High Performing Teams and Improved Collaboration through Biomimicry
Managing any team, network or group becomes a whole lot simpler if you understand the three rings of member commitment.
Continue reading “The 3 rings of member commitment in any dynamic group”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
i,Team
The famous science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, forecasted the coming age of Robots with a series of entertaining stories involving dilemmas around the concept of the Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov’s work was brought to the big screen in the recent block-buster film starring Will Smith “i, Robot”. But can these laws also be applied to teams?
Continue reading “The Three Laws of Teams”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
One of the most important team questions, often not properly resolved when a team is setup is:
“What type of team is it?”
Continue reading “The Three types of organisational teams”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
What can we learn from conflict resolution that can help us build strong virtual communities, networks and teams?
Continue reading “Virtual communities – learning from conflict resolution”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
The Trinity of all Living Systems – A Design Framework for Bioteams. Dr Humberto Maturana and Dr Franciso Varela, 2 Chilean biologist/neuroscientists, in their ground-breaking book “The Tree of Knowledge – The Biological Roots of Human Understanding” [1] suggest a simple but profound model, represented graphically below, which wonderfully captures the essence of living systems.
Continue reading “A Design Framework for Bioteams”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
Image Source: Chalkdust Magazine
I have been reading Lord Sacks daily thoughts “Celebrating Life” and was impressed by his piece on “The Prisoners Dilemma”. The Dilemma in a nutshell is that 2 prisoners are given the chance to do a deal and betray each other.
Lord Sacks is the UK’s chief Rabbi and highlights one vital aspect of the dilemma which I had not previously paid enough attention to – the fact that the two prisoners are not allowed to speak to each other!
Continue reading “The Prisoners Dilemma, Trust, Cooperation and Effective Teams”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
What do we mean by “Teamwork”? We often talk about Teamwork as if its a singular thing however in nature there are 4 different types – each of which have a very precise meaning. I call these Solowork, Crowdwork, Groupwork and Teamwork itself. An effective team knows how and when to use each type – an ineffective team only uses one!
Continue reading “Top teams understand the 4 different types of Teamwork in Nature”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
As a team leader you have two distinct leadership responsibilities – Managing the Individuals and Managing the Team. Leaders who fixate on managing the individuals tend to have happy teams which unfortunately under-perform in terms of deadlines, quality, customer satisfaction and budgets! Leaders who obsess on managing the team may hit most of these targets but at the expense of team member Alienation, Burnout, Compliance, Disinterest and eventually Exiting (easy to remember – ABCDE!). Great Team Leaders manage both responsibilities. Here is a simple framework with a nice supporting spreadsheet to help you assess and improve your leadership:
Continue reading “How good a team leader are you? Try my Team Leadership Assessment!”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
An important free tool which I provide with my new book ‘A Systematic Guide to High Performing Teams‘ is a Team Process Health Check Spreadsheet written in Microsoft Excel. The spreadsheet allows you to rapidly assess each of 16 important team process elements on a scale of 0-3 ranging from ‘totally absent’ to ‘present and effective’.
Continue reading “Free High Performing Teams Instant Healthcheck Tool Spreadsheet”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.
By observing newly formed and existing teams playing business simulations I have learned some important insights into how team-working ‘evolves’ and offer here some specific ideas on how you might accelerate this evolution in your own organizational teams.
On the road to Effective Team Collaboration there seems to be two intermediate phases of ‘naïve collaboration’ which many teams seem to go through – Hyper-Communication and Over-Delegation.
Continue reading “The evolution of effective team working and how you can accelerate it!”
Ken is an expert practitioner, author and speaker on Collaboration, High Performing Teams, Change Management, Business Strategy and Leadership Development.