Urgent Reminder – Deadlines Approaching

SYMLOG Annual Certification Program, San Diego, March 1-5, 2010
SYMLOG International Conference, San Diego, March 5-6, 2010

Time is running out! We are still accepting registrations for the SYMLOG Certification Program and/or the International SYMLOG Conference that immediately follows; however, hotel registration must be completed by February 15th to lock in the special conference rates.

Why should you attend now?

Ask yourself these questions:

• If you work to improve a leader's performance, but his/her team is fragmented, how effective will you be?
• If you work to improve a team's performance, but the organization's culture doesn't support teamwork, how effective will you be?
• If you work to improve an organization's culture, but the individual leaders are not part of the process, how effective will you be?

Without an integrated approach, you are likely to be working with organizations whose systems undermine your development efforts.

Certification provides access to the most powerful, yet easy to use measurement and feedback method available for individual, team, and organizational development, and the only one designed to work across all three levels at once.

The International Conference will focus on applications from consultants who have successfully integrated these multiple-levels into their practices.

Come learn from the experts on how to improve the outcomes of your development efforts.

What's wrong with this picture?

Figure 1

Figure 2
Area Description for Figure 1
(Area 1 is the target for Most Effective Teamwork)

Values members perceive as currently Rewarded in their Teams:

These data are extremely valuable, and seldom collected in individual development programs. They indicate the extent to which the rewards in the organization tend to support active teamwork versus individual performance. When individual efforts are the primary rewards, team performance is not optimized. In this case, about 2 out of 5 raters (40%) perceive the reward system in the team in areas that are highly likely to undermine and interfere with effective teamwork.

These data provide significant insight into the norms actually operating in the teams and provide crucial leverage points in guiding and changing group norms toward greater productivity. Unfortunately, these data are also least likely to be used since changing the reward structures within teams often means cutting across strong currents in the organizational culture (which individual leaders and team members are often reluctant to do). These potentials for polarization between team norms and organizational practices are just one of many reasons that programs aimed at improving individual leadership and teamwork need to be well grounded in simultaneous efforts to improve and align the reward systems within the organizational culture.

Bottom line: To be effective and sustainable, attempts to improve an individual leader’s performance are best done in the context of an overall organizational development effort which simultaneously and specifically is geared toward improvements in the culture of the organization, team development congruent with the overarching values of the organization, and leadership development processes that integrate the entire system. These efforts generally require repeated multiple-level measures and feedback, and an ongoing process of individual and organizational learning. When done well, the picture of the process looks something like this:

© 2010 SYMLOG Consulting Group