Collaborative Group Behaviors>>

Our model of change management is structured around the psychology of collaboration within groups and within organizations. Specifically, we posit that collaboration is the critical X factor separating extremely successful groups from the failures. Even mediocre groups that are "just getting by" may be only a few short steps from a catastrophe.

Research also shows that highly collaborative groups are orders of magnitude more successful and productive than their uncollaborative counterparts (demonstrated below). Therefore, actively cultivating and driving collaboration should be the top priority of an organization leaders, on behalf of stakeholders and all parties concerned.

We have identified the specific, measurable behaviors known to foster collaboration within groups. We can help you to effectively turn these behaviors into your performance expectations and train, train, train all of your group members to become genius collaborators.

Used correctly, these behaviors can turn even the most fledgling organization into an industry leader. We call these behaviors Collaborative Group Behaviors.

Background

In groups that do not have an enhanced environment (which is the type of environment that Collaborative Group Behaviors will give you) everybody is getting hurt. Lose-lose or win-lose situations are typically the only options available, work environments are always in an quasi-eroded condition, and resentments are buried deep, motivating passive-aggressive behaviors as well as simply passive and/or aggressive behaviors. Productivity and profitability are being lost in specific ways that are beyond your current metrics, so you don’t know how bad it is, nor would you know how to fix it even if you did know. You have a real sense that things could be going much better but are not sure what to do. You are not alone.

In an enhanced environment, each group member has bought into a set of shared values and has done so with a level of commitment such that the mission becomes the primary definition of how shared values should be defined. In addition, when those shared values are also consistent with individual human behaviors, it encourages collaborative group experiences that empower every group member to very high levels of job satisfaction and individual performance not typical to most groups.

Being a leader in a group that is in a very deteriorated condition is a sickening, thankless job. In these situations, leaders are asked to do the impossible because the group they are leading does not possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities to get the job done. If you are on the leadership team of a group that is doing okay but could be doing a lot better, chances are you are still having to endure a significant amount of needless frustration for the same reasons.

I can’t prove to you that the next big money-saving idea didn’t occur because of inappropriate behavior or a lack of collaboration, or that major process problem left unsolved could have been dealt with more effectively. But the evidence seems to indicate that this is exactly what is happening in a deteriorated, non-enhanced environment. As noted, if you are in leadership, you might have a real sense that things could be going much better, but you aren’t sure what you can do about it. That’s about to change.

John Kotter and James Heskett, in their groundbreaking work Corporate Culture and Performance, did a study that tracked numerous blue-chip companies in several industries over an eleven-year period, measuring cultural values, behavioral patterns, and shared attitudes. They classified the companies as either having enhanced cultures or non-enhanced cultures.

The results:

It’s important for everyone in the group, and especially so for those on the leadership team, to know why the effort of implementing Collaborative Group Behaviors will be worth it. Look at the results above. If you are a leader, YOU owe it to your board of directors, donors, law makers, shareholders, citizens, customers, and fellow group members to produce the results that can be had by providing an enhanced environment through the use of Collaborative Group Behaviors.

Shared values in the eight Collaborative Group Behavior categories of Mission, Culture, Effective Interpersonal Relationships, High-Quality Communication, Technical Competency, Productivity, Problem Solving, and Continuous Improvement will allow your group to grow, producing results that are likely far beyond your current understanding if you have never worked in an enhanced environment.

At full implementation, the results will be nothing less than revolutionary.

Collaborative Group Behaviors (supported by Collaborative Leadership Initiatives) are the essential actions that need to be demonstrated by the members of a group if the group is to move towards its mission successfully. All groups, to one degree or another, suffer from a lack of human collaboration. The condition of reduced collaboration is caused by the types of behaviors both demonstrated and not demonstrated by the group’s members. 

Simply put there are behaviors typically demonstrated in your group right now that if stopped would increase human collaboration. Likewise, there are behaviors typically not demonstrated in your group right now that if used would increase human collaboration.

While this logic would seem easy to understand and apply, I can assure you that the former only appears to be easy to implement, and the latter can be almost impossible for most leaders in most groups. It’s easy to understand how using or not using a particular behavior will increase collaboration in a hypothetical scenario. However, when dealing with real problems as they play out in the trenches, we can’t assume anything will be easy until we’ve tried it for ourselves.

Application of collaborative behaviors is problematic for several reasons. 

One, most people have not been trained how to collaborate beyond the lessons they learned in grade school. Many groups will essentially focus on a person’s technical skill when determining their value to the group and not by placing a premium on collaboration. While that statement might be objected to by many readers, one must understand that the for groups to hold human collaboration as important, they must do two things well. First, they actively train people how to be collaborative. And secondly, they hold their group members accountable for using and not using certain behaviors in order to advance collaboration in the group. Most groups do not have adequate training skills necessary to teach the right collaboration behaviors and even if they do, their ability to hold group members accountable is dismal at best. 

Two, most leaders don’t realize that certain obvious and hidden sources of fear being generated in the group are literally influencing the decision making locations within the brains of group members. When there are high levels of fear and uncertainty in an environment, decision making moves from the cerebral cortex to the amygdala in the brains of our group members. This is highly problematic. Moving decisions from the cerebral cortex (where logical, rational and ethical behaviors come from), to the amygdala (which detects threats and activates our fight-or-flight physiology) creates a culture of mistrust, where all we can think about is protecting ourselves from the next “attack.” If you are human it is an inescapable fact.

What this means is that in order for the group to seize mission success, the leaders need to be experts at knowing what behaviors to encourage and what behaviors to extricate and then have the courage of holding everyone accountable to these collaborative behaviors. The alternative is working in an environment in state of perpetual chaos, frustration, and instability, which wreaks constant havoc on our personal happiness and snubs any budding collaborative potential.

Let me ask you: how many leaders are hired based on their expertise in collaboration? Or, how many leaders do you know were hired based on their courage? How many were hired because they were rigorously tested in both of these attributes as part of the hiring process? Yes, not many or more likely, none. 

That’s where we come in.

We give leaders this unique expertise so that they can exercise their courage to move the group closer to the mission success, but that is not enough!

What we can also do is give the group a specific list of Collaborative Group Behaviors to use (and what behaviors NOT to use) in order to promote peak human collaboration. Once these behaviors are integrated and become performance expectations everything starts to change for the better.
 

These collaborative behaviors fall into eight categories of behavior:

• Mission

• Culture

• Effective Interpersonal Relationships

• High Quality Communication

• Technical Competency

• Productivity

• Problem Solving

• Continuous Improvement

Mission

A clearly defined and well used mission is the key to group success. A group without a mission may be hard working and well-intended but they won’t be effective. They will go through the motions and may appear very busy, their activity however will be wasted activity. Read on to see if you recognize what’s missing in your group. 

We have for far too long looked to those who labor in our groups as just that, labor. In doing so, we continue to miss the greatest opportunity for group survival. The people who labor in our groups have brains that know how to improve group performance in ways the leaders will never know. They provide unique insights, great ideas and mission centered decisions that can be the determining factors in group success. Leadership needs to build an environment that treats everyone as a contributor to the mission. By training group members the mission related skills it will avail them of the opportunity to achieve great things.

Because achieving great things satiates the individuals in the group, giving them the opportunity to do so based on a purpose (a mission) pushes the group to success.   

When a group is unaware of the importance of a mission or a set of values that direct group members towards unifying behavior, incompetence is prevalent. Yet this incompetence is not caused by a lack of desire or aptitude on the part of the individual. The cause is instead that they lack direction from a coherent unifying leadership message called a mission. Without a mission, each member of your group will naturally use their own definition for success–and who can blame them? No one wants to suffer failure, and if leadership won’t teach them how to succeed with a coherent mission and a clear sense of values then they are left to do the best they can to resolve the situation on their own. It’s a dilemma they don’t have the tools nor the authority to solve.

So, leadership blames the individual, reprimands their behavior and walks away, never understanding the hidden underlying systemic cancer of missing mission and values statements. Nobody is able to see the mission-less group environment as being the secret culprit to poor decision making. Yes, it’s not the only reason poor decisions are made. But those decisions that are made poorly because of the absence of a mission statement are hidden from common understanding. Does that make sense to you?

We have the behaviors you can use and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations.  

Culture

The primary reason for Collaborative Group Behaviors is to protect the group environment from obvious and not so obvious destructive behaviors. Destructive behavior creates fear and fear then becomes the controlling factor in adversely impacting the many necessary prerequisites for human collaboration. Collaborative Group Behaviors require training on the appropriate behaviors to use and the inappropriate behaviors to avoid so the individual can succeed in a group environment that is free of fear. Once fear is reduced the decision making location of the brain switches from the fight or flight Amygdala to the Cerebral Cortex with rational, logical and ethical behaviors.  

Culture plays a key role and is guarded without compromise as it comes up against any activity that adversely impacts dignity and respect of the individual. Without these safeguards in place, subterfuge starts to undermine any well-intentioned effort that leadership puts forth. It’s more than “playing nice.” Without drawing a line in the sand and having the courage to act against destructive behavior, passive leadership is generating hidden fears. 

3 essential human needs for eliminating fear within a culture:

• Each person wants Inclusion to feel significant. Without feeling significant their fear is being ignored. 
• Each person wants Control to feel competent. Without feeling competent their fear is being humiliated. 
• Each person wants Openness to feel likable. Without feeling likable their fear is being rejected. 

An environment where these 3 needs are addressed is an environment where people are significant, they are given control and they are supported in their want to be competent. 

Living in constant fear of being humiliated, rejected or ignored—does that sound like a high performing group? Of course not, because high performing cultures have a culture that prioritizes sharing control by sharing responsibilities. Because high performing cultures increase inclusion through recognition of good performance and because they encourage openness through transparency.

Without standards for maintaining a respectful environment, a culture that cannot be protected against destructive negative behaviors is formed. In this condition, we simply accept a fate of permanent failure when in fact we instead have proven alternatives that could result in success. The destiny for each of us and our groups is not written, it is chosen. Start choosing a culture that will enhance everyone’s future. When this choice is made and these behaviors are integrated into performance expectations over time, eventually what you are left with are people that want to collaborate.

Imagine that. 

We have the behaviors you can use and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations.

Effective Interpersonal Relationships

In order for a group to reach its potential for mission success, it needs to develop collaboration between the humans present in the group. And this is where the misunderstanding starts. Most people think that we are focusing on training the humans in the group to promote collaboration. But that is only partially true. You see people can think and feel whatever they want, that’s their human right to do so, but they can’t do or say whatever they want, at least not without consequences. So while we are teaching collaboration to people, the express purpose is to ensure that their relationships are collaborative, not necessarily them. Let me explain.  

As the number of people in a group might rise in a linear fashion the number of relationships are rising logarithmically. With ten people in a group it results in 45 relationships. With 100-person group its 4950 relationships. Yes, we added 90 more people and in doing so we added 4905 relationships! If we add another 9,900 people to the group, the number of possible relationships skyrockets to nearly 50 million! While we need each one of those relationships to be collaborative we can’t train 50 million relationships, but we can train 10,000 people. 

The success of the group effort is directly supported by the accumulation of effective one-on-one relationship-building efforts by each person. This is why each relationship is important and it’s why building a capacity for professional relationship creation is important!

In our view, the ability of group members to hold themselves to professional relationship building behaviors and to avoid behaviors that are damaging to relationship needs to become a job requirement. This is why many of the collaborative group behaviors go beyond just holding people accountable for treating each other well. But now, more importantly, holding them accountable for holding themselves accountable for developing professional relationships. See the difference? Having each person actively contribute to solutions for resolving interpersonal conflicts are fundamental behaviors necessary for collaboration. 

The primary reason groups don’t place a high priority on Effective Interpersonal Relationships (even if they think they do) is because they underestimate the magnitude of the issue. They think they are dealing with a 100 person issue when actually it’s a 4950 relationship issue. So it’s not 100 reasons to require effective interpersonal relationships, it’s actually 4950 reasons to require effective interpersonal relationships, even though there are only 100 people in the group. Right?

We have the behaviors you can use to build effective interpersonal relationships and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations. 

High Quality Communication

Communication as we know it: a string of words coupled with body language and other behaviors that communicate. That are then endlessly connected end to end to other words and behaviors, resulting in an almost limitless breadth of communication.

Communication is not static. In other words, it does not stay the same even though we can’t always tell it is changing. Communication is our ability to transfer thoughts and feelings. Once sent and accurately received, our communication usually results in a conclusion that requires some type of action. As the need for action changes so does the communication. As the need for high quality action rarely stops, nor should the need for excellent, dynamic communication. If action occurs but communication is not keeping pace, it creates problems for the group. When the pace of initiating new communication is unable to keep pace with the need for the group to respond to new environmental changes, the current group’s actions become ineffective. If left unaddressed, this fault will threaten mission success, simply because with each unaddressed action the group grows ever more irrelevant to the exact things its wanting to impact in a positive fashion.

The communication thread as described above is dynamic. Dynamic, meaning that it is ever changing. And in a group it is as complicated as the independent movement of each water molecule in a giant raging river. If we start to see communication this way, we start to come closer to treating it with the respect that it deserves. 

Because communication is dynamic it is always either getting better or it’s getting worse because it doesn’t have the ability to stay the same. If you don’t know for sure that communication is getting better, then it’s usually getting worse. 

Pause after reading each statement: We make judgments as we listen and filter out anything we don’t believe and we don’t realize we are doing it. We each use different pictures in our mind for the same words that are being used in the conversation and we don’t realize we are doing it. We assume that the words we are using in our conversation represent reality with 100% accuracy. They don’t and we don’t realize it.  We have a tendency to fill in the gaps between pieces of information instead of asking questions and we don’t realize we are doing it. We can have difficulty communicating our own self-interest and we don’t realize we are suffering from this inadequate or inaccurate communication. When we hear communication that makes us feel uncomfortable we have already decided that it is wrong or inaccurate and we don’t realize we are doing it. If we hear a verified fact in a conversation that opposes one of our belief systems, we start to sabotage the dialogue and we don’t realize we are doing it. Fear prevents us from conveying important information and we don’t realize it. Talking about anything “new” can feel dangerous so we don’t talk about it and we don’t realize we are avoiding it. 

Do you see anything on this list of communication issues that all issues have in common? That’s right; we typically don’t realize we are doing it. 

If we don’t know we are doing it, we can’t take the initial steps of correcting the situation. If we can’t correct the situation, it continues to do damage and we don’t even realize it. This is why High Quality Communication creates such an opportunity for improvement in a group setting. 

We have the behaviors you can use to build high quality communication, and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations. 

Technical Competency

Being able to make a skilled contribution is what makes you, as an individual, fundamentally valuable to your group. Having a group of technically skilled contributors advances the success of the group and its mission. It’s that straight forward, yet the path to how technical competency is prevented from helping the group along the way is filled with road blocks that most groups don’t know about. As we don’t know the problem we fail in applying technical skills for reasons we are unaware of. 

Being able to make a “skilled” contribution is what makes you, as an individual, fundamentally valuable to your group. Having a group of technically skilled contributors advances the success of the group and its mission. It’s that straightforward, yet technical competency within the group is often blocked from its full potential by roadblocks that most groups don’t know about. As we don’t know the problem we fail in applying technical skills for reasons we are unaware of. 

As the collective skill level rises in a group, the chances of mission success also rises. As the skill level drops so does the success. We as individuals are married to group success and this group success is directly proportional to the collective technical skill level of the group. There are two basic skill sets, hard skills and soft skills, or what I will call collaborative skills. Both are essential to a successful group.

Hard skills are those that are required to be performed by an individual related to a particular specialty, or your expertise. This specialty then adds to the group’s other specialties provided by others. Whether you are an accountant for a hardware chain, a piano player in an orchestra, a machinist at an airplane factory or an English teacher at your school, if you don’t know how to do your job well the entire group is damaged, not just you.

And it can’t just be one or two or ten people who know what they are doing.  Groups of diversified skill holders are complementary. You can have the finest menu with the freshest ingredients, a famous chef cooking wonderful food, friendly and competent servers pleasing diners, but if the dishwasher does a lousy job and everyone is eating off poorly washed dishes all of the rest just doesn’t matter. If everyone is not technically competent in their specific area of expertise it lowers the group’s ability to meet the mission and it creates risk. 

A word of warning: when technical incompetency shows itself as a problem it typically reveals itself at the individual level so the typical group can misunderstand the problem to be a problem with the individual. While this might be true, upon further investigation it can also be another unrecognized problem. When an individual is given effective training from a highly effective training program their chances of demonstrating low technical competency is low. Be aware; when the group member in question has the aptitude and the desire to learn their technical training, any issues with low technical competency might be sourced back to a flaw in the training program. This can also be supported when you find more than one person making the same mistake.

When a group has a coherent, focused and effective training program that applies to all technical skills embedded in the group, the entire group advances towards success. Having each and every group member fully competent within their specialty is an essential bottom-line necessity: technical skill set competency creates group success.

We have the behaviors you can use to build Technical Competency, and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations.

Productivity

Simply put, productivity is the amount of effort or work per unit of time or money. Sounds a bit “stuffy,” yet understanding it well has been responsible for building empires. Likewise, not understanding it, not protecting it or not improving it, has led to their downfall. On the surface it appears rather dry, yet productivity is such a consequential factor that it becomes the topic most likely to determine the success or permanent failure of you and your group.

Like all Collaborative Group Behaviors, productivity is uniquely important. Without improving productivity overtime the group fails. In essence, improved productivity generates increased wealth. As the cost of producing a product or service is reduced through innovation, the savings can be shared in a myriad of ways such as higher wages, more cash for capital purchases and better dividends to the shareholders to name just a few.

Before it can be improved upon it needs at the very least to be maintained or sustained. If productivity is to be first sustained and then improved upon to generate wealth, the value it provides for the group needs to be fully understood. Once grasped, this understanding needs to be fully acted upon by every member of the group. 

When productivity is growing on a regular basis from improvement strategies based on collaborative tactics, the group is in a mode of constantly generating wealth.

It’s not necessarily about working harder. The central themes are the particular contributing behaviors that move the group towards higher productivity, and simply working harder is not a concept that a group can use to improve productivity. Working at a reasonable pace according to the task and conditions at hand is a baseline, but it’s not the most powerful method a group uses to grow wealth.

It’s really about “working smarter” and the possibilities of doing so never seem to be exhausted. There is always a new idea around the corner that drives productivity ever higher. And this stream of ideas for improvement comes from the people in your group.

We can’t tell the future. But with an innovation process that drives productivity up, the group can get closer to a better future using one good idea at a time. Step by step. Motivation and Innovation pushing productivity up creates wealth within the group. And that wealth creates opportunity for meeting the mission. Working smarter means knowing how to be more productive today, tomorrow and the next day and the next.

But the fact is, there is no improvement in productivity unless the group members possess the desire to improve. Generating the desire and the passion to improve in your group is not a hard skill, it’s a soft skill. Without it, it is just a matter of time before your customers, competition, or board of directors notice you circling the drain of mission failure.

The key to success is to use some of that productivity increase and plow it back into the group. Anytime resources start dwindling below minimum things start to go very wrong.

The competition for dwindling resources and the on-going snipping and gossiping on paid time that can go along with it replaces cooperation, further exacerbating the problem of falling productivity. As fear grips the environment, cooperation begins a slow persistent drop that spells the fate of collaboration and trust amongst group members. Because of this, productivity loss accelerates the group into a death spiral, taking everyone’s job along with it.

The good news is, exploiting productivity improvement opportunities in your group results in just the opposite. The desire to improve caused by working in a highly collaborative group, creates opportunity, creates relationship, creates economic spirit, and metaphorically speaking everyone is moving to a richer neighborhood.

Productivity, implemented by a group well versed in its power, becomes an explosive positive movement. Esprit de corp builds camaraderie and respect between group members. When a group becomes a high performer it’s always because it has also became a high producer. Success in productivity cements effective relationships as a “living moment” when an individual is positively recognized for demonstrating productive behavior. It communicates to group members a desire and commitment that others will observe. As productivity increases the group moves ever closer to its maximum potential of mission success. 

We have the behaviors you can use to create High Productivity, and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations.

Problem Solving

Group members now have permission and are encouraged to bring problems of any sort forward. In fact, it’s essential that they do. From technical problems to professional issues to personal disagreements. When they come forward with problems for examination and resolution and the problem is resolved effectively you will have removed one of the most significant issues that keep a group from succeeding.

Having good problem solving skills is not that same as being smart or intelligent. Just because a person is smart and has risen to prominence based on that intelligence does not mean they have good problem solving skills. Believe it.    

Problems solved and issues resolved as fast as they show up is one of the most important actions that a successful group does well. And problems can’t be solved if they are not first known. It’s a team sport, it now matters less who solves the problem, the only thing that matters, in the final analysis, is that the problems are resolved and the damage they create is stopped. Problems and issues left unresolved will suck the life blood from your group. Problems and issues have a life of their own and as long as they go unanswered they roam around doing lots of damage to the group.

When a group can solve problems and resolve issues as fast as they show up, the group has maximized chances for success and minimized the significant tangible damage that unanswered problems will do. The damage includes making people’s lives miserable, gutting productivity and providing a major cultural impediment to collaboration that makes continuous improvement much more difficult than it would be otherwise.

If the amount of unresolved problems escalates beyond a group’s ability to solve them, then suddenly you have a list of problems piling up, and it is growing longer with each passing day, month and year. The tangible result becomes an unmanageable chaos that smothers collaboration. Any chance at healthy collaboration is now buried under the debris from bad feelings, a lack of confidence in the mission, lost customers and everything in between. Yesterday’s unsolved problems are added to today’s unsolved problems and both of which are added to the list of problems that show up tomorrow. The result: group motivation is buried in shallow, unmarked grave. I know that sounds pretty dark, but what we need to understand is this: when unsolved problems hurt people and mission success, it’s a sad story. But when unsolved problems hurt people and mission success AND it could have been prevented, it’s more than a sad story -- it’s a tragedy. Poor decision making and unsolved problems hurt our people and hurt our groups.

For every issue or problem there is a solution that will help to mitigate the damage. Groups typically lack solutions in several critical areas, making sure unsolved problems stay unsolved. To name just a few; we haven’t made recognizing and talking about problems into a top operating priority in our group environment. We don’t use a team step-by-step problem solving philosophy, and therefore all of our collective knowledge, wisdom and resident staff genius is left untapped and unleveraged. We don’t realize that we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t understand that cognitive biases and fallacies are leading us to deny valid answers to pressing problems because of our flawed thinking patterns. We don’t understand what a “fact” is. We lack imagination in the sense that we don’t use the creative powers that we possess.

We have the behaviors you can use to foster Problem Solving, and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations.

Continuous Improvement

There is one single difference between humans and all the other animals [as far as we know] and that is we can “think about thinking.” This is the fertile soil upon which conceptual thought turns into an activity that is beneficial to the human. Much of our thinking is prioritized towards activities that are more important, or more beneficial, for our survival. Much of this thought is unconscious, in other words we are thinking about how to survive more than we probably know. And when faced with any type of threatening situation, real or imagined, physical or psychological, our brain definitely shifts to the survival mode.

Knowing that some conditions encountered were unprecedented coupled with the fact that survival was held in the balance, humans throughout prehistory were highly motivated to develop innovative responses to effectively counter the unprecedented nature of their circumstances.

The ever changing prehistoric environment begged an ever changing response to maintain the conditions necessary for survival. Maintaining our survival conditions by responding to a changing environment is our fundamental adaptive response. This is why innovation is critical to a successful group. Successfully adapting to a new or unprecedented environmental condition creates a constant process of innovation. People innovate constantly but are rarely aware that they are doing it as much as they actually are.

In high performing groups, people are encouraged to initiate ideas for improvement, ideas that solve problems, ideas that save time or save money, ideas that increase sales and ideas that help other ideas for improvement to succeed. High performing groups encourage people to do some research ahead of time that will help determine whether or not to take an idea to the next step. They encourage you to participate in brainstorming sessions that are focused on a particular issue and other sessions that are open forums for the specific purpose of gathering the problems for you and others to solve.

Continuous improvement is a combination of constant innovation and constant recovery. 

The main thrust of continuous improvement is that negative performance events, either within a system/process or within people centered performance, are followed by a mission-conscious debriefing. From that debriefing adjustments are identified to improve future performance. 

By prioritizing recovery from mistakes and focusing on the recommended changes for improved behavior instead of attacking the person, performance improves at an accelerated pace and less than desirable behavior drops and doesn’t re-emerge.   

It is acceptable in the context of negative performance events that the communication be appropriately clear. Yet it will be focusing on feedback that is designed to promote the individual’s success that will always be the most effective. Hard working and well-intended people want to be effective, recovery training gets them there.

With a constant and consistent flow of small improvements over time, mission success becomes bulletproof. Sorry to say, it’s not “talent” that will drive the world out of its problems, but “skill.” And if skill is to be developed it needs an objective that defines success coupled with an effective training program that uses constant feedback in order to make constant small adjustments towards success.

We can’t just reprimand our way to success but we can “recover” our way to success. Do not underestimate the power of recovery behavior; it helps to produce some of the best fighter pilots in the world.

Combining innovation and recovery behavior keeps processes and people forever improving.

We have the behaviors you can use to establish Continuous Improvement, and the training you need to then insert these high performing collaborative group behaviors into your performance evaluations.