The Teamwork Ladder: 8 Steps to Maximum Success for You & Your Organization

By William J. Nippard

The lessons taught in this book will increase productivity, improve performance and most importantly, bring members of your organization to a higher level of satisfaction both in and outside the workplace. The authors straightforward, common-sense approach makes for an enjoyable read.

David Newell, editor, Advertiser; Board of Judges,

Canadian Newspaper Association

Does your organization have great people and strong assets, yet underachieve? Many employees and employers believe they are doing the right things yet are not getting their desired results. The Teamwork Ladder teaches you specific improvements needed to bring the success and fulfillment you crave. In addition, it teaches how to implement those changes smoothly and proficiently within your unique organization. After reading this book, you will understand what has been getting in your way, preventing you from being where you want and deserve to be. You will also realize your strengths, so you can build on your constructive actions.

Learn the secrets of productively working with others. Clarify what it takes for you to be living the life you dream of living. It is possible, and even easier than you may think to achieve your wildest, most ideal dreams. The Teamwork Ladder provides the practical and sensible model you need. Start building your very own teamwork ladder today, and enjoy the climb to higher levels of job fulfillment and MAXIMUM success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449726935

William J. Nippard

As president and founder of Nippard Solutions, Inc., William J. Nippard has for more than a decade consulted to both employees and employers at large national conventions, small businesses, churches, and non-profits on how to work  with others for maximum mutual success. Outside of writing about and teaching the eight most powerful principles of teamwork, William enjoys weight training and travelling with his wife and three children. A 1988 graduate from Dalhousie University, William lives in Grand Falls-Windsor, Canada.

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Copyright © 2011 William J. Nippard

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-2694-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-2695-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-2693-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011917178

Printed in the United States of America

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/4/2011

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: Prologue

A New Lens for a Brighter World

Chapter Two: Becoming Mission Conscious

The Power Behind Purpose

Chapter Three: Intentional Communication

The Influence Behind Connection

Chapter Four: Openness

The Freedom Behind Truthfulness

Chapter Five: Confrontation

The Peace Behind Conflict

Chapter Six: Production

The Potential Behind Being Results Oriented

Chapter Seven: The Score Clock

The Fun Behind Keeping Score

Chapter Eight: Pay Day

The Fulfillment Behind Receiving

Chapter Nine: Nails of Personal Growth

The Joy Behind Finding You

Chapter Ten: A Final Word

Appendix 1: Team Player Self-Assessment

Appendix 2: Organizational Assessment

Appendix 3: Team Problem Solving

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Every act is on some level a product of teamwork. Writing this book has been no exception. I am grateful to the many who have helped make this book a reality:

Holly Hoskins, my life partner, best friend and greatest teammate anyone could ever dream of sharing life with.

My two sons, Jeff and Brad, and daughter, Genieva, who daily inspire me.

The Publishing team for believing in this project and helping me present a quality product.

The wonderful leaders who pre-read this work and offered words of encouragement and support.

The many great leaders, including Zig Ziglar, Ken Blanchard, John Maxwell, Jack Canfield, Jim Collins, Stephen Covey, Larry Lindsay, John G. Miller, Jay Triano, Marcus Buckingham, Tony Campolo, Phil McGraw, Wayne Dyer, Darren Hardy, Shevaun Voisin and Patrick Lencioni, whose teachings and lives I have learned from.

My family and friends who continue to shower me with support and love.

Introduction

Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much

Helen Keller

The first deaf/blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree

This book is not a compilation of the latest pop psychology on teamwork or a collection of feel-good fads for groups. Instead, it is a creative summary of time-tested principles, utilized and proven by some of the world’s most successful leaders and teams. It is, in essence, a how-to manual on how to direct your day-to-day actions at work and at home, ensuring maximum success.

If you were going on a cross-country trip, you’d need a map or gps to ensure you reached your desired destination. If you were a baker preparing a tasty treat, you’d need to follow a recipe to make sure your choice of ingredients and their proper amounts were accurate. How about if you were a carpenter? Obviously, you’d follow a blueprint, knowing that even the slightest deviation from the plan would be disastrous. If you coached a sports team, you’d be certain that before game time you had a game plan, depending on the strengths and weaknesses of your team. But, how about your day-to-day work life? What do you and your company use as a guide to direct the day, ensuring success for everyone?

Unfortunately, many go to and from work each day hoping they reach some arbitrary pinnacle of success. This seems as productive as the carpenter who constructs without a blueprint or the baker who bakes without a recipe. There is no need to wish for success! There is no need to speculate whether you are maximizing your chances of success. Adhering to proven principles and strategies, this book serves as your guide to constructing a teamwork ladder that will advance you to off-the-charts success and job fulfillment.

As you begin to assemble your very own teamwork ladder, you will by the end of your reading understand what brings about maximum success: not mediocre, average, getting by, making-ends-meet, or survival types of success, but maximum success. You will understand what specific improvements are needed and how to implement them smoothly and proficiently within your unique organization or team. I want to make certain that by the book’s end you understand what hindrances (your weakest rungs) have been preventing you from being where you want and deserve to be. I also want to expose your strengths so you can further strengthen those constructive daily actions.

My objective in writing The Teamwork Ladder is to share the secrets of working with others. Specifically, I want to clarify what it takes for you to be living the life you have always wanted. Essentially, I want to help you become more successful! One of my life’s most sincere and personal objectives is to assist others in unlocking their potential and thereby situate themselves for optimal success.

I have learned that success is something you attract by the person you become. Throughout this book you will be challenged to become a better, more equipped person for success! This heightened reward of achievement begins with a clear and focused understanding of what teamwork entails and how it manifests itself in the day-to-day activities of your organization or team. It is worth noting that more than eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies subscribe to teamwork. 1 Teamwork brings success, no matter how you define victory!

For more than a decade I have extensively studied and humbly taught the laws and principles of team success. I have been blessed to share my learning with a wide variety of people at diverse settings, including small businesses, provincial fitness franchises, health care staff, family conferences and large, national conventions. Personally, I have experienced great successes with healthy teams but unfortunately, have also been involved in weak teams, whose members failed to understand the foundations and premises by which teams thrive. In my early years, I painfully labored on a team where members did not feel trusted and respected, therefore withheld honesty and growth opportunities from each other. With a minimal sense of cohesion, unity, and team spirit, problem-solving processes became muddled as individual roles were unclear and expectations inconsistent. The energy and sense of purpose among members were weak. We seldom expressed warmth to one another and team accomplishments were infrequently recognized. There was much reacting and repairing, as predicting and preventing escaped our daily work ethic. It was to be expected that our morale-tank ran dry and staff turnover was alarmingly high. This school of hard knocks taught me plenty and I learned much from this team.

I am pleased to report, however, that my experiences with teams improved and I grew to experience the joy and fulfillment that can only be gained from being a contributing member of a healthy team. One of my life’s greatest accomplishments was helping to lead and grow a volunteer team that began with three volunteers and thirty-five members to more than one hundred volunteers and more than six hundred members, all within one year. Our team ladder was well constructed as we flourished in our mission. We had the right people in the right positions, providing regular opportunities to grow, produce and find a sense of integration into the organization’s vision and big-picture goals. An authoritarian, micro-managing style of leadership was replaced with a shared vision, well communicated values, mutual trust, and team goals. Members saw themselves as part of a winning team. We felt valued and appreciated. We listened to each other, gave and received regular feedback, kept our expectations high, celebrated our victories and made certain that platforms for problem-solving and constructive communication were always present.

Keep it Simple

Intrigued by the power and potential behind teamwork, I interviewed dozens of leaders and teams to find common threads to all our successes and failures.

I believed teamwork should be simple to understand and easy to apply. Its principles should be as easily and proficiently adopted by a family as by a large, multi-faceted organization. I searched to find the core principles from which all the other ideologies stem.

My quest was to simplify what the extensive manuals, journals, studies and books are reporting and discovering about this phenomenon called teamwork. Once I had broken down the many teamwork equations to the simplest and most practical form, I wanted to introduce it in such a way that even the novice team player could relate and subscribe to for personal and corporate success. The end result is The Teamwork Ladder.

Let me assure you, teamwork is not rocket science! In fact, building a healthy, productive team is so simple that most overlook the principles, searching for something more academic and mysterious. As I teach these concepts, I often get comments like, "I can’t believe we don’t do these things naturally, without being taught! and This is basically common sense. Why haven’t we been living these truths all along? and This is like putting together a puzzle … the most demanding aspect is our time."

Your Journey

In its simplest reality, life is a journey. Whether you are intentional about it or not, you are headed somewhere. Each day when you rise from bed and pursue work, school, leisure, or whatever your daily agenda dictates, you continue that journey. As the miles of your road unfold, you are faced with a crucial decision. Your choice in this matter is so critical that not only will it determine the quality of your life, but every detail of your journey hinges on it. This all important decision is simply, Who is going to sit in the driver’s seat?

There will always be volunteers eager to plot your life’s course and delegate you to the passenger seat. Parents, friends, teachers, clergy, co-workers and siblings will at some point along your voyage, attempt to steer your course and plot your every move. Although they often have the best intentions, no one is better suited to be the driver on your life journey than you.

While many allow a significant other to assume the luxury of riding in their seat, still others choose to set their controls on autopilot, cross their fingers and hope they somehow have a safe and rewarding trip. Sadly, such people are simply allowing life to happen to them. They spend most of their life reacting and responding to other’s decisions and demands, according to their insecurities and unproductive habits, rather than directing and being proactive. The only way to maximize fulfillment and gain the bounty of life’s rewards is to do your own driving! This is your journey, so rule number one is to be responsible for it; the successes and the failures! Personal development guru, Jim Rohn, has said, The day you graduate from childhood to adulthood is the day you take full responsibility for your life. 2

This may seem like an odd introduction to a book on teamwork. It may appear I am advocating life as a solo act. Nothing could be further from the truth. Once you realize that you should be sitting in the driver’s seat of your life’s vehicle, only then are you ready for the enriching realities of teamwork. To further the analogy of life being a highway and you driving your custom-made vehicle, you must realize that this vehicle goes nowhere without a team. There is no fulfilling journey, and certainly no successful journey possible, riding alone. All-star NBA great, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, once commented, One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team.3

However you define success, we all seek it. To some degree, we also want control of where we are headed and how we will get there. Realize this: the reality of controlling what you get from life is easier and closer than you think. But, you cannot achieve your personal or professional dream as a solo act. You must practice teamwork. In The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, John Maxwell writes, The question is not, ‘Will you participate in something that involves others?’ The question is, ‘Will your involvement with others be successful?’ The key factor in your success is how proficiently you utilize the life-changing principles of teamwork.

How to Read This Book

Each principle outlined in The Teamwork Ladder is taught in sequential order, one principle building on the next. Some of its information may be new to you and you may want to read it through the first time, underlining key points and making your own notes to apply to your specific team, reflecting again on these key points at a later time. Other principles may be very familiar to you and will simply serve to heighten your awareness of its dynamics and specifics. On such aspects, you may need less time to absorb these truths as you sharpen your application skills on the specific tenet.

I highly recommend that as you glean meaning from each core principle of the teamwork ladder that you keep in mind the ladder analogy. Realize that as the ladder can only serve its complete, maximum purpose and potential when all pieces are securely fitted together as one unit, so too, the individual laws of teamwork work best when they operate together. However, if you choose to apply any one of these principles in isolation, you will have more success than operating in conflict with that chosen law. But to maximize the potential of teamwork, each principle must be operating in harmony and synergy with the others.

Just as in nature, where inertia and gravity operate separately as physical forces and can be studied and applied independently of the other, they are best understood and applied to daily living when we see them working together. As you apply these concepts to your distinct team, whether volunteer, family or business, I suggest you tackle one principle at a time. Depending on your team standing, you may have to spend varying amounts of time in application and invest varying degrees of time and energy teaching the principle(s) to other members.

Be patient! Just as climbing a ladder works best when you take one rung at a time, so your development as a successful team will also work best if you take one principle at a time, learn that principle, practice it and then live it consistently. Developing your team will be a process, not an event! Take it slowly and patiently. Master each principle in the order suggested. Do not yield to the temptation of skipping ahead or taking shortcuts in your team development. As famous operatic soprano, Beverly Sills, once said, There are no short cuts to any place worth going.4 Your team’s dysfunctions, unproductive habits and culture did not develop overnight and therefore you cannot expect to remedy them in one or two staff meetings. I do know, however, that once you begin the growth process, you will accomplish more than you ever dreamed possible. It doesn’t matter if you agree or fully grasp the dynamics of why these principles work - they just do. Whether you understand gravity or not, it is an existing law that if you defy, you will experience some major problems. So it is with these core principles. Work with them, accept them and enjoy the journey.

For practical purposes, I suggest that every member on your team read and understand The Teamwork Ladder. The reading will allow everyone to understand the theory before you begin its application. I further suggest that each month, in a casual and relaxed environment, you conduct a specific staff meeting to discuss each piece of the ladder in succession. Debate the points made, discuss them and chat about your current position in reference to the ideal of the principle.

Getting Started

In business and volunteer circles, there is probably no more overused and misused word than "team." Simply because a group shares a common timetable or working environment and refers to themselves as a team, does not necessarily mean they are a team. As you will learn, a team is much more than a collection of individuals.

The Teamwork Ladder will serve to heighten your awareness of powerful teamwork principles. In addition, it will focus you on intentionally working with principles and concepts that yield success and job fulfillment. When applied, these principles will propel you and your organization to even greater success levels. Subscribing to true teamwork will be an exciting journey from which you will enjoy and reap many rewards. It requires a little something from you, however. You must have a desire to work for positive change. As the old Irish proverb says, "You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather is." If you are the owner of a business, you cannot delegate the growing to your workers, hoping they will improve the ease of your journey. Equally true, employees must not rely on ownership or management to grow and improve, ignoring their own need to learn and apply. You must do your own growing because it is your life and your success that is at stake.

Teamwork, however, requires more than a strict focus on you. It demands that you adopt an attitude of win-win in all you do. You have to be determined to stop living independently, focused on only your own successes and begin to live interdependently, concerned about the team’s success as much as you do about your own victories. You are, in essence, taking responsibility for your own growth but using that new found knowledge, understanding and ethic for everyone’s benefit, not just your own.

A key team priority through this learning and growing process is to be constantly moving toward the right destination. Your objective must be to gain mastery of the specific principle taught in each chapter. It will not be enough to simply study these proven principles. They must be applied. Knowledge without application is useless information! The power of the ladder lies in its application. Throughout the book, you will be challenged to make small adjustments to your daily routines. Up front, it may appear as if some of these suggestions are insignificant. On the contrary, the suggested incremental adjustments will change ordinary living to extraordinary living. It is one of life’s profound paradoxes that little, simple changes yield astronomical results. As publisher of SUCCESS magazine, Darren Hardy has had the privilege of interviewing many of the world’s greatest and most respected leaders. Through their insight, along with his own learning, he has come to fully understand the impact of small daily decisions. He writes about it passionately in his book, The Compound Effect. To understand this concept of how small changes yield significant outcomes, he challenges us to consider a plane travelling cross country. If the pilot adjusts the nose of his plane by a mere one degree, it will affect his destination point by 240 kilometers. Such is the case with your work habits. The less-than-ideal behaviour that seems insignificant today, when repeated over a period of time, can take you places far removed from the success you desire. The little improvements to your daily behaviours, however, bring you exactly to where you want to be.

As you consider embarking on this exciting, life changing journey, take some time and realize where you are. Also, give some thought to where your organization currently stands: what are its strengths and weaknesses? (See appendix at the end of the book) Once you have accepted the current standing of your team, envision how you would like it to be. You must know where you want to go. To be most successful, everyone on your team must be eager, or at least compliant, to begin this team development. You may begin as the leader of this initiative by purchasing the book and making the suggestion for positive change. But as you begin, others will likely assume the leadership role with or instead of you. Leading an initiative of change may seem like a tall task, but once you start climbing your teamwork ladder and living the key principles outlined in this book, the possibilities of your dream are well within your reach.

You may be asking yourself how you will enable those within your sphere of influence (your team) to build winning attitudes, create relationships of mutual trust and respect, to see things as they could be (your vision) and treat people with dignity and worth. That is the challenge I want to help you embrace as we build this ladder together and move to a higher plane of living.

It is your success that is at stake. Be committed to always work together in a spirit of cooperation and courage. Cooperation requires you to work to make others’ dreams become reality. Courage is needed to accept your need for personal change and to make sure your own dreams become reality as well. That’s true win-win.

Final Question

I have one quick question for you to ponder as you prepare to read this book. Consider this scenario. Seven students meet at a bus stop every morning. They head off to the same campus and even study the same courses. They are dismissed from school at the same time each day and embark on the same process to go home. Are these seven people a team? Why or why not? We will return to this question at the conclusion of the book. At that time you will likely be more prepared to answer this question with confidence.

Thanks for being willing to invest some positive energy towards your success. The payoff will be priceless! I am looking forward to your ascent towards greatness. Let’s climb Your Teamwork Ladder.

Chapter One: Prologue

A New Lens for a Brighter World

I have long been profoundly convinced that in the very nature of things, employers and employees are partners, not enemies; that their interests are common, not opposed; that in the long run the success of each is dependent upon the success of the other.

John D. Rockefeller

Billionaire, businessman, philanthropist

Everyone is part of a team. If you belong to a volunteer group, are married, have a boyfriend or girlfriend, have a job or belong to a family, then you are a member of a team. Every day, in one way or another, you impact your team.

Before we begin construction of our team ladder, this notion of how you impact your team is a critical point that deserves closer attention. Because you impact your team does not necessarily mean you are maximizing your potential as a team player. In fact, it reflects nothing about your level of contribution. Solid teams have members who maximize their individual potential. They understand fully their impact on other team members, the team’s purpose and ultimately its success. Besides being vital to team success, the closer you are to maximizing your potential as a team member, the closer you are to having others assist you in achieving both your personal and professional dreams. Maximum success comes to organizations made up of individuals who do outstanding or exceptional work. What that exceptional or outstanding work ethic involves will become clearer as you assemble your ladder in the chapters ahead.

Sometimes our personal dreams and professional dreams are quite unrelated. Yet for others, the two are very closely related. Whether they are connected or not, one point is certain: both professional and personal dreams are arrived at most proficiently through the same principles that we will discuss during our climb. Firstly, we must look closely at the exact nature of your impact on your team.

Point of Impact

Your daily impact within your organization or family may be positive, or it may be negative. The impact you have on your team may be strengthening it, contributing to its greater success, or it may be weakening the team, contributing to its eventual failure. As a member of your team’s chain, you are either a weak link or a strong link. There are no neutral players on your team. How you view your position or standing within this team is not necessarily how others view you or how you indeed impact it, regardless of your title. Your life experiences, your successes and failures, your upbringing, your family and friends, your acquired insecurities, your education and even where you live, influence, and maybe even distort, your image of where you stand with your team.

It is as if you are looking at the world through a lens that filters certain information, only allowing you see a partial glimpse of reality. As sunglasses filter certain colors of the light spectrum, only allowing certain wavelengths of light through to your eye, so your world-perception lens only permits certain amounts of information to reach your brain for processing. Only a fraction of the sensory data you are exposed to reaches your processing center, and so you often arrive at conclusions without all the needed information for accuracy. Your brain automatically does this data-filtering, maybe to prevent overload or maybe to keep you focused on what is needed to survive.

As an example of how the data-filtering process has potential to distort our perception of how we are viewed by our team, consider Mary. She has been a volunteer leader with a girls’ group for more than five years. At last month’s meeting to discuss budget concerns, Mary followed through on her plan to suggest that the girls sell her homemade cookies as an ideal fundraising option, speaking in favor of this while munching on a crisp oatmeal. Her crude, belittling remarks of another’s fundraising idea was her exclamation point to her persuasive speech … or so she thought. These tactics, she was certain, would project her favorably in front of the other volunteers and win their support. The fact that people snickered when she made the suggestion was filtered by her as a positive response to her sense of humor. After all, her family considers her their comic relief and the book she read last week encouraged her to use wit in her persuasive speeches. Her lenses, created by past experiences of comedy working for her, in addition to her family’s positive response to her disposition, did not allow her to pick up on the negative body language of her peers and failed to inform her that her credibility with them was very low.

Her fellow volunteers eventually dismissed her idea, sending her a polite letter thanking her for her suggestion, but informing her that the executive decided to go with other fundraising options. Unimpressed with her repeated immature and inappropriate antics, they are currently seeking a tactful way to ask for Mary’s resignation as a leader. All the while, Mary believes she is a valuable contributor to her team. Before Mary can fully understand her value to and impact on her team, her lens will need to be adjusted.

On the other end of the spectrum, consider Jack, a salesman at a large furniture store. Jack is results-oriented, optimistic and works, not strictly for his own success, but equally for that of his company. Growing up as the middle child, he was accustomed to having his opinion overshadowed by his older and wiser brother. He grew familiar with being overlooked in favour of the cute antics of his younger sister. His solutions to family dilemmas were usually given little attention or feedback. In the busyness of his family, Jack quickly learned to occupy himself and withhold his ideas. His curiosity and imagination was often snickered at and seldom rewarded with praise or affirmation. Jack learned to be withdrawn and unconfident.

With only one year of experience at the furniture store, Jack deeply feels his lack of seniority and seldom shares his ideas, for fear of being ridiculed. He relies on the more experienced staff to provide dialogue at staff meetings. Although he has the highest volume of sales for 10 months in a row, has broken weekly and monthly sales records, and is adored by staff, as well as his loyal customers, Jack has decided not to apply for regional manager, even though he would love to have this position. His reason? He feels the older, more experienced voices (applications) will be given more credibility. Jack thinks he knows his team standing, but his lens that he views his world through, have distorted the true picture. He is in much higher standing than he realizes and consequently is denying himself and his company of much potential success.

Are You a Jack or Mary?

What we are getting at here is the concept of self-awareness. I believe that most people are not fully aware of their own impact on others. To fully grasp this point, think about your family and then move on to your extended family. If you are like most, you likely have a nutty uncle or an out-of-touch cousin. Maybe you have a paranoid aunt or a cranky grandparent who sucks the joy from even the sunniest of days. If you think hard and long enough you will likely remember someone who showed up at a family reunion or barbeque and revealed their crazy side in full bloom. If, however, you approached this person and asked them if they were as whacked out as everyone else concluded, he or she would deny what is obvious to everyone else present. Everyone else recognizes the negative impact, but the person himself does not. This is where self-awareness helps.

Since no person is an island, we must develop a keen sense of self-awareness. We must tune in to how we are being received by others, know what our strengths and weaknesses are and how our words and body language are being received by others. Stay tuned for the test!

It seems as if, like Mary and Jack, where you think you stand on your team may be quite different from where you are actually placed. But, there does not need to be any doubt. You can know where you stand. I want to make certain that you are wearing a productive lens allowing you to see reality. This is important because before you can determine where you want to be, you need to first understand where you are currently. In addition, I want you to be certain that you are not a weak link on your team, but instead a strong contributor, valued and respected by all within your sphere of influence. After all, this is where we all want to be.

The problem in discerning this is that we all wear that invisible pair of glasses that impair or distort the reality of how our interactions and influence with others actually are. Kris Cole, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Clear Communication, teaches that Our values, beliefs and thoughts are the lenses through which we view the world. These lenses serve a practical purpose. Our invisible glasses protect our egos and serve as a guard from reality, in the event we are ill-prepared to handle such. Like an overprotective parent, many times the lens does more than its intended purpose, stunting your growth and prohibiting you from achieving higher levels of living.

Have you ever wondered exactly what impact you have on your team? As you read this, you may wonder if you have blurred vision with respect to your team standing. To clarify this issue of team standing, I want you to take a minute and perform this