Archive | High Performance Teams

While no business executive can personally make a team great, smart leaders can put in place the underlying conditions that increase the chances for team success. If you put in place the six conditions for team success outlined in this article, your team will have what is needed to drive both team and organizational success.

Letting go of control is not easy: all too often it feels unnatural or premature. When our own reputation or job is on the line, it is even harder to not attempt to control every detail and every person. The more control we attempt, the less effective it is; paradoxically, though, this only convinces us […]

One fine day, Arthur, the CEO rode forth upon his trusty steed. At his side hung his magic sword, Expostfacto. Expostfacto was widely considered to be a sword with a sharp legal mind. Arthur had made his fortune renting camels, which he parked every day in a large camel lot.

Three valuable business lessons to be learned from a friend’s experience with a problem he was having with a light fixture in his home.

What is the half-life of a New Year’s Resolution? Apparently not very long. The new year is still young and already I’m hearing managers complaining about how none of the promised, worked-for, much talked about changes are occurring. After a brief flurry of action, everything pretty much fell back to status quo. It’s not that […]

Here are a few lessons about teamwork we can all learn from the magic of the San Francisco Giants

Imagine for a moment Mr. Scott giving his famous, “Captain, the engines cannae take much more of this,” line and Kirk responding, “No problem, Scotty. You take a break and I’ll fix the engines.”

If you give someone a problem they can solve comfortably, and one that they have no idea how to approach, they will do the former.

The experience of changing something in one part of the business causing an apparently unpredictable reaction in another part of the business is, sadly, far too common. How information moves through the system varies according to the roles people play, the way communication is handled, and the unwritten, implicit assumptions that people make.

In a business, the tendency is to apply expert opinion and previous experience to many situations. A break in similarity, however, is a clue that something major may have changed. It is a clue that the previous situation and, therefore, opinions and judgments based on that previous situation, may not apply. When that happens, it’s […]