Here’s an exercise from a team building class I attended that I wanted to share with you. It uses questions from a Mensa quiz to illustrate the point that a team’s collective wisdom is always greater than any individual team member’s. To get started, see how many of these questions you can answer individually. According…
What’s one of the biggest barriers to people working together effectively? “The human ego,” according to Dr. Ken Blanchard, best-selling business author and co-founder of The Ken Blanchard Companies. As Blanchard explains, “When people get caught up in their ego, it erodes their effectiveness. That’s because the combination of false pride and self-doubt created by…
About 60 percent of the time, work teams fail to accomplish their goals, according to Dr. Eunice Parisi-Carew, a Founding Associate at The Ken Blanchard Companies. To make matters worse, the experience will create lingering hard feelings among team members, In a new article for Human Resource Executive Online, Parisi-Carew identifies the top ten reasons why…
An effective team brings together people from different backgrounds and different experiences to work together toward a common goal. Yet most teams do not ever achieve their full potential because team members do not take the time to explore and agree on the team’s purpose, values, and destination. Jesse Lyn Stoner, a leading expert on…
Differences are inevitable when passionate people work together. Eventually, after a team gets through an initial orientation with a new task, members usually come to the realization that working together to accomplish a common goal is tough work. This occurs in the “dissatisfaction” stage of team development when the team recognizes the discrepancy between what…
Most work teams experience conflict, but few team members know how to respond appropriately. Dr. Eunice Parisi-Carew, who recently presented on the topic of Why Teams Fail—Dealing with Friction and Dissension recommends that teams address conflict head-on and look at it as an opportunity to be creative and innovative instead of something to avoid. As…
Collaboration is a hit-or-miss proposition (and mostly a miss) in today’s organizations, according to Dr. Eunice Parisi-Carew, a teams expert with The Ken Blanchard Companies. The result is a huge loss in productivity and potential as “pseudo-teams” struggle with tasks that could have been accomplished more successfully if the team members worked together more effectively.…
Teams fail for any number of reasons, including poor planning, unclear goals, or a lack of training. Research by The Ken Blanchard Companies has identified the top 10 reasons for a team failing to reach its potential. See if any of these sound familiar: Lack of a sufficient charter Unsure of what requires team effort…
Contrary to the “Don’t get personal at work” philosophy there is growing evidence that strong relationships at work are a key ingredient to high performance. In Why Relationships at Work Are So Important, best-selling author Susan Fowler, a senior consulting partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies explains that “relatedness”—a feeling of connectedness and belonging—is one…
One of the biggest barriers to people working together effectively is the human ego. When people get caught up in their ego, it erodes their effectiveness. That’s because the combination of false pride and self-doubt created by an overactive ego gives people a distorted image of their own importance. When that happens, people see themselves…