It is quite normal now for us to be working daily with people we rarely meet face to face, with people of different cultures mother tongues. Inevitably problems arise just as they do with people with whom we share a workspace and culture.  But toss in geographic and cultural boundaries to the usual list of obstacles we encounter when things are getting tense around the single location organisation and you have a much increased potential for situations to get out of control. In the absence of eye-contact and of the comfort blanket of shared culture we surely must rethink, in fact, really work at ‘making contact’, bridging gaps between the different people involved in the enterprise.

A few days ago I invited Tom Buehlmann to join me on PEC’s monthly teleseminar. I wanted someone there who had done the whole managing scattered teams for real. This Bulletin is largely a report of the nuggets of that conversation.

Tom has managed teams across multiple geographies for about 25 years for brands like Procter & Gamble, Lindt & Sprüngli, the famed Swiss chocolate maker and Catalina marketing, the company credited with the invention of the now ubiquitous card loyalty scheme.

I began our conversation by asking Tom what sort of scale of operation he had dealt with in the past. A few hundred here, fifty there, three hundred over there. Big, then. And here is the first mistake that Tom has encountered time and again. He started life with Catalina with twelve direct reports, scattered across half a dozen countries. Far too many he laments, “I ended up with seven in the end – much more manageable.” So first lesson. Keep the number of direct reports down. Seven – tops.

I then ask him about his top tips for managing long-distance, aside from the cultural stuff which we will come to later. “I’d prefer to think of it as a list of mistakes I made the first time – so what I would do differently next time is…

1. Don’t assume it’s easy managing at a distance – it’s not. It takes a conscious effort to get to know people and not just the business.
2. Don’t assume that a solid reporting line on the org. chart means that you have a relationship with that person. You don’t.
3. Don’t try to do everything – prioritise and let them do their jobs.

I am curious to know what a conversation between Tom and a direct report might sound like when things are going wrong and the person is hundreds, if not thousands, of Kilometres away (Buehlmann is Swiss). He asks me to quantify ‘going wrong’. I reply, “Not catastrophic but bothering you a lot, over a few months”. He needs no time for reflection, “When can I come and see you?”. He adds, “you have to be prepared to get into your car, train, plane or whatever and get in front of them – fast. It is time-consuming but you have to do it. Spend as much face to face time with them as is feasible and desirable – on their home territory where they feel safe and at ease”.

According to Buehlmann, when communication is not face-to-face, different methods of communication have a different effect on the dynamic – specifically changes in power and intimacy levels. According to Buehlmann, different methods carry different messages too. He goes on to specify: “A personal, hand-written note is very special, very powerful, very personal”. A text is about as impersonal as you can get – it’s about the worst. No, actually email. I really don’t like it. It is so open to misinterpretation.” The message is: choose the medium for the message carefully. If in doubt: talk or travel.

I want to get an idea of how to tackle situations where cultural boundaries are being crossed and I ask him for a top tip on what to do when you are starting out in this new territory of working across national boundaries. He sighs: “I learned a lot from working in Japan. For me the number one thing is to try to understand the local codes and rules.” I prod him for a little more detail. “When I first went out there I just turned up to the regional office and met with all the people at the top of the org. chart for that country. I asked all the right questions and thought I was doing just fine. Then I found out that I had terribly offended the Chairman of the company. He didn’t appear on any chart but what I should have done was to get off my plane and get in the car straight to his office. I would only have needed to spend twenty minutes with him. Word would have gone round very fast that I had done the right thing. My visit would have shown that I had manners – that knew how to behave. Big mistake”, he frowns and shakes his head in self-criticism.

Buehlmann tells me another story, this time about his former top manager in Japan. When Buehlmann first arrived in Japan he recalls that he was keen to show the manager and his own Board colleagues back in the U.S. that he was managing the global business, getting things repaired, helping to make the Japan operation profitable. But after months of doing business with his No.1 in Japan, endlessly going out in the evenings for meals to discuss the business and to get to know the local problems, the manager out-of-the-blue, over dinner one evening, suddenly tendered his resignation. “I was really shocked. I’d had no warning at all. I asked him, of course, what was wrong. He replied with words that I will never, ever forget: Tom-san, you don’t even know the names of my children.”

But not all cultures are so extremely removed from our own Western European way of doing things. I suggest to Tom that there are mistakes to be made much closer to home. He agrees. “France is a good example. In France there is a formal and informal organisation. The informal is arranged according to where you went to university – where you grew up intellectually, really. There are strong bonds between people who share educational experiences and backgrounds. You have to get to grips with these unspoken links and relationships before you can really figure the rest out and get things done easily.”

It seems from my time with Tom Buehlmann that what we say we do and value is not always played out in the office even by someone whom I regard as a seasoned international player; someone who really gets the people bit. Talking about the value of relationships is easy and it’s in all the books. Resisting the temptation to focus one hundred percent of one’s attention on the running of the operation is the tough part, it seems. Buehlmann: “Developing human relationships is critical. No one wants to be a name in a box, a human resource.” It’s an obvious but illusive point: developing relationships is an essential part of keeping people with you, especially when you don’t see them often. They will forgive all sorts of cultural and linguistic transgressions if you have gone to the trouble to get to know them, to show them respect as people. Buehlmann concludes: “Talking about business all day is not developing relationships. That is done separately.”

7 golden possibilities (we don’t like rules).

1. Planning for success

What do you want? What do they want? These questions need to be answered in terms of emotional, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes. Try to wean yourself off purely business objectives because that’s rarely where your focus needs to be. Running meetings successfully is mostly about managing feelings, not facts.

2. Getting their minds on the right stuff

Sometimes a meeting can take a while to find its focus because people arrive from another meeting with their heads full of the old topic, unprepared, tired, under fed or caffeined up to the eyeballs. Consider some sort of transition device. One we use a lot is called ‘baggage check-in’. We go round the table and ask participants to check-in (mention/let go of) any distracting thoughts. All sorts of interesting things can turn up and people seem to enjoy the chance to decompress a little before being asked for more rigorous, intellectual engagement. All the leader needs to ask is “what’s on your mind?” or “what do you want to check in?”.

3. Handling the ‘big personalities’

We call these people: loud, pushy, talkative, chatty, bossy, show-boaters, big mouths etc. The trick (not really a trick, more of a point of recognition) is to involve these people as much as possible and at the same time to be prepared to protect the space of the less voluble participants ruthlessly. Golden rule: involve potential disrupters as you do your most co-operative participants. Keep everyone fully occupied. And the rationale for all this? People mostly kick up trouble when they feel left out or powerless. Kevin Holligan of Meeting Magic suggests partitioning time and attention by using devices such as sharing thoughts using Post-It Notes or giving the group other short tasks where everyone is allocated an equal voice. Probably most important of all – avoid the labels I’ve used – people aren’t born ‘pushy’ or ‘loud’ – we help to make them that way. And we can help them to not be that way too.

Inclusion not control

4. Keeping to time

Leaving a meeting on time is a rare event these days. People tend to put far too much on their agendas. Be sparing and respect your participant’s time boundaries. If you are realistic about how you plan the time slots within the meeting for each discussion point the people will be able to reward you with their attention. Meeting Magic suggest 12 minutes is the attention span for an adult. Sounds about right to me. To give yourself an even better chance of finishing on time… begin bang on time, do not wait for stragglers; they will soon get the message – even if you are as nice as pie when they come in late.

5. Involving the quiet ones

People who don’t say much in meetings behave in that way for a number of reasons. The meeting leader, and the other participants, rarely get to find out those reasons. One result of letting things continue without finding out the causes is that you always end up with the same result: the same people talk and the same types of outcomes come to pass. Another result of not involving the whole group is that unhelpful group beliefs have an opportunity to take root: “She’s a bit quiet, a bit shy…not much help really.” “You’ll never get a word out of him in the first hour… he’s a bit lazy… takes him a while to get going.” and so on. We think the key here is to identify who is likely to stay quiet and then ask their advice, before the meeting, about how they would like to be involved. Get to know them and how they like to be managed before it becomes a distraction for the group. If this opportunity does not arise then it can be helpful to go around the table at the beginning asking people to say a few words about the minimum that they want to walk away with at the end. This then gives you the excuse to keep checking that each person is getting what they wanted.

6. Getting things done afterwards

Meetings often get a bad reputation not because of what happens within it but from what is expected from participants afterwards. You might run the greatest meetings but if you get the reputation for weighing people down with long lists of To Dos your meetings (and you) will lose popularity. Meeting Magic’s advice here, and we agree, is to force people to prioritise before the meeting ends – set a group rule for the number of take-outs and encourage people to stick to it. Kevin Holligan also suggests giving people the chance to make a group start on the critical tasks. That way when people leave they have a head start on the task.

7. Helping other people’s meetings go better

But what if it’s not your meeting that is going wrong – what then? Do you just have to grin and bear it? We don’t think so. Here are three common problems and our suggestions on what you can say to nudge things along:

1. Help the other participants to regain perspective when they are getting buried in endless detail. Consider saying: “I’m finding the level of detail informative but I am starting to get lost in it – is that a problem for anyone else?”
2. Help the chairman who is losing his/her grip regain control by saying: “As the outsider I’d be very interested to hear what you (indicating the chairman) has to say.”
3. When the meeting shows no sign of ending and you either need to get away for another meeting or for your own mental health. Consider saying: “I have found this meeting really useful but I have completely run out of time.” Then watch three other people sigh with relief as they start packing their papers!

Most articles about leadership focus on best practice. However, this piece is about worst practice – and how to avoid it.

1. Being the No.1 ideas generator. Most of the people we work with in leadership positions think that they are there to come up with ideas. They are living in the past to be brutal. That is the territory and luxury of the early shift – people early in their careers. As soon as you get people working with you as your team then the whole game changes. You have other mouths to feed with inspiration. It’s not just you who has to stay interested and excited – others do too. You can either help this to happen by giving them permission and encouragement to think or you can starve them and have all the fun and challenge yourself.
2. The ‘open-door’ policy. This is one of those things like ‘teamwork’ and ‘empathy’. If you are naming it it’s because you’re not doing it. When the doors to management offices opened all those years ago it was only the dinosaurs who didn’t take them off the hinges altogether. The new generation of leaders were encouraged (ordered) to get out on the floor to MBWA (Manage By Wandering Around). The expectation was now that we would leave our offices and get seriously interested in what all those funny little people out there, called ‘staff’, were doing with their time and the company’s money. Let’s not go back on that one by talking about the ‘open doors’ that shouldn’t even be there.
3. Buy-in. If you have begun a project or initiative and you are now looking to get buy-in you are too late. Involvement which produces ‘buy-in’ should be adopted at the conception stage – not after the birth.
4. Teams bigger than seven. Something strange happens in a group’s dynamics as soon as you have more than six people around the table. If you have fewer than four it can be hard to generate energy and ideas; things can get stuck. As soon as there are seven or more around a table then someone will almost certainly quieten down or shut down. Is this another manifestation of the power of the magical number 7?
5. Email to your direct reports. I’m not just going off email – I’m getting frightened about its capacity for messing up the message and the flow of relationships in general. Here are 5 reasons not to communicate with your team this way. Firstly a ‘good’ email takes time to compose and check – time is probably one thing you have little of. Secondly, ambiguity – can you guarantee its absence? – No. Thirdly, unknown reaction – how have you made the other person feel at that moment? You don’t know. Next: Depersonalisation – the email replaced the corporate memorandum or ‘memo’ – the dinosaur’s manager’s way of communicating bad news, orders and all the other forms of rubbish that floats around companies between people. Don’t ruin the email by making it do the jobs that should be done face to face. lastly… Relationships are about creating a feeling of closeness. Emails, in a team situation, tend to create distance.
6. Working more than 45 hours a week. The toughest consulting outfit I ever worked with had one really good rule: no working on client site after 6pm. The thought was that if you couldn’t get it done in nine hours you were deemed to be “out of control” as the saying went. The reality was that they wanted to make their consultants look efficient to the client which enabled them to constantly point out the inefficiency of the client’s staff. Nevertheless, here are three genuinely wholesome reasons to go home on time: The return on time invested dips more steeply the later you work. Secondly, your people will think they have to copy you – a daft competition is set up. Lastly, rest will make you more personally effective the next day.
   

   55 hours this week and still going wrong

7. PowerPoint. I like a good graph as much as the next man. But within a team I cannot think why anybody needs to even open their laptop other than to show off a new litter of puppies or exchange holiday snaps. The alternative? A pen, a flipchart and the minimum amount of data and information that you need to get the troops fired up.
8. Big words. Continuing on the theme of impact… this comes up again and again in PEC client sessions. Bottom line: everyone likes to listen to an expert who uses simple language to express complex ideas. People also trust simple language largely because people who have something to hide (like bad news or a lack of knowledge) mostly try to cover their tracks with big words (and lots of them). Go simple for maximum impact.
9. A client suggested this one: He wanted his boss to: “Stop trying to do my job for me – provide guidance etc. but then let me get on and do it myself.”
10. The same client sought some 360 degree feedback. His team gave him feedback about being more himself – here are his comments: “[they wanted me to] to switch off and just sometimes be myself, rather than by business-self. I suppose we get wrapped up in doing what’s right for the business and forget about the importance of emotional connections.”

My comment on this feedback would be that most people, both in our public and private lives, want to be given the chance to know us – to be trusted with the real person. To pretend perfection is to shut people out – to say to them: “I don’t trust you with who I really am.”

So that is the PEC take on what good leaders should give up. As always, please feel free to get in touch if you want to discuss the points we have made here.

I confess at the outset of this post that I’ve never much been into the ‘cultural differences’ stuff – empathic communication and its breakdowns are my first love. And to tell you the truth, until last week I simply hadn’t been that interested in the topic.

The facts are that I like people from all over the place, I like traveling and I find different cultures, ways, foods, places etc. all fascinating. Full stop. I had of course failed to grasp how someone’s place of birth and the culture of their upbringing might impact on their interactions with other people other than because of differences in their accent, incomplete vocabulary and a quite natural suspicion of British food. A conversation last week has unearthed, for me, a more intriguing subtlety in this cultural difference malarkey.

I imagine that it is generally assumed (well, it was by me) that when a person, for whom English is not the mother tongue, sets out to express an opinion in conversation, any faltering on their part might be explained by a hole in their grammar or vocabulary and/or a misplaced unease about making themselves look daft by using the wrong phrase. According to the one person with whom I have had my only proper conversation about all this (not a large sample I grant you – bear with me) what invariably holds him back from expressing himself more transparently can more accurately be described as a strong dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of the second language and not any lack of his grasp of it.

So, it is not embarrassment that ‘le mot juste’ is, at that moment, beyond his reach but a deep-seated conviction that people from the culture in which he is the visitor would not get to grips with the essence of what he was trying to express, no matter what words he chose. He finds himself thinking: If I can’t get them to connect or empathize with this sentiment then I would prefer to leave the whole thing out. This barrier to expression therefore is not about a hole in idiomatic sharing as much as wider gap in cultural reference points such as what is funny, familiar or foul. The problem is only compounded when a person speaking their second language is skillful to the point that their colleagues believe that none of these problems exist. In such instances, it is possible that untimely failures to speak up might be misinterpreted as examples of ‘not joining in’ and therefore as signs of aloofness.

The conversation last week also shed light on something closer to home. I gave up speaking Italian to our first daughter, Vianne, after more than a year of persevering. I found that I was simply unable to express the subtleties of my feelings for her during the day-to-day ups and downs in a way that did justice to what was going on in my head – and heart. Although I had done my three Rs in Italian, and had been fluent in both English and Italian from first words, I was starting to feel cut off from Vianne. I should not have been surprised. I had, after all, only really been exposed to parent-child language in English and had thus acquired the subtleties of my own parenting vocabulary in that language rather than in Italian.

It seems that linguistic proficiency is only one superficial cultural bridge. The invisibility of other barriers should make us more wary about jumping to negative conclusions about the social faults that we find in acquaintances from other cultures. However, a question remains: In future, will I be quick enough to notice my lack of cultural empathy before they do?

PS. Thanks again to Robert for his excellent cartoon strip. www.robertthompsoncartoons.com

Many great companies start out as family concerns – yours might be one of them.

Mars, now Masterfoods, is a huge and successful example which grew out of a home-based sweet making buiness founded, in a small kitchen in Tacoma, Washington by Frank and Ethel Mars back in 1911. And S.C. Johnson, inventors of the Ziploc bag, Pledge, Glade and Windex were founded in 1886 by Samuel Johnson who invented a new floor polish to go on the parquet flooring he was installing in those days. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of Marsians over the years (I don’t know what the SCJ people call themselves – answers on a postcard) and they did stand out from the rest of my clients. More than any other group they seemed to be fiercely proud of their heritage and of the company’s products. No matter where the person worked they seemed to have a very detailed knowledge not only of  production methods but also of production values; to be let loose on the line as a young manager at Mars was to be trusted with the crown jewels – it certainly was not seen as lowly work.

And there are numerous other distinguishing features I could list which defined them as ‘different’ such as their unusual way of opening ‘product’ (Marsian for ‘sweets’) which was to peel the wrapper along the seem so as to reveal the production details (line number, date and time of manufacture, sell-by-date etc. etc.) Aside from all of this, the people from Mars seemed to act as a cohesive group, I hesitate to say for fear of sounding corny, as a ‘family’ group; there seemed to be an extra layer of fabric keeping everyone together.

But is it feasible to reproduce the kind of bonding fabric found in a company like Mars or cabury or in a well-functioning family, within an ordinary company manufacturing ball-bearings or tomato sandwiches? Or would it be found that the product was too mundane, the company too new, the people too ordinary? I suspect that those elements are really nothing to do with it. And I also suggest that there are proportionally just as many badly functioning families as there are badly functioning companies so that just trying to be more like a family probably won’t make a bad company, better. However, I do believe that there are some things that a well-functioning family can pass on to the leaders and members of a mediocre company; this view is in some way borne out by the words of a leading psychologist who was once asked at interview whether being a psychologist had made him a better father. He replied: “No, but being a father has certainly made me a better psychologist.”

So what is the definition of a psychologically healthy family? The literature on the subject suggests that it is one where the roles shift and swap according to what circumstances demand. Sometimes the father leads, sometimes the mother makes the first move. Sometimes the children are told what to do and other times the parents pay attention and act upon the children’s ideas and wishes. Sometimes the parents come up with the solutions, at other times the children spot the problem and the solution before the parents have even got out of bed. As the children grow in years so the relationships are allowed to move on; the children are encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their actions and the parents relinquish much of the control of the organisation and leadership of the unit in acknowledgment that the troops are now more than capable of organising and handling life’s events. By this point the parents have assumed a new role as mentors, advisers-in-the-wings whilst the children have gone on to create their own ‘companies’ with their own particular feel and collection of values and traditions. This all assumes, of course, that the parents have got their psychological act together in the first place, that is to say, that they, to some degree, understand themselves, their own insecurities and needs (especially in terms of needing to be needed) and that they have the courage and judgment to enable them to be flexible as well as consistent at enough of the right moments.

P.S Thanks to you Robert for the great cartoon you did for us. Click here to buy this very cartoon from him!

I was doing a spot of wiring at the weekend and whilst grovelling around through piles of dusty (and terribly itchy) ceramic insulation, in a part of the attic that I had never to, I stumbled across a large control panel bolted to the wall.

This shoebox-sized box sprouted a wild assortment of about twenty cables and was covered with an array of red LEDs – all lit. This large gadget had evidently been hanging there for the past three years, since we bought the house, fully powered up, doing it’s thing. What’s its ‘thing’ was I have not discovered but I do know that it did it quite without anybody’s help. No reset buttons to press, no dials to adjust, no displays to monitor. How clever of it, how resilient and independent; what a little stalwart. Not all machines are like this. The more we design machines to do, the more help they seem to need from us. Computers need upgrades, software needs patches, cars need servicing (oh, how they need servicing), bikes need mending and microwaves, well they just get thrown away – sorry. But we fully accept this maintenance burden; when we buy a machine we buy an uncertain future and usually a big fat warranty to ‘protect’ us from that future. But people, ah, now you’re talking.

"Come on ol' girl"

The beauty of buying, or as we like to say these days, ‘hiring’ people is that you just get them in the building, tell them where the coffee machine is (they always manage to find the toilets by themselves) and let them get on with whatever it said in the advert. Job done. Sometimes. The tricky ones need maintenance (oh gawd, here we go – should have bought another bloody machine instead).

Fear not, here is the Quick Start guide to help you get the best from your new person or ‘human’ without wasting valuable business hours.

1.  No need to read a book about ‘leading people’ instead ask it what it needs to operate properly: what turns it on and what makes it malfunction. Then believe it and do as it asked.

2.  Be aware that it will need a reasonably nice place to work properly: space for its cables and attachments, daylight, access to fresh air, a chance to eat and freewheel for a few minutes a day; in essence, somewhere that it is pleased to come to.

3.  If you are going to connect it with other people units make sure that all of them know why they are being connected and find out from them, or at a push, tell them, which person is going to do what. Of course, do make sure they are talking the same language. It doesn’t matter that they are different (you probably chose them that way), it does matter that they can make sense of each other.

4.  If they start getting dusty or crusty it is probably because you haven’t been near them for ages. As with any good machine, the better you get to know your person (and the better they come to know your preferences), the more productive and maintenance-free you and they can be.

5.  Preventative maintenance. This comes in a variety of forms; here are 3 critical ones:

• Communication. If there is an instance of good productivity or a malfunction – talk (like with the car).
• Time to think. If you load your machine with ‘stuff’ don’t expect great results. Like a washing machine – put too much in and it all comes out dirty.
• Be nice to it. We all talk to our cars and that works really well on an icy road or on a cold morning doesn’t it? (I hum to the microwave too – it helps the food to heat quicker). So be nice to your person and they will be nice back to you.

But if you are not entirely satisfied with your person, whatever the model, simply return them to where you got them and there is a good chance that there is someone out there who can successfully give them a more suitable home where they can function at their peak.

Getting caught up on the wrong side of a bad team dynamic can be hell – under normal circumstances it’s enough to get people to jump ship. But can the in-fighting and disagreements have a positive purpose?

Join us live at 9.30am on Tues 21st July and hear what Martin Down has to say on the subject. He specializes in helping teams to learn how to put conflict to their advantage – and he has done it for real too, skippering across the Atlantic in nasty weather!

Just send us an email at enquiries@pec.org.uk to reserve a place and visit http://www.pec.org.uk/events.asp for details of this and other past seminar recordings.

Everyone wants to know how to motivate their people to perform better in the current climate. It’s a pity they weren’t as interested before – had they been they would have been in better shape right now. What they should be doing now is no different to what they should have been doing originally, only now, it’s not really optional.

In brief – there’s more to each of these than meets the eye, BTW, so think before you dismiss ; ‘ )

Exceptional performance in tough times – what does it take?

The boss needs to know these few things:

1.    What is the No.1 preoccupation of each individual who works for me – ‘insights’ that start with “I think…” don’t count.
2.    If my people were unpaid volunteers what would I need to do to keep them? Am I doing it right now?
3.    Do I tend to clear the way or get in the way? How?

The report needs to know these few things:

1.    What frightens me?
2.    What feeds me?
3.    How to get through to the boss

• The report with their own people needs to know all those things.
• The boss and report both need to be prepared to act on what they know or to work at why they won’t.

Does it really exist?

Waiting for the hot water to come through in my hotel room. First a trickle, then a sputter, then nothing, then lots of gurgling, a breathy hiss, another trickle then final silence. Replace water for action and the hissing for talking and you have what mosty happens when companies employ consultants to help them to ‘team build‘ in the name of ‘doing management development’. Management development is a sticky business to begin with since most organisations don’t seem to want managers at all – especially now. They want thrusting, brave, articulate, sensitive, tough, creative, steady, ‘business-aware’ gods who can save the day. If that sounds batty, try getting a whole collection of these unicorns together in the same room (you’ll find them in any branch of Woolworths between the packets of Hen’s Teeth and the Fairy Wings).

The reality (according to me): team-building is to improving corporate performance what trying-for-a-baby is for family expansion. Have you ever ‘tried for a baby’? It’s horrible and the very act of trying kills much of the will to undertake the act that results in the conception of said baby. Why not just do the right things, naturally and the baby will come (IVF cases aside – apologies if you are one of those, of course).

So… If you want to build a team out of a group of individuals be very clear about what you are hoping for. It may be, for example, that if you just want people to talk to each other more, or relate to one another more warmly that you can do that for yourself and spend the money that you had earmarked for some sort of rope and barrel swinging exercise in the Dales to buying your team lunch somewhere once a month.

Bottom line: (does anyone else still say that?). Be clear about what you want to achieve in building your team, explain it to yourself in behaviours, think ‘common sense’ whe it comes to making the new behaviours happen and then get them to tell you how to do it. Hey presto – that’s team-building!

If your dreams still remain unfulfilled after many attempts then you may just need someone to come in. At least then you will know what you are asking for.

But the PEC’s rules for team-building consultant shopping are thus:

1. Be specific about what you want (“I want people to stop arguing about everything in meetings”)
2. Be precise about what you want instead (“I want challenge without the nasty stuff’)
3. Be conservative (“I want everyone to like one another” – is not realistic)
4. Be sure that you know who wants what (not everyone will want what you want just because you are the the boss). Check for REAL buy-in as you go along.

Good luck