1. What does it mean to be a member of a team? What can a team accomplish that one person working alone cannot?

2. What positive and negative experiences have you had as team member or a team leader? Identify instances when your team’s effectiveness has suffered due to style differences among members.

3. Do you regard your team responsibilities as a top priority or as an intrusion on your “real job”?

4. In your organization, to what degree are you evaluated and rewarded for your skills and effectiveness as a team player versus for your individual performance? (more…)

1. I did my part; I can’t help it if other people didn’t do theirs.

2. Nobody gave me a deadline, so I just figured I had all the time in the world to do it.

3. I never really did agree with the decision, but I wasn’t about to say that to my boss.

4. What a mess—someday someone should really clean this up.

5. They never tell us anything! (more…)

We tend to focus on diversity as an issue of workplace relationships.

It’s much more than that.

When we limit our focus to whether or not people are “playing nicely” together, the idea of diversity can take on a lot of destructive baggage.  We can even begin thinking that it would be easier if we had a less diverse workforce.  After all, if everyone were more alike, we wouldn’t have to deal with these issues – right?

Maybe, and maybe not. (more…)

How successful is your organization in meeting the objectives set by your leaders?

When teams are energized, motivated, and inspired, they can achieve amazing results.  On the other hand, we’ve all seen what happens when teams are de-motivated, disengaged, or unenthusiastic about their goals. (more…)

In the workplace, cooperation represents the blending of many skills to produce collective achievement. Even in teams where some members are competitive in nature, there are simple things you can do inspire genuine cooperation.

Focus on Team Goals –Keeping the team’s goals center stage, and explaining how each person’s “to do’s” contribute to the team’s mission, encourages team members to be more cooperative as individuals in order to be more competitive as a team. (more…)

Challenges abound for teams who are scattered across the globe – think how difficult it is to get together with teammates on a large corporate campus, for example, and then multiply that exponentially. Virtual teams include cultural, technological and interpersonal challenges that are unique, but not impossible to work around. From the leadingvirtually.com blog, this article focuses on the challenge of a virtual team with several sub-teams.