Coach Dan's Blog

The key to unlocking your team's full potential? Balancing the 3 Es - Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Engagement. While many organizations focus solely on efficiency, measuring and optimizing for results, this approach can lead to limited long-term value. By inspecting and balancing the 3 Es, leaders can enable cross-functional teams to achieve their full potential indefinitely. Don't limit your team's success - prioritize effectiveness and engagement alongside efficiency.

High performing teams are not just about getting results, they're also about investing in themselves. Learning about each other, their customers/users, and the work that everyone does to bring shared success. Measuring results and efficiency is easy. Measuring the team's engagement is harder, but oh-so worth it. Balancing the Three Es - Engagement, Efficiency, and Effectiveness - is key to achieving high performance. Remember, you get what you measure, so measure the Three Es and help your teams be high performing!

One of the most important contributions that leaders can make in any transformation is to model the types of behaviors that we want teams and team members to adopt!  Modeling our target behaviors sends a very clear message that we are invested in not only changing the way we approach work, but also the culture that enables and reinforces those target behaviors.  Making small but thoughtful changes in the way you present yourself to your teams and partners can go a long way in creating the kind of organization we need.  As you’re working with your teams and partners, consider incorporating just one small thing from the following ideas. Pro tip – Don't have time to read this whole document right now?  Check out the “tl;dr” (Typed Long; Didn’t Read) section at the bottom of this post for an executive summary. Emphasize outcomes and put a premium on achieving business results rather than focusing on output.  Agile minded leaders view results in terms of achieving b...

 

 Empowerment begins with your team feeling psychologically safe. This week's blog post is specially crafted for leaders, managers, product managers and product owners.  Don't let that slow you down if you have a different fancy job title, of course, but today I'm speaking directly to the leaders of teams! One of my favorite definitions of empowerment comes from CEQ, Collaborative Equalit y: “Empowerment is defined as …the largest amount of voluntary and discretionary action in support of the company’s goals.  It is people proactively, and habitually, doing the right things at right time; people working out what’s needed and acting without instruction; people looking within the team for support, not looking upwards for answers." Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?  Problem is, it doesn’t just happen!  You have to work every day at creating and maintaining an environment where your teams feel safe to “work out what’s needed and act without instruction.” Here are some...