Team Building At Work

Team Building: The Headache of Policies and Procedures

Monday, September 24th, 2007

There is nothing wrong with the idea of policies and procedures. But they should be guidelines, helpful ideas to turn to in time of doubt - not a needle’s eye to squeeze the actual corporation through. 

Team Building: The Eight Engines of Teamwork

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

There are quite a few methods currently in use to create high performing teams. All the way from outdoor experiences like ropes courses and climbing mountains to the classroom and on the job experiences. Some, obviously, work better than others for your situation.

Team Building: Team Jerks

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

Nowhere is is written that you have to get along with everyone. There are people in the world who should not, who must not, be on any team — ever. These are people who lack interpersonal skills.  They are not necessarily bad people, although some (the dark angels I’ll talk about in the next newsletter) [...]

Team Building: The Myth That People Like Working Together

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Say you have just been to a galvanizing seminar on high performing teams, or read one of the excellent happy team books that abound on business bookshelves. You are excited about the potential teams have. You decide to “GO TEAM” with your colleagues.
You think, if we are to be a team, we must live, eat, [...]

Team Building: Team Tyranny

Monday, August 20th, 2007

One of the worst and most expensive decisions organizations make is to establish a high performing team system, when all they are really after is an atmosphere of greater collaboration.
Collaboration is a misunderstood commodity. There are managers out there who still associate it mentally with the negative collaborations (collaborating with the enemy) during World War [...]

Team Building Activity: The Team Biosphere

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

How do you create a great high performing team atmosphere?
First ask, whose job is it to do this?
It is everyone’s responsibility to create a high performance teaming atmosphere, by fulfilling their roles within the team.  I use the phrase “organizational karma” to describe this shared responsibility for climate control - karma being the wheel of consequences, with [...]

Team Building: TransCompetition

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

I’ve beat the dead horse of high performance teamwork for some time now. I’ve even mentioned the bad things about being too collaborative. I thought it is time to get a more balanced view between being too collaborative (supercollaboration) and too competitive (supercompetition). A concept I call TransCompetition.
Think of TransCompetition as a grafting of fruit [...]

Team Building: The Myth of Senior Teams

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

There is a seriously mistaken notion that senior teams function like other teams, just in a more senior way. That teams at the top - teams comprised of board members, CEOs, presidents, vice presidents, and other senior level execs - roll up their sleeves and collaborate in the same way that grunt teams do. They [...]

Effective Team Building: When to Team

Monday, January 6th, 2003

If you are absolutely sure that a team is what you need, then you must map the team out.  This means deciding who the right core and resource team members are, actually forming the team, and following the process of clarifying goals, roles, barriers to success, personality differences, etc. etc.
Even at this stage it’s still [...]

Team Effectiveness: Teams vs. Mobs

Monday, October 7th, 2002

In the rush to bestow the manifold blessings of teams upon our organizations, lots of groups get called teams that probably should not be. The resulting groups are too big, too lumpy, quite mismatched, and more than a little confused.
I call these assemblages mobs. There are ways to differentiate real teams from fake teams or [...]