Blog
How Well Does Your Team Know Its Stakeholders?
High-performing teams take seriously how well they create value for their stakeholders. The best teams know what their stakeholders need and expect from them. Here are some things to keep in mind as you focus on understanding your critical stakeholders, both inside...
What the Best Teams Do to Optimize Their Decision Making
Making decisions for yourself difficult. For teams, multiply the difficulty of decision-making even more! Not only do decision-making biases and pitfalls abound, but chances decrease of reaching a solid decision when the process used is found lacking. There are,...
Dialogue: Moving Through Conflict To Creativity and Innovation
Do you congratulate yourself on the fact that your team never argues or even disagrees with each other? Hold on. That might not be a good thing. Results from a study of 55 executives teams by consulting firm RHR International found that while internal cohesion and...
Top Mistakes When Aligning Strategy and People
A recent survey found that one of the top frustrations of CEOs is aligning strategy and people. This was interesting to me because of the amount of research and experience available to companies about strategy, change management, employee engagement, etc. Moreover,...
5 Ways to Transform a Group of Individuals into a Team
In the U.S., most people are taught from an early age to be individually competent and independent. It’s no wonder that most of your employees have some difficulty in knowing how to work effectively within a team. Here are five things you can do to forge a collective...
Challenges of Forging Individuals Into a Team
How does a sense of team emerge where the whole is prioritized over the individual, especially in Western cultures where the emphasis is on the individual? A team is a specific type of group where individuals come together to accomplish a shared purpose. In a team,...
Why You Should Prize Failure
Failure happens when a desired or expected outcome doesn’t materialize. It can happen whether or not there was something you could have done about it, too. Whether the mistake is a small glitch or a major flop, failure often weighs heavily on you personally because...
Sacrifice for the Team
Mythologist Michael Meade wrote, “All meaningful change requires a genuine surrender. Yet, to surrender does not simply mean to give up; more to give up one’s usual self and allow something other to enter and redeem the lesser sense of self.” Your employees do this...
This is Why It Takes Patience to Implement Your Brilliant Idea
Difficult and uncertain situations often highlight weaknesses and failures in our habits, systems and practices. Energized by any “Eureka” moment, you might emerge from difficult situations as an evangelist for a new ideas or ways of doing and being. As you begin to...
Build a Team of Self-Motivated Self-Starters with This Subtle Mindset Shift
Are you frustrated because you don't think your team takes responsibility or is as accountable as they could be? Do you feel like you have to hold people's hands too much? Do you believe all or some team members lack self-motivation? You might be feeding into this...