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Three questions to ask before organising a capacity building workshop | tools4dev. In my opinion, capacity building workshops are one of the most overused activities in international development / aid programs today. Normally involving the words “strengthening”, “sustainable” or “empowerment”, these events have the potential to waste large amounts of money and achieve relatively little. That’s not to say workshops are completely useless, only that people often use them in the wrong way. To avoid this problem, ask yourself these questions before booking your next capacity building workshop. 1. Can the problem actually be solved with a workshop? I know this might seem like an obvious one, but I have been surprised at the number of times this question has been ignored. A UN agency event I attended a couple of years ago is a classic example.

A workshop might be the right solution if you need to teach people something very specific, like how to use a new report template. A workshop is unlikely to be the right solution if: 2. 3. Photo by City of Seattle Community Tech. How To Hold A Productive Meeting In Seven Minutes Or Less. What's a "daily huddle"? Simple: It's a short, approximately seven-minute, all-company meeting designed to raise your group's energy level and make sure everyone is on the same page. Here's how they work. Everyone On Their Feet The first couple of minutes you'll spend sharing good news before diving into the numbers, followed by the daily forecast, then the developmental update, then airtime to discuss any missing systems and frustrations, before finally wrapping it up with a cheer.

Needless to say, daily huddles work great for sales teams, but you can take this basic approach and adapt it to the your own team's rhythms and goals—as long as you can pinpoint what a successful day looks like for your team members, you can host a productive, seven-minute standing meeting every single day. There’s no sitting down during these meetings; everyone stands up because it forces people to move and think a little faster, without the luxury of getting too comfortable. Your Seven Minutes Start Now. Action Learning Can Accelerate Team Psychological Safety. Développer la fiabilité du collectif, prendre les bonnes décisions (à… Corporate & Board Retreats -- Pinnacle Performance Improvement Worldwide.

When a team convenes for an “off-site,” it is important to maximize effectiveness and leverage results. How can you make the best use of the time and energy invested? Corporate and Board Retreats: Best Practices Based on our years of experience helping corporate and association clients, it is important to keep this Top 10 List in mind: A more detailed explanation of each item follows: 1. Intact Leadership and Management Teams (Including Staff) Present Plainly and simply, if those being asked to execute strategy and work toward goals are not present, then how can they be expected to “buy in” to identified goals and objectives? --> Return to top 2. If we don’t develop an Agenda which is focused on specific goals and outcomes, we are doomed to failure. --> Return to top 3. 4. While many of us have heard the phrase “staying focused and ‘on message’” attributed to successful political advisors and candidates, the same maxim applies to achieving corporate results. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Characteristics of Effective Teamwork | Building and Sustaining High-performing Teams. Building and sustaining high-performing teams One of the crucial characteristics of effective teamwork is synergy. When synergy is achieved then a team moves towards high performance. Continuing our series on stages of team development using our STAR team model, in this article we consider how to help a team achieve and sustain high performance.

Aspects of synergy will be developed during the performance stage of the model. However high performance, the subject of this article, is where the team starts to exceed its results and to re-define some of its goals, both consistently. Whilst every team and context is different a few important characteristics of effective teamwork can provide a basis on which to develop your approach to developing a team that consistently performs to a high level. Characteristics of effective teamwork – the STAR team model A different emphasis and focus for each of the STAR model elements is needed at different stages of the team’s development.

The Secret to Smart Groups: It's Women. The concept of "general intelligence"—the idea that people who are good at one mental task tend to be good at many others—was considered radical in 1904, when Charles Spearman proposed the theory of a "g factor. " Today, however, it is among the most replicated findings in psychology. But whereas in 1904 the U.S. economy was a network of farms, mills, and artisans, today's economy is an office-based affair, where the most important g for many companies doesn't stand for general intelligence, but, rather, groups. So, what makes groups smart? Is there any such thing as a "smart" group, or are groups just, well, clumps of smart people? As a team of scientists from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Union College write in this Sunday's New York Times, research suggests that just as some individuals are smarter than others, some groups are smarter than others, across a range of tests and tasks.

That bolded sentence is hiding a lot of heavy conclusions in plain sight.