In a team building session I have almost always focused on improving communication skills, no matter what type of team building session it is or what the identified objectives are. A new study published by the MIT Human Dynamics Laboratory and summarized by Alex “Sandy” Pentland in the Harvard Business Publishing magazine seems to validate this approach. Pentland says the study uncovered some surprising results: that individual talent and skill matter far less than communication when it comes to building high performance teams. “The best way to build a great team,” he says “is not to select individuals for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.” The research was conducted by placing little sensor badges on the members of high performance teams and recording their communication patterns for a period of months. After…
A couple weeks ago I attended a reunion for a hotel company I used to work for, 12 years ago. It was kind of like a high school…
Peter Bregman, one of my favorite bloggers, had an interesting post on Harvard Business Review recently called Diversity Training Doesn’t Work. He cites dismal statistics on the ineffectiveness…
When I came home last Friday night I made the mistake of leaving my suitcase half packed and open on the floor, because I was leaving again on…
I worked with a group of individuals recently who were about to be reorganized into a new team structure. We were doing a team building class; not a…
Living in New Hampshire in a primary year is not an easy thing. I don’t have a traditional landline myself, but my mother, whom I live with, does. …
My family doesn’t do Christmas (or Hanukkah, or anything remotely similar). We dropped it about 20 years ago, when some of us began complaining about crowded shopping malls…
Yesterday I went for my usual afternoon hike with my dog in an unfamiliar area of the Green Mountain National Forest. I wanted to hike all the way…
Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, is a popular book about negotiation skills and a favorite of consultants and trainers. In my mind, the most…
Jeffrey Saltzman’s blog this week talks about how we tend to base our assessment of organizations not on current performance but on the direction in which they’re moving. …
In a recent training session on federal personnel systems with a government agency, participants kept venting their frustration about a “changing mission.” I pushed back several times; surely…
I was facilitating a class for a group in interns in a defense-related federal agency this week, and when I arrived to set up the meeting room I…
My best friend came to visit last weekend and she reminded me that we never write our goals anymore. This is something we used to do at the…
I got some shocking news last week: my brother, who has been my partner in New England Crane School for the past year, is taking off for greener…
I love it when this happens. I had another video teleconference session to facilitate this past week, and where is the conference room I’m working from? In the…
Gervase Bush, one of my favorite organizational development theorists, likes to talk about teams, tribes and federations. Here are his definitions: A team in the truest sense of…
Sometimes I do things that I think are really smart and proactive and they turn out to be the stupidest thing I could have done. I was supposed…
I just finished up a three-day training session via video teleconference. It’s been a long time since I had nightmares before a delivery, but this one really had…
Confirmation bias is one of my favorite topics, in work and in life. We all tend to pay more attention to observations that confirm our beliefs and filter…
Shawn Achor had a great blog post on Harvard Business Review last week called “What Giving Gets You at the Office.” Two decades of research, Achor says, prove…
I moved back to the east coast recently, to be near my family again. The cool thing about that is I get to spend time on the lake…
In 2001, I quit my job, sold my car, put all my furniture in storage and traveled around the world for seven months, backpacker-style. When I came back,…
During a recent team building class with an agency group, employees began to complain about their headquarters back in Washington, DC. “They have no idea what we do…
One of my favorite things to do in a team building class is to take the participants through a shortened version of an interpersonal style model (I use…
Penelope Trunk, my favorite blogger, had a post recently about how prom is a career stepping stone for teens. Why? Because it’s about learning how to fit into…
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s new book Poke the Box. At first I thought it was just a long restatement of the truism that you must not…
Priscilla Claman, in the HBR blog post Choose Your Boss Wisely, talks about how important it is to evaluate a potential boss’s leadership style when interviewing for a…
I ask participants to make their own ground rules when I facilitate a meeting or training session. But I always ask their permission to add one ground rule…
Marcie Schorr Hirsch, in a Harvard Business Publishing blog article called What Separates the Extremely Successful from the Pack, describes the results of a fascinating research project. She…
We all control our emotions to differing degrees. Or I should say, we control the way our behavior is driven by our emotions to different degrees. But I’ve…
Recently I led a team building session for a federal agency group in which the team’s manager had a bad sarcasm habit. He used sarcasm for everything—to make…
A blog post on Harvard Business Publishing, Are Happy People Dumb? by Shawn Achor, got me thinking about this old but interesting question. The theory often touted is…
Imagine that suddenly, a new federal regulation was released that said you must take a test in order to prove you know what you’re doing in your job. …
An interesting column in Newsweek, High on Anxiety by Casey Schwartz, details research on emotion regulation that says some people seek a feeling of anxiety because that’s what…
Watching the Academy Awards the other night I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if every industry had a recognition event like that? I believe in the power of…
I haven’t even finished this book yet but I had to write about it already. Parts of it are the usual “here’s what makes our company great” type…
I was facilitating a leadership class for mid-level managers and supervisors recently, and two people were being very vocal about their frustrations with lack of information flow between…
I used to scoff at people who repeated this tired old phrase. Not only is it overused, but how can it possibly be true? How could anyone think…
During a recent team building session I gave my standard spiel about the fundamental attribution error, and how we need to give each other the benefit of the…
I had a participant in a team building meeting recently who was a pastor on the side (in addition to his job with the federal agency I was…