Category: Management, Supervision & Leadership
Building a New Project Team
Many articles focus on the importance of teamwork. Often, these articles assume the team is in place, and your goal is to introduce team building activities that maximize its performance. In this article, we share activities that can help build a project team when it is first getting started: Define…
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Great Team Building Icebreakers
Sometimes, a team doesn’t need or isn’t quite ready for an in-depth set of team building activities. Maybe it’s a team that is just forming after reorganization, or maybe it’s a team of individual contributors and teamwork is less essential to success. In these cases, team building icebreakers can be…
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Selecting Team Building Activities: Maximizing the Benefits
Many managers are interested in realizing the benefits of team building, but aren’t sure where to start in selecting team building activities. Here are some questions to ask when selecting effective activities for your team: Is there a clear learning point? Effective teambuilding activities are designed to highlight and develop…
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What Is Agile Leadership? Core Agile Principles
The dictionary defines “agile” as, “able to move quickly and easily.” Effective agile leaders exercise this definition at organizations every day. For leaders, new to this approach, let’s look at some key principles: Incremental delivery of usable product – Part of moving quickly is developing products or services quickly, and…
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Agile Leadership: Playing to Your Strengths
The “Agile Manifesto” was published more than a decade ago, but agile leadership is here to stay. Originally designed to help leaders create better software, the manifesto emphasizes the importance of individuals and interactions, working products developed in an iterative approach, customer collaboration and responding to change (Agile Manifesto, 2001).…
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Agile Leadership in Times of Rapid Change
As we write this post, leaders throughout Texas, Florida and Georgia are guiding recovery efforts following Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. They are making tough choices about where to send resources; leading teams of people that have experienced personal loss; and making decisions in the moment that impact thousands of lives…
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Motivating Employees Through Employee Engagement Surveys
There are many survey tools available to assess employee engagement in your organization. This article provides ideas and activities to engage your employees through two simple and interactive employee surveys. These surveys will provide you with feedback about employee motivation and offer paths forward for increased engagement. Survey 1: Defining…
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8 Simple Activities that Build Employee Engagement
Thoughtfully motivating and engaging employees takes a concerted and systemic approach throughout the organization. That said, there are also simple activities that also support employee engagement — make it a point to do one a day and you will see the benefits in both the short and long term. Say…
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Connect to Engage
As a newly-promoted leader to the position of a project manager years ago, one of the most daunting tasks that I faced was the motivation of my team members. These were my former colleagues. We worked together as peers on project teams, and my technical expertise was recognized by many…
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Leadership and Teamwork: Blending I and We
"There is no I in TEAM" is a popular expression, but great teams know that individual leadership is essential to effective teamwork. In fact, without effective leadership, teams often lose focus and direction, and work and morale suffer as a result. Different leadership approaches work equally well on teams. When…
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