We’d just finished facilitating a two-day offsite retreat with an international resources company when I came back to my office to find the June issue of Harvard Business Review with a feature article on “The Secrets of Great Teamwork.” The authors — two management and organization behavior professors at Wharton and INSEAD — were reporting […]
Read post »Terence Mitchell, professor of management, organization, and psychology at the University of Washington Business School, along with doctoral student William Felps “analyzed about two dozen published studies that focused on how teams and groups of employees interact, and specifically how having bad teammates can destroy a good team.” They concluded: “A single ‘toxic’ or negative […]
Read post »Community is one of those words that have many meanings, primarily because the experience of community is so diverse and rich. Community can help shape our identity as a collective and interdependent people. It creates the opportunity for us to care for and about others and, in turn, to be cared for, the key […]
Read post »I’ve known Paul Born for many years and have deep respect for his work founding the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement in 2001. Their community-based work has reduced poverty for 250,000 people in Canada and many other countries. When Paul gave me a copy of his latest book I expected it would center on his […]
Read post »Emotional Intelligence research shows that the leader sets the group's emotional tone.
Watch video »We can't build a team or organization that's different from us. Successful team or organization leadership begins with successful self-leadership. The first step in improving my team or organization is improving me.
Read article »Management can be tough, but leadership takes real courage. "Dumbsizing" sometimes provides short-term relief, while hurting companies in the long-term.
Read article »A compelling vision of the team or organization's preferred future keeps people from obsessing over present-day obstacles or getting stuck in the past.
Read article »Many of the symptoms and root causes of motivation and morale can be clarified by understanding the doing versus being aspects of mobilizing and energizing. We need to get beyond "do to" programs and techniques.
Read article »The moose represents an issue that everyone knows is a problem but isn't being addressed. People are trying to carry on as if things are normal.
Read article »Team spirit is the catalyst every organization needs to achieve outstanding performance. Strategic plans, marketing, technology, and capital investment are clearly important but emotional commitment, of the people using the tools and executing the plans, is what determines whether companies sink or soar.
Read article »There are no dead-end jobs, only dead-end people. Meaningful work goes well beyond what I do for a living, it joyfully expresses what I do with my living.
Read article »As we contribute our work to our team or organization, we also need to contribute a deeper sense of meaning or purpose. If we're going to be leaders, we need to take ourselves and ours to the Emotional and Spiritual levels.
Read article »Add a richer sense of meaning to our lives by developing purpose aimed at serving others. Profits are a reward. The size of our reward depends on the value of the service we've given others.
Read article »Most high-performing organizations use a wide variety of teams. Discover the Leading Teams approaches that can help you to avoid the pitfalls and pave your organization's pathway to success.
Read article »People rally around passionate leaders with a compelling vision and purpose. Effective leaders generate action that comes from creating energy and transforming jobs into crusades, exciting adventures, or deeper missions.
Read article »Effective team management begins by clarifying what a team's purpose and role is and deciding how it will operate. A team's commitment and performance increases exponentially with the degree of power, control, and ownership they feel they have.
Read article »Many managers unwittingly believe that leadership only comes down from the top. They give away their power by believing that they don't have any.
Read article »Strong management teams change and improve their organizations despite obstacles, handicaps and problems. It's called leadership.
Read article »Strong leaders connect and energize people. They work tirelessly to ensure that no ones loses sight of what it's all about.
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