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Tagged with 'team effectiveness'

Is Your Team Coughing Up a Culture Hairball?

Recently, I reposted an article on cultural assumptions often being wrong because leaders don’t understand how their current culture is perceived. A reader posted a comment asking if it’s realistic to expect to change the culture of large organizations, especially “mature ones with profound legacies and cultural liabilities.” He then suggested, “it might be better […]

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In Your Dreams: See It to Be It

A senior leader was determined to strengthen her organization’s culture. She recognized that getting her executive team to work together more effectively was a key first step. In preparation for an offsite leadership team retreat I interviewed each executive with a series of team and organization assessment questions and ratings. It became clear that a […]

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Are You Doing it…To…For…or…With…Your Team?

Many studies have shown the impact that control of our situation has on our health, happiness, and effectiveness. In one experiment a white-footed deer mouse was placed in a brightly lit cage. The mouse could press a bar to alter the light. The mouse reduced the lighting to a dim level. The next morning experimenters […]

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Webinar: What to Do About the Performance Review?

What’s your experience with performance reviews? How energizing and helpful are they — to give or receive? Do you look forward to performance discussions with excitement or dread? Do performance reviews in your organization boost, block, or befuddle effectiveness? In a Harvard Business Review article on “The Performance Management Revolution,” the authors write, “hated by […]

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Hardiness and Resilience: When Giving In Can Give Us a Lift

When you experience failure, loss, or a serious setback do you see it as temporary or permanent? Is failure an event or who you are? Is it a learning or crushing experience? Does it traumatize you or become a springboard for growth? Confucius said, “our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising […]

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Position versus Persuasion Power

Joel’s a high IQ manager with strong analytical skills coming from a deep technical background.  He hates meetings (“they get in the way of real work”) and resents having to sell changes or get people on side. “I don’t care if they like me,” he’s fond of saying, “I only want their respect and implementation.” […]

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Readersourcing: The Highest Voted Development Topics

Workplace stress is rising while employee engagement and performance is sinking. A major cause is mediocre managers and bad bosses. The poorest leaders are often the ones who need leadership development the most. But they’re too crazy-busy and running faster and faster on their treadmill just to keep up, and don’t take time for development. […]

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What Are Today’s Most Vital Leadership and Culture Development Topics?

Early in his career, Thomas Edison invented a vote recording machine for use in legislative chambers. Politicians could vote yea or nay from their desks. This would replace the time consuming process of counting votes. Edison patented the machine and went to Washington to demonstrate and sell it. He was turned  down immediately. Edison was […]

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Help Us Distill Today’s Vital Leadership/Organization Development Topics

Which leadership/organization development topics are most critical to you today? How can you cut through all the clutter to quickly find and apply practical applications to boost effectiveness? Can we distill and sweeten the personal, team, and organization development process? These are especially relevant questions this sweet time of year. Sugar shacks are sending up […]

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HR Needs to Make Big Changes to Boost Effectiveness

Innovation and agility are critical to thriving — or even surviving — in today’s fast-changing world. Balancing speed and quality is now a vital leadership skill. First used in software development, Agile is an approach now spreading to other functions. Its main principles are focusing on people more than process, using pilots and prototypes for […]

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Nine Essentials to Honing Your Leading Edge and Boosting Team/Culture Performance

I’ve just invested research and development time in updating and fusing key components of our workshops and retreats into a new two-day workshop. Periodically we step back and review the latest research, draw from our experience, and enhance our development tools and approaches. The Leading Edge is a new workshop to help leaders struggling with […]

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How Leaders Cause Their Teams/Organizations to Sink or Soar

The leading edge of an airplane wing is critical to slicing through the air and directing airflow around the wing to create lift. Leaders form the leading edge of their teams or organizations. He or she shapes everyone’s energy and behaviors. Highly effective leaders and outstanding leadership teams create powerful lift. Their teams and organizations […]

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Are You and Your Team on the Bleeding or Leading Edge?

Is your team/organization overloaded with many priorities and conflicting activities? Does your team/organization load new projects and goals on top of existing workloads without rigorous “stop doing” pruning to make room for them? These are the two biggest problems emerging over the last few months of work with our Strategic Use of Time Assessment. The […]

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Facing Reality: Are you a Rational Optimist or Unrealistic Pessimist?

A few years ago, I ran into an old colleague I hadn’t seen for a while. Our short conversation confirmed just why I hadn’t seen him in a while. I greeted him with, “Hey Phil. How’s it going?” His response was, “Oh, you know; same crap, different day.” He then proceeded to proudly pile up […]

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It’s That Time of Year: How Strategic is Your Use of Time?

Imagine a large jar filled to the brim with golf balls. Is it full? What if marbles were slowly poured in as the jar was shaken until no more could be added? Now is it full? How about sand being trickled into the jar as it’s vigorously jiggled? When the sand reaches the brim is […]

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Webinar: Change Culture by Upgrading Leadership Development

We did a series of focus groups, interviews, and a feedback survey with a division of a large company to help Eric, the division manager, determine why their culture wasn’t performing at the level he wanted. We found that the shortfalls in the division’s levels of engagement, service, and productivity could be traced to the […]

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What is “it” that drives you and your team?

In the movie “City Slickers,” Billy Crystal plays Mitch, a middle-aged man in crisis who has lost his direction. He and his friends go to a dude ranch to participate in a real cattle drive and search for the meaning of life. Jack Palance plays Curly, a crusty old cowhand whose job it is to […]

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Podcast: Leveraging Leadership Time

I was interviewing a senior executive to prepare for an offsite planning retreat and I asked about the biggest challenges facing the leadership team. He wearily replied it was their unfocused frantic pace of activity.  “We have lots of projects, goals, and priorities. We’re constantly making lists and setting action plans. But we seldom see […]

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Thriving Companies Pursue Both Purposeful Profits and Profitable Purpose

If the reason for a company’s existence is just profit, they won’t be very profitable. Eventually the company probably won’t exist. The dollar sign isn’t a cause. It doesn’t stir the soul. Operating margins and returns on investment don’t excite and inspire. As an ultimate objective on its own, the pursuit of profits is hollow […]

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Google’s Research Identifies 5 Dynamics of Their Top Teams

What makes a team great? Why do some teams flourish and others flounder? Google’s People Operations (what they call HR) conducted a two-year study to find out. They conducted over 200 interviews looking at more than 250 attributes on over 180 active Google teams. Google analyst, Julia Rozovsky, reports that “who is on a team […]

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