Thursday, May 31, 2012

5 Habits for Team Excellence

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.” –Aristotle.

Habits are routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously (Wikipedia.org). Experts state that the brain is designed to develop habits that can help an individual perform specific tasks and activities automatically, repetitively and more effectively. Habits also result in predictive results, such as to improve accuracy, enhanced out comes, and even excellence. Goals in turn guide habits most fundamentally by providing the initial outcome-oriented impetus for response repetition. In this sense, habits often are a vestige of past goal pursuit.

So, can teams and organizations instill habits amongst all members to become highly effective in their pursuit of achieving excellence in their field? At GamePlanX we believe instilling corporate habits is an essential factor to achieving team excellence. Our experience with high performance teamwork leads us to recommend the following habits to achieve Team Excellence:

1.   Advertise the vision, plan, and desired outcome on regular basis
2.   Be aware of opportunities, competition and readiness to execute
3.   Proactively seek access to Knowledge, Training and Infrastructure
a.    Knowledge and Guidelines to achieve desired outcome
b.    Infrastructure to execute efficiently with Processes, Resources, Systems
c.    Train to execute as expected
4.   Build Team Spirit - Encourage and Facilitate Teamwork, Celebrate Wins, Acknowledge Effort, Evaluate and Empower to Improve.
5.   Execute with initiative, discipline, purpose, precision, and most of all passion.
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However, how does an organization instill such habits so that they are woven into the very fabric of daily task execution to achieve excellence? How can leadership bring together all of the resources, processes and systems to make it easy for every team members to adopt the 5 Habits for Team Excellence?

GamePlanX (GPX) can help you put together all the components essential for easy adoption of the 5 Habits for Team Excellence. We offer a comprehensive framework to develop a Winning Organization as illustrated in Figure 1 below - that enables immediate sharing of vision, goals, and plans with the workforce, and then, allows management to get out of the way while teams and employees are empowered to collaborate and execute as planned.

 
Figure 1: GPX Winning Organization Framework
The GPX Winning Organization Framework comes from our experiences of working with world renowned scholars to impart continuing education skills training and professional services; and high performance pro-sports, military and emergency/critical healthcare delivery team development to bring about significant and immediate performance impact towards leadership and workforce empowerment to achieve planned business outcome. As part of the Winning Organization Framework, we also provide you with access to GamePlanX, a powerful multimedia platform, which will be customized so your teams can stay connected to the knowledge, experts and attendees to establish communities of learning for easy adoption of the 5 Habits for Team Excellence. (You can also find related information by reading the blog on enabling an organization to realize strategic vision, http://gpxwinningorg.blogspot.com/)

GamePlanX also offers the GPX High Performance Teamwork Model (Figure 2 below) to enable your team to overcome corporate cultural barriers that can prevent adoption of the 5 Habits for Team Excellence. In the blog, Team Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast! (http://gpxblogculture.blogspot.com/), we addressed how the culture of an organization can make it very difficult, and in some cases impossible to execute strategic vision therefore achieve desired business goals.
 
Figure 2: GPX High Performance Teamwork Model

We hope you found this blog interesting. You can send us your feedback on this topic or contact GamePlanX at econcierge@GamePlanX.com to learn how GamePlanX can help your organization instill the 5 Habits to achieve Team Excellence.