Most organisations use leadership in teams to achieve goals Even with the best technology, most efficient processes, and most exciting ideas, you ultimately implement your strategy through people. Probably people in teams! which means you will need leadership. Unless you have these guys at your disposal: Teams will allow you to undertake larger, more complex [...]
Sherlock Holmes uses key indicators. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories he says “I watch these five people and when they do something different I know the game is afoot”. It would be great to have such an arrangement in our organisation. “We watch these eight measures and when one starts moving we know [...]
Picture from Silvio Roli on Railpictures.net Setting strategy can be complex. Organisations carry out complex analyses of who they are and how they can make the most of opportunities. The plan should be simple. The best teams know a few things they always ‘MUST’ do and a few things they know they must ‘NEVER’ do. [...]
Accountability is a two-way street. When you have committed to what you will do and I have committed to what I will do we are able to hold each other accountable for what we have to do. So far so good. But if we leave it till the end of the task to follow up [...]
In ‘The Mentalist’ Patrick Jane is a petty criminal turned consulting detective. Incredibly perceptive, with a deep understanding of human behaviour, he picks up all sorts of clues from people, alive or dead, that his likeable but flat-footed professional colleagues always miss. He then uses clever psychological ploys and strategies to get the perpetrator, whom [...]
Thirty years of research into what makes teams work has lead J Richard Hackman to the conclusion that team tasks have: A beginning A mid-point and an end OK , this sounds a bit like that Monty Python sketch that people used to recite about Anne Elk the scientist who found that a brontosaurus was thin [...]
How do you further grow performance in your team, once you are stretching your top-performers?
Four behaviour traps we may fall into in delegating work
Is your team a wheel-barrow? When you stop pushing it, does it stop moving? (Thanks to John Coxall for this unforgettable though rather pessimistic metaphor). If your team lacks internal motivation, it may be time to review how their work is designed. According to J Richard Hackman, author of “Leading Teams”, internally motivated teams require [...]
There is a shift in the balance of power that happens in a typical coaching, mentoring or managerial relationship. The model offers a passage through four quadrants each of which offers clues to how to manage a relationship conforming to the quadrant.
