After you’ve had a number of brainstorming sessions, you may find your creativity is sapped or the sessions are simply not as good as they had been previously. We’re going to explore 4 tips to better brainstorming sessions.

1. Introduce Some New Blood to the Meeting

Sometimes, a different perspective is just what you need to kickstart a brainstorming session. In the past, I’ve invited members of our creative team (graphic designers), communications team, or sales team to a brainstorming session. They offer a unique perspective which helps spark new ideas on the team.

2. Sometimes You Need a Different Environment

If you’re holding the brainstorming sessions in the same conference room, perhaps you need a different work environment to spark ideas. Move the brainstorming session to a different floor, outside, or off-site. A new environment can provide the extra oomph needed to come up with new ideas.

3. Try Encouraging New People to Speak

Often a brainstorming session is driven by the same voices. Encouraging other members of the team to take a more active role, and encouraging the talkers to be quiet, is just what’s needed to get the brainstorming session into new territory.

4. Change How the Meeting is Run

Many managers don’t realize how their tone or language affects brainstorming sessions. You may unconsciously dismiss ideas from certain people, or speak in a tone which discourages innovation. Changing the structure of the meeting – or simply being quiet and letting an employee run the meeting – may be enough to get creativity back in your meeting.

Brainstorming sessions can produce new ideas for your team, new products, or a solution to a difficult problem. Follow these steps to restore creativity back into your brainstorming sessions.

1. Commiserate with Your Team

One of the first reactions after a bad boss leaves and the team inherits a new boss is to assume you are the same as their previous manager. The team has formed bonds by having to suffer together and you need to respect that and use it to help rebuild. Let people air their grievances about the experience, about what went wrong, and reminisce to the days when the team was functional. These complaints are important to discover their beliefs, values, and what they care about. It also gives them an opportunity to be heard – one they likely have not yet had.

2. Demonstrate You Are Different

Many managers try to rule with fear as a motivator and this can leave a strong lasting impact on a team. Demonstrate immediately that you will handle things differently – firm, yet fair. You aren’t there to coddle them due to their bad experience, but you also aren’t there to tear them down. You are their manager and want to build a functioning and high performance team.

It will take time for some members of your team to rebuild trust, so give some latitude if their previous boss was abusive.

3. Weed Out Root Problems

The previous manager is not always the root of the problems with a team. You must discover what the true causes of conflict are. You can do this by speaking with members of the team, internal customers they dealt with, and external customers. You will likely find a ton of data which will point to the true cause of the problem.

If the previous manager wasn’t the issue, you need to resolve the problem quickly and effectively. It takes a long time to recover if you walk in as a new manager and a problem employee remains to wreak havoc on her coworkers. You need to deal with the issue quickly so it doesn’t bog down your time as manager.

4. Be Open for Communication

Taking over an orphan team takes a lot of energy and requires you to be open for communication. Communicate regularly with the team when there are problems to be resolved and make sure your employees know your expectations. On-going feedback and communication can resolve a lot of problems before they become major issues.

Rebuilding a team takes a lot of effort, but in the end, its worth it to save the employees and build a high performing group. As a manager, its not a pleasant experience, but once which will leave a lasting impression on you and teach you lessons for years to come.

Show People Your Good Work

You can only build a solid reputation for your team by showing off your good work. Managers in enterprises are often very busy and don’t notice good work – they are busy with their own tasks, projects, and reports. You have to show off your good work without coming off as just being self promotional. You can accomplish this a number of ways.

1. Discuss Your Team Successes

By focusing attention on what your team is accomplishing, you will show off the good work of your employees (and yourself) without seeming too self promotional. A team oriented approach also builds your image as a team player and a manager that works well with others. Start by praising members of your team and the hard work they did on a particular project or an effort that was successful at your firm.

2. Praise Others to Bring Attention to Your Team

When you work with other teams in some effort, praise others involvement and you will often receive praise back. Gaining a reputation as an encourager will demonstrate that you understand how to work well in a team or matrix work environment.

3. Be Genuine and Honest with Your Feedback

An honest and candid manager is a strong asset for a company. When you are honest and candid with project failures, you will be known as a straight shooter and when you have a successful project people will listen. An honest and frank assessment of how things are going is desirable on any management team.

4. Show Your Team You Value Them

Promoting your teams’ accomplishments will demonstrate to your employees that you value them and you value team accomplishments. Encouraging this behavior will result in future successes and as you continue to promote your successes, you will find that people will recognize your team as one which gets things done.

Some managers are afraid that promoting successes is like patting oneself on the back, but instead, its making sure that those around you understand that your team is valuable and offers value to the company.

You Undermine Your Position When You Act Like You Know

In fact, they are undermining their position as a supervisor or manager by not admitting when they do not know something. When you fake understanding something or fake information, you undermine the trust people have in you and earn a reputation of being a “know it all.”

You Miss Opportunities When You Act Like You Know

You also miss opportunities to learn when you act like you know everything. Admitting when you don’t know something gives you an opportunity to learn and gives people an opportunity to teach. This helps improve crucial skills your employees should have – the ability to digest and teach others.

Don’t hide your ignorance in these situations: ask for help. You will have a better team, better working relationships, and improve your own skills and knowledge.

1. Assess the Barriers to Excitement

Take out a sheet of paper and write down as many barriers to excitement as you can think of in the next 90 seconds.

Good, you have your list? These are the things that you need to overcome to generate excitement in your team. If you were at a loss to come up with any ideas, in my workplace, here are a few of the ones I thought of:

• This is the way we have always done it!
• The work just isn’t inspiring
• It’s hard to connect results in our group with the results of the company
• Sometimes it gets monotonous
• The group influencers aren’t positive people

As you look through your list, you’ll find that several of the items are emotional in nature. You can make a choice if you find your work fun, inspiring, or meaningful. Help your team understand that each day you can make a choice to have a good day or not!

2. Get the Naysayers Involved

The biggest challenge many managers face when trying to motivate their employees is that there is often an influencer on the team who is a naysayer or negative. An influencer is someone who others look up to and frequently is an employee who has been with the company for a long time. These individuals often are stuck in their ways and often “know more than those around them” – including the manager!

Turn your biggest challenge into a strength – ask the influencers for help. Explain to him that you are trying new ways to motivate team members and you wanted his opinion on some of your ideas. Even if the naysayer is negative about it, he will want to be involved because he will see the value in continuing as an influencer. You might have to tweak your approach because of his involvement, but in the end, having him on board will benefit your cause.

If the naysayer becomes too much and is too negative, you will need to deal with it directly and forcefully. A problem employee can bring down an entire team and when you’re trying to motivate your team, a negative force can destroy your efforts. Deal with the issue head on and immediately.

3. Reward Excellence

If you continually reward excellence on your team, your employees will strive for excellence. The principles of positive reinforcement work well with employees in motivating them to get the job done. There are a number of ways to reward employees for a job well done, including:

• Money bonus
• Extra time off
• Public recognition
• Buy them lunch
• Gift certificate
• Coffee & donuts
• Team building outing
• Company products

Rewarding employees for specific behavior will encourage that behavior.

4. Create an Atmosphere of Excitement

Finally, you will want to create an atmosphere of excitement on your team to motivate your employees. One of the things we do on our team is have a daily quick meeting at 9 am. We discuss our schedule for the day and give everyone an opportunity to ask for help when they need it. We also use this time to publicly recognize people that are doing a good job. For many people, public recognition for a quality job done is better than cash or gifts.

You can use all of these methods to motivate your team and have an exciting work atmosphere.

1. Relationship Mentoring

Managing interpersonal relationships is a challenge for just about everyone. As a manager, you will help employees through all sorts of relationship problems, dynamics, and growth. This dynamic requires you to have a knack for relationships, what makes people tick, conflict resolution, persuasion, influence, and other relationship factors so you can mentor the employee properly.

2. Informative Mentoring

Effectively mentoring an employee involves sharing information with him and teaching him how to properly handle information. In this aspect of mentoring, you will teach the employee how to value, process, and respond to information. It’s also important for the employee to learn how to keep some information confidential and how to ingest information from different people (i.e. information from boss versus coworker).

3. Facilitative Mentoring

A manager needs to discover the likes, beliefs, habits, and other personality factors of the employee to achieve facilitative mentoring. Facilitative mentoring helps an employee look at her situation, properly analyze it, and think outside of her beliefs for a resolution. Employees who are single minded and close minded often do not succeed, so your task as a mentor is to help facilitate new ideas for the employee.

4. Confrontive Mentoring

Some facilitating new ideas in mentoring doesn’t work and you have to result to confronting the employee. You are not a mentor if you do not have the ability to confront someone with facts. This does not suggest you should be aggressive with the mentee, but instead, be firm and challenge the employee. In a mentoring role, you do not order the employee around, but instead help direct him to the right path. Let him decide to walk down it.

5. Modeling and Mentoring

You are modeling behavior to your employees every day and if you’re mentoring them, it’s very important to ensure what you’re modeling is the behavior you want to see reproduced. As a mentor, your actions carry weight and if you’re constantly yelling at other people, you find members of your team will adopt this method of communication. In your role as a model, you must display and encourage behavior which will positively impact your team members.

6. Employee Vision Mentoring

Finally, your role as a mentor will include helping your employee with his career development. As an employee vision mentor, you will help your employee discover the career path that best fits his skills and desire. This is both an important role as a mentor, and a difficult one. If the career path is not on your team, you have to be cautious on how you mentor your employee.

Mentoring an employee is both challenging and rewarding.

1. Create Specific Goals

People need to understand exactly what they are striving to achieve. You need to make sure all goals are very specific – vague goals can never be achieved. One time several years ago, as we were walking out the door to get into the car to go to a family renunion, I asked my wife if she had a map to the marina it was being held at. She said no, but it should be easy to find. It was only about 10 miles from our house. An hour later, we found the marina.

We didn’t have a map to where we were going and creating vague, non-specific goals is similar to this driving adventure. A sales goal of “increase sales” is not as powerful as a sales goal of “33% sales growth for the Zeus product line in six months.” That is a very specific goal and one which the employees will know if they are on target to achieve.

2. Strategy is Good, Execution is Better

When we discuss goals, we often develop a strategy to achieve them. The strategy is good and necessary, but the execution of that strategy is what really matters. Develop a number of good strategies and never actually executing them will result in failure. As you create a goal, thing strategically about how you could achieve this goal and whether or not executing that strategy is feasible. For example, if you want a 33% sales growth in 3 months and you know the strategy will involve increasing your marketing budget 50%, will the CEO sign off on that spending increase? If you know the answer is ‘no,’ you need to factor that into both your goal creation and the strategy that follows. Or, you need a strategy to convince the CEO this is necessary. Either way, execution is a crucial part of creating an attainable goal.

3. Create Measurable Goals and Then Measure Them

When an attainable goal is your desire, you should always think about how you will measure the goal. In our earlier example, measuring a 33% increase in sales is pretty easy. If you’re working in an internal IT support team and you want to close 25% more support tickets, are you sure all of the tickets are being measure? “Drive by” IT tickets are the bane of every support manager. When you craft an attainable goal, make sure it has a measurable component (this defines success), think about how you measure it, and then make sure all of staff have the tools necessary to measure it. As you progress towards the goal, report on current progress so employees understand their efforts do make a difference.

4. Be Optimistic and Realistic About Your Goals

Be optimistic about what your team can achieve, but realistic about the resources you have. There are going to be times in your management career when your goals are not met. Either you didn’t have the right team in place to achieve them, external factors prevented them from being achieved, you poorly managed the path to achieve the goals, or some other factor caused failure. Hopefully, you learn a lesson and understand how to craft attainable goals in the future. Be optimistic about what you could potentially achieve, but realistic about what may happen.

When you create attainable stretch goals, you will find employees will strive to meet them.

Sometimes I Need a Little Crap to Grow

I didn’t buy a bag of cow manure because I especially enjoy the smell or the activity of distributing it around the garden, I bought a bag of cow manure because I know it will help my garden produce more vegetables and help my bushes and trees grow. I could have skipped the manure and my garden beds would have been fine, but with a little crap the plants and trees will flourish.

Sometimes in our life, we need a little crap to grow. Sometimes we need pressure, difficulties, and struggles to force us to get out of a comfort zone, to stretch beyond our current limits and force us into something new. This crap could come in many forms: pressure at work, financial difficulties, a job loss, or a project failure. All of these challenges put pressure on us to either falter or push through it. Without these types of challenges, we become stagnant and grow at a slower pace.

Breaking Down Life’s Crap

If you were to take a bush and plant it in cow manure, it likely would die. The bush needs soil and nutrients that cow manure can’t provide, yet as the cow manure is mixed into the soil and breaks down, it provides nutrients to the plant’s roots. When you’re loaded down by life’s pressures, you need to break the crap down into chunks you can handle.

There are a number of ways to practically accomplish this.

1. Identify the Pressures You’re Facing

First, identify what the challenges are that you’re facing. This will help you take the challenges head on and break them down into pieces you can handle. If you don’t know or understand all of the pressures you’re facing, it becomes more difficult to grow and break through all of them.

2. Know When to Ask for Help

There are times when we all have reached our limit. Many times, those of us who are too stubborn to ask for help find that this causes a break down in our life. You aren’t weak if you ask for help. As the crap piles on, know when to seek help from those around you to assist through the situation.

3. Find a Healthy Relief Valve

Challenges and pressure can cause you to make decisions which are not healthy. When you’re facing a load of crap, find a healthy way to blow off steam – play a round of golf, read a good book, pray, go on a day trip to the beach – find something which will help you alleviate stress and continue fighting.

A Foundation to Withstand Life’s Pressures

A friend of mine once remarked something he had heard from an old pastor,

My prayer for my children is not that God prevents any of life’s challenges to come upon my kids, but that I build a strong enough foundation that when the weight of the world comes they won’t crumble.

When life doesn’t feel like crap is being poured upon you, take some time to build foundations in your life: a relationship with Jesus Christ, educate yourself, a strong marriage, strong friendships with good people. These foundations will help you when it’s time to break down life’s crap and grow stronger.

We’re going to explore how to help your employees fail cheaply and how to recover from a failure.

1. Give Your Employees Small Projects

The first step in building the experience of your employees is to assign them small projects. Small projects help build confidence, and if the employee fails, he fails cheaply. Your goal is to reduce your failure rate to almost zero. As your employees become more familiar with how to overcome problems on a project and gain the confidence of several small wins, you can assign them larger projects and the likelihood these projects will succeed increases.

2. More Communication = Better Project Success Rates

Many projects or tasks fail due to a lack of communication. Sufficient communications allows you, as the manager, to understand status and identify problems before they become much larger issues. I recently managed an office move project and one of the staff members managing the furniture moving vendor kept telling me everything was fine and on schedule. I asked some probing questions and discovered several conflicts with the movers and the date we selected. The employee initially thought it was a small problem, but as she got deeper and deeper into it, she found it to be a much larger issue but was afraid to tell me this far in. I made a few phone calls with her and resolved the problem.

Make sure you let your employees know that you want to know successes and failure, ideas and problems, and that you will work together with them to resolve the issues. Ask for regular status updates and hold people accountable when they don’t communicate well.

3. Know When to Ask for Help

In the office move project, my employee should have asked for help much sooner, but she was afraid of the consequences because she let it go on too long. One of the key things you need to teach your employee is how to know when the tide has shifted and she needs help. This is a judgment call for each employee, and unfortunately, the more experience you have the easier it is to know you need help. Unfortunately, when you have the least experience is when its more likely you will need help. Teaching your employees to know when to ask for help will keep failures at a minimum and keep them cheap!

4. Make Decisions More Quickly

When you do have a project or task that is on the path to failure, you need (as a manager) to know when it’s time to pull the plug. You will need to learn the art of making decisions quickly and correctly. This will take some time for you to develop this skill. Once you have mastered the art of figuring out when a project is on the path to failure and knowing when to pull the plug, you will help your employees fail cheaply.

5. Learn From Mistakes

If the project does fail, take an opportunity to learn from the mistakes you and your team made. Could it have been avoided? Is there more you could do? Should you have pulled the plug sooner? Learning from mistakes and teaching your employees that you can learn from mistakes will help you fail much more cheaply the next time.

We all experience failures in life, it’s how we handle those failures and what we learn from them that makes the difference. If you can instill the confidence in your employees to take on new things and not be afraid of failure, you will find that your failures will be cheap and your successes great!

The next time you are ready to defend yourself and put up a good fight, weigh the cost of the fight. You may find that the outcome of a fight will make the situation far worse than it is and it might be time to consider apologizing first.

By demonstrating empathy for your opponent, you will help disarm him. You can show concern and a willingness to change to help resolve the situation and find common ground to reconcile. Apologizing is not the same as being defeated, but instead an opportunity to sidestep a fight and find a new way to work with someone.

The next time your employees are caught up in conflict, discuss the situation with each of them and encourage them to apologize to each other. This gesture will go a long way to improve team dynamics.