As long as people remain the center of organizations, attracting, retaining, and motivating those people—keeping them happy at work—will be one of the most important elements of a leader’s job. Work is central to our lives. For most adults, work occupies the majority of waking hours. And being happy at work can make a big difference in whether those hours are a drain or not. And, by extension, whether those hours are productive or not. But that job as become more and more difficult over time. In...
May 15, 2023•12 min
The world runs on teams. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another happen more efficiently and at higher quality because we work in teams. The number of teams we form, and the size of those teams has increased exponentially since our ancestors formed teams to chase down prey. And so has the importance of building teams that perform well together. You’ve probably felt what it’s like to be on a high-performing team. You feel energized. Your brain is on fire with great ideas, and co...
May 08, 2023•11 min
Failure is feedback. And that maxim is nowhere more true than on teams. When individual team members or the whole team experiences a failure, how they respond can be the difference between a team that continuously improves and enhances performance, and a team that falls apart. And research backs this up. One of the first studies of psychological safety focused on how teams responded to failure. Amy Edmondson examined the teams of nurses on various wards of a hospital and found that the teams wit...
Apr 30, 2023•10 min
Managers make the difference. Senior leaders set strategy. But middle managers and front-line managers make the difference in whether that strategy gets executed…and in whether or not people are engaged and motivated in an organization. According to Gallup, 70% of an individual employee’s engagement is determined by the manager of her team. In turn, this means that managers have a significant impact on an organization’s success or failure. In this episode, we will discuss the four common mistake...
Apr 24, 2023•11 min
When you start out your career, you’re most often an individual contributor. And in that role your knowledge and skills are most important. But if you do that role well, you’ll likely be asked to consider becoming a leader. And in leadership, the methods you relied on to be a great employee don’t often help you become a great leader. Those skills will rarely help encourage and coach others to be great employees. Being a great leader requires a new toolkit. As Marshall Goldsmith often says “What ...
Apr 17, 2023•10 min
Our world requires collaboration. Just about every job now requires collaborating on teams and every employee’s calendar is full of evidence of collaboration. In one study, up to 85% of participants’ work weeks were spent working in direct collaboration or a result of collaboration with a team. But it can be difficult to collaborate with people whose perspectives, preferences, and personalities are different from our own. Still, getting what you want from your work and career requires being a gr...
Apr 10, 2023•11 min
Teams are how work gets done most of the time. In a knowledge work economy, up to 85% of an average employee’s time is spent in collaboration with other people—on one team or on multiple teams. And that makes effective collaboration and good teamwork a top tier skill. Whether you’re currently a leader or looking to become a leader, focusing on developing your teamwork skills—and the level of teamwork on your team—is one of the highest returns on effort you can experience. In this episode, we’ll ...
Apr 03, 2023•11 min
Teams are a central part of our work experience. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another happen more efficiently and at higher quality because we work in teams. The number of teams we form, along with the size of those teams, has increased dramatically in recent decades. And much of a team’s performance comes down to its culture. Yes, the talents and skills of individuals matter. But without a positive team culture, those same individuals will fail to achieve the level of perfo...
Mar 27, 2023•10 min
At the core of teamwork is the need to solve problems. And when generating solutions, the more diverse a team you have, the more ideas you can generate. Sort of. The rationale behind diversity being a strength on teams is solid. When you’ve built a team of various perspectives, experiences, skills, and abilities, each person brings that variety into discussions and more diverse ideas get generated. More ideas mean a better chance of finding the perfect solution. But that’s not always what happen...
Mar 20, 2023•9 min
Communication is what makes a team a team. Otherwise, it’s just a group of individuals working away at their desks, handing work up to some unnamed boss. In reality, people don’t work in a vacuum. And much of one individual’s work requires coordinating with one or more teams. Effective team communication makes individuals and teams dramatically more productive. But unfortunately, a majority of employees say poor communication is the reason they’re falling behind and missing deadlines. That means...
Mar 13, 2023•9 min
Progress is a powerful human motivator. But unfortunately, many teams mark progress only when projects are complete or big milestones are crossed. They don’t often celebrate small wins that build up to those big completions. But recent research suggests that small wins celebrated regularly are a more potent way to keep teams engaged and motivated. In a landmark study from Teresa Amabile, participants were most energized and motivated not in the aftermath of a big celebration, but when they had l...
Mar 06, 2023•7 min
One of the most consistent findings in organizational behavior over the last decade has been just how significantly team performance is affected by psychological safety. A psychologically safe team is one where team members feel comfortable being themselves, expressing their ideas and opinions, and taking risks without fear of being punished or ostracized. Teams with high psychological safety learn faster, communicate better, and hence collaborate more effectively. At its core, psychological saf...
Feb 27, 2023•10 min
Work is teamwork. And it’s no secret that some teams truly are greater than others. A recent meta-analysis combined research conducted on over 200,000 teams in a variety of industries in order to answer that question. Across 274 dimensions of performance and over half a million individual team members, the researchers found that, in most fields, performance differences of teams followed a power-law—with a small number of high-performing teams achieving most of the results. In other others,...
Feb 20, 2023•11 min
As the world grows increasingly more complex, so will its challenges—both globally and for any given organization. To solve bigger and more complex problems, you need a bigger and more complex team. And to do that, you will need to foster collaboration in the workplace. But the enhanced need for collaboration brings a paradox. According to a recent study summarized in Harvard Business Review, team success requires teams to be larger, more diverse, more virtual and more specialized. But those sam...
Feb 13, 2023•11 min
Learning how to build trust at work is critical if you’re going to be successful as an employee, a manager, or an effective leader. If you don’t have trust, it’ll be more difficult to communicate and coordinate with your peers or colleagues. If teams lack trust, it’s difficult to achieve true collaboration and create performance greater than the sum of each individual’s talent. A team isn’t a team without trust. Without trust, it’s just a group of people who share the same boss—who they pr...
Feb 06, 2023•11 min
We all arrive at leadership with certain preconceptions about what makes a successful leader. Sometimes we form an idea of what great leaders do based on historical leaders or modern-day leaders who are always getting media attention. Other times we form a picture of great leadership based on our own past experiences—both leaders we’ve worked under and even what attributes got us promoted into leadership. But those are often anecdotes. And the plural of anecdote is not data. When you look ...
Jan 30, 2023•11 min
Teams face a lot of different challenges. Leading a team involves leading through many challenges. You’re given performance objectives. You map out a plan of execution with your team. But pretty quickly, you will run into challenges—both seen and unseen. And while most of these challenges are unique to the work being done and the team doing that work, some challenges are universal for teams. These challenges all teams face are less about the work and more about teamwork and collaboration. That’s...
Jan 23, 2023•9 min
We’ve known about the importance of developing emotional intelligence as a leader for some time now, but there are still some misconceptions about exactly what emotional intelligence is (or is not) and how to increase it. Emotional intelligence isn’t just about having “soft skills.” And it’s not a set of mindfulness practices. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and control your own emotions and recognize and empathize with the emotions of others. Leaders with high emotional...
Jan 16, 2023•11 min
Leaders don’t need to have all the answers. That sounds counterintuitive. There is a lot of pressure on leaders to have the right answers and to solve problems that team members can’t solve on their own. In fact, most leaders were promoted into a leadership role because they had many more of the right answers than others in the organization. And the further up the hierarchy you go, the bigger the problems and bigger the expectations for answers. But the more complex work gets, and the more compl...
Jan 09, 2023•8 min
Motivation can vary wildly on a team. At any given time, a few people might be highly motivated, while others are totally unmotivated. Ideally, there are times where everyone is motivated at once, but sadly there may be times when everyone is demotivated or burnt out. All this means that an inescapable part of a leader’s job is to motivate the unmotivated. The good news is that leaders don’t have to rely on raw charisma or the inspirational words of a halftime speech from insert-your-favorite-sp...
Jan 02, 2023•9 min
One of the core tasks of team leaders is keeping motivation and inspiration high. This doesn’t mean all great leaders are charismatic and inspiring. In fact, the opposite is often true. Motivating employees isn’t about what you say to them, it’s about understanding what they’re seeking from work. And while understanding the unique desires of each team member might take a while, there’s a proven model for understanding human motivation that just might help you uncover your team’s motivation myste...
Dec 19, 2022•9 min
Teams today are asked to do more and more with less and less. The demands on their time have only increased. And so has their uncertainty. That leads to a lot of stress, potential setbacks, and failures. Overcoming these obstacles requires building a resilient team. And that starts with understanding what a makes a resilient team. Resilience isn’t toughness. Resilience isn’t about continuing to take punches. It’s not about bouncing back. It’s about the ability to bounce forward. Resilience is th...
Dec 12, 2022•11 min
One of the great mysteries of the modern workplace is that we still assess performance on an individual level, when so much of one’s ability to produce results depends on their team. Work is teamwork. Which means that how well a team communicates and collaborates has a significant impact on how well individuals perform. As a team leader, that makes coordinating collaboration a key part of your role. And the tool most team leaders use for coordination is the team’s weekly meeting. This is where t...
Dec 05, 2022•11 min
High-performing teams didn’t just perform a little better, they performed up to ten times better than normal teams. And the explanations for it hint at more secrets. High-performing teams don’t get these results because they act a little different. They do several key things totally differently. In this episode, we’ll outline four secrets that high-performing teams know that normal teams tend to lack. 0:00 Introduction 1:28 Work Out Loud 2:37 Understand Differences 4:02 Build Trust 5:13 Reinforc...
Nov 28, 2022•8 min
Anyone can be placed in a leadership role. In most organizations, the reward for being an outstanding individual contributor is to be promoted into leading a team of other individual contributors. But those leaders often find that the skills that made them great employees aren’t as helpful when leading great employees (or even mediocre ones). As Marshall Goldsmith famously says, "what got you here, won’t get you there." Being successful as a leader requires developing a certain set of new ...
Nov 21, 2022•10 min
Leaders are constant learners. Or rather, good leaders are constant learners. And aspiring leaders need to be consistent learners as well. Growing into a leadership role requires you to develop leadership skills. And growing from a new leader to a great leader requires you to continue to develop your leadership skills. But development is often one of the first activities sacrificed by the needs of the moment. New problems to solve and new tasks to complete steal time away from developing your le...
Nov 14, 2022•9 min
The vast majority of work today is done in teams. And that makes collaboration and teamwork all the more important. But we have a tendency to think of team building exercises as one-and-done events—ropes courses or personality tests that happen every so often, usually if there’s extra budget that needs to be spent before the end of the fiscal year. But team building isn’t an activity, it’s a habit. Team building happens every day as norms of behavior are established. Team building exercises, if ...
Nov 07, 2022•10 min
Have you ever worked for a team of strangers? Not literal strangers. Outside of maybe being an extra on a film set, it’s highly unlikely you showed up for work day after day not knowing anyone. But a team of strangers meaning a team that just refuses to bond or hasn’t been given a chance to bond. It’s draining to work on a team that just doesn’t connect with each other. How teams bond has a dramatic effect on how well they work. Research shows that team bonding significantly enhances the p...
Oct 31, 2022•10 min
Everybody feels stuck at work from time to time. You feel like you don’t enjoy doing the work. You feel like you’re not growing, or like you’re not challenged anymore. According to a study by Oracle, more than 75% of people feel “stuck” personally and professionally. That’s led directly to a phenomenon called “quiet quitting” — what we used to call disengagement. Too many people have already quit but keep showing up for the paycheck. And when you think about getting unstuck in your career, you m...
Oct 24, 2022•12 min
There are a lot of bad bosses out there. In a recent survey, the majority of workers reported they either had worked or currently work for a micromanager. And micromanagers aren’t the only types of bad bosses out there. So, it’s safe to assume a significant percentage of bosses are…less than ideal. But here’s the uncomfortable truth about bad bosses. Most of them don’t know they’re bad. Most of them don’t think they’re bad. And in fact, most of them aren’t bad. They just need to shift their styl...
Oct 17, 2022•9 min
