The Team Performance Curve

As I've written about before, I started working diligently to understand teams and what makes them work over 20 years ago. In the mid 90's, I read a book by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith called The Wisdom of Teams. In it, I discovered a picture to illustrate the journey we were on as an organization.

Today's Challenge: Team Structure

This is the next installment in a weekly series in which I answer a question from a leader somewhere in the world. If you’re new to this site, you may not know I wrote a book not long ago entitled The Secret of Teams. While I’ve been working to better understand and leverage the power of teams for decades, I’ve answered one question over and over again… Today’s Challenge: How should I structure my team for maximum performance?

The Cross-functional Team Advantage

I’ve been a baseball fan my entire life. I started playing the game when I was 5 or 6 years old – a little late by today’s standards. I’ve played on good teams and bad, but I’ve never seen a successful team with nine second basemen. That’s the analogy I use when I see teams that lack diversity – specifically functional diversity.

5 Things High Performance Teams Do

Last week, I wrote about the critical role of the team leader in a high performance team. The question often emerges, “So what does the team do?” The correct answer: it depends. It depends on the purpose of the team, their composition, their competency, their level of maturity, etc. However, you can often find some common behaviors in the best teams. I’ve written more extensively about this in my book, The Secret of Teams. For today’s post, here’s my top five list.

The Critical Role of Team Leader

In my book, The Secret of Teams, I advocate for a higher form of team – a high performance team. In this approach to leading an organization, the role of the leader is transformed. She or he is still actively involved in the business but is engaged differently. What should a leader do in a high performance team environment? Here’s a look at some of the things you'll want to consider.

Today's Challenge: Team Focus

This is the next in a series of posts in which I attempt to address a question or issue that’s been submitted by a leader from around the world. Today, I want to address something that virtually every team leader has faced. Today’s Challenge: How do we help our team maintain focus?

Today's Challenge: Assessing Team Health

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of meeting with a group of outstanding leaders. Many of them are attempting to build a high-performance team like the one I described in my book, The Secret of Teams. Specifically, this group was focused on building their leadership teams. One of the first questions I received was, “How can we assess our progress on the journey?”

5 Tips to Help Your Team Be More Creative

In today’s challenging economic times, creative thinking is more valuable than ever. Not creative for creativity’s sake – creativity to solve real business problems. Many of the ideas of the past are no longer relevant. As a seasoned leader shared with me recently, “The half-life of ideas is decreasing rapidly.” So what’s our response?

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