The team with exceptional performance is essentially its own organism, as Duke Head Coach Mike Krzyzewski pointed out when he said, “To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.” Building a strong organization with scalable success requires building a great team. It can mean the difference between outstanding success and crashing failure.
You can’t just bring the pieces to the table. You have to work to put them together.
In her iconic 1952 gospel single “The Ball Game,” Sister Wynona Carr tells us, “Life is a ballgame, but you’ve got to play it fair.” Fair play includes things like building your strengths, overcoming your weaknesses, and developing the chemistry that allows your team to work together as something greater than the sum of its parts.
The ballpark is the source of many great lessons for teams of every type.
The Great American Pastime has been compared to all sorts of life situations, and the analogy is usually apt, because baseball,… Read the full article >
Traditional thinking is that collaboration is driven from the top down. The fatal assumption is this: that the leader sets a vision for teamwork and then people will eventually come along. In theory this makes sense, and some element of this is true. Yet it misses something essential: employees hold the keys.
The fact is that much of collaborative process comes from the bottom up. Yes the leader must have a business need driving the need for collaboration such as innovation to beat the competition, quicker responsiveness to customers’ requests to close deals, better quality products. And they must… Read the full article >
After a working with an American global leadership team for a few days on the coast of Spain, Lawrence Polsky, co-founder, shares a CEO’s misstep and learning.
Most leaders are under the delusion that a successful year happens over the course of 12 months. Setting goals and then giving an ongoing effort on a daily basis, creates success. This is not true. A breakthrough year comes fom a combination of team building efforts which start in January. Top performing leaders understand this intuitively and use January to make December great.
“Fantasizing about the future is one of my favorite pastimes.” – Richard Branson
Branson understands the old adage “start with the end in mind.” I met a top performing SWAT team leader who understands this, too…. Read the full article >
People more than ever are thinking on their own. As I have traveled the world this year working with leaders—across the United States, in Paris, Turkey, Switzerland, Eastern Europe, and Asia—I’ve seen this playing out in business too. I am seeing, more than before, a deep desire from people to have their point of view heard, and to influence the direction of the teams they are a part of.
I was doing leadership development in Istanbul and a fellow named Sertac came up to me at a break and asked “Are you Jewish?” Being in Turkey, a little… Read the full article >
Most leaders, despite the myths they tell themselves, are not great. In fact leadership research shows that CEO’s are more optimistic than the average person. This often applies to their self assessment. They cannot see their limitations or how they are undermining their team. Additionally, people around them wont give them honest feedback on their leadership skills for fear of retribution. They can live in an inflated bubble, believing their own spin. There is only one way for a leader to know the truth of their leadership greatness: look at what your team is doing.
It is a little known fact that the best wine grapes grow in the worst, most inhospitable soil conditions.
How is that possible? Stress. The grapes are under pressure to survive. They are forced to seek nutrients deep in the soil for sustenance and to direct what little water there is for the grapes as opposed to the rest of the plant. Interestingly, surviving through this crucible of sorts helps to shape them into best-of-breed varietals.
The new movie now headed to your local theater—Steve Jobs—sets out to make the point that the man who created arguably the greatest company in the world was slightly off his rocker. Or perhaps he was a nasty, crazy man in disguise.
Rather than indulging in that pointless debate, let’s step back and look at a broader and more meaningful issue: virtually all great leaders are in fact lunatics in part.
It is the very oddity of their thinking and personalities that lets them see and develop what passes the rest of us by. The fact is, I have… Read the full article >
Research continues to show that the people who rise to the top, who inspire the most people, and who tend to take charge are the tallest. But since you can’t grow taller, what does this mean for the average (heighted) leader?
One would think in the year 2015 we are past Leadership Trait theory. It originated in late 1800’s, and it says traits such as height, age, social economic background, inborn personality, etc.—which can’t be changed (rather than behavior which is learnable)—will determine leadership success. It is related to the idea and practice that you are born into leadership… Read the full article >
