Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
In my senior year of college, way back when I was 20 years old, I had a business experience that I can point to as being one of the defining moments of my leadership development.
This defining moment came from taking a specific course, a 400 level strategic management course. Most business schools have an equivalent course, one students take towards the end of their degree program that has the student look at big picture decision making. You know, the kind of decision making that executive leaders need to make every day.
The interesting thing looking back [...]
Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes
Recently the role I play in my organization has begun to change again and I’m in one of those really great places where I get to define the role and create the systems that I need to be successful. As this all started to happen, I thought it would be a great time to finally read David Allen’s best seller Getting Things Done. I know I’m a little late to this particular party seeing how the book was first published 9 years ago, but I figure better late than never.
Before you tune out thinking “oh [...]
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 [...]
