Conventional team building events may be fun, scary, even interesting, but they don’t do much to change the ways people work together. Any benefits they do yield fade quickly in the face of the day-to-day pressures of work. But, when relationship building reinforces meaningful, shared work, it strengthens results and creates bonds that endure no matter our differences.
Read MoreYou come to this third Practice knowing why your collaboration matters, which work requires collaboration, and who should be doing it. Cultivate Collaboration is the payoff for all that work. It is about contracting, connecting individuals to the work of the team. Cultivate Collaboration is about creating more intentional collaboration. In fact, it’s the only Practice that is directly aligned to Intentionality.
Read MoreCollaborative accountability goes beyond the tasks people do together; it includes commitments for how they intend to work together, the behaviors they are signing up for. Intentionality is the ultimate virtue of superior teamwork.
Read MoreOne startling discovery was that relationship building, despite all the time and money teams and organizations devote to it, doesn’t ignite collaboration
Read MoreI’ve posted a couple of articles about trust and courage in teams in my blog, Teaming With Ideas. I connect my thinking about those two subjects to what’s become a justifiably hot topic in the realm of collaboration: psychological safety.
Read MoreA few years ago, one of my HR colleagues called me with a request. “There’s this finance team I support and they are so dysfunctional it’s unbelievable. Can you help?” I paused, uncertain how to answer. I’d always felt that I was good with troubled teams, that I had a knack for working with dysfunction. But in this case, I balked.
Read MoreIn my work at Mars, Incorporated I ask teams to think of low trust as a symptom of other more tangible issues, not as a problem in an of itself. I also remind them that trust, at its most basic, is an emotion.
Read MoreTrust isn’t a precondition for team success and we have to stop treating it that way. Don’t get me wrong; trust in teams matters - a lot. But too many teams believe that they need to build trust first in order to improve their performance or address their issues.
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