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Energy, Engagment and Some Science to Support High Performance Team Development

Mar 21, 2012

As a lifelong team participant and now devotee of leveraging the power of teams, I was fascinated and excited to see the article, “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” in the April, 2012 issue of Harvard Business Review. I suspect we are all for adding some science to the stick, squishy and often problematic issue of how to get people to not only play nice together in the sandbox, but how to do so at a sustained high-level of performance. Here are a few thoughts and “blink reactions” to this interesting article and study:

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Strategy-Towards Hypotheses, Experiments, Involvement & Learning

Jan 25, 2012

Few would argue that a nimble, quick-to-learn and quick-to-adapt organization is a bad thing. Given the rate of change in our world, those characteristics are increasingly table-stakes for survival and success. Why then has the approach to strategy and the notion of “strategic planning” in so many organizations remained mired in a 1960’s kind of static, top-down event-focused model? Here are six ideas to transform your organization’s approach to and effectiveness with strategy.

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Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Get Engaged to Help Your Project Teams Succeed

Nov 27, 2011

I hear from hundreds of professionals every year in workshops, via coaching assignments or in classrooms, about the challenges they have working in and on project teams. From almost every student’s worst nightmare, the classroom group project, to major strategic initiatives with high-level sponsorship, the complaints are consistent: we as leaders don’t do enough to support team development and performance.

While the list of things that can go horribly wrong on project teams is long, these 5 consistently rise to the top of the lament list.

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Leadership Caffeine™—10 Situations to Throttle Back on Speed

Leadership Caffeine™—10 Situations to Throttle Back on Speed

Oct 17, 2011

Somewhere on the way to this world we now live and work in, “speed” became a proxy for success. Speed is undoubtedly important, but beware relying on it as the sole indicator of effectiveness. It’s a cruel tyrant, demanding fealty from followers, while discouraging critical and deep thinking and focusing solely on time-to-response as a metric of success. Here are at least 10 situations where you should resist the need for speed and call a timeout:

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Next! Call for Interviews: Product & Project Managers & Organizational Integrators

Aug 24, 2011

When chatting with leadership author and expert, John Baldoni, on the Leadership Caffeine Podcast (published on itunes last week), I asked him which of his books was his favorite. I loved his response…”The one I’m working on now.”

I’m just a few weeks away from the publication of book #2 for me, a collection of essays organized into helpful…self-help sections for professionals striving to survive and succeed (Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development), and try as I might to resist the urge to do this again (right away), I have to have a book in process in my life. Next! Bring on the Organizational Integrators and Informal Leaders!

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Management Excellence Toolkit: Better Design for Workplace Discussions

May 23, 2011

Getting to a good decision on big issues is challenging. Navigating the discussions leading up to a decision however, often resembles something on the difficulty of slogging through the Amazonian jungles in search of a mythical lost city made of gold. If you survive the process, you are bound to come out a very different person. It doesn’t have to be so hard.

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It’s Time to Start Teaching Your Teams to Succeed

May 18, 2011

If you’ve ever been part of a truly effective team…a high performance team, you know the experience is memorable. For those who’ve lived and thrived on a high-performance team, the memory of what it was like to work with a motivated, caring, challenging (but respectful), accomplishment-focused group of individuals provides sustenance for the lonely, near-death experiences that characterize so many other team and project experiences in the workplace.

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The Millennial View: Fixing Our Shortcomings

May 13, 2011

Eric Rodriguez is the voice of The Millennial View here at Management Excellence. His periodic posts offer insights from early career professionals seeking to navigate their way through this challenging world. Today’s post encourages all of us, regardless of generation, to renew our commitment to overcoming the weaknesses that keep us from reaching our personal and professional goals.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Coping with Workplace Critics

Apr 4, 2011

I’ve yet to accomplish anything worth a damn when I didn’t have a fair number of critics lined up and all too happy to tell me why I was out of my mind. It’s a fair bet you’ve seen this before as well. In my experience, the more audacious and creative the idea, program or strategy, the more vocal the critics become. Here are five ideas to help you cope with the worst of your workplace critics.

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