Category: Managing People

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The Wisdom of Teams: Outperforming Individuals

The Wisdom of Teams

The Wisdom of TeamsThe Wisdom of Teams is a true classic among Twentieth Century business books. Based on detailed interviews with 47 teams across the US, it uncovers the wisdom of what teams can achieve, and how they can perform at their best.

The authors of The Wisdom of Teams acknowledge that what they discovered is both obvious, in that we recognise the truths straight away, and subtle, in that making sense of them in the real world can be hard. They rank their findings as both common sense and uncommon sense. And all this is as it should be. Teams are people. And people working together can be messy and hard to characterise.

So, while the book has been criticised for its obviousness, and also for being too long and sharing too many long stories, this is its nature. Real team stories show not just the obvious truths, but the subtle complexities too. Perhaps the biggest idea of the Wisdom of Teams is that there is no one Big Idea, but many smaller big ideas.

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Mentoring – Passing on the Benefit of Your Experience

Mentoring - Passing on the Benefit of Your Experience

Mentoring - Passing on the Benefit of Your ExperienceThese days, mentoring is defined – more often than not – in distinction to coaching.

That’s easy to do, but if I were to do so, it would pre-suppose that you know what coaching is. And you may do. But, what if you don’t?

I have set myself the task of describing mentoring without mentioning coaching again in this article.

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Positive Organisational Scholarship

Positive Organisational Scholarship

Positive Organisational ScholarshipThe easiest way to understand Positive Organisational Scholarship is to think of it as the systematic study of Positive Psychology, at the level of an organisation. And, if you need a primer on Positive Psychology, take a look at our article.

A lot of the formal descriptions of Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS) use dry academic language. Put simply, it’s the study of what makes members of an organisation perform at their best levels, by focusing on what they do well.

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Cognitive Behavioural Coaching (CBC)

Cognitive Behavioural Coaching

Cognitive Behavioural Coaching is not as well known as others among our Big Ideas. In fact, it’s more of a spin-off from a Big Idea, than one in its own right. But Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) would certainly qualify. It has had and is having a huge impact on people with serious problems.

Cognitive Behavioural CoachingBut CBT is not designed for the workplace. It’s a tool for mental health practitioners. If only there were something that could apply its principles to lower level stress and self-efficacy problems than its older sibling, CBT.

This is where Cognitive Behavioural Coaching comes in. Drawing from the ideas and tools of CBT, it is ideal for problems like:

  • procrastination
  • stress
  • lack of assertiveness or of confidence
  • perfectionism
  • hesitancy in decision-making
  • aggression

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MBWA: Management by Walking Around

MBWA - Management by Walking Around

MBWA - Management by Walking AroundWhen I was an active Project Leader, I practised Management by Walking Around, long before I knew it was a thing. Then, when I learned about it, I was fascinated to learn that, if this idea has any formal origin, it was in a company I much admired.

But can something millions of people have done over many centuries by instinct, truly be a Big Idea?
Well, maybe I could argue that such a powerfully intuitive approach cannot be anything but a Big Idea.

So let’s dissect the idea of Management by Walking Around.

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Logical Levels of Awareness

Logical Levels of Awareness
Logical Levels of Awareness
Logical Levels of Awareness

There are few models that are as beloved of management trainers as Robert Dilts’ Logical Levels of Awareness.

It is popular among those who have learned it as part of formal NLP training, through reading books, or by osmosis. The logical levels model is pervasive and hard to miss if you are alert to these things.

So, in this article, I want to explain what it is, how it came about, and why it is a big idea that merits your attention as a manager.

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The Inner Game

The Inner Game
The Inner Game
The Inner Game

What are you really capable of? And what holds you back from achieving it? Competing against your own mental obstacles is the ‘Inner Game’.

Although many people in the world of work have never heard of the Inner Game, nor of Timothy Gallwey, its founder, this big idea has been extremely influential.

Because Gallwey and the ideas behind the Inner Game are very much the immediate progenitors of modern performance coaching. It it is hard to over-estimate the impact that has had on management and organisational life.

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Coaching in the Workplace

Coaching

CoachingIf coaching in the workplace seemed like no more than a trendy idea put about by a few business gurus and trainers in the 1990s, think again.

The upward rise of the trend has stabilised. And today, over 25 years from the publication of John Whitmore’s ‘Coaching for Performance’, the discipline is in rude health.

From my perspective, coaching is here to stay.

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Team Building

Team Building

Team BuildingTeams are a good thing. No one doubts that. So, how can we doubt the benefit of team building?

Team building has become a multi-million Pound/Dollar/Euro… industry. Search for it online, and you’ll find dozens of service providers offering everything from cake decoration to high risk expeditions. But:

  • what is it?
  • why should you use it? and
  • what should you know about doing it well?

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Neuroleadership: The Appliance of Neuroscience to Leadership

Neuroleadership

Neuroleadership‘We’ve finally found our silver bullet‘ says one HR professional in a promotional video for a conference on Neuroleadership.

If that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine; perhaps it should. Silver bullets come from the same shop as snake-oil! So we have to ask,

‘how solid is one of the latest big ideas in management: neuroleadership?’

The principle, of course, is solid. Because what it seeks to do is bring the findings of neuroscience into the practice of leadership.

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