How to build a team like NASA
The U.S. job market seems to be reliably back on its feet, and it’s signalling a sea change for employers and employees alike. Job seekers are no longer desperate for any opportunity that comes along. Those who are currently employed are discarding the I’m-just-thankful-I-have-a- job mindset. At long last, many people have the luxury of stepping back, taking stock, and figuring out what they really want out of a job, career and company. This means businesses are suddenly facing serious competition for talent, something they haven’t had to deal with in a while. Some of the elements that factor into the job hunt calculus are what they have always been—fair pay, good benefits, the possibility of a healthy work/life balance. Employees today expect to be consistently acknowledged for exactly who they are, and communicated with in exactly the way they want to be. Actually, the desire to feel seen, known and understood is nothing new. More than 40 years ago, Dr. Listen to their language
Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others
Individual intelligence, as psychologists measure it, is defined by its generality: People with good vocabularies, for instance, also tend to have good math skills, even though we often think of those abilities as distinct. The results of our studies showed that this same kind of general intelligence also exists for teams. On average, the groups that did well on one task did well on the others, too. In other words, some teams were simply smarter than others. We next tried to define what characteristics distinguished the smarter teams from the rest, and we were a bit surprised by the answers we got. Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics. First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. In a new study that we published with David Engel and Lisa X. And they did. This last finding was another surprise.
Don’t Just Play Nice
When confronted with conflicts or difficulties at work, often we find ourselves seeking agreement, order, and “pleasantness.” At first glance this appears appropriate—even obvious. But more often than not, seeking harmony in order to promote a healthy workplace can diminish creativity, hamper communication, and stunt growth over the long run. In his book Managerial Courage, management consultant and psychologist Harvey Hornstein concludes from his research that when pursuing harmony in the face of conflict, we can find ourselves mistakenly anesthetizing our creative thinking and skillfulness. “What often emerges under the pressure to get along, be nice, and work and play well together is an uncontroversial package of rules about how to act and what to think, distinguished only by their blandness,” he writes. Instead, Hornstein suggests, in the face of conflict we need courage—not harmony. Rushing toward this kind of false harmony can have dire impact on how we develop effective teams.
Simple Ways Leaders Can Help to Refocus a Team’s Negative Outlook
A mindset increasingly prevalent in today’s workplace that infects other team members’ motivation and drive is a negative attitude. In order to learn how to influence an employee’s negative outlook, it is important to first understand its origins. In an article published in the The Journal of Organizational Development, researchers determined three major internal events that feed negative emotions in the office: 1) perceptions of an insecure future 2) perceptions of inadequate treatment by the employer 3) perceptions of inadequate working conditions Obviously, as a leader you cannot control how an employee perceives or interprets communication and events. Meet Haley, the Company Hater Haley starts work at 7 am in a dark cubicle. Research shows that employees feel emotionally drained after experiencing or witnessing sour interactions between co-workers. She perpetually engages in office gossip and complains that employees in other departments are slowing down the effectiveness of her work.
Why Being In a Group Causes Some to Forget Their Morals
Three reasons good people do bad things. When people are in a group they are more disconnected from their moral beliefs, according to new neuroscientific research. The results come from a study which compared how people’s brains work when they are alone compared with when they are in a group (Cikara et al., 2014). The study was inspired by a trip to Yankee Stadium in New York made by Dr Mina Cikara, now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. On the trip her husband was wearing a Red Sox cap (for non-US readers: the Red Sox are a rival team from Boston). He was continuously heckled by Yankee fans, so Mina took the cap from her husband and wore it herself: “What I decided to do was take the hat from him, thinking I would be a lesser target by virtue of the fact that I was a woman.I was so wrong. When ‘me versus you’ becomes ‘us versus them’ Two reasons why people behave differently in groups are that: “I have stolen food from shared refrigerators.” Forgotten morals
10 Truths About Building School Teams
I've spent the last ten years serving on and attempting to build effective teams of educators -- to various degrees of success. This last year, I've been writing a lot about team development. I first articulated the following "ten truths" for myself when I coached a team some years ago. I used these to remind myself of what it would take to build a resilient, high-performing team that worked in challenging contexts. I was hesitant to call them "truths," but these ideas have been tried and tested, and they feel truer to me than anything else when building a team. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. If you have a "truth" about building school teams to add to this list, I'd love to hear it.
Trust fall
A trust fall is a purported trust-building game often conducted as a group exercise in which a person deliberately allows themselves to fall, relying on the other members of the group (spotters) to catch the person.[1] There are many variants of the trust fall. For instance, in one type, the group stands in a circle, with one person in the middle with arms folded against his chest and falls in various directions, being pushed by the group back to a standing position before falling again. In another variant, a person stands on an elevated position (such as a stage, stepping stool or tree stump) and relying on multiple people to catch the person. This variant is potentially more dangerous and therefore it is all the more crucial to have the rest of the group in position and ready to catch him before he steps onto the platform. This type of trust fall was shown in the film Mean Girls during the "attitude makeover" scene, and in season 4 of HBO drama The Wire.
