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 1924 Wernher von Braun strapped six rockets to a small wagon and watched in delight as the wagon roared around his street and then exploded. The local constabulary were less impressed however, and took the twelve year old boy into custody. And so began an incredible story leading up to July 16, 1969. On [...]
A standard approach to project initiation workshops is to get people to discuss their concerns, expectations and assumptions in small groups. This conversation surfaces all the issues the team need to consider as they set a clear objective and map out a plan. Last week I facilitated a workshop in which the sponsor asked me [...]
What interventions do you use to engage your teams? And when do you do them? J Richard Hackman author of ‘Leading Teams’, describes three levers for effectiveness and three key milestones in a team life-cycle when intervention can have the most impact.
Five basic conditions for creating and maintaining effective teams
Conversation is a powerful mechanism to draw a team around a plan of action if we understand how the process works and how to harness the dynamics. This is how my friend Arthur Gobey describes how ideas align: The arrows at the top are supposed to indicate how people arrive for a conversation with different [...]
If projects are the way to go, workshops are the way to start Everyone is doing projects. In our environment of intense competition and unbridled change most organisations are using projects to keep up and cut themselves some competitive edge. Some organisations are doing projects well, while others are incurring unnecessary costs due to failed [...]
