Periodically, I share a favorite book review from Readitfor.me. There is never enough time to read all the latest books – this tool is a great way to learn and to stay on top of the latest topics and new ideas.

Your Team is your greatest resource. Recognizing each member’s abilities and fostering their growth to full potential will grow your Team’s Strength.

This review of Build an A Team   by: Whitney Johnson outlines the “S Cures” of learning that you can use to strengthen your team to reach peak productivity. 

Build an A Team
by: Whitney Johnson

Book Review by ReadItFor.me

Disruptive innovation, at its simplest, explains how low-end industry insurgents take on—and eventually outcompete—high-end incumbents who seemingly should have known better Things take traction and the David beats the Goliath.

It is now generally accepted that disruptive innovation underpins the invention of new products and services. Less generally recognized, is that personal disruption in the workplace—the movement of people from one learning curve to the next, one challenge to another—can drive learning, engagement, and even innovation. Johnson claims we can build an A Team this way. Let’s explore how.

The S curve of learning

The S curve of learning represents three distinct phases:

1. The low end, involving a challenging and slow push for competence.
2. The up-swinging back of the curve, where competence is achieved, and progress is rapid.
3. The high end of the curve, where competence has evolved into mastery and can quickly devolve into boredom and disengagement.

An A-Team Is a Collection of Learning Curves 

Johnson challenges us to visualize our team as a collection of people at different points on their own personal S curves. New team members will be at the low end of their curve for approximately six months depending on the difficulty and aptitude. At the six-month mark, they should be hitting the tipping point and moving onto the steep back of their learning curve. During this second phase, they’ll reach peak productivity, which is where they should stay for three to four years. At around the four-year mark, they will have made the push into mastery. In the mastery phase, an employee performs every task with ease and confidence. But ease, and even confidence, can quickly deteriorate into boredom without the motivation of a new challenge. It is  time for them to jump to a new learning curve.

Accelerants of Learning And Growth 

Johnson gives us pointers to progress on how to get the right Team on the right Learning S-curves.

Johnson challenges us to visualize our team as a collection of people at different points on their own personal S curves. New team members will be at the low end of their curve for approximately six months depending on the difficulty and aptitude. At the six-month mark, they should be hitting the tipping point and moving onto the steep back of their learning curve. During this second phase, they’ll reach peak productivity, which is where they should stay for three to four years. At around the four-year mark, they will have made the push into mastery. In the mastery phase, an employee performs every task with ease and confidence. But ease, and even confidence, can quickly deteriorate into boredom without the motivation of a new challenge. It is  time for them to jump to a new learning curve.

Accelerants of Learning And Growth 

Johnson gives us pointers to progress on how to get the right Team on the right Learning S-curves.

1.Identify the Right Risks 
What needs aren’t being met on your team? Does it make sense to redistribute responsibilities? Create a new role? Would more high-quality candidates be available if you looked beyond the spec of the current job? As a manager your job is to mitigate the risk of disruption, not to plug gaps with human resource plugs.

2. Play to Individuals’ Distinctive Strengths 
What does each person do well that other people on the team do not, and what sorts of problems do those strengths equip them to solve? As a manager, your job is to pinpoint what people do uniquely well and pit these abilities against assignments that make their strengths relevant

3. Stepping Backward Is a Way to Move Forward 
Why would an employee be motivated to step back from success in a role while resting on their laurels at the top of the curve, enjoying privilege and entitlement? Because stepping back is your slingshot to moving further forward and contributing more. Pull back and accelerate further.

4. Give Failure Its Due 
At the low end of the curve, when you hire within the organization you must expect staff to flounder. This gives them support for learning, allowing them to quickly engage in the actual work. With employees in the sweet spot of the S curve it can be harder. You may want to shield them from failure, but when tasked with undemanding assignments their confidence begins to falter. Give them stretch goals to keep the edge.

5. Encourage Discovery-Driven Growth 
With discovery driven growth the initial plan is skeletal and is fleshed out as feedback rolls in. We can use this approach when managing people. As you learn about a person’s capabilities you can redeploy them to improve the match between strengths and unmet business needs. Job descriptions should be deliberately vague attracting talented prospects who can contribute now, while offering potential unexplored roles.

Hire People Who Can Grow on the Job 

Begin by reminding yourself that the goal is to approach human resources as raw materials rather than as finished products, the same way you would handle other resources. Johnson suggests we consider the following.

1. Identify the tasks you want a new hire to perform. Don’t accept that it has to stay as it currently is. Genuinely understand what you are looking for, then make the effort to find it.
2. Do a team check: consider how the new role will affect the team. How might a new hire enhance the capacities your team already has? Where are the gaps in good team compatibility?
3. Do a sanity check: identify your motivation for the new hire.  Having identified these, may require an adjustment to expectations. If we onboard someone who can do the functional job but can’t do the emotional job, we won’t be satisfied no matter what they do.
4. Write the right job specification. The target should be to attract talented people who are qualified to onboard at the low end of the job’s learning curve. They won’t be experts, but they will have what it takes to learn and grow into other roles. If we inflate the necessary qualifications to attract the crème-de-la crème we will get a candidate who will become disinterested within the first few months of employment.

Managing the Hungry New Hire 

New hires need a vision. Understanding why their job is important will aid them through early stage difficult days. Initially they may struggle and try your patience. You may even wonder why you hired them. But you can increase their odds of moving up the learning curve by laying out a vision from the outset. Just as your new employee needs to understand the company’s vision, you’ll want to understand theirs. Find out what they are trying to accomplish as a person and how this new role fits with their goals, as well as what they anticipate they will need from you to be successful.

As your employees share their goals with you, clarify expectation that progression by learning is important. Be explicit: I am here to help you help me get my job done. Here’s how. I will then reward you for your contributions. And here’s how I’ll do that. Get your new hire’s perspective on your operation. Being able to hear the contrary ideas of others allows us to move more quickly up the learning curve. Learn to solicit ideas and opinions from newcomers who aren’t yet blind through familiarity. Future performance and innovation may hinge on it.

Be a Chief Encouragement Officer. Feeling the agitation or disapproval of the boss can cause concern. Remember staff took this job and will stay in this job—or not—largely because of the leader. If you can make them feel safe and acknowledge their efforts, even when imperfect, you’re sitting on a gold mine.

Playing to Sweet Spot Strengths 

Sweet-spot employees are confident in their abilities, having moved past the daily struggle at the low end of the curve. Yet it is common for managers to be reluctant to provide these employees with stretch assignments. Maybe you don’t want to discourage or derail them. But experiencing a genuine risk of failure – working under pressure – is what motivates most of us to step up to the plate. Allow, and even generate, pressure. In the case of your sweet-spot employees, consider imposing constraints that fall into the following categories:

• Time – A task that is less demanding becomes a major challenge if you impose a tight deadline. Here are some questions to ask your employees, and yourself. To hit annual targets in nine months instead of twelve, what would you do differently? If you were going to be away for three months, what would you do to make sure things could run without you? What are the most important priorities? Which things aren’t as important? What must you absolutely get done so that your manager can advocate for your jump to a new curve? 
• Money – Trim back the expenditure on the team. Ask questions such as: If your business unit had to be profitable as a stand-alone entity, what would your business model be? If you only had half of the current marketing budget, what would you do differently? If you had to assemble an A-team with only 80% of your current budget, what would you do? 
• Expertise – Exploit their deep understanding. Ask: If you were CEO for a day and ran the company based on your area of expertise, what would you change? What if everyone on your team were new? No experts, only novices. What would you do differently? 

Managing Masters 

Here’s the challenge: after months, maybe years of investment, our employee shoots up the learning curve. They have become our go-to person, willing and able to do whatever is asked. We’ve become accustomed to an outsized return on their effort. Why would we push them to try something new, when we’re still reaping the rewards of our investment? As growth peaks and flattens out, if change isn’t on the horizon, our high performer may become a low performer. This is seldom intentional, but it happens anyway, either because they feel stymied or because work has become too easy, and routine is boring.

Have Your Best Workers Share What They Know 

High-end-of-the-curve employees are sought after assets internally but even more so externally. So how can you manage (and keep) this human resource you’ve worked hard to develop in a way that will work for your organization, your team, and you? There are three important roles they can play:

Pacesetters: pushing low-enders to excel. Put your top performers to good use by showing low-enders what success looks like.

Trainers: conveying corporate memory. Have the top enders create their legacy in the creation of the Organisational Encyclopaedia – The business Book of Knowledge.

Mentors: the benefits of mentoring offer a fresh angle on the job for someone who may be a bit idle while they await the jump to a new curve, and it disperses the training responsibility through a wider pool of talent.

Keeping Masters Engaged

The goal is always to retain talent, but the more people achieve seniority, the more it becomes a challenge. Not everyone can go up. But it is also true that “up” isn’t the only way up: a lot of learning and growth can happen in lateral moves that may give employees the perfect skill set to forge ahead. If lateral moves carry some stigma, then backward moves are often seen as even more so. We tend to assume something’s wrong with someone who takes a step back. But sometimes taking a step back is exactly the right move. Like the slingshot, we pull back to get the momentum we need to catapult forward.

Shake Things Up 

Managing people as a series of S curves requires a disruptive mindset on your part. Here are some important questions Johnson says we should consider.
How can I shake up employees or teams who have become set in their ways? What goals might be accomplished by shifting people into different roles? How can I create a company culture that encourages and even insists on curve jumping? 

Where to Climb When You’re at the Top

For some employees, there may not be a next curve to jump to within the organization, especially those who are approaching retirement. Data tells us that more people are choosing to work past traditional retirement milestones. Some may have the work-life bandwidth remaining to tackle entirely new learning curves, others may not. Efforts to accommodate their needs, perhaps part-time or remote work can keep them contributing at great benefit to everyone involved. Many will be willing to discuss adjustments to compensation that will maintain their high value to the firm while allowing them more flexibility to pursue noncareer objectives. The key is to think creatively. Years of experience is a human resource not to be wasted.

Conclusion

Periodically, I share a favorite book review from Readitfor.me.

There is never enough time to read all the latest books – this tool is a great way to learn and to stay on top of the latest topics and new ideas.

The Readitfor.me tool has grown into a great resource for both personal and team growth, offering book summaries, micro courses and master classes. Check out this link: Readitfor.me. See how these tools can help build you personal and Team Strength.

Here is a summary of the Book Brief by Joseph McCormack.

Getting you point across clearly and concisely, saves resources- time and money.

Read on to learn how you can get your point across in a world full of distractions.

Brief   
by Joseph McCormack

Book Review by ReadItFor.me

We live in an attention-deficit economy, and being brief is both desperately needed and rarely delivered.

When we are not clear and concise, there are consequences. Time, money and resources are wasted. Decisions are made in confusion, great ideas don’t get pursued, and deals take far too long to close.

This book is all about getting your story straight, and then getting to the point. Quickly.

Join us for the next 12 minutes as we explore how to communicate your message briefly, and powerfully. As author Joseph McCormack points out – it’s like Six Sigma for your mouth.

Let’s get started.

Why Brevity Is Vital

These days, everybody is busy. Especially executives. Your rambling marketing message or sales pitch is likely to get lost in the daily flood of information they struggle to stay on top of.

As McCormack points out, being brief is not just about time. The more important point is how it feels to the audience. It’s not about using the least amount of time. It’s about making the most of the time you have.

There are three things you need in order to adhere to the principles of brevity – be concise, clear, and compelling. What follows naturally from this is that you also need to have a through understanding of your subject matter.

Mindful of Mind-filled-ness

Living in a world full of distractions means that the people around you are mentally stretched. That makes getting to your point before your audience gets distracted an imperative.

There are 4 main sources of pressure your audience is battling as you try and get your point across:

• Information overload, which has gotten worse as social media and email invades our lives more and more every day;
• Inattention, causing them to struggle with paying attention longer than 10 seconds at a time;
• Interruptions, which means that there are many different things competing for attention at all times;
• Impatience for creating results, which causes people to be stressed almost all the time.

Here’s the point. Even if you are given 30 minutes to make a presentation, you have far less than that before your audience tunes you out.

Why You Struggle with Brevity: The Seven Capital Sins

In spite of the evidence that brevity is a necessity in today’s world, it turns out to be difficult to master because of what McCormack calls the “seven capital sins.”

• Cowardice. You don’t have the guts to be clear and take a stand on the issue, so you mask your message in mounds of jargon and buzzwords.
• Confidence. You know the material so well and can’t help explaining it in painful detail.
• Callousness. You don’t respect people’s time. When you say “this will only take a minute”, it ends up taking many times that.
• Comfort. When you are comfortable with an audience, you let yourself get wordy and drag the story out.
• Confusion. You tend to do your thinking out loud, not mindful that your audience would rather hear the finished product.
• Complication. You think that the issue is really complicated, missing the point that your job is to simplify it for people.
• Carelessness. You don’t think about what you are going to say deeply enough, and so your message gets mixed up.

Brevity Tool #1: BRIEF Maps

People who start to gain experience in making presentations and sales pitches mistakenly abandon outlines, thinking they are a tool that only rookies use.

Professionals understand that an outline is critical to their success. McCormack tells us that there are five immediate benefits you’ll get by using them.

Outlines keep you:

• Prepared, so you are ready to deliver your message.
• Organized, so you understand how all of your ideas connect.
• Clear, so you are certain what your point is.
• Contextual, so you can draw a bigger picture so your point stands out.
• Confident, so that you know what to say, inside and out.

The BRIEF way to do an outline is organized as follows:

• B: Background or beginning;
• R: Reason or relevance;
• I: Information for inclusion;
• E: Ending or conclusion;
• F: Follow-up or questions you expect to be asked or that you might ask;

This format can be used for anything you need to present – from an important project update to your team to the most important sales pitch of your life.

Now that we’ve covered how to outline your message, let’s move on to how to deliver it.

Brevity Tool #2: The Role of Narratives

Bore your audience to death with corporate-speak and they’ll tune you out faster than you can say “next slide.” But tell them a good story and they’ll gladly give you their undivided attention.

McCormack introduces us to the idea of the Narrative Map to help us do just that. There are five elements in the map.

The focal point

This is the central part of the story, and tells the audience what it’s about. For instance, at the beginning of his presentation launching the iPhone, Steve Jobs said “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.”

Setup or challenge

In the context of a marketing or sales message, this is the challenge, conflict, or issue in the marketplace that your organization is addressing. Every great story includes a dragon that needs to be slayed.

Opportunity

This is about communicating the opportunity that the challenge poses. Some people call this an unmet need or an aha moment.

Approach

Now we move on to how the story unfolds. This is the how, where and when of your story, describing how you’ll solve the problem or take advantage of the opportunity. There are usually three or four key points to be made here.

Payoff

All good stories include a payoff at the end. This is where you paint the picture of what life looks like for your audience after your solution is implemented.

So that’s how you outline and then craft a narrative that gets communicated clearly, concisely and powerfully.

Let’s now move our attention to a method for being clear in our every day conversations with the people around us.

Brevity Tool #3: Controlled Conversations and TALC Tracks

As McCormack points out, if we are undisciplined in how we present information, we are even more undisciplined in how we have our daily conversations.

Being brief in a conversational setting means shifting from endless monologues to what he calls having controlled conversations. These conversations have a rhythm, a purpose, and a point.

In order to get conversations right, there are things you need to do, and things you need to avoid.

Let’s start with the three common mistakes that draw people into long, unwieldy conversations:

• Passive listening: Letting the other person babble on about everything and say nothing. As a result, there is no control.
• Waiting your turn: Letting the person talk, then jumping in to say your part. As a result, two separate conversations are happening.
• Impulsively reacting: Responding to a word or thought the other person said. As a result, there is no clear direction in the conversation.

Now let’s move to a structure for balance and brevity. McCormack calls these TALC Tracks.

T is for Talk

Somebody in the conversation starts talking. It could be you or the other person. There are two things to consider at this stage:

• Be prepared to say something when the other person finishes speaking.
• Make sure your response has a clear point.

AL is for Actively Listen

Listen closely to what the other person is saying the entire time. Don’t zone out, multitask, or otherwise take your attention off the other person. There are two things to consider at this stage:

• Ask open-ended questions related to what you heard.
• Dig deeper into the parts of the topic you are genuinely interested in.

C is for Converse

When a natural pause happens in the conversation, it’s your turn to jump in with a comment, question, or sometimes a bridge to another topic. There are three things for you to consider at this stage:

• Don’t use your turn to start a new conversation.
• Keep your responses short.
• Know when to stop so the other person can start talking again.

When and Where to be Brief

Now that we’ve covered the foundations of how to be brief, let’s go into some specific examples of when and where to be brief.

In Meetings

We all know that meetings suck. There are three villains that you need to slay in order to make them suck less.

• Reduce the amount of time devoted to them. Put the BRIEF back in briefings.
• Consider a standing meeting, or a meeting with no table. And most importantly, meetings should be more like a conversation than a presentation.
• Making sure that no one person dominates your meetings. That includes outside presenters.

Social Media

McCormack suggests that we create social media posts and emails that respect a busy executive’s time. That almost always means making things shorter.

Presentations

The best way to deliver a presentation is to first understand what your audience wants to hear, and then speak to those things, and those things only.

Job Interviews

Nobody likes job interviews, and that includes the person doing the hiring. When you are the candidate, create a BRIEF Map that quickly explains why you are qualified. Then, tell a story that shares some of your past successes that demonstrate what your potential employer is looking for.

Sharing Good and Bad News

When you are sharing good or bad news with your team, always get to the point quickly. Then, let some time for the news to sink in and leave time for them to ask questions.

When you are delivering bad news in particular, consider three important issues:

• State bad news simply and clearly, without pulling punches.
• State the real reasons for the bad news so people know what’s happening.
• Take advantage of tough situations to have a heart-to-heart.

Conclusion

Everybody is busy. The world is begging you to get to the point quickly.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said:

Be sincere, Be brief, Be seated.

Please share this with a friend/colleague