Beyond Team Building

2CONTEXT: THE FOUNDATION OF TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Several years ago, we were asked to consult with a large financial institution that was having difficulty implementing a new marketing program. The president of the company defined the problem this way: “We're trying to get our people in our branch offices to be more assertive in offering our products and services. Rather than just passively attending to our customers' current needs, we'd like our employees to actively assess the future needs of our clients and recommend products that would meet those needs. Unfortunately, we've not seen much success since we rolled out this new program six months ago.” He then asked: “Can you help us find out what's wrong and what to do about it?”

We agreed to help him, and decided that our first order of business would be to interview the branch managers as well as a select number of branch employees throughout the company. As we conducted the interviews, we asked why they were having such difficulty implementing the program. Some of the more common answers were: “I think we're here to provide service—not to be salesmen”; “I don't really understand how the program works—more training would be helpful”; and “I'm not sure there are enough incentives to get us to do this new program.”

After hearing these reports, we then asked the branch managers what they were doing to help their employees work through these issues. We often heard answers like this: “We'd like to work through these issues with our ...