81 Posts Found

As Peter Senge wrote in The Fifth Discipline (Doubleday Business, 1990), a learning organization is one in which “people continually expand their capacity to create results they truly desire.” When we view learning in this broader sense, we build feedback right into the system as an integral part of the work. If you want to accelerate learning on your team, first engage them in a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Elizabeth Doty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Teamwork

A look at the value of in-person meetings for dispersed teams.

Content: Article | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Teamwork

Getting a team to work efficiently requires focus on team building. But what are the best tricks for getting a team to bond and succeed? We’ll provide you over thirty science-backed tips for making the most of your team.

Content: Article | Author: Anastasia Belyh | Source: Cleverism | Subject: Teamwork

What we were expecting to find is that we would have a long list of individual characteristics that would help us determine the composition of an effective team.

You would want a 10-year mix. You want to make sure you have gender diversity, you want extroverts, you want introverts, you want highly conscientious people — you want that whole mix. If we could quantify that mix, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Brian Welle | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Teams that fall in love with a problem have more successful outcomes than teams that fall in love with particular solutions. This is because knowing that a problem is worth solving continues to be motivating even when a team doesn’t come across the right solution on the first, second, or Nth try.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: Medium | Subjects: Challenge, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Problems / Solutions, Teamwork

How you measure success is critical to the long-term results of your team because it’s the thing that people rally around. Make sure to give this exercise the proper time and attention (more, even, than you would give to thinking about “how should we do this?”).

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: Medium | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Shared experiences are a powerful tool for managers to build high-performing teams. They help to shape values, norms, and behaviors that allow people to get work done more efficiently and effectively.

Content: Article | Author: Augusto Giacoman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Teamwork

During the past six years, we have studied the behavior and performance of more than 3,000 teams across a range of organizations, functions, and geographies. Our data includes responses from the four groups associated with teams: the team leader, the team’s members, the line manager of the leader, and the team’s external stakeholders. Specifically, we surveyed them on 16 factors that together helped us determine … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Colin Price | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

A lot of people attribute groupthink to cohesion. They think that if we’re too close, if we trust each other too much […] then we’re not going to challenge each other. That turns out to be false. Cohesive groups often make the best decisions. People frequently when they trust each other are willing to challenge each other and say, “I know this person is not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

The strength of cross-cultural teams is their diversity of experience, perspective, and insight. But to capture those riches, colleagues must commit to open communication; they must dare to share. Unfortunately, this is rarely easy. In the 25 years we’ve spent researching global work groups, we’ve found that challenges typically arise in three areas.

Content: Article | Author: Ginka Toegel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Culture, International, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Stanford Graduate School of Business PhD alum Kathleen Eisenhardt, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Engineering, studied how product development teams burdened by a complicated set of rules frequently derail while teams with no rules at all never even get started.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Kathleen M. Eisenhardt | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

The advantage to having people from all over the world on a team is that you may find that you have more innovation and creativity, and that you’re closer to your local markets. The disadvantage is that multinational teamwork is usually a lot less efficient than monocultural teamwork. When we’re all from the same culture, we don’t have to talk about how we work together. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, International, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

There are five ways in which social distance gets created and you have to manage each differently. To begin with, team structure—the physical configuration of the global team, how many people are in what location, not to mention where the leader is. Then there are the processes that you use for managing team interactions—without carefully managing communication, team interactions can end up as a dialogue … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

As the director of People Analytics at Google for the last decade, Brian Welle’s world revolves around data. He has found that those hard, cold numbers can, when used properly, uncover the key attributes that make people better managers and team members. Once identified, the attributes can then be cultivated and instilled to boost performance. Welle spoke recently with Cade Massey, Wharton practice professor of … [ Read more ]

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Brian Welle | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork | Company: Google

Anita Woolley of Carnegie-Mellon University and her collaborators constructed a measure of collective intelligence and found that it is roughly as predictive of group performance as IQ is of individual performance. Surprisingly, collective intelligence is not explained by factors such as group satisfaction, cohesion, or motivation. Instead, the strongest predictors of collective intelligence—and group success—are equality of conversational turn-taking (measured using sociometric data) as well … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Because we self-select sites we visit, the Internet pushes people to reinforce their own preconceived ideas and opinions, such that groups solidify more internally due to the attractive forces of common belief but fragment more externally due to the repulsive forces of opposing belief. This mental malignancy metastasizes in two ways: less diversity within groups and more alienation between groups.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert Lawrence Kuhn | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork, Thought

If you have a team that you think has a lousy leader, the first question to ask is, Is the team too big? It’s amazing how crummy leaders become great when they go from leading, say, 11 people down to five. And the reverse is true as well. You may think someone has reached their limits as a manager when they’re asked to take on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert I. Sutton | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Great leaders and teams are masters of the obvious—a rare talent.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

We found four factors that were correlated—four things that might account for the degree of collective intelligence in a team. The first was the most obvious: the intelligence of the individual team members. We had expected that the group intelligence would correlate with the average or maximum intelligence of individual group members. But we were surprised to find that the correlation was not very strong. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas Malone | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Humans are incredibly good at making quick interpretations of visual scenes. We then decide what to do. This provides an evolutionary advantage. It works extremely well at an individual level and has kept the species alive.

When we interact as a group, however, this skill limits our effectiveness. We argue about what to do without being curious about the different interpretations we may have of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: David Marquet | Source: 99U | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork