know what their strengths are, with disastrous consequences for engagement at work.

There is a solution…

Yet now there is a solution.

The Highlands Ability Battery helps you identify your talents scientifically, discover your strongest roles at work, and play to your strengths.

It is in our opinion the single most important assessment any professional can take.

Moreover, this assessment can be done in the convenience of your own home or place of work.

If you would like to find out more about the Highlands Ability Battery and how it can drive engagement in your job, career, and work teams, you can read more about it here.

Or, ask us for a free introduction to discovering your Talent by emailing us using the form here.

It’s time to let your Talent shine!

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Talent Technologies :: Taking your Talent to a Higher Level

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