Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
I’ve been writing quite a bit lately about teams and I wanted to continue with a look at different roles that team members take during team interactions.
When we work on something collaboratively in a team setting we are all trying to accomplish a shared goal. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the best ways to promote teamwork and to create a high performing team is to be a better team member. Part of being a good team member is identifying the appropriate role that needs to be played at any given time.
Jim Clawsen, who is [...]
Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
In a previous article I looked at some of the challenges to being a team. Many of the challenges that I looked at were related to the creation, care, and feeding of a team. While we’ve all heard that “there is no ‘I’ in team” teams are absolutely made up of individuals. The one individual on the team in particular that I want to look at is ourselves. There are things we can do as individuals to help us be better team members, which will lead to better and stronger teams.
There has been much written [...]
Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
For several years now organizations have been trying to become more team oriented. Somewhere along the way we collectively seemed to understand that more things can be done when we split the work amongst a team of people. Nowadays job applicants need to prove that they can play well with others and many times job interviews aren’t with a single person, but with other members of the team to make sure the new person is a good fit.
Based on my experiences, I think we are overselling the use of the word team. I think we [...]
Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes
Much of organizational life these days revolves around “teamwork”. We try to organize the work by teams because we believe that when the conditions are right a team is able to create and do more than individuals can do on their own.
Unfortunately, I think most of us go through the majority of our work life without ever being part of a real team. Instead, we mostly spend our time as part of a group of individuals working on the same project. The difference between a team and a work group may seem small, but they [...]
Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes
In a previous article about why leaders can’t do it all, I suggested that we need to be able to delegate work effectively if we hope to be able to get all the work done that we need to in order to meet our goals and vision. I also suggested what delegation should not be. Now I want to take a look at what effective delegation should be.
Those who have a position of leadership or authority need to be spending the bulk of their time leading and managing. In most cases, this means there isn’t [...]
