A message from Dr. Dennis Romig....

"I hope and expect that you will achieve great success when you learn and apply the principles of Side by Side Leadership. Please visit the on-line coaching section of our site frequently. We will continue to report the latest research and conclusions to show leaders how to facilitate improved productivity."

A comprehensive study of over one hundred workers in a variety of occupations discovered the workers spent only 75% of the time at work actually on job related tasks. Csikszentmihalyi found that 25% of the time employees were doing personal business, socializing, and daydreaming. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). I once asked a management group at a factory if I could walk out on their factory floor during a break in my initial leadership training with the group. I observed 15 individuals not on task: several young men were playfully flirting with young women; one man was reading a sports magazine; and several others were sitting and daydreaming. This was the same workforce that stampeded out of the factory at exactly 5:00 pm.

More work than ever is now done by groups and teams because of the interconnectedness of the work. The products, services and knowledge demanded by consumers require teamwork. Every study of top job tasks in which organizations expect their managers and supervisors to excel, concludes that the ability to effectively lead teams is either the number one, two, or three most important task.

Leaders who plan with their work groups on how to become a shared management work team can gain back that lost time back and more. Leaders who guide the development of structured, side by side teams capture the hearts and minds of their contributors and improve work performance 20 to 50%.

In the interpersonal leadership role, subordinates and peers are a part of the leader's network. By using listening and checking understanding skills, the leader creates positive interactions for achieving each individual's goals including the leader's goals. Team leadership takes improved performance of one-on-one interactions to a higher level through cooperatively setting group goals and then using structured team processes to coordinate goal achievement.

Teams have the potential of achieving geometric gains and breakthrough results. They can also be mediocre or blow up in the manager's face. The term, group dynamics, expresses the potential for breakthrough or breakdown. A pervasive reason for team failure is that many executives, managers, and supervisors do not believe in teamwork. Because of the managers' personal negative experiences with team-building, the manager only gives lip service to the teams or actively fights their use.

As I worked with Fortune 500 companies, government, and service industries the number one obstacle to successful team utilization and development was the skepticism and lack of support by managers. I wrote the book, Breakthrough Teamwork: Outstanding Results Using Structured Teamwork®, because of control group field research and the successful results of hundreds of structured teams by applying those research results. The research described in the book legitimized some of the manager's skepticism as it proved that unstructured team-building games and recreation did not lead to improved results. On the other hand, teams and team leaders that structured themselves together around achieving shared goals and work plans greatly improved performance every time.

The effective team leader knows how to coach the team to transform the business results desired by upper managers into compelling team goals. The leader must plan and lead the team meetings to promote the creative participation of every team member towards their goal and action plan development. The heart of team leadership is drawing the knowledge and creative ideas out of the team members to achieve shared goals, in contrast to the leader who has all of the answers. The research revealed the leadership principle that the more effective the facilitation of mutual leadership, the greater the commitment by all towards the shared goals.

The end result is contributors and leaders are devoting 100% of their thinking and time at work achieving team goals they shared a voice in developing.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (1997), Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.