Tools and resources

This blog focusses on the bioteams concept – more effective teams based on nature’s proven models. If you would like a detailed overview of bioteams you can request a free copy of the 33-page Bioteaming Manifesto here.

The Bioteaming Manifesto has been downloaded 20,000 times over the last 15 years and is a very popular resource for anyone interested in the important discipline of developing and sustaining High Performing Teams.

Bioteams is structured around 4 levels of team maturity (“zones”) each of which operate around 3 guiding principles (“rules”) as shown in the diagram.

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:

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’.

There are a plethora of excel add-Ins out there, many of which aim to improve or extend a feature which excel already performs. I am not much interested in these but what I am interested in is add-ins which enable you to do something really useful which you cannot currently do in excel. In this article I introduce seven excel add-ins which meet this criterion – NodeXL, Solver, Rainbow, Spreadsheet Converter, Crystal Ball, Fractal Maps and XCell Compiler.

One of the most useful aspects of Microsoft Excel is its ability to quickly slice and dice customer data from live systems to identify important trends and behaviors which can inform strategy. In this article and screencast I share a 7-step plan, illustrated with a worked example, for Instant Customer Analytics using Excel.

In this new short audio/video I share 7 secrets on how teams can significantly improve performance by adopting simple techniques from Bioteams. These techniques are particularly relevant to large cross-functional teams and multi-enterprise teams whose members are not co-located and spend much of their working days on the road or on client site.

If, like me, you think that Company Mission Statements are often not worth the fancy cards they are embossed you should take a look at Dilbert’s Automatic Mission Statement Generator (unfortunately no longer available online). It looks like many of our major enterprises and public organizations have used it already!