Situation: A CEO is concerned that there is a lack of teamwork across the company’s account teams. Often, they compete with each other rather than sharing knowledge and information. While some competition is good, too much can stifle growth. How do you build teamwork across account teams?
Advice from the CEOs:
- It looks like the company needs to change its account management culture. There is a need to review the entire operation and rethink how the account teams interact with each other.
- Schedule meetings with the full account staff – attendance required – describe the concern and encourage teams to share ideas and resources.
- The commission structure drives performance. Tie financial incentives to collaboration. Reward the teams on collaborative efforts disproportionately to individual team effort – Y% commission for individual team effort vs. 1.5 x Y% commission for collaborative effort.
- Increase monitoring of revenue and client acquisition – for the full group as opposed to individual account teams.
- To keep a manageable level of competition among teams, group them into “leagues.” The leagues compete against each other for production and financial rewards. Encourage them to develop social interaction to build the league spirit.
- A twist on this is temporary “leagues.” Shift team and league groupings from time to time to share best practices and resources. Measure the results. Track and reward the best league performance over time.
- Be sensitive to the possibility that individuals may respond differently to league vs. individual team incentives. Those who respond more positively to the league concept can become the collectors and disseminators of best practices among the teams. This creates a status incentive to complement the financial incentives.
- Consider the peer-programming model from the software industry. In this model, two people are occasionally teamed with one as lead and one as back-up. Let them learn from each other for a period and then return to normal operation. The same can be done with teams.
- Does the company really have a problem? If the corporate competition leaves at 5:00PM but the company’s staff are working weekends to produce, maybe things are OK!
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