A week ago I attended the annual meeting of our homeowners association (HOA). In past years it has been a controversial affair but this year it was noteworthy for a different reason. It…
Teamwork
A recent climb of Mt Baker taught me a lot about teaming. It is the practice of working together as a team to achieve an objective. In our case it was to climb…
I worked with a leadership team this week to help them understand their team personality. I’ve seen many teams do this as a fun team building exercise. It can be fun but make…
I shared Amy Edmondson’s four key leadership behaviors for managing extreme teams in a recent blog post. They are: Build an engaging vision Cultivate psychological safety Develop shared mental models Empower agile execution…
I’ve talked a lot about the importance of developing a shared purpose for any team. A good shared purpose energizes and binds the team together, defining its reason for being. I believe there…
One of the most important things a team needs to succeed and thrive is commitment to a shared purpose. On paper this sounds pretty simple. Pick a meaningful purpose, talk about it as…
When working with others our default action is to form a team. After all, teamwork is good and everyone works in teams. It is interesting to compare this idealized view to the reality…
I have rarely worked on a team where all its members have been highly engaged. The ones where I have stand out as tremendously enjoyable experiences and I can describe them in great…
The fifth and final conversation center of our team performance model is Measure. When I ask leaders how they judge the performance of their team, they typically talk about business results. They are…
We have reached the fourth conversational area in our model of the conversations of a high performing team, ‘Manage’. You may be thinking it is good to be back to a familiar topic. …