SkillInside

Every team has its own habits, but some habits—like some teams—are more effective than others. Building and reinforcing good habits can be the key to a cohesive and productive team. Make sure your team is supported with habits that will take them from vision to goals to achievement. Here are some of the best: Keep the safety net strong.  Productive teams are not scared of failing or messing up. They’re not afraid to take risks and be vulnerable with each other, because they have the security of knowing no one will fault them if things go sideways. The essence of a great productive team is the combination of accepting risk while insisting on excellence.  Every team member wants to know: Can I  take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Create structure and clarity.  The best teams assign each member a clear role with clear plans, guidelines and goals. They make sure that they’ve fit the best qualified person in each key role on the basis of backgroun...

The way to learn is to learn from truths; the way to thrive is to take those truths and implement them in your own life. Here are 12 truths that will help you succeed triumphantly. 1. Embrace your mistakes and learn from them. Mistakes happen. Don’t judge yourself by your mistakes–look at them as learning lessons. No matter how smart you are, how wise you are, or what degrees you have, everyone makes mistakes. So learn to embrace them and make them worth their weight in wisdom. 2. Love what you do and create work that you love. Find work that you love, because you will be doing it for a long time.  Perhaps more important, you want to avoid waking up one morning and wondering why you are doing something you really don’t love or even like. Find something that is bigger than yourself, and love every moment and work hard at making it successful. 3. Find time for self-care and integrate balance in your life.  Invest in yourself.  Most people work...

Not long ago, I received a call from an HR manager at a large corporation seeking an executive coach for one of their senior leaders. He was described as arrogant, tactlessly blunt, and lacking empathy. Despite his challenges, all of which hadn’t improved much despite several previous coaching interventions, the company hadn’t fired him because he was considered one of the industry’s most brilliant engineers, responsible for several of the firm’s most profitable patents. The company simply couldn’t afford to let him go. How do you coach a leader whom others think is a hopeless case? Sometimes you can’t. The person may well turn out to be a jerk who won’t change their toxic ways. In that case, the company needs to fire the individual. Tolerating destructive behavior will send the signal that it’s ok to mistreat others as long as you get results. But, often, as was the case with my client, the leader who everyone thinks is hopeless is simply being misunderstood and their behavior...

So many different people can get to you through different channels, and the pressure is enormous.” “Constant e-mail, international travel, calls at all hours—I was exhausted. The collaborative demands eventually wore me down.” “I always felt I had to do more, go further, save the day. I would become people’s life raft and then almost drown.” These are the voices of collaborative overload. As organizations become more global, adopt matrixed structures, offer increasingly complex products and services, and enable 24/7 communication, they are requiring employees to collaborate with more internal colleagues and external contacts than ever before. According to research from Connected Commons, most managers now spend 85% or more of their work time on e-mail, in meetings, and on the phone, and the demand for such activities has jumped by 50% over the past decade. Companies benefit, of course: Faster innovation and more-seamless client service are two by-products of greater collab...

When setting team goals, many managers feel that they must maintain a tricky balance between setting targets high enough to achieve impressive results and setting them low enough to keep the troops happy. But the assumption that employees are more likely to welcome lower goals doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. In fact, our research indicates that in some situations people perceive higher goals as easier to attain than lower ones — and even when that’s not the case, they still can find those more challenging goals more appealing. In a series of studies we describe in our latest paper, we tested how people perceive goals by asking participants on Amazon’s crowdsourcing marketplace, known as Mechanical Turk, to rate the difficulty and appeal of targets set at various levels and across spheres from sports performance and GPA to weight loss and personal savings. We asked about both “status quo” goals, in which the target remained set at a baseline level similar to recent perfor...

I believe that morning habits are especially important. If you want to be successful, a set of good morning rituals that you follow faithfully can make a big difference. The probability of your success may well depend on the choices you make about how to spend those critical hours before your workday gets under way. Here are some elements of the morning habits of some of the most successful leaders, that I coach, do on a daily bases. Implement them yourself and watch your effectiveness increase. They start strong and start early.  Successful people tend to be up and going strong while the rest of the world is still asleep. However you choose to use it, find some quiet time to prepare for the day—ideally before anyone else is up so there are no distractions. How well you start your day determines how well you live your day. They carve out time for reflection.  Set aside time for journaling, reflection, reading, or meditation. Time spent on reflection is never wasted...

Currently, a quarter of all employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health Organization describes stress as the “global health epidemic of the 21st century.” Many of us now work in constantly connected, always-on, highly demanding work cultures where stress and the risk of burnout are widespread. Since the pace and intensity of contemporary work culture are not likely to change, it’s more important than ever to build resilience skills to effectively navigate your worklife. While working as a director of learning and organization development at Google, eBay and J.P. Morgan Chase, and in my current work as co-founder of the learning solutions company Wisdom Labs, I’ve seen over and over again that the most resilient individuals and teams aren’t the ones that don’t fail, but rather the ones that fail, learn and thrive because of it. Being challenged — sometimes severely — is ...

Back in my corporate years, I engaged in many forms of communication—delivering presentations, running meetings, developing proposals, sending updates and other business writing. At the time, I thought I was a competent communicator. Yet oftentimes, I became embroiled in conflicts and disagreements that went badly for me. Usually, I believed it was the other people who were in the wrong. It wasn’t until I studied communication theory and power dynamics in my marriage and family therapy training, and subsequently served as a therapist, coach and writer, that I realized how much of the success of our communication is driven by our own internal beliefs and intentions, which are often subconscious. I saw that the more we can manage our emotions, ego and intentions, and gain awareness of exactly what we are trying to communicate, the stronger our relationships will be. This increased awareness helps us build important bridges and positive relationships with the people who matter mo...