Liane Davey

Many team dysfunctions manifest as trust issues when, in fact, they stem from discrepancies in goals, priorities, or expectations. Clearing up those misunderstandings often resolves what you thought were interpersonal issues.

Erik Roth

What makes a high-performing innovation team is a diversity of perspectives and experiences, but in a psychologically safe space so that team members can actually share openly, come up with a common vocabulary, and look at the problem through very different lenses.

Go, teams: When teams get healthier, the whole organization benefits

Creating effective teams depends on multiple factors, including high levels of trust and communication, and understanding team context. A new approach helps elevate performance and create value.

Create Authentic Connections with Virtual Team Members

In this Nano Tool for Leaders, scientists from the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative provide eight steps to enhance online collaboration at work.

4 Common Types of Team Conflict — and How to Resolve Them

Managers spend 20% of their time on average managing team conflict. Over the past three decades, the authors have studied thousands of team conflicts around the world and have identified four common patterns of team conflict.

The Six Dimensions of Winning Teams

Teams with clear goals, values, rules, roles and processes, backed by full individual commitment, are primed for peak performance.

Guide: Understand team effectiveness

Much of the work done at Google, and in many organizations, is done collaboratively by teams. The team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience most of their work. But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction.

Following the success of Google’s[ Read more ]

Sally Helgesen, Fred Kofman

The exclusive focus on monetary rewards inevitably leaves organizations fighting a fierce but losing struggle to balance individual and team results. Rewarding high performers serves the imperatives of accountability and excellence but can undermine alignment and cooperation among team members. Yet basing pay on team results in order to incentivize collaboration often ends up inadvertently rewarding subpar individual performance and penalizing individual excellence. Neither approach … [ Read more ]

Aaron De Smet

What we found is teams with psychological safety and a supportive work environment actually benefit from being edgy and pushing to do better. But you put that same edge, that same kind of push, on a team that doesn’t have psychological safety or an open and supportive work environment, and it has the opposite effect. It actually makes the team go into a sort of … [ Read more ]

Jiaona Zhang

Build a team in the same way you would build a product. Just as you would think about your users and their pain points, you should think about your team and the problems you’re facing so that you have clarity on what you’re solving for.

When Leaders Say They Are Aligned—But Aren’t

Five key practices can unify leaders up, down, and across the organization—and spark concerted action.

Rituals at Work: Teams That Play Together Stay Together

Rituals—even seemingly silly ones—help employees bond and add meaning to their work.

Theodore Kinni

One of the challenges of leading remote workers is ensuring that they share a clear understanding of four key areas: their goals, their individual roles, the resources at their disposal, and the norms that will govern their interactions. This alignment can be hard to achieve when employees are co-located. But it becomes even more difficult when they are working separately and at a distance.

The Ultimate Guide to Running Executive Meetings — 25 Tips from Top Startup Leaders

Great meetings don’t just happen, they’re meticulously crafted. At its best, an executive meeting strengthens the bonds of your leadership team, surfaces mission-critical problems facing the business, and carves out plans for the future. But as you wade into the executive meeting waters, there are waves that can toss you around.

The executive team’s time is worth a lot, so it’s a shame to waste it. … [ Read more ]

Molly Graham

When I was managing a team I didn’t have tons of expertise in […] I first started with: Do people’s roles make sense? Do they know how they fit in? How they align to the business? Then the second piece is, do they know what’s expected of them? Do they know what success looks like? 80% of the time when I go into a team … [ Read more ]

How to Lead a Meeting People Want to Attend

Gallup research shows that satisfaction is an attitudinal outcome, like loyalty or pride, and doesn’t always relate to employee performance.

Engagement is different, deeper and more emotional, and it predicts important business outcomes, like profitability and productivity.

Job satisfaction beats misery or annoyance any day, but it’s not exactly something to strive for.

If you want people leaving the conference room fired up by an idea or excited … [ Read more ]

Darren Lee, Mike Pino, Ann Johnston

Many conventional teams are inductive, starting with a theory and looking for data that applies; others are deductive, trying to form hypotheses only after all known data is gathered and analyzed. Abductive reasoning, by contrast, is an iterative process. You start with the data you have and test it, drawing a preliminary hypothesis and continuing to adjust the concept over time. The types of problems … [ Read more ]