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How Do You Know That Was A Successful Meeting?

Submitted by Richard Hawkes on

successful meeting
Meetings are essential to getting things done in businesses, but how do you know a meeting was actually effective? Indeed, how do you know whether any conversation is actually effective?

This post provides a link to an article that provides a comprehensive and powerful approach to running a successful meeting for high performing teams.

If you’re serious about raising the bar in your organization, an important leverage point is knowing which kind of meeting is required for the task at hand. Moreover, having effective meetings is not just an exercise in following rules. Let’s face it: business culture is meeting culture. The speed at which complexity can be managed – the speed of innovation – is dependent...

The Art Of Leading Change -- How to push.

Submitted by Richard Hawkes on

How do you lead change in a business so that other's follow? What is the right way to push? Pushing Change 

Let me share an experience of leading change:

I was working a with the senior team as a business coach at a real estate development company. They said they wanted to grow their company but believed it was not possible. To understand why, you need to understand how they found new investment opportunities.

The way in which they found most new investment opportunities was by having one of the partners drive to work a different route everyday. He had a great talent for seeing opportunities. However, it could take him a long time to find the right opportunities. The logic was that since...

The Stages to Becoming a Higher Performing Team: A Primer

Submitted by Bob Voss PhD on

Evolution-Development

The path to becoming a higher performing team and culture follows predictable stages. Recognizing and understanding this truth, if fully embraced, can fundamentally change the way you look at your organization. And more important, it will enable you to consciously and deliberately create the conditions for developing a high-performing team and culture.

The pathway to success is simple. Organizational development has predictable and knowable stages. Each stage has it's strengths, weaknesses and limitations. And there are clear milestones that need to be reached to move to the next higher stage of development. With this knowledge, you can map the path forward and establish clear and specific next steps for moving down that path.

Just as people, cultures and natural systems go through developmental stages...

How to deal with stress in the workplace - The SCARF model

Submitted by Christo Schutte on

Work Stress

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the blog post Simple Stress Management Tools. It was so popular that I decided this week to follow-up on this topic.

I thought it might also be appropriate to introduce you to Nick Petrie. He is a senior faculty member at the Center for Creative Leadership and is a guru on the latest leadership research. I connected with Nick and he gave me permission to share his latest blog video (below) -  “The SCARF Model - How to deal with stress at work” I recommend it on so many levels, if only for another cool accent! His blog is also worthy of your attention...

Frequently Asked Questions About The Four Evolutionary Stages Of High-Performing Teams

Submitted by Richard Hawkes on

We have applied the evolutionary stages of high-performing teams model with hundreds of teams. This post includes frequently asked questions.  

The Evolutionary Stages To Becoming A High-Performing Team

As they develop, all executive teams go through four predictable stages. The stages can be shown on a clock. And, clock times can be used to represent developmental milestones. At each stage, a different logic for success dominates.

Translating The Formula For High-Performing Teams

Submitted by Richard Hawkes on

How To Measure High-Performing Teams? 

In his well-known business book "Good to Great", Jim Collins summarized the formula for high-performing teams as “getting the right leaders in the right seats on the bus”!

To make this formula quantifiable, it can be translated as follows: High-performing teams are an ideal state in which team culture and business models are aligned to make higher sustainable performance inevitable.

A high-performing team is a state in which four key conditions are optimized...

Leaders Are Accountable For Business Culture (e.g., Fabrice Tourre Followed The Leader)

Submitted by Robert Heinzman on

So, Fabrice Tourre, it really was a crime.
In the end, Wall Street greed drove Mr. Tourre to lie and deceive. -- SEC lawyer Matthew Martens 

Former Goldman Sachs vice president Fabrice Tourre was found liable today. He knowingly deceived investors about the real value of the mortgage-related financial products he was selling. They were toxic bombs. We now all know the story. So do tens of millions of others who suffered from the implosion of a deregulated financial sector's ability to create wealth for itself and pass the risk on to, well, tens of millions of others.

I'll let HuffPo reflect my frustration of the gov't's ability to bust only a foot soldier so far...

Most Team's Aren't High-Performing Teams

Submitted by Richard Hawkes on


Businessman LoserThe belief that working in teams makes us more creative and innovative — that teams are a better way to get things done — is deeply entrenched. However, I can tell you from working with hundreds of leaders and teams, it is often not true, but it can be fixed!

From experience, there are three kinds of teams:

First, there are a small number of teams that are committed to the personal struggles of their leaders above sustainable high-performance. As a result, these kinds of teams can be dysfunctional nightmares. However, such teams tend to self-destruct so they are relatively rare.

Second, there are teams...

Business Strategy for Nonprofits—A Primer

Submitted by Bob Voss PhD on

Wordel

The ability to craft effective business strategies is essential for nonprofit organizations being able to respond to rapidly changing conditions and deliver on their mission. The excerpt below from an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (a must-read for nonprofit leaders) addresses a key element of what is needed: strategic thinking. And to take this one step further, we need to develop cultures of strategic thinkers—teams working together to constantly create, innovate and test strategies for growth.

“We think that what is necessary today is a strategy that breaks free of static plans to be adaptive and directive, that emphasizes learning and control, and that reclaims the value of strategic thinking for the world that now surrounds us.”

The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy—Stanford Social Innovation Review

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