Your People's Contribution: A Simple Test
21 April 2010
One of the greatest challenges for every business is developing the right and motivated team. When you work with a team for a period of time, it’s easy to develop an acceptance of different behaviours. This can manifest itself in a number of ways: on the one hand taking for granted the extra hours that Tracy always puts in and on the other tolerating negative behaviour as “that’s just Bob and one of his quirks”.
To truly achieve its potential, everyone in the business has to not only be contributing to the delivery of the product / service but also bring a positive energy to the company.
Sometimes, especially with small teams, where you are dependent upon the output of everyone in the team it is easier to tolerate those “quirks” than to really take an objective view of the impact each of the team members has, both on the others and on the business. Observing this at one of our client’s led us to develop a simple positivity assessment tool. This enabled the owner to achieve that objective view.
The tool is designed to assess the contribution of each individual in the team, and establish whether it is positive or negative. It assesses them in three areas: productivity, attitude and contribution to the team. For each statement the manager is asked to rank them from -3 to +3. We deliberately chose a negative to positive scale to accentuate the difference between:
· Brakes: those people who are overall score is negative and are effectively applying a brake to the growth of the business
· Neutrals: those individuals who are “just doing their job” and whose contribution is neutral on the growth of the company
· Accelerators: these are the people who share your attitude, are positive to work with and make a great difference towards the growth of the organisation.
Below is an actual example from one of our clients. It clearly shows that Denise, who they have been “tolerating”, is an impediment to their growth.
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They are now working on changing that and are giving greater attention to Bob and Clare in order to move them from Neutrals to Accelerators.
Posted: 21/04/2010 13:32:37
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Growth Accelerators
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