Does your staff work together effectively like a championship team? Or do you have difficult "people problems" that waste your time and keep your business from reaching it's full potential?
Building high-performance teams for your organization involves certain timeless principles. But, few managers know them and use them. Quite often, managers pay more attention to the technical issues and not enough to the people issues.
The truth is that you need both technical skills and teamwork in order for your organization to flourish.
Communication
Effective communication is required for all levels of interaction, from the boardroom decisions to the hallway conversations. However, most organizations take communications for granted. The same company that verifies grade point averages for a high school graduate fails to audit their own organization for the effectiveness of its internal communications.
Productive communication is not limited to verbal and written expression. It wisely extends to nonverbal communication and to the five different approaches to listening. How well do your key people listen to you and to one another?
Executive Team Building
If teamwork is needed anywhere, it is clearly needed in the executive team.
A well-functioning executive team makes effective decisions by consensus on issues of policy or other wide-ranging topics. Decisions are more robust, since they are made from multiple perspectives, and they tend to gain more commitment and ownership. Also, having a true executive team relieves some of the burden from the chief executive officer, develops other executives, and positions the management for growth.
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Organizational Team Building
As with the executive team, the key to true teamwork is for team members to understand and value their team and individual roles as well as the differences in "behavioral tendencies" among each other. Mature teams manage themselves (without the need for constant management intervention), improve morale and performance, and set the behavioral norms for the organization. This ultimately provides better service for the customers, a better working environment for the employees, and better returns for the business owners or shareholders.
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| Open Space Technology
This technology facilitates large groups of people, engaging them in constructive and creative conversation, focusing on a core topic. OST is a highly participative process supporting group sizes of 25 to 500. In Open Space participants create and manage multiple agendas in parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance. Using OST is powerful because participants effectively connect and strengthen what is already happening in an organization.
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Conflict Resolution and Crisis Intervention
While professional disagreements are usually healthy, some circumstances require intervention by a professional. These may include intractable poor relationships, a "broken" team, widespread poor morale, alleged harassment or intimidation, any case of potentially bad publicity, or even adverse litigation. In these cases, an outsider's perspective looking after the company's best interests and a "neutral" stance can provide the only hope of satisfactory resolution to a big problem.
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