team

Without Support You Will Fall

History provides lessons for teams. Let’s take the time to explore a few of them. This post explores patterns that I see resulting from the interaction of ability, demands and support. Let me explicitly state what I mean by those variables – Ability is the capacity to do something through talent and skill. Demands are [...]

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Tripwire Removal

I have rules. You have rules. Teams have rules. Rules trip up both individuals and teams causing unintended consequences. We learn rules about such things as what we can do, what we can question, and what we can say. A rule dictates behavior. But when transformed into a guide, it enables you to choose appropriate [...]

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Stop that Mole Now

Do you have a mole undermining the work of your team? Someone who constantly complains privately to any teammate who will listen but refuses to bring that same complaint publicly to the team? Someone whose actions are destroying teamwork? A mole erodes productivity. Stop that mole now. A team is like a garden. A good [...]

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Organizing the Team

Workshop When you are a member of team, what hopes do you have for productivity? My hope is for synergy, by which I mean team productivity that is clearly superior to what the sum of the individual members’ productivity might have been working separately. Productive teamwork — that’s the desire. But how do you organize [...]

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Protecting the Team

Workshop A vital task for a successful team is to extend membership to the right people and deny membership to the wrong people. If you add or persist with the wrong people, the team will fail at some level. Feelings about who is excluded cut deep. Talk to anyone about exclusion and you will hear [...]

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Seeing the Organization Anew

Workshop Does your organization want help analyzing its intergroup dynamics? Does your team want help diagnosing its own intepersonal dynamics? Do you want help interpreting the state of your relationships with other members of the organization? The typical org chart belies the state of the organization. It shows a hierarchical structure that appears neat and [...]

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Managing Yourself, Managing Meetings

Workshop Is your time being wasted in meetings? For example, you join a problem solving meeting attended by the right six people. But the discussion wanders aimlessly and contributes little to the solution. You feel your time was squandered and wish you would have invested your time doing something that would have made a difference [...]

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Change: Knowing When, Knowing How

Workshop Kurt Lewin said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” A gift from pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir is a good theory about how people process change. The Satir Change Model describes the: five major stages of a change; transition between stages; effects each stage has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology; [...]

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Selling Your Ideas to Management

DAVID: Ruth, I think we should buy the ABC software to track trouble tickets and issues. RUTH: There is no budget for that. DAVID: But it takes me days to put together the information you want about the state of the product. And without an automated collection mechanism, I think many problems aren’t being reported. [...]

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AYE Conference

Although I am no longer a host, I recommend the annual Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference.  The focus is around individual, team and organizational effectiveness. Esther Schindler, a reporter for CIO Magazine, participated at the 2006 conference and said the following about it on CIO.com’s Information Collective Blog: …it was a breath of fresh air [...]

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