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Trust the Process
When you depend on a colleague whom you don’t trust to do a good job, it can create significant anxiety. Instead of complaining, badgering, or giving up, invest in aligning around the approach they will take. This proactive approach is much better than waiting for them to disappoint you. When you can’t trust the person, trust the process.
How Can I Be More Trustworthy?
What does it mean if someone on your team thinks you’re “untrustworthy?” Trust is a small word that encompasses a wide swath of different issues. This article provides different explanations for low trust and gives you several different remedies to earn the confidence of your colleagues.
Stop Trying to Sound Strategic!
Some people put more effort into trying to sound strategic than into actually being strategic. The research says it won’t work. Here are three ways that people try to sound smarter that are actually having the opposite effect.
How Team Dynamics Affect Strategic Planning
Is your team in the right mindset and even the right mood to be strategic? Running from an operational meeting where you’re fighting fires into a 3-hour strategic planning meeting is not going to give you the best shot at a great strategy. Here are seven hallmarks of the right team dynamic for strategic planning and my best tips to help you create each of the seven if they’re missing.
Why Your Strategic Planning Needs More Insight
Why are so few strategies actually strategic? Why is strategic planning more planning and less strategy? The issue is that we’re not setting up our processes to lead us to insight. Learn what is detracting from your ability to create insight and how you can inject more of it into your next strategic planning process.
How Can I Be More Strategic?
If you want to be considered strategic (and get the recognition and opportunities that go along with the most coveted label), you need to do two things. First, become more self-aware about the tactical contributions you’re making that give the impression that you’re not strategic and then start noticing and questioning trends, ideas, and opportunities that might better position your business in the future.
How to Strengthen Connection on Remote and Hybrid Teams
I’m now convinced that virtual teams can be productive, but the jury’s still out on whether they can be fun. Too much time is being spent in structured, task-focused time and too little on unstructured work time or on conversations that are more about relationships and connection. Here are several strategies use can use to strengthen the connections on your remote or hybrid team.
Are you using the right virtual collaboration tools?
Are you Zoomed out? And if you are, how else are you supposed to collaborate with your remote teammates? In this post, we’ll talk about some new options for virtual collaboration and how to choose the right one for the task you’re working on. Based on new research, I’ll share three cases where it might be time to break out of your default approaches.
Building Trust in Remote and Hybrid Teams
Research suggests that trust is even more strongly related to team performance in virtual and hybrid teams than in traditional, co-located teams. That would be fine if it weren’t harder to build trust when you’re not physically together. This article shares four components of team trust and provides practical strategies for bolstering them on your remote or hybrid team.
The Pros and Cons of Hybrid Teams
You’ve mastered working as a virtual team over the past two years, so returning to the office should be easy as pie, right?!? That depends. Will your team have some people in the office and others remote? If so, you’re going to be facing the challenges of a hybrid team. And if you don’t actively manage the potential pitfalls, hybrid teams can be the worst of both worlds. In this article, I share three issues with hybrid teams and provide a few tips for ensuring that hybrid is the best of both worlds, not the worst.
The Steps to Resolve a Conflict at Work
Many workplace conflicts are constructive and valuable but others are harmful. These unproductive conflicts slow productivity, erode trust, and create undue stress. This article provides both universal and targeted conflict resolution steps that will help you work through your next task or interpersonal conflict at work.
Productive Versus Unproductive Conflict Resolution
Conflict is an important part of life. There are always trade-offs to be made and uncomfortable messages to be shared. But how you have conflict makes a difference in whether the argument moves you forward, strengthens relationships, and reduces anxiety or whether it stalls progress, erodes trust, and leaves you more stressed than before. These are the characteristics of productive and unproductive conflict. Which is your team having?