Teams, not individuals, are the future of work. As organizations mobilize to solve increasingly complex problems at an ever-faster pace, cooperation and trust between employees has become paramount. But how do you move teammates from collegial behaviour to true collaboration? By building their empathy and compassion…
https://hbr.org/2016/12/to-make-a-team-more-effective-find-their-commonalities
You are most likely to succeed in life if you use your talents to their fullest extent. Similarly, you’ll suffer fewer problems if you know what your weaknesses are, and if you manage these weaknesses so that they don’t matter in the work you do.
So how you go about identifying these strengths and weaknesses, and analysing the opportunities and threats that flow from them? SWOT Analysis is a useful technique that helps you do this.
If you’re a leader, how do you like the idea of people being able to rate you – giving you a mark out of 10 for your strategic thinking or your people management skills? Initially, it might sound a bit alarming but, in the cut and thrust of business, a company’s success depends largely on its leaders’ abilities.
“But how do you know somebody’s a good leader?”
https://www.mindtools.com/blog/2016/12/05/rate-quality-leadership-skills/
When you’re surrounded by happy, motivated team mates, the working day can pass in a blur of camaraderie. Colleagues can become friends, you enjoy coming to work, and you push one another to do your best work.
On the other hand, even a single day spent with a team that is disengaged, dysfunctional and fractured can drag on forever, and you begin to dread seeing the same dreary faces day after day. And when there’s no energy, ideas dry up and productivity drops.
So, what does it take to create a team that gels and thrives, and gets the job done?
https://www.mindtools.com/blog/2016/12/07/positive-team-tips/
To achieve true transformational change, CEOs must have more than a strategic plan. To effect actual change, they need to understand how biases — their own, and their employees’ — can shape behaviours and decisions, and prevent them from achieving what they set out to achieve.
CEOs need to be especially aware of how the subtle forces of bias can operate in our subconscious and influence our choices. Let’s take a look at the two seen most often: loss aversion and conformity.
https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-loss-aversion-and-conformity-threaten-organizational-change
We often hear tips and tricks for helping us to “control” our emotions, but that’s the wrong idea: strong emotions aren’t bad, and they don’t need to be pushed down or controlled; they are, in fact, data. Our emotions evolved as a signalling system, a way to help us communicate with each other and to better understand ourselves. What we need to do is learn to develop emotional agility, the capacity to mine even the most difficult emotions for data that can help us make better decisions.
https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-to-manage-your-emotions-without-fighting-them
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” ∼ US novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
How many great ideas have failed to see the light of day because they were lost in a sea of information? For example, a great innovation could have slipped through your fingers because it was just one of a number of solutions thrown up during a team meeting.
There are many tools available to help you to generate ideas, such as Brainstorming, The Charette Procedure, and SCAMPER. But it seems that there are far fewer techniques or processes for organizing and presenting them in a way that makes it easy to put them into action.
https://www.mindtools.com/blog/2016/11/24/organize-ideas-with-affinity-diagrams/
The Perils of Too Much Choice…
Yes, it’s great to have choice, and we’ve never had more choice than we do now. But sometimes it can be overwhelming. Even the weekly shop now comes with a multitude of choices… Do I want to buy free-range? Organic? Gluten-free? Shall I splash out on a premium product or stick to value? Maybe I should start that diet that I’m always putting off and go for healthy options.
I could spend ages pondering the benefits of wheatgerm bread over brown… but I’ve got things to do and places to be!
So “What techniques or strategies can you use to help you make better decisions?”
https://www.mindtools.com/blog/2016/11/09/improving-decision-making-techniques/
“Actions speak louder than words” and “Talk is cheap.” Words flow quickly and, usually, without consequence. But changing our behaviour requires time, energy and effort. We live with the after-effects of what we do, not what we say we are going to do, after all.
The 20th century’s most popular motivational speaker, Zig Zieglar, understood that – unlike words – behavior has a transformational effect. While he urges his listeners to work hard, he also warns that, “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
https://www.mindtools.com/blog/2016/11/17/actions-speak-louder-words/
Dealing effectively with emotions is a key leadership skill. And naming our emotions — what psychologists call labeling — is an important first step in dealing with them effectively. But it’s harder than it sounds; many of us struggle to identify what exactly we are feeling, and often times the most obvious label isn’t actually the most accurate…
https://hbr.org/2016/11/3-ways-to-better-understand-your-emotions