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While employee engagement is important, and you will see your results start to improve, engagement is just the first step in creating a high performing team. Engagement ensures that you now have everyone pulling in the same direction which is really going to help you make progress in that direction. The challenge I see with many companies is that it's often the direction that people are pulling in is not the right direction. To create high-performance teams you need to have everyone pulling, not only the in the same direction, but also the right direction.
Often when I see disengaged teams, people are disengaged not just because they lack interest, but also because of the lack belief that the direction is the right direction. I read an interesting statistic on project failure, "Fuzzy business objectives, out-of-sync stakeholders, and excessive rework" mean that 75% of project participants lack confidence that their projects will succeed.
When we can get teams engaged, and increase their belief and confidence that they can be successful, not only are the pulling in the same direction and the right direction, but they will also pull much harder. Here are four things that you can do to ensure that you have everyone pulling in the right direction.
- Ensure you have a clear picture of what success looks like and that it is communicated clearly and simply to your teams so that your teams know where they are going.
- Have a clear and simple plan for how you will achieve your goals. Complexity kills understanding, it kills execution, and it kills any chance of success.
- Keep goals and targets to a minimum, ideally no more than three. Too many goals and targets can lead to confusion which is just as bad as complexity.
- Just ask your teams if they think the initiative will succeed. This is such a simple question, but too many leaders shy away from it. It's a great question because if there is a misunderstanding, it gives you a chance to clarify it. However, if the concerns are valid, it gives you a chance to address them early which then gives you a confident team.
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Charles Duhigg thought he was on top of things. The New York Times reporter won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013, and his first book, The Power of Habit, was a best seller. But looking at some contemporaries, Duhigg realized he wasn’t doing as much as he could. He decided to find out how some people tackle so much. The result is Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. Here are five things Duhigg found that could expand your view of what you can do.
LOOK AT SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
The best collaborative communities cultivate what Duhigg calls “psychological safety”: a sense that teammates can trust one another and have honest discussions. Smarter Faster Better looks at the example of SNL, which developed a culture where people felt secure enough to create. Teams that use this approach become more productive, Duhigg says, as members share ideas and feel empowered to take risks.
BE WILLING TO “LET IT GO”
Highly productive people constantly hone their approach. “They don’t find one system and stick to it,” says Duhigg. “They think about productivity all the time and frequently change their methods.” In his book, Duhigg writes about how Disney executives decided to rethink Frozen midstream, ditching the typical fairy-tale story line and reinventing the characters. The ensuing anxiety fueled creativity, resulting in a movie that became the top-grossing animated film of all time.
STRETCH YOURSELF
Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean it is, and the more ambitious you are, the more you’ll do. Duhigg calls this setting “stretch goals.” “A stretch goal is a huge ambition,” he says. “It inspires our motivation and dreams. But it can create panic.” To avoid that, Duhigg suggests breaking them down into shorter-term goals that will seem more achievable.
THINK LIKE A MARINE
How can you get excited about a project? Duhigg points to the U.S. Marine Corps’s discovery that the most engaged troops are those who feel they have influence over their own lives. As a result, the USMC redesigned its boot camp to offer more options and assigned tasks without instructions for completing them.
BET ON THE FUTURE
Duhigg writes about poker champion Annie Duke, who, when placing a bet, weighs the probability of each outcome and acknowledges what she doesn’t know. If she bets wrong, it’s experience from which to draw later. “Most of us are trained to think of the future as one right answer,” says Duhigg. “Force yourself to think about contradictory possibilities: what is more likely and why. You’ll make much better decisions.”
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After the 2016 study, other researchers set the human parity rate at a 5.1 percent error rate. Therefore, even using the more conservative standard, the system has achieved human parity.
A 5.1 percent word error rate for the speech recognition is an important accomplishment, but many challenges remain for the speech research community. According to Microsoft technical fellow Xuedong Huang, using distant microphones to achieve human levels of recognition in noisy environments, achieving higher levels of recognition for accented speech, and recognizing languages and speaking styles using only limited training data are still more distant goals.
Moreover, taking this technology beyond transcribing and into deeper comprehension — such as understanding of intent and meaning — is another goal, and the next major frontier for speech technology and artificial intelligence.
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