Leadership Development: Three Types of Team Leaders – Which One Are You?
A critical leadership development skill is understanding your leadership style. Are you General Patton, or Ghandi? Or somewhere in between?
Leadership Development: Preparing for variation, Finding Your Teams’ Magnetic North
In my article, "Finding Your Team’s True North," I walked through a leadership development exercise designed to help a team find and recognize its “True North” – the unchanging star that is a team’s Mission, Vision and Values.
Leadership Development: Finding Your Team’s True North
In business, True North means Mission, Vision and Values. It’s the point on the map that your team is moving toward, with you at the helm. You determine the principles they’ll follow and understanding your team's True North is a key leadership development skill.
Teamwork Skills: The A.B.E. Effect – Awareness Brings Effectiveness
One critical teamwork skill that all team members must learn focuses on not becoming so focused on a single task that they lose awareness and comprehension of what is going on around them.
Teamwork Skills: Conflict resolution 101: Keeping Your Composure
I write quite a bit about effective teamwork in the workplace, because it gives team members and leaders a view of how great a team can be. Of course, real life tends to throw obstacles at our best-laid plans. And sure as the sun will rise, we’ll experience conflict of one kind or another—whether between team members, a team leader or a customer. Dealing with this conflict is one of the most important teamwork skills we can develop.
Effective Teamwork – Seven Myths of Effective Teams
There is a surprising amount of misinformation and assumptions out there about effective teamwork and creating & maintaining an effective team. Leaders who believe these myths can actually hamper team cohesion. I’ll lay them out here.
Organizational Development: Defining responsibilities and purpose within a team
In past blog posts I’ve talked briefly about the importance of knowing the purpose of a work team and the responsibilities of each team member. I want to discuss that further because it’s such an important component to developing solid teamwork and your overall organizational development.
Team Development: The Fourth Stage of Team Matriculation: Performing
In my earlier posts, I discussed the early and middle stages of a team development process that I call Team Matriculation. As a team forms and becomes familiar with each other and the rules established for it, and after testing the boundaries of those rules, it eventually shifts into the fourth stage of matriculation: Performing.
Team Development – The Third Stage of Team Matriculation: Norming
As a new team begins to develop—or as an existing team is refocused or rebuilt—it moves through the two initial stages of Team Matriculation: the honeymoon phase of Forming, where everyone gets to know each other and ground rules are established; and the boundaries-testing stage of Storming.
Team Development – The Second Stage of Team Matriculation: Storming
Whether a work team is completely brand-new, or has recently had a shift in personnel, or has simply lost focus and cohesiveness, Forming is the first step in team development.