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Five Secrets of the World's Most Productive Teams

Why is it that you can take a team of perfectly capable people and in one context they will succeed, while in another they will fail miserably?

1. Good Teams Trust Each Other!

2. Good Teams Support Open, Creative Thought Process

Looking at organizations who are far and away innovation leaders, they work very hard to create a culture where creative thought will thrive. This takes a lot of work as many people are so cautious to share ideas for fear that they might be crucified. One of the great 3M stories of all time, is their accidental darling product the "Post-it" note; while attempting to make a form of super glue, a chemist screwed up, but just before they tossed the batch a group of researchers asked a great 3M question; "has he made something else instead?" when some happened to fall onto a pile of paper. In most companies this is where the story would end; somebody might think, "hey do you think that anyone would ever need to stick paper together?" but they certainly wouldn't persue it. 3M created hundreds of millions in revenue from it's ubiquotus post-its.

3. Good Teams See Problems As Opportunities and Tackle Them Together



4. Good Teams Love To Work Hard and Love to Play Harder

5. Good Teams Understand and Respect Each Other's Relative Strengths and Weaknesses

Malcolm Gladwell's Best-Selling Novel, "Blink" Explores the pheonmenom of productive decision making and communication with people. Gladwell highlights with some great examples just how intuitively brialliant human beings are. So, as Gladwell explores, maybe the key to results is to get everyone trusting their instincts, and trusting their colleagues to accept and encourage some of these instincts without a cross-examination. Corporate buraucracy has long been accused of killing ideas, but Gladwell found that these 'snap judgements even have place in the emergency ward;

"a few years ago [Cook County Medical Center] changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain."

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Is Your Team Hearing Two Voices?

Why is Communication Challenging? Is Your Team Hearing two voices?

We're not all crazy, but many people immersed in corporate cultures hear two voices - they hear what their colleagues are telling them, and then a little voice inside their head attaches all sorts of meaning to it.. meaning which is inaccurate 50% of the time! 

I'm a pretty practical person most of the time; I believe in the power of human potential, and I'm keen to see people and groups perform at their peak.. but don't normally attend seminars with the Anthony Robbins crowd, it's a little too far-out for me sometimes. About a year ago, I was dragged out to one of these types of seminars, and some lady is at the front explaining to us that we all hear two voices.. "huh?" I thought to myself, "two voices.. this lady is nuts, I can't believe I signed up for this?" then I listened again, and this voice told me, "the guy next to me must go to these things all the time, like he has too much time on his hands." Wow! this second voice of ours is pretty harsh!

The next day, in the boardroom, I watched someone ask a colleague a simple question, and it turned into a cordial version of world war two! That one question could have been answered directly and in five seconds, and we could move on, instead we spent an hour completely immersed in office politics! So now that we realize how much politics has a real cost to the organization, as well as the welfare of our team, what can we do?

A Few Ways to Open Up Communication & Understanding in your Organization:

  • Start all meetings with a light-hearted opener
  • Use a moderator who has control of the meeting
  • Celebrate victories together
  • Use failures as learning opportunities
  • Actively discourage politics by acknowledging that it exists and agreeing that nobody likes it!
  • Encourage full event participation
  • Create opportunities to develop camaraderie with the entire team
  • Run great events that aren't all business
  • Do fundraising events together

 


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Leadership Development

Jim Collins' Level 5 Leadership

Jim Collins' best-selling book Good to Great, is more than a great read, many of North America's fastest growing companies credit a large majority of their success using it as their operational guide. One of the most astounding discoveries that Collins and his team of 50 made, when studying companies that have had extreme and consistent growth for over 2 decades, was that the CEOs of these companies were very different than the celebrities we sometimes read about...

There is one thing Jim Collins' "Level 5 Leaders" don't worry about - their leadership abilities! Not because they are cocky or arrogant, but because they are humbled by the goal that their entire team has rallied behind!!

Collin's book was a comprehensive study of companies in a crossection of industries who over a period of over 20 years consistently outperformed their sector by over 100%. Like a true academic, Collins and his team compared these companies to their 'control' companies, and discovered some remarkable differences; one of the most suprising difference for everyone was the qualities of the CEOs of these companies. Almost every one of these leaders was very different from what is generally understood by people and many management professionals beleive to be


what we generally




 

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Team Building

10 Elements of Trust in Teams

Most business leaders agree that without trust, teams lack the fundamentals to deliver phenomenal results.

In his article, 8 essential elements for trusting teams

Blaine Collins asserts that "One of the most telling predictors of a team’s success is the extent to which it builds trust among team members."

"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."
- Henry Ford...more