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Tag: teambuilding

7 Tips for better leadership

19/02/2020 /

What makes you a leader is not a title but your attitude and your actions. Leadership is about how you interact with people and how you motivate them to work with you toward a goal together.

In this article you’ll find practical tips to improve your leadership:

  1. Value every relationship: there’s a person behind every job title. You have the chance to influence him/her by the way you interact with every team member.
  2. Think about your team’s needs before your own: Thinking about your team’s needs could be as simple as saying thank you or as serious as making a trip to the hospital after hours.
  3. Help your team grow: Provide training and opportunities for them to work at their full potential. Encourage and sponsor continuing education.
  4. Share the credit: Make your team look good. Give them the spotlight and let them shine.
  5. Shoulder the blame: If you and your team fail to meet a goal or a project doesn’t go as well as planned, the blame stops with you. If you need to give feedback to people about their performance, do so privately.
  6. Never say that’s not my job: Help with what needs to be done, even if it’s not your responsibility. Even when nobody’s watching.
  7. Be a person of character: Leadership is less about skills and more about living by your values. Your team certainly doesn’t want to follow a leader they can’t trust. Respect takes a long time to earn and a second to lose.

Image: Pixabay – rawpixel (CC Creative Commons)

10 Tips for Better Teamwork

06/02/2019 /

Effective teamwork is both profoundly simple and difficult at the same time. It’s not always the task at hand that challenges teams in their progress, it’s the relationships and the little things that happen day-to-day. According to this article, teams have basic needs that must be acknowledged and fulfilled if you expect your teams to experience their greatest success.

The following  ten tips describe the environment that must occur within the team for successful teamwork to take place:

  1. The team understands the goals and is committed to attaining them. This clear direction and agreement on mission and purpose is essential for effective teamwork.
  2. Team members trust each other. The team creates an environment in which people are comfortable taking reasonable risks in communicating, advocating positions, and taking action.
  3. Communication is open, honest, and respectful. People feel free to express their thoughts, opinions, and potential solutions to problems.
  4. Team members have a strong sense of belonging to the group. They experience a deep commitment to the group’s decisions and actions.
  5. Team members are viewed as unique people with irreplaceable experiences, points of view, knowledge, and opinions to contribute.
  6. Creativity, innovation, and different viewpoints are expected and encouraged.
  7. The team is able to constantly examine itself and continuously improve its processes, practices, and the interaction of team members. The team openly discusses team norms and what may be hindering its ability to move forward and progress in areas of effort, talent, and strategy.
  8. The team has agreed upon procedures for diagnosing, analyzing, and resolving teamwork problems and conflicts. The team does not support member personality conflicts and clashes nor do team members pick sides in a disagreement.
  9. Participative leadership is practiced in leading meetings, assigning tasks, recording decisions and commitments, assessing progress, holding team members accountable, and providing direction for the team.
  10. Members of the team make high quality decisions together and have the support and commitment of the group to carry out the decisions made.

 

Imagine: Flickr – U.S. Pacific Fleet  (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Motivate Your Team

10/12/2015 /

Talent helps individuals and teams to reach their goals, but is it enough? What about a team where people act for their own purposes, without any common motivation? In one of his articles, Adam Fridman explains how to motivate a team in order to maximize the results it can achieve. In particular, here are seven tips to bring a good team to the next level.

  1. Respect everyone. Every member of the team is important, and great leaders make sure that everyone is appreciated for his contribution to the common results.
  2. Offer incentives. Rewards put value and energize progress, not only for individuals but for the whole team.
  3. Stay plugged in. Good managers stay current with their teams, even if they leave enough freedom and trust to stimulate creativity.
  4. Lead, don’t boss. People tend to follow a good example more than they obey to an order.
  5. Make work have value. Working hard is not enough, you must be sure the activity of any member is functional to the goals you give to the team.
  6. Be genuine. Leaders, as every team member, know who they are and remain leaders in every moment.
  7. Make goals clear and achievable. Team must know what it must produce, and must be confident it can achieve these results.

Read more here.

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Image source : Scott Maxwell – Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Top Team Building Activities

17/03/2015 /

Team building activities are essential in creating a productive team, since they serve to increase communication among team members in a positive working environment. Actually staff are most productive when they are happy within they role, and feel that they are making a valued contribution to the team’s goals.

Team building does not have to be painful, annoying or even embarrassing. There are many valuable team building exercises that can be effective in uniting groups, developing individual skills and collective strengths.

There are four main types of team building activities, which includes:

1. communication activities and icebreakers;

2. problem solving and/or decision making activities;

3. adaptability and/or planning activities;

4. building trust.

If you want to learn more on team building activities, read here: http://www.huddle.com/blog/team-building-activities/

teamwork concept on blackboard

Image source: http://bit.ly/1uEy4E9

Team-building and dry spaghetti

07/10/2014 /

In his Ted Talk, the designer Tom Wujec presents some surprisingly deep research into the “marshmallow problem” — a simple team-building exercise that involves dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. He also explains what  it takes to turn us from an “uh-oh” moment to a “ta-da” moment.

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