Blog
As a Supervisor, Are You Leading or Bullying?
(This is an updated version of a post I did in October 2012.) “I feel like you’re intimidating and bullying me.” These are the words of a female employee during a meeting with her male supervisor, who intended to set expectations with her. Taken aback, the supervisor...
Why You Need to Do More Systems Thinking with Your Team
For over 400 years, western civilization has increased its use of analytical thinking and the scientific method to explain almost everything in the natural world. By using analysis (separating a whole into its component parts), our society has greatly expanded the...
How Double-Loop Learning Will Increase Your Team’s Agility and Effectiveness
The Learning Cycle is a simple framework used by teams to improve products and processes. It’s a cycle that includes Planning, Doing, Reviewing, and Learning from the results of projects and tasks. This basic learning cycle is useful for reviewing events and spotting...
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 because some conflict can be beneficial, especially during team conversations. Results from a study of 55 executives teams...
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...