The 8^th and final competency separating merely good from great leaders is, according to recent research by Korn/Ferry Lominger, ‘Managing Vision and Purpose’.

To many people, the development of a company or departmental Vision and Purpose (also known as ‘mission’) seems like a light and fluffy assignment. Most organizations have a Vision and Purpose, but few use them to their full potential.

Vision and mission statements should be more than a plaque on the wall. When done right, and when genuinely understood by employees across the organization, they provide guidance in almost every decision made. They resonate with people’s values, connect their day to day work to the greater organizational picture and align individual efforts across divisions.

As always, the development and use of these tools is deliberate and conscious. You must lead the processes of crafting the mission and vision statements, and the processes of sharing them. You must help others explore the vision and mission to fully understand them, and to understand their roles in fulfilling them. You must be a change leader. This means, ‘walking the talk’, motivating and inspiring everyone (including the resisters), removing barriers and recognizing even the small successes along the way.

There are three related strategic concepts that organizations commonly express, including purpose (i.e., mission), vision and values.

• A mission statement describes the fundamental purpose of a group – why it exists and who it serves. It should be short, powerful and, usually, timeless in the sense that it fulfills ongoing needs of the clients. Mission statements may be renewed and refreshed, but the underlying purpose can remain valid for decades. For instance, a construction company might have the mission to “design and build safe, efficient transportation infrastructure for people with places to go.” Transportation methods may change from cars to trains over time but, in all likelihood, this company will always find a transportation “need” to be met with “safe, efficient infrastructure”.
• Values are important beliefs that are shared among the stakeholders of an organization. Values drive culture and priorities. Interestingly, organizations often seek to discover their shared core values, not create them, since adults usually walk into an organization with their basic values already formed. A clear understanding of shared values is very important to guide day-to-day decision making at every level within an organization.
• A vision statement paints a picture of your destination over the long term (usually about 3-5 years). It can describe what you want to achieve (your big goal) and, sometimes, who you want to become as an individual or team. It is ambitious yet achievable (unlike your mission, which is never quite completed). It represents the planting of a flag in the ground with the strong statement: this is where we are going. A vision statement does not tell you how you will get there (there may be many possible routes), but it provides the direction of travel. It provides inspiration and a call to action. It must be brief, powerful, passionate, easy to remember and easy to communicate to others. The construction company with the mission described in the first bullet might have a vision of “becoming the number one highway construction company in the country by 2016”.

Don’t skip this critical step and make sure you have a plan to fully utilize what you develop. Contact Summit to see what we can do to help.

According to Korn/Ferry Lominger, the ability to build effective teams is a critical leadership competency. It has been proven time and time again that effective teams get more done and make better decisions than individuals working in isolation. It has also been proven that, just because you put a group of high performing individuals together, you are not guaranteed a high performing team.

Building an effective team is, once again, largely the job of the leader in the sense that he or she initiates, drives and monitors the process. Done well, this is a very deliberate and conscious process that involves:

1. Creating a vision of what high performance will look like
2. Creating an action plan to get there
3. Periodically reflecting to gage success, and
4. Making adjustments where necessary.

Since engagement and commitment of all members are fundamental prerequisites of good team work, the leader must seek to involve the team in all of the above steps. A leader who does this, connects to the powerful drivers of personal values, sense of purpose and autonomy.

As a leader, you can:

• Create and share your vision
• Know what inspires and motivates the team and each individual
• Promote innovation and creativity
• Make sure you understand each individual and their personal needs
• Move management and rewards from individual to team-based
• Build a strong foundation and positive relationships through team building activities
• Provide training for essential team skills such as communications, conflict management, change management, trust, time management, etc.
• Understand and leverage the diversity of personal styles in your team, and help team members appreciate their differences
• Engage a team coach
• Remove barriers to success

Give us a call to talk about building the performance of your team. We run sessions to teach leaders how to develop their teams, and to help people understand how to consciously develop themselves into high performing teams.

There is more to team success than leadership ... team members do play a critical role ... however, great leadership can make even a dysfunctional team great. How? Great leaders are very conscious in their approach and use what we at Summit Training call the “Deliberate Success” approach.

Deliberate Success involves developing yourself into the great leader you want to become, while simultaneously helping those you lead develop into the great team you, collectively, want to become. In both cases it consists of three simple (and deliberate) steps: Vision, Action and Reflection.

1. Create your VISION of success. This includes both a vision of the results you intend to get, and the values you intend to follow. Create a clear definition of success for your team and for yourself as a leader. It is not good enough to say you will be ‘high performing’ because that really has no meaning … or, rather, it can have any number of meanings. You need to be very specific as to the results and the culture that you want to have. You want effective interpersonal communication? Great. Explore and describe together what exactly that looks like in your work setting. After all, if you cannot define it, you cannot measure it. And, if you cannot measure it, you have no idea whether or not you are doing it. As Stephen Covey writes in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind”. When you create a team vision, it is very important to involve all team members in uncovering and describing the ideal culture that reflects their collective values and goals. In the end, they will be motivated and committed to achieving such a vision.
2. Take ACTION. Make a deliberate, focused plan and implement it. These actions must be directly connected to your vision. Deliberate and specific actions are essential to success. You can just do what you do and hope for the best, or you can do the right thing and get your desired result. Make sure you schedule your actions. State what you will do, when you will do it, who you will do it with, why you are doing it and what you expect as results. Without this level of detail, there is a very high chance you will not follow through.
3. Reflect. Without reflection, it is easy to lose your way, to stray off course toward some “shiny object” that catches your attention. Periodically ask yourself if you are achieving what you set out to do. Is your vision still the right one for you? Are you being who you said you would be? Are your actions getting you the results you had hoped for? If not, why not, and what do you need to change?

Great leaders will take this very deliberate approach to building the foundation of a high performance team.

The fourth of the “Big 8” leadership competencies (Korn/Ferry Lominger) we’re exploring in this series is motivating others.

Once again, Dan Pink had tackled this topic in his book “Drive”. What motivates (and what does not motivate) others will surprise you. Marcus Buckingham also sheds light on this topic in his eye-opening book “First Break All the Rules”.

Motivating others is complex and challenging. Some of us are more naturally gifted at it than others, but it is a deliberate skill and we can all learn to be better at it.

Some of us feel that, just because we are self motivated, others will be as well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Leaders must build strong relationships with their team members and they must know how to motivate and inspire them.

Motivation is the use of external rewards to get a job started and completed. It is, in its simplest form, the “carrot and the stick”. Research has indicated that this carrot and stick approach only works well for simple tasks where thought and creativity are not required.

Inspiration, on the other hand, is a desire from within to do something you believe is worthwhile. You are not doing it just for a reward or to avoid punishment, but because you want to do it. As a leader, tapping into inspiration requires personal understanding of your team members. You must know people well enough to connect them to a compelling, shared vision, and to tie the task or challenge to personal outcomes that they find personally worthwhile.

Ultimately, a leader’s job is to make their team look good in the eyes of others and feel good about the work they do. When you facilitate them (as opposed to driving them) to achieve great results, you can tap into powerful forces of motivation and inspiration.

Summit and Frontier President Scott Kress is excited to announce the release of his book “Learning in Thin Air”. The book shares the insights Scott has gained in personal, team, and leadership performance from years as a high performance consultant and trainer, and a wilderness guide. He shares stories from his early learning grounds to the biggest mountain on earth; Everest. Included are the tools, models, and strategies that have proven to be successful in helping Scott build high performance teams in the mountains and in the workplace. This book is a great companion piece to Scott’s keynote and also supports our training and team building programs. Go to www.learninginthinair.com to see the book and to order it today. Autographed copies are available upon request.

Ask any business leader what the formula for a successful team is and you will likely get a myriad of responses. While it’s true that high-performing teams come in all shapes and sizes and have different strengths, it is also true that now more and more of them share an amazing attribute – the passion to extend their success beyond their own boardrooms and to share their good fortune with our global neighbours who truly need it.

We know that this is true because we are asked about it all the time. Clients call and ask how they can provide an experience that will allow their team to grow while at the same time fulfilling the desire to give back. This really gets our attention! It is great to meet and work with organizations that share our view that Corporate Social Responsibility is more than just a “flavor of the week” and have baked this value into their culture.

It is immensely rewarding to send micro-loans to deserving entrepreneurs all over the world on behalf of our clients - in fact, it is my favourite part of the job. We are in the process of adding other program options that will both foster team development and provide an opportunity to improve the lives of others both in Canada and abroad.

We often quote Plato who says “you can learn more about a person in an hour of play, than in a lifetime of conversation.” Why not have that play, also be helping someone out who doesn’t have the opportunities we do. What can your company do to move beyond our borders and help our global community?

It is rare that Everest is climbed solo. Even if a climber is alone on the mountain, there is a team at home that has given this person the support to do what he or she is doing.

Everest is climbed step by step and each person must take those steps on their own. Nobody can do this for you. However, it is the team that gives the individual the power to perform.

As I was approaching the summit of Everest on that beautiful day in 2008 I was alone. I was alone in my thoughts and I was alone in my movements. Yes there were other people around me, but essentially I was alone in my own small world. I was performing alone, but I was climbing off the “backs” of my team mates and they were climbing off my back. The team had been essential in my success as they helped to give me the mental and emotional strength to do what I was doing. Without the team I never would have been able to accomplish what I did.

I had another critically important team with me that day. Back home my wife and two children were waiting for news of my ascent, but they were with me every step of the way. Death is common on Everest and many climbers will just sit down and never get up again. There were times when I wanted to sit down and give up, there were times when my body faltered, there were times when my mind wandered. This is when my home team came into play. Thinking of them would snap me back into the moment and force my body and mind to perform.

Everest is not often climbed by teams anymore. It is climbed by groups of people loosely bound together by a common goal; the summit. However, they are not bonded to one another and there is no common vision in most cases. This can work out just fine when the sun is shining and life is good. But when the mountain throws a curve ball these groups fall apart.

It often becomes “every person for themselves” with a few Sherpa and guides trying to help whomever they can. You can see the results of this in many of the tragedies on Everest and other high mountains such as K2. Having a strong and tightly bound team does not guarantee safety, but you have a much larger operating zone. You can tolerate greater extremes and come out on the other side.

In times gone by when small independent climbing teams worked together there was a very strong team bond. This is what was referred to as the “brotherhood of the rope” (It is not that different from the mariner’s code where ships will divert their course to help another ship in distress regardless of time and financial cost). These climbers worked very closely together and supported one another. Today the common practice is to climb Everest with a group of strangers. These people do not have the same bond to one another and there is not the same level of commitment.

If a climber becomes sick or injured it is the responsibility of the guide to deal with. Climbers within teams often will not sacrifice their summit chance to assist a fellow team member and this is even more prominent when it is a stranger in distress. People die every year as others walk by. Often there is little that can be done, but in some cases this help can save a life.

Ultimately being part of a high performance team will make any activity easier, safer and more enjoyable.

True Patriot Live expedition update:I have so far raised $2300 for True Patriot Love towards my $10,000 goal. Please go to www.expeditionhimalayas.ca to learn more and go to http://www.canadahelps.org/GivingPages/GivingPage.aspx?gpID=19224 to donate to this worthy and patriotic cause.

My last blog focused on the destructive effects that poor leadership can have on a team. This blog will look at how to achieve success through good leadership.

There is more to team success than leadership ... team members do play a critical role ... however, great leadership can make even a dysfunctional team great. How? Great leaders are very conscious in their approach and use what we at Summit Training call the “Deliberate Success” approach“.

Deliberate Success involves developing yourself into the great leader you want to become, while simultaneously helping those you lead develop into the great team you want them to become. In both cases it consists of three simple (and deliberate) steps: Vision, Action and Reflection.

1. Create your VISION of success. This includes both the results you intend to get, and the values you intend to follow. Create a clear definition of success for your team and for yourself as a leader. It is not good enough to say you will be ‘high performing’ because that really has no meaning … or, rather, it can have any number of meanings. You need to be very specific as to the results and the culture that you want to have. After all, if you cannot define it, you cannot measure it. And, if you cannot measure it, you have no idea whether or not you are doing it. As Stephen Covey writes in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind”.
2. Take ACTION. Make a deliberate, focused plan and implement it. These actions must be directly connected to your vision. Deliberate and specific actions are essential to success. You can just do what you do and hope for the best, or you can do the right thing and get your desired result. Make sure you schedule your actions. State what you will do, when you will do it, who you will do it with, why you are doing it and what you expect as results. Without this level of detail, there is a very high chance you will not follow through.
3. Reflect. Without reflection, it is easy to lose your way, to stray off course toward some “shiny object” that catches your attention. Periodically ask yourself if you are achieving what you set out to do. Is your vision still the right one for you? Are you being who you said you would be? Are your actions getting you the results you had hoped for? If not, why not, and what do you need to change?

Great leaders will take this very deliberate approach to build a high performance team. While there is a great deal more to leadership than this, you can consider this the foundation.

True Patriot Live expedition update: I have so far raised $2000 for True Patriot Love towards my $10,000 goal. Please go to www.expeditionhimalayas.ca to learn more and go to http://www.canadahelps.org/GivingPages/GivingPage.aspx?gpID=19224 to donate to this worthy and patriotic cause.

It is an honour to announce my participation in the True Patriot Love "March to the Top" expedition this October. True Patriot Love www.truepatriotlovefoundation.com was created to honour and support members of the Canadian military and their families. The March to the Top expedition will pair 15 wounded and ill Canadian soldiers with 15 civilian business leaders. Each civilian will be paying for the total cost of their partner soldier to participate in the expedition, and raising awareness and funds for the much needed work funded by True Patriot Love. These men and women have risked it all and sacrificed their chances for a “normal” quality of life, all in an attempt to defend democracy and pursue world peace. It is the least we can do to support them in their hour of need.

This team of climbers will trek to Everest base camp and then embark on a summit attempt on Island Peak. Amputations, burns, gunshot wounds and post traumatic stress disorder that they have endured in battle will add to the grueling challenges that they will face on the mountain.

My role will be as the Captain of the civilian team. Based on my previous mountaineering experience and my team building skills, I will endeavour to assist in the formation of this team, and to do my best to help each team member to stand on the summit of Island Peak. I will be blogging daily while on the expedition and you can follow along right here on this blog.

Joining us will be a documentary team from the CBC who will be filming the expedition. The documentary will be aired on CBC in January of 2013. The goal is to raise awareness of the challenges our soldiers face when returning from combat and peace keeping missions around the world www.cbc.ca/marchtothetop.

Part of my mission for this expedition is to raise funds for True Patriot Love. Please go to www.expeditionhimalayas.ca or contact me directly to learn more about this expedition and to make a donation as part of my goal to raise $10,000.00.

Leadership plays a significant role in the overall team success for several reasons. Leaders, good ones at least, define the vision, mission, values, goals, roles, and expectations for the team. Referring to Tuckman’s stages of team development (Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing), these are all things that need to take place in the forming stage. This is the foundation from which all else will be built. Start with a shaky foundation and your team will crumble in the first storm.  Build a solid base and your team can withstand great force.

A leader’s job ultimately is to make the team successful. Leaders are coaches and mentors; they help keep teams on track, remove barriers and prepare the ground so the team can perform unhindered.

Conversely, leaders can also create a toxic environment that leads to total team destruction and failure. Sometimes this is due to incompetence and sometimes leaders simply use bad tactics because they think they are right.

In my soon to be released book, Learning In Thin Air (the same title as my keynote), I share stories of good and bad leaders and the impact they had on overall team success.

On one of my first real big Himalayan expeditions I was unable to get any of my long-time climbing partners to join me. I was forced to sign on with a professionally led trip. This trip brought together a group of highly-experienced strangers with a common goal, and then added a team leader. We would not be using Sherpa support and our leader was not a guide, but someone there to coach and mentor us, and to help us navigate our way through the complex world of 8,000m climbing. Our leader did not lay a foundation of trust and communication, but actually alienated all of us, drove a wedge between team members and destroyed trust. There was no plan, no vision and no sharing of information. This very long story ends in epic failure. Not a single team member made it to the summit and it had nothing to do with skill, experience, fitness or weather. It had everything to do with the toxic environment created by our team leader and the resulting total breakdown of team function.

At the time I placed the blame solely on our leader. But, in time, I realized that my own inaction had also played a part in our failure. I had done nothing to counteract what was happening within our team. I just sat back and played the part of the helpless victim.

I learned immensely from this experience and have applied this learning to all future expeditions and in business as well. In my next blog, I will share a success that grew from this leadership failure.

As a climber and a team and leadership specialist I want to take some time to discuss the recent tragic events on Mount Everest. You may have heard in the news about the deaths on Everest over the last few days. Everest is a dangerous place and deaths are part of every climbing season. However, this year there have been 11 deaths and the season is not even over. This is considerably higher than most years. When I summitted in 2008 there was only one death. So what makes this year different than other years? What is it that causes climbers to die on Everest? There are no simple or complete answers to these questions, but there are several factors that play into them. Over the next few blog postings I will reflect on and explore this tragedy based on my 25 years of climbing experience and, particularly, on my personal experience on Mount Everest.

As with everything in life some of the factors that are leading to climbers' deaths on Everest are outside their circles of influence. But many are not. I will touch on both in my blog.

I see three main factors that lie within our circle of influence that are causing issues on Everest: 

1. overcrowding,
2. inexperienced climbers, and
3. lack of team work.

Outside of our circle of influence is a big one: climate change.

Some of the topics I will discuss include:

• Why is Mount Everest so dangerous?
• Why are so many people going to Everest in spite of this danger?
• Is there an overcrowding issue on Everest?
• How is climate change impacting safety on Everest?
• Is inexperience playing a role in the deaths on the mountain?
• What role does leadership play in success, failure and death on Everest?
• How to be a great leader.
• What role does team work play in success, failure and death on Everest?
• How to build a high performance team.
• How can one prepare for a climb of Everest?
• What is a smart risk?

There are many choices in customized and ‘off the rack’ team assessments. The 4-D system by Charles Pellerin is very well-supported and well researched. There is a simple 25 question assessment in ‘Games Teams Play’ by Lisa Bendaly (McGraw-Hill Ryerson). The Internet provides many free assessment tools (e.g., Mind Tools, Team effectiveness assessment). Most are based on team members’ self assessments and scoring of a number of team attributes. In this era of metrics, you may wish to find statistically robust measurement tools.

However, I personally think that there is also value in teams developing their own self-assessment tool through a carefully guided process that includes going through an exercise to define what a great team and great teamwork mean to them. They can then develop a descriptive list of key behaviours that relate to such areas as trust, communications, responsibility, etc. and a scale for scoring.

Regardless of the tool you use, a single assessment yields only a snap shot taken at a moment in time. To get real value, report results promptly to team members, debrief and discuss them, create action plans and provide workshops on key areas for improvement. Repeat the assessment to measure progress and, once again, report the results. People need to know they are making progress, and so does your organization.

Risk is something we all face every day. We take actions and make decisions that could have bad consequences. Many of these consequences might affect other people, and most of us don’t like to feel responsible for another’s grief (or for a project’s failure). It is especially difficult to make decisions and take action in a culture where people are quick to shine the spotlight of blame. Though no one likes blame, the act of blaming often arises from a fear of being blamed.

High performance teams have a blame-free culture. That is not to say that people fail to take responsibility. On the contrary, people are willing to take responsibility for their role in any failure, look at it objectively, and take steps to draw learning from it so it’s not repeated. Team mates remain supportive of each other and refrain from personal attacks. Think what a team can do when there is no blame.

Charles Pellerin identifies ‘complaints’ as a related issue. Complaints are not the same as feedback. They are not productive. A complaint often starts out as an angry or negative voice in our head that eventually finds its way out to a variety of people who are usually powerless to address the issue. When we complain, we are usually blaming others rather than looking for ways that we can contribute to a solution. We assume the role of victim. The opposite, of course, is to take responsibility and do what we can to rectify a situation that concerns us.

Responsibility is a key individual ability for all team members. Each member acknowledges and accepts his or her role in the workings of the team. Each one exercises initiative and leadership to ensure it happens.

In your team, to what extent do people fear blame? Do they play the role of victim, or do they feel empowered to address issues that concern them? To what extent does each person take responsibility for their tasks and for the overall success of the team?

At the end of the day, and after the tough discussions are complete, high performance teams commit to a course of action. Every single person walks out of the room supporting the plan and is prepared to do their best to achieve success for the team.

Commitment is about knowing what to do, accepting responsibility for one’s role in a project and actually caring deeply about the outcomes.

Commitment also frees us up to be creative. We no longer need to waste energy thinking about whether or not we should ‘go for the prize’. That’s already settled. We can concentrate on being creative about how we’ll achieve success. In the process we inevitably set all kinds of events in motion and recruit others to our cause, all helping to make it a reality.

One of the best ways to gain commitment in a team setting is through consensus-based decision making. (Consensus means that everyone feels heard and supports the decision, not necessarily that everyone is complete agreement.) When people feel heard, they generally feel the decision is theirs too.

Ask your team: Do they feel they have a genuine say in decisions? To what extent do they care about and feel committed to the work of the team?

Let’s face it: without optimism, energy ebbs and life is a chore. A team without optimism can hardly be high-performing. Yet, misplaced optimism can be just as damaging. It can blind the team to the degree of challenge ahead; otherwise minor issues catch them sleeping. As a simple example, consider a recreational day hike in a rugged natural park. An optimist, looking at the sunny, warm morning weather trundles off in shorts and t-shirt carrying only a water bottle and lunch. A pessimist looks at the weather report with a 10% chance of rain, and stays home. A reality-based optimist looks at the weather report, thinks it will likely be a great day but packs rain gear just in case. To follow up on the scenario, if it does rain, the optimist gets soaked, risks hypothermia and spends a miserable day. The pessimist misses a great hike on a mostly sunny day and a reality-based optimist deals easily with a temporary shower and has a great excursion.

Reality-based optimism means that you believe you can meet the challenge and are willing to face the sometimes unpleasant realties that it entails. Perhaps it means that people have to put in extra work to succeed. Perhaps the chance of success is small but the rewards will be great. Reality-based optimism also means allowing people to be negative and critical at certain times in order to get all those feelings, fears and ideas out on the table. Then, you make your plan, commit and move forward with the sincere belief that you can succeed.

Does your team have a ‘can do’ attitude that is well grounded in reality? Are they open to confronting and examining the possible downsides of a situation and then resolve to go forward?

In How NASA Builds Teams, Charles Pellerin addresses the team behaviour of keeping agreements. At Summit Group, we often describe trust as the foundation of a team; without it, you cannot build a solid, high performing team. Stephen R. Covey has written and lectured extensively on trust and has even developed a model likening trust to a bank account. Certain behaviours are like deposits to our trust account with another person, others are like withdrawals. High performing teams have team members who keep a healthy balance in all of their trust accounts.

It is important to specify that team trust is based on much more that intent and effort. The quality of the outcomes is also important.

There are specific behaviours that we recognize contribute to trust. Keeping our promises is one of the most important. This includes ‘inferred’ promises such as meeting project/reporting deadlines, being prepared and prompt for meetings, following up on actions we’ve committed to and, basically fulfilling the responsibilities of our own jobs in order that our colleagues can do theirs. In a high trust environment, people also spend fewer wasted hours second-guessing and generally fretting that others may not come through for them.

Sometimes, breaking a promise is unavoidable and understandable. Serious family matters, weather events and technology failures can contribute to missed deadlines or late appearances. Here is where a timely ‘heads up’ and a sincere apology come in. Your ‘trust account’ may take a small hit but, if the balance is healthy, trust will remain high, particularly if you take steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Trust is also about loyalty. Leaders and team members that go to bat for one another create loyalty. Those who act or gossip behind the backs of their colleagues create suspicion and mistrust.

So, do your team members enjoy a climate of high trust? Do they keep promises with each other, with partners and with clients? Do they feel strong loyalty to the team, the leader and their partners?

Journey of a Lifetime!

"Men Wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success”

As the story is told, this was a employment advertisement put into the London newspaper looking for members for Ernest Shackelton’s Nimrod expedition to Antarctica. Apparently thousands of applications were received for what in print seems to be a rather bleak job. However, the enormous enthusiasm surrounding this ad reflected the human desire to explore, to adventure, and to push personal boundaries.

People often ask me why I climb. Why I spend my free time in cold and inhospitable locations. Why I put my life at risk. This is a difficult question to answer, but the basic response is because I love it. It makes me feel alive.

In mid November of this year I will join two friends in an attempt to climb Mt. Vinson, the tallest mountain in Antarctica. To date I have successfully summited the tallest mountain in 6 of our 7 continents. Climbing Mt. Vinson, providing that I make it to the top, will be my final summit of the “7 Summits.”

Before my departure, my blog’s will focus on my daily preparations, my gear, my thoughts, my family’s thoughts, my drivers, and much more. Once on the expedition I will do my best to send back daily blogs reporting on our progress and my personal thoughts and insights.

As a leadership and high performance team specialist I will also share my insights into this world and how some of my personal experiences can be used to better understand how to lead and build high performance teams.

My good friends at Adult Essentials (www.adultgummies.com) will be supporting me on this journey. Daily exercise and nutrition are a critical factor in success. The stronger I am, the greater my chance of success and the more I will enjoy the experience. My challenge however, is that like many of you, I Iead a very busy life. Between business and family commitments it is difficult to find time to train and I do not always eat as well as I should. This is where nutritional supplements come into play: to help me balance my dietary needs while finding time to train physically for this trip

I’ve been writing about Charles J. Pellerin’s book, “How NASA Builds Teams”, and measureable team behaviours he identifies as important to effectiveness. This behaviour that Pellerin describes is also related to how much people are made to feel that they “belong”. Though many people, particularly technical people, like to think they are independent, they need to feel appropriately included in the important workings of the organization and team.

What is appropriate inclusion? It is far more than sending out information willy-nilly. We all have in-boxes stuffed with information that should not concern us. Ideally, people feel they get the important information they need to do their jobs and to remain tuned into the big picture, but not so much that they are overwhelmed by incidental detail.

One of the best ways to gage if a person feels included is to find out if they feel heard, and if they believe their opinion matters to their team and to their leader. On high performance teams, people do feel their opinion matters, and so they will go to great lengths to put their best ideas forward. Imagine what great creativity, not to mention critical thinking, can be contributed from all those brilliant people you hire when everyone believes their ideas matter.

Appropriate inclusion should also be considered in your decision making, and this can go beyond simply soliciting input. Are there situations when your team can make meaningful consensus-based decisions?

Thoughtful inclusion is also important when it comes to celebration, reward and other forms of recognition. It is often difficult to remember all the people who may have contributed in some way to the success of a particular project but if someone feels overlooked they can become demoralized and hesitate to put that same effort forward the next time.

At this moment and on your team, can you measure to what extent do people feel included in the important affairs of the team? To what extent do they make the effort to appropriately include other team mates, clients, partners and customers?

A high performance team has a culture that meets the emotional and intellectual needs of all the team members. People are inspired to do their very best every day while caring deeply about the welfare of their colleagues. They also feel that their colleagues and the organization itself care about them. People know what to do, they are equipped to do it and they feel they have the power and support to move forward. So what does this culture look like in terms of measurable behaviours?

In How NASA Builds Teams, Charles J. Pellerin describes a number of team behaviours that he has determined are key to creating the type of culture where people can be most effective. (Pellerin has developed this into his 4-D Assessment Process.) The descriptions alone are very insightful.

A key behaviour relates to “Expressing Authentic Appreciation”. As Pellerin points out, this behaviour helps to address our emotional need of belonging, something that Abraham Maslow identified as fundamental to human motivation. When we feel we belong, we are happier and free to focus more fully on the tasks at hand. One of the important aspects of appreciation is that it must be felt and offered genuinely. Another is that we are appreciated for the things that we ourselves value. I will get less satisfaction from your appreciation of my coffee-making ability that from your appreciation for my leadership ability. (Well that’s only partly true.) Also important to note, High performing teams exercise authentic appreciation for others, such as clients, partners and customers. They do this even in high stress situations, framing negative events and perceptions in constructive, appreciative terms.

So, at this moment and on your team, to what extent do people feel appreciated for the contributions that they feel are important? To what extent do they express the positive aspects of a situation or relationship?

Why Assess your Team?

At Summit Group we often emphasize how important it is that teams have a clear vision of who and how they would like to be as a high performing group. This type of vision is about team culture: how people will ideally work together, treat each other, relate, communicate, support one another etc., as a high performing, productive team. Such a vision is critical. Whether on a remote mountain side, a busy freeway or a country road, we need to know the destination before we can go there together.

But simply knowing the destination is not enough to get us there. Even when we are taking a drive through familiar territory we must constantly check for landmarks, watch for signs, even use GPS technology to assess where we are along the route. Then we can anticipate and plan our next move. Whether we are drivers or passengers, I think this need to know where we are is pretty close to innate. (If you have ever traveled in a car with toddlers you will be familiar with the persistent and urgent phrase, “Are we there yet”?) Team members also need to know and confront where they are with respect to their vision of high performance culture. You can give them that information through simple, regular team culture assessments.

There are many existing assessments of team ‘health’ or ‘performance’. They can help you gauge where you are on your collective journey, and if you are moving towards or away from your target. If you have described clearly your vision of a high performing team, and have identified key member behaviours in a “best practices” or “code of conduct”, you may be able to create your own meaningful assessment tool by attaching criteria and a scale to each item. The important thing is to assess the team’s progress in a meaningful way and at regular intervals. It opens dialogue, motivates and keeps the team developing in a positive and deliberate way.

Over the next few blog entries, I will describe some ideas about which behaviours are reported to be most crucial for high performance and productivity, and give some sources of available assessments.

As we all know, great teams do not just happen, they are built from the ground up. As Jim Collins writes in his bestselling book Good to Great, you first need to get the right people on the bus and then get them into the right seats. But once you achieve this, your job at forming them into a high performance team is far from over. Use this simple model to guide you in the formation of your team whether you are a new team or one that has been together for quite some time.

For years we tried to determine how to create high performance teams. We read dozens of extremely complex models that presented countless steps, but the complexity of these models always ended in confusion and frustration. We knew there had to be an easier way.

We created the Deliberate Team Development model to provide a simple and effective framework to achieve the end goal you are looking for as a team. This model consists of three steps; Vision, Action, and Reflection.

Vision: As Stephen Covey writes, begin with the end in mind. In the formation of a team you should know your end goal. You want to determine success factors such a business goals, but before these can be achieved you need to determine team dynamic goals. You must identify what high performance is for your team in relation to your business and your company culture. It is not enough just to say you will be a good team, you must discuss and determine what high performance is in relation to leadership, team interaction, communication, problem solving, conflict resolution, etc… This vision will provide you with a measuring stick to know if you are being who you said you would be as a team. Without the clear identification of the end goal you are really just doing things and hoping for the best. Be deliberate in your team formation.

Action: Without specifically applied action a vision is useless. Once you have your vision in place you must determine specific actions that will bring this vision to life. How do you live your definition of high performance communication? How will you deal with conflict in a positive manner? Be deliberate in this phase and the benefit will be huge down the road.

Reflection: As a leader and as a team retrospection is critical. Sometimes we lose our way in the fogy complexity of reality and sometimes the landscape changes under our feet. Without dedicated reflection time these changes may go un-noticed leading your team toward an impending downfall. Take time as a leader and as a team to reflect upon your team, your actions, your results and your vision and course correct when necessary. Fine tune your sails as you navigate the seas of business and you will sail a much truer and faster course.