Author: Team Building

An article in The Wall Street Journal* suggested that while team building exercises may be fun (for some people), they really don’t do much to solve workplace issues.

For example, sales executive Paul Garvey claimed that the most insightful team-building exercise he ever participated in involved paintball, which in no way helped to resolve the relationship issues back at the office. Speaking of his former company, he said that colleagues would poach each other’s deals while their manager played favourites. Someone decided a paintball exercise would help. It didn’t, and merely reinforced the divisions and favouritism already present.

Another instance of completely inappropriate team building involved the team from a contractor on an Apollo space project. They were asked by their HR department to participate in a role-playing exercise where they had to return safely from the North Pole. Their day-to-day job involved helping astronauts return safely from space. What additional insights into teamwork did HR think this role play could teach them? Continue reading “Does “team building” actually work?”

Take a peek around your office, who’s got bags under their eyes? A recent poll revealed that lack of sleep is the biggest health concern for 42% of the population, with another 34% experiencing low-level general fatigue.

Our relationship to tiredness is paradoxical, a source of shame, indicating our inability to cope; but also a badge of honour, signifying the importance of our work, for some its become an ‘affordable’ status symbol.

In reality tiredness leads to irritability, either bad decision making or worse, procrastination, poor concentration and reduced creativity. Fatigue also reduces our immunity leading very quickly to ill health. Continue reading “Sick and tired – two ways to reduce short-term sickness”

So far this year I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember trying to calm the nerves of fraught conference organisers. Often days before the event has even started.

The other day I spent the afternoon on the set of a live TV show. With just two hours to air the production team managed to deal with numerous unforeseen crises calmly and confidently.

Much has been written about stress and its impact on individuals but this afternoon’s experience got me thinking about team stress.

It’s surprising how often we allow anxiety to build from within our teams, limiting productivity, stifling creativity and eradicating the fun from work.

The TV production team demonstrated excellent performance under pressure by following these 5 simple rules: Continue reading “5 Tips to help teams perform under pressure”

For any company to be successful in the current economical climate it is going to be vital for organisations to optimise their resources. And surely any organisation’s most valuable resource is its staff.

For example, one option is to use this period to promote young talent rather than take on the cost and risk of recruiting externally, a tactic backed up by Dr Emma Parry’s recent report, Nurturing Talent, published by Cranfield School of Management. Another report from Cranfield suggests that initiatives such as Investors In People can have a positive impact on financial performance.

In these leaner times it is going to be increasingly important to draw a distinction between financial capital and human capital. Whilst there’s little doubt that finances are restricted, now is not the time to constrain your people. In fact this climate of change offers the perfect opportunity to unleash new talent within your organisation, encourage innovation and allow the next generation of leaders to identify themselves. Continue reading “An organisation’s most valuable resource is its staff”

From guest writer David Kershaw, from eVisioner MetaTeam®

A friend of mine who has been in business for many years advises new managers who are trying to run an organization for the first time. Several times he has told me stories of young execs who get down in the weeds helping to get the actual work done while the company starts to drift and lose its way. His advice to them has to do with separating the work of organizing the work from helping to perform the work in progress. “Look, playing the odds that things will continue to go right is a bad idea,” he says. “Pretty often you have to step back and work on the business, not in the business.”

In simple form, that pretty much sums up the situation many team leaders find themselves in. A pretty broad swath of project managers and team leaders are savvy enough to know that organizing the group at the outset is Job One. They bring people together using good communication, create a charter laying out the goals and ground rules, and overall get things off on the right foot. Great initial organization = great project, right? Continue reading “The importance of team governance”

The days of leaders who can raise productivity and consequently profitability just by ‘managing by walking about’, patting their staff on the back and asking after the dog, are gone.

In fact some would argue that relationship-based leadership was a fad or flash in the pan and now that businesses are in a battle to survive, ruthless tacticians are what’s needed to lead the team. Luke Johnson said in the Financial Times : “It is becoming apparent that many leaders were really just suited to the good times. During a severe recession, when growth is irrelevant and all that matters is survival, their bullish attitude and denial of reality becomes positively dangerous .”

Let ’s not be fooled into letting the pendulum swing too far however. Continue reading “New Leaders Needed”

It’s generally accepted that team based working is preferable to individuals serving a single line manager, but what evidence supports this?

Team based working gained popularity during the late 80s and 90s following initiatives such as kaizen and Total Quality Management. All too often we simply accept that the team way is the right way, but perhaps we should spend a moment testing this assumption.

Firstly, it’s worth considering different kinds of teams that can exist within an organisation; Continue reading “Do teams work?”

Research has shown that employers are unprepared strategically, unprotected legally, and underinsured with regard to tackling the growing phenomenon of stress in the workplace. Many simply do not understand its impact: they are either hoping it will just go away or paralysed with uncertainty as to how to handle it.

Meetings can take up a large portion of anyone’s working day and for many of us, demands on time in the office are already high. So in an ideal world every meeting should count, with specific objectives and results making the time invested worthwhile.

All too often though, meetings – even during and afterwards – are perceived as a waste of time by those invited. This can usually be attributed to a lack of understanding about what the meeting was for. To avoid the sense that it was all worthless, here is a list of ten reasons why meetings can fail for you to use as a checklist when planning your next meeting: Continue reading “Ten reasons why meetings fail”

We’re Tom Vaughton and Dan Collins from team performance experts Fresh Tracks, who run team building events, team development programmes and staff conferences, and we’re the co-hosts of this blog. You can read more about us next to our pictures in the sidebar. This blog will be about various aspects of team performance, team building and team development, and will focus especially on practical tips and tools, including posts from guest writers. You can learn more about this blog by clicking on the About link just under the header.

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