Are your team meetings oriented toward success? Or are they loose, unstructured amalgams of daily life, jokes, chatter, and very little progress? You need some fundamentals if you’re going to orient your team toward success!
Team building does not happen in an empty space. It has a very specific context and fulfills a very basic need: alignment. Good team building combines business topics with collaboration and team dynamics, helping a team organize and start work each day with a clear… Read the full article >
You’re launching something new in your organization: a new business unit, a new innovative product, a new growth plan… anything new that is supposed to improve your company.
In every case, you have 3 choices. One, you can create a dysfunctional team where people are miserable and the project will ultimately fail. Two, you can create a functional team that does a “good job” but isn’t good enough to capture the results you desire. Or three, you can create a team… Read the full article >
How do you create a sense of “we” when teams are spread across the state/country/world? Here are 6 practical strategies we know work because we have seen them first hand.
1. Set a Team Goal. Does your team have a goal that everyone is focused on? Or is It like most teams, where everyone is evaluated by their individual performance goals? Doing that creates a focus on “me.” By creating a team goal, everyone will focus… Read the full article >
Why would you want to optimize your collaboration with other divisions, functions, or companies?
Because it will feel good, reduce your workload, and give you leverage for the future!
Feel Good
For most of us, working with others, getting inspiration, being appropriately challenged, and having fun makes a big difference. How could you do all this alone? – Collaborating can be challenging at times, but in productive relationships, the reward is much higher than what you are putting into… Read the full article >
Winning teams do not think of their work as work. They view what they do as a mission. The difference is profound. Think of the NASA teams who put people and shuttles into space. They weren’t working for the agency – they were committed to the country, to science, to the mission of exploring new frontiers. If you think that’s the private reserve of space travel or the search for a cancer cure, look at the teams constantly driving… Read the full article >
Ask any CEO their goals for the year and they will tell you their market growth and profitability targets. But ask them WHY these goals matter, and many won’t get beyond long-term growth and competitive advantage. These are important reasons to set goals but they won’t set your team on fire. They won’t give your team the energy to climb the hurdles they will face. Organizational success is built upon a stronger bedrock than goals. The research is clear that the motivation to excel resides in the emotions, not the intellect. To blow away your goals, you need to create a… Read the full article >
Swing is a term from crew boat racing and means a team of talented people working in near perfect synchronization.
The quality of an organization’s team – specifically, how it is galvanized and unified to achieve a mission – has a major impact on the success of the organization. Great teams – teams with swing – are identifiable by their forward progress. They continuously raise the bar, move forward, innovate on the run, achieve their goals, set new objectives, and exceed benchmarks and expectations… Read the full article >
Much of what is called teams in workplaces are merely groups. Groups whose behavior seems quite arbitrary and whose members don’t necessarily have any allegiance to each other. With lack of allegiance comes siloed thinking, the politics of power rather than the politics of accountability, and an underwhelming pace and quality of work.
But teams are different. A team is a collection of people who are mutually committed to the team itself and to achieving the team’s goals. Additionally, teams have a sense of mutual accountability, something groups usually don’t have.
Great leaders have one thing in common. They take a winning idea/product/innovation and rally people around it to create exceptional levels of success.
You can give credit to the innovations – but the roadside is littered with seemingly genius innovations that went nowhere–often because the geniuses behind the innovations could not rally people to make it into a feasible business. Based on my experience coaching and advising leaders for two decades, the ones who can successfully inspire their people to greatness, have one competency before all others: cultivating mission critical thinking.
When people talk about sports analogies in business, no one ever talks about crew teams. And the term that never gets talked about in great teams is “swing”.
79 years ago this week, an underdog US Crew Team astonished Hitler and the world by winning the 1936 Olympic Gold in Germany. This story of true teamwork is told in recent best-seller Boys in the Boat. In the book, “swing” is described this way:
“There is a thing that sometimes happens in rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define. Many crews, even winning crews, never really find… Read the full article >
