The Team Building Blog

Wouldn’t it be good to know that every decision you take over the next 12 months will be the right one. This may sound impossible but there is a way to significantly increase the likelihood of your decisions being correct.

Trust, decisive leadership and openness will all significantly save time. Which one of these two asks the best questions?

The secret is understanding. Without understanding we are very likely to make bad or the wrong decisions, with greater understanding we should have, not just the facts but also the instinct to make the right choices.

The key to gaining understanding is to ask the right people the right questions, whether they be staff, colleagues, customers or even our bosses. Here are some pointers towards asking the right questions: Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you are managing a team at work, captaining your sports team or leading a multi national organisation your leadership style is crucial to your success. 

Was Spartacus a visionary or diplomatic leader?

Consciously, or subconsciously, you will no doubt use some of the 10 leadership styles featured below, at least some of the time.  By understanding these leadership styles and their impact, you can become a more flexible, better leader.  Read the rest of this entry »

The idea that staff set their own pay, come and go from the office as they please, all within a business that has no written strategy sounds like a recipe for disaster. Not the story of a company that’s gone from $4m to $160m.

Is this man a management genius?

Semco is no ordinary workplace, despite the fact that it operates in an industry as ordinary as engineering. Read the rest of this entry »

Fresh Tracks uses ‘Belbin Team Roles’ to develop teams but what are they? For this months video blog actor Andy Taylor explains.

A Belbin team role as defined by Dr Meredith Belbin is: “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.”

Its not a real word I know but the principle of a ‘volunteam’ is an interesting one.

What can we learn from Moroccan builders?

I’ve been visiting a relief project in Morocco that is building new homes for widows and the very poor following the earthquake in 2004.  Incredibly over 5 years after 12,000 homes were destroyed an enormous number of people are still trying to survive without a home in the hills around Al Hoceima. Read the rest of this entry »

If I think back to when I’ve seen people most stressed in my working life, the majority of instances were immediately before and during conferences.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs...

Very often it’s not the speakers who’s nerves are showing or the AV technicians that are flustered, its the conference organiser.  These people know they are in the firing line if the lights go out or the timmings go aray.  They can often be heard to say “My job is on the line if this isn’t a success”.  Leaving unfair dismissal to one side the truth is there is little benefit in allowing the strain to show.

Earlier this week I was part of a live TV show in which the decision was made to rebuild the set 45 minutes before going on air, while rehearsals were still underway and the lighting and camera angles were far from set up.  Additionally the script was being adapted requiring changes to the autocue and the need to re-brief the presenter and guests. Read the rest of this entry »

We all try harder when there’s a prize at stake, no matter how small.  The desire to win is in all of us to a greater or lesser extent and even those who wouldn’t be described as ‘competitive’ still enjoy playing.

The plan to increase productivity by canceling coffee breaks flopped!

In business, sales teams have included competitive measurement and reward to drive productivity for generations with such great effect that very few sales roles exist that don’t have some form of prize built into the remuneration package.  So it’s strange that other departments haven’t created their own ways to combine play with productive working. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how good your project or the technology you have to work with, if your team doesn’t mesh – your project’s in trouble.

A recent research study on collaboration, conducted by BNET and Harris Interactive, revealed some illuminating facts about interpersonal team dynamics. Watch Stephen Howard-Sarin, Vice President of CNET’s business sites, on the video above as he shares the findings.

Please let us know what you think of this video by comments link below.

Research has shown that employers are unprepared strategically, unprotected legally, and underinsured with regard to tackling the growing phenomenon of stress in the workplace. Many simply do not understand its impact: they are either hoping it will just go away or paralysed with uncertainty as to how to handle it. 

So what is stress? According to the HSE, stress is ‘The adverse reaction people have to excessive pressure or other types of demand placed on them.’

Pressure is part and parcel of all work and helps to keep us motivated. But excessive pressure can lead to stress, which undermines performance, is costly to employers and can make people ill.

Why tackle work-related stress? Read the rest of this entry »

If you felt too tired to get out of bed this morning, spare a thought for Michael Lusher who was shot in the head during the early hours of Sunday 20th May 2007, but he didn’t realize it until he awoke nearly four hours later and noticed blood coming from his head!

You can't beat a good nights sleep!

In our 24/7 world, time spent sleeping is in decline so it’s little wonder that some of us find it hard to wake up in the morning.  It’s reported that we sleep at least one hour less each night than we did a half century ago.

A recent American study found that during a two-week period, 40% of workers reported fatigue. Of those, 65% reported health-related lost productive time. According to the researchers, workers with fatigue cost US employers $136.4 billion annually in health-related lost productive time.

Two-thirds of adults report frequent sleep problems, however only one in eight says those problems have been diagnosed.  The ‘sleep deprived’ are also more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular, psychiatric and gastrointestinal disease, and impaired immunity.  So it’s not just the quantity of our sleep that matters but also the quality; snoring loudly, daytime dozing, trouble falling asleep or waking unrefreshed are just a few of the signs that a person could be ‘sleep deprived’

“Sleep is sort of like food,” says Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School.  He adds, there’s one important difference: “You can be quite starved and still alive. But many of us live on the edge of sleep starvation and just accept it.” Read the rest of this entry »