One of the laments we get to hear from leaders and team members alike is about the number of unproductive meetings that they have to suffer through. Some of the concerns we hear include quotes like
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My visiting card says that I am a Facilitator.
“Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. “ – Ralph Waldo Emerson
In my last blog post, I wrote about what goes in laying the foundation of a great team. True, laying the foundation is an important first step, but what next? A team is all about people – and when there are people involved, so is that confounding variable – their emotions and behaviors. So the question I was seeking to answer was: What is it that lights the fire or inspires people to achieve remarkable results while working in teams?
“One great team can transform an entire organization” these starting lines from Adrian Gostuk and Chester Elton book The Orange Revolution lays so much emphasis and power on what a great team can do to an organization.
A fascinating new team activity that we recently rolled out for a customer – was what we call, “The Domino Challenge”. It’s a startlingly simple activity that teaches everyone involved profound lessons.
One of the things I love about our work is getting to hear amazing stories from the different teams that we work with. The below post originated from one such story…We were facilitating a leadership team workshop recently, where one of the participants was expressing his skepticism about the success of teams being over attributed to “softer” factors like trust. In his opinion, competency trumped everything else when it came to people working together in teams. This led to a healthy debate amongst the team on how factors like trust can play a role in successful teams. During the discussion, one of the team members remarked: “We are good at demonstrating these behaviors in team building games, but back at work, it is each person for himself! We sometimes do not even trust team members to speak the truth to each other! How can we get away from clichés like trust and work better as team? ” In response, the leader of the team shared a story of the legendary US Navy Blue Angels…….
Continue reading “Stories of Great Teams – Part 3: The US Navy Blue Angels”
In her remarkable book , A Paradise Built in Hell, author Rebecca Solnit describes how in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters — such as the one that unfolded in Fukushima, Japan — human beings tend to respond by banding together, not tearing apart.
We have often witnessed the same truth being played out in the many crisis that our country has faced – be it the July 26, 2005 deluge in Mumbai, the December 26, 2004 tsunami or the horrific 26/11 Mumbai attacks, all of which saw people coming together to help and offer solace to each other most selflessly.
Continue reading “CRISIS: A Recipe for Good Team work”
The below article has also been published by THE REDIFF GET AHEAD on November 22nd, 2012
Just because you are talking does not mean you are communicating.
Think about that sentence for a minute.
It’s perhaps something to do with the way we are taught at our schools. We are taught to read, write, pronounce and spell – but we are never taught how to listen. The unsaid message seems to be – if you make yourself heard, you are communicating! How wrong that can be! Whether it is in close personal relationships, in organizational contexts or in any of our human interactions – the implication of this untaught lesson can be very costly.
Continue reading “How To Communicate Efficiently?”