Team Leadership

Leaders be cautious promoting an individual before they have proven they are ready for the new position. Learn what your team wants, what you (really want) and what you want to do to avoid demoralizing your team and attacking team performance.

Team Building Fail - Climbing Trees is fun in the moment but does little to unite your team toward performance. Take time to dive into the problems, expose the hidden story around why we don't trust or work well together. Then, and only then can you truly start to build together.

We have all sat in meetings with a manager who blows up, repeatedly, and stands on their proverbial soapbox to make their point. We have all also turned off our listening and disengaged from that same behavior pattern. Yet still, this management style is one of the most prominent and least productive. Learn the strategy to work around it if you can't change it.

During a recent trip out of town, I learned something about equipping our teammates to make decisions and to make them quickly. One evening, while away from our hotel room, we returned rather late to a room that was flooding. Clearly, the person in the room above us had left the bathtub to overflow, and a lot of water had made it’s way down the walls and out of the light fixture in the ceiling. The sound was alarming to walk into, but the appearance of that much water was even more surprising.

If I had a nickel for every conversation I have had about removing a ‘label’ that a manager or leader gave a team member, I’d be a wealthy, wealthy woman.

Have you considered, for any length of time, your motives with your team? What is it that you need and want from them? How are they measuring up to your expectations? And, if they aren’t measuring up, what are you prepared to do about it?

Recently, I had the great pleasure of attending a 4 day intensive retreat with my coach. Yes, even I have a coaching team I work with and that is because I believe so strongly in walking my talk. During this retreat, a powerful question came up for me and, of course, I had to share it with you.

Do you ever wonder how the really great ideas come to be million dollar inventions? Or, how some leaders appear to have the golden ticket for getting the right team members to get the win? I have pondered these things for many years. If you are like me, you have had an idea, drawn it out, envisioned what it can do to transform the world or make life easier for someone only to have your idea go on the shelf. A few years later, that very idea is now making someone else millions of dollars! And yours is still on the shelf.

Over the years of working with teams from Government to Manufacturing to Corporate Enterprise the average leader will creatively avoid telling the members of their team the truth about the status of the business–At all costs.

If you have ever undertaken a major change initiative with your team and led them toward a big goal, you may have experienced some feelings of frustration around people slipping back into old behaviors. The very behaviors you are trying to change to increase performance or drive the new initiate to success.