We coach, develop and work alongside leaders and teams to shift ideas on leadership and provide the skills and tools needed to grow teams.
The Cynefin Framework is an interesting lens to use when looking at the challenges and responsibilities of a team. Through this framework, you can make assessments about how members of the team should be working when tackling a particular task or challenge.
“When someone in your team wants to discuss something at a team meeting, do you start the discussion and then eventually try to figure out why you are having this discussion?
I suspect this is a common experience.”
“I’d like to share with you something I discovered by chance when I was teaching Leadership to managers across a range of sectors and businesses.
One day, in a programme I taught repeatedly, I decided to ask a series of questions related to receiving Feedback and see what happened.”
What do we mean by ‘a big ugly elephant in the room?’. We mean those things that teams tend to avoid speaking openly about. You know, things like…
Like most of us, you will be really busy just coping with your daily mountain of work.Of course, when you hear an idea that can help you improve how you tackle that work, you take notice and maybe get inspired.
We often ask leadership teams to review themselves against these four groupings.
At this point we introduce the Katzenbach & Smith definition of a team:
Maintaining trust in a team that has to work remotely is challenging, but there are some preventative and responsive steps you can take.
Here are a few techniques and tips to help your group work remotely but together.
As early as possible, agree the protocols or ground rules for your team calls or chats (I’ll call these ‘collabs’ from here on). For example, do you need to see each other the entire time or is audio-only fine? …
If we thought we were living in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) before, what are we experiencing now?
People can do crazy stuff when they are threatened enough and start looking out for themselves at the expense of others…
We frequently hear senior managers complaining that the managers beneath them are working a level down; that is, they are doing some or a lot of the work that their own people should be doing.
Time and again we hear of meetings where groups of people walk away feeling frustrated that their time has been wasted. Discussions seem to go on too long and meander out of control. Often, people complain that they weren’t even sure what the discussion was meant to achieve.
So, we developed a simple tool that we teach teams to adopt during their meetings which seems to have made a big difference. We call it BOOST.
Accountability is a word that is often bandied about in the workplace by leaders and teams. It seems everyone wants someone to be accountable. Particularly when things have gone wrong. It appears having accountability is very much like wearing a sign that says: Blame me!
Who would want that?
“I have a lot of great people in the team and we go away for a day or two and make some brilliant plans. We come away charged up with lots of agreed actions and then we get back to work and very little actually changes. If you can find a way to overcome that, then I’ve got lots of work for you!”
The Neuroleadership Institute has done a lot of work, presented in their recent webinar, to try to understand what precisely it is about greater organisational diversity that causes higher performance. What they found is that diversity actually impacts performance at the team level.
Most of the leaders we get work with are pretty good leaders. They realise that they need to have a successful team to help them and their business succeed, and as such, invest time and effort in their team. This an honourable intent and typically means you are better than average at leading people. But kicking-off a few initial team development or team building sessions are never enough.