The Podcast and Blog about people at work, working together.
Ulf Hahnemann thinks it’s much more powerful to create an atmosphere where people feel trusted and comfortable enough to use their brains and intelligence, and they come up with the solutions that are the right ones for the organization. Here are the 5 essential steps he uses to build his teams’ trust.
Don’t miss the Parking Lot Mentor story!
Read MoreI divide my team and how I communicate with them between attitude and aptitude. If someone has the right attitude but not the aptitude, I can work with them on the knowledge and capability building. Someone who has the right aptitude but not the right attitude is more difficult because you are losing some trust there.
Clarity of communication and motivation are essential for the individuals on the team. A manager must understand the individual’s context and ensure they’re understanding the manager’s contextually nuanced meaning.
Read MoreIn this Teaming With Ideas episode, you, my brilliant listeners, will meet Robert Ginnett, a teams practitioner and researcher with a bachelors in Psychology and Criminology, an MBA and a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Yale. I met Robert a few years ago at the Center for Creative Leadership where we did some work together. In this interview we explore common myths and misunderstandings about teams and team building. And, you’ll hear Robert’s fascinating stories of his work with teams in the US Military, at NASA; in hospital surgical suites and in commercial airline cockpits. Enjoy!
Read MoreBrian Graczyk has worked remotely for 10 years of his 30 years at Mars working for m&ms, Snickers, Uncle Ben’s Rice, Dove Ice Cream, and now Mars Food. Since the pandemic shut offices down, he has switched jobs twice within Mars. Now his resilience is being tested by leading his global team in several time zones remotely, most of whom he has never met face-to-face. Here’s how he’s developing methods to remotely onboard new team members from his home office to around the world.
Read MoreBobby Parmar, U Va professor and team behavior researcher, discusses results from his escape room study. “Teams relate through behaviors, even micro-behaviors. How a team communicates is highly predictive of their success. For example, one of the things that we find is the amount of humor, laughter on a team is highly predictive of the number of hypotheses that a team throws out when they're solving these puzzles. Laughter is one potential way of getting to psychological safety, but there's lots of ways of getting it. Psychological safety, being inclusive, being trusting, having integrity: all of those things are mechanisms by which we can draw others out and say, "your ideas matter. And I want to hear from you how to make things better.
“We found that people who spoke with certainty, struggled in the escape room. Even a little bit of certainty from someone made it a lot harder for me to say, ‘Nope, that didn't work’ because it feels like I'm judging that individual or I'm going to cause a negative emotion in that individual. And that makes it harder for the team to provide that disconfirming data and makes it difficult for the team to be effective.”
Read MoreIf we think about transformations in companies or in societies or NGOs wherever, it's always a group of people that get together and make magic to change what exists today.
The second belief that I hold, and maybe this fits into the contrarian point of view, is that today I think we in companies are wasting a lot of money when we try to support and kind of generate team effectiveness. By and large, I would argue traditional team building exercises don't necessarily build a more effective team unless the team actually sits down and has a meaningful debrief about that experience.
Read MoreDana Wasson, MSOD, author and graphic facilitator: The reason we haven't moved the needle on engagement is surveys are a very flat document of a very three-dimensional thing that we're trying to measure. I think engagement is an outcome. I don't think it's the thing that we can go after to hunt down and make better. I think that employee engagement is something that happens at the end of having a really great experience. So that flips me over to employee experience which is, what are the experiences? What are the touchpoints that we have with employees in businesses small to large?
Read MoreI notice is the erosion between work and personal life, and the exhaustion people have by being promoted sometimes to school principal of their own home school that they never wanted, to being a teacher of their children, to just the ceaseless connectivity. managing energy for people and that human connection is so important. I think people not feeling part of a team, being distracted, distanced, not as much huddling around a coffee machine, no natural points of intersection. How do we proactively bring people together in a way of building the team where it's not just another Zoom meeting with more Zoom marathons and Zoom fatigue but it really creates a connection and clarity, so that we are tracking on what matters most while not burning ourselves out or getting two disconnected running or swimming in our own lanes?
It's that idea that we care about you as a human being not just a human doing.
Read MoreWe worry easily when we don't know what's going on, which is why communication, especially when there's conflict, is really critical. I always reduce my negotiations course to, “You get what you want by helping others get what they want,” which is an old Zig Ziglar tagline. But it's a really good one, because it means you have to understand what they want. And most people don't try to understand what the other side wants. They're telling you why you should understand what they want. And, when we do that, when you really tell me, “Hey, listen, this is what I need to know”, and, “This is what I'm struggling with,” and, “This is what I'm trying to get at,” then I can think, “Well, I'm going to try and help you do that. Can you help me?” And then, if you help me, then that's what gets the cycle of reciprocity going. The challenge is that somebody has to take the first step. Stay curious. Try to understand, ask questions, seek first to understand then to be understood.
Read More“Running towards the fire” is a willingness to see that there is no more going back to normal. We have to reinvent and reconfigure and rethink how we're going to operate. As Winston Churchill said, “Never waste a good crisis.”, which is the embracing the opportunity that this presents. [Having everyone work remotely] is less ideal, but we can take the opportunity to connect around the world. And we can see how that will reimagine the whole world of work. Running towards the fire is embracing the “Not Knowing.” And as FDR said, “Courage is not the absence of fear.” Courage is responding despite the fear.
Read MoreWhy Teaming With Ideas? Where does this passion for team collaboration in Carlos Valdes-Dapena come from? What is his vision for the future of team collaboration at work? From a large family, to an MFA in theatre, team collaboration has been a central through-line in Carlos’ life. Learn here what drives this passion and where it’s leading.
Read More
