Team Skills

Podcast: Download (Duration: 17:41 — 16.2MB)

Do you have a team that does not always play to win? Do you feel more like a referee in a fighting ring, some days than a manager?

Don’t worry if you do, the good news is that people are not designed to work in team. Think ‘survival of the fittest’ we have a natural instinct to be competitive in order to survive…so it is completely normal for things to kick off a little!!

At Think, we believe that, whilst rivalry and competitiveness is healthy, you should never excel at another persons loss or expense. To help you unite your team to work together to achieve common goals why not try our Team Skills course.

Teamwork
Some people regard their glass as half full, some half empty. In my case, if I were to sum up my week, I’d say that someone had downed the rest of my wine and made off with the glass afterwards.

Unlike last week, however, where you’ll have noticed my mood was dark; this week I have decided to view the theft of my proverbial glass as a good thing because:

1.)  drinking too much is bad for you and;

2.)  it gives me an excuse to loiter in the Waterford Crystal department in John Lewis next weekend.

As Francois Lelord says in his wonderful book, ‘Hector and the Search for Happiness’, “Happiness is a way of looking at things”.

I have spent the week overseeing the implementation of a new computer based sales system for a client; with set-back after set-back as the system would not play ball (a bit like the England football team except that we eventually won).

Whilst I could look back at the week, exhausted, with a sense of utter frustration, I am choosing only to see the good in what happened. more…

Team Skills

I have an idea for a new reality TV show in which I would, of course, be prepared to feature. Take six very different, independent women from various walks of life and plonk them all on a foreign island somewhere for a week together and see what happens. So committed am I to this idea that I have just tried it out. The ‘team’ in question consisted of me and 5 other women, 3 of whom I did not know before my holiday. And we interacted exactly as one might expect.

How do I know what one might expect? Because team development usually follows a very similar pattern. Bruce Tuckman first described the four stages of team development in 1965 as;
Form, Storm, Norm, Perform.

more…

Team Performance Management

When discussing Team Performance Management the other day, I was reminded of a lovely story I heard when training as a practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Once upon a time there was a huge steam ship that had run out of steam. It had come to a grinding halt, out at sea, and the engineers on board were unable to get it going again. They called on the finest specialists in the land, who came on board with their sophisticated equipment and computer technology and tried many different ways to get the ship started but to no avail. more…

Team Morale

• No. of centimetres of snow the weather men promised for Bournemouth:     21

• No. of centimetres of snow that actually arrived:      2

The Big Freeze is upon us. It fascinates me how different people react to situations like this. Some, like my brother in Kent, seized the opportunity to build a pink igloo (as you do) and convert various pieces of furniture into sledges. Others chose to add this turn of events to their list of post Christmas grumbles. more…

If you run a business you can probably put your people into one of 3 categories according to how they work and their team skills:

• Luke SkyWalkers
• Followers
• Dark Side

First, the ‘Luke Skywalkers’ of this world. These are the people who will never let you down and strive to achieve great things, whatever is thrown at them (You probably have a few of these in your organisation).

At the other end of the scale, you have those people who primarily like to moan a lot and drag everyone around them down in the process. We’ll call these people ‘The Dark Side’ (You probably have more of these). more…