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What makes a group of talented people a trusting, high-performing team? What norms would allow them to self-manage? These are some of the questions Vanessa Druskat answers through her Team Emotional Intelligence Model.
To get past the Diversity and Inclusion aspiration, leaders need to be intentional in building organizations that can leverage everyone’s uniqueness and talents.
What if, instead of exiting colleagues, a team could help struggling members rediscover their strengths and find their place in the organization? That is one use of a Role Advice Process.
Change is inevitable. It’s not something we should fear but rather embrace and take advantage of. The thing is, often resistance to change is not only about resisting the new. It’s also about self-preservation and resisting the loss of what you love—what is familiar.
Power is an emotive issue in organizations. Individuals who feel disempowered experience frustration and resentment, while those with power often struggle to manage their positional authority. Today, the structures that have traditionally shaped power dynamics in organizations are being challenged by new models of leadership. But what are these emerging forms of leadership? And how do they influence traditional power paradigms?
Legal documents should be crafted to align with our values and provide for dealing with less-than-ideal outcomes in a more human way.
The use of conscious language helps reinforce positive patterns in the workplace and strengthen the bond between team members. Conscious language helps us become more empathetic when delivering feedback and create a space where everyone feels safe to express themselves.
Holacracy and self-organization will not work unless we, as leaders, understand that they are not rigid structures that we should impose on our teams but rather a foundation to build more equitable, just, diverse, and efficient organizations. So our goal should be to find the balance between encouraging individualism and inspiring people to achieve a collective purpose.
Discover how self-managing teams approach diversity and inclusion in a meaningful way, building stronger, more innovative organizations
Embracing emerging leadership philosophies doesn’t mean hierarchy needs to disappear, but it does need to become dynamic. Leadership isn’t held consistently by a small group of individuals. It shifts based on who has the most knowledge and experience in a specific context. Every leader has to face challenges, but they don’t have to do it on their own.
Some of the questions that often come up when we talk about organizations that lead together, who don’t have managers in the traditional sense are “What happens when there’s a team member that’s causing a problem? Or “What happens when there’s somebody that the organization needs to let go of?”
In this blog post, Lead Together co-authors Brent Lowe and Susan Basterfield share their thoughts on how self-managing organizations could approach exiting colleagues.
Organizations plan in two ways: predicting the future and then aiming to control outcomes or sensing what’s changing and responding accordingly. The former continues to rule the day, but progressive leaders see that predictions have become less reliable. With this knowledge, they are shifting how their organizations set strategy.
Now, more than ever, it’s worth the effort to make intentional space for connection and ritual. We have to be ever vigilant in creating opportunities for coherence in our physical separation, and rituals help.
We reflect in Lead Together on the many elements of the workplace that take us right back to our school days – being a new joiner is right up there. If you are anything like me, every time you start at a new organization there is that little pang that takes you right back to the first day of school: What will the kids be like? What will my teacher be like? Am I cool enough? Am I too weird? Am I going to have to eat lunch alone?
Regardless of what led up to that first day of work, now you are here. The cliché ‘there is only one chance to make a good impression is a cliché because it’s true.
The most successful teams make recruiting a top priority. For inspiration, here are five ways progressive organizations break free from traditional recruiting processes.
How awesome would it be if everyone on your team acted like an owner? It’s part of the founder dream. When the team thinks and acts as I do, I’ll be able to step back for a bit, take a restful vacation.
So why isn’t everyone as accountable as you, the founder CEO?
Many answers exist to this question. All are rooted in the same soil.
Great training should be able to address needs that are important for the organization, but the training should be able to do it in a way that leverages someone’s unique talents.
Meetings can be a deliberately developmental space – and help us think about our Lead Together culture. The way we engage with content distribution inputs is a great frame to think about the ‘how’ of our meetings.
We need to hone our awareness of which practices work for the outcomes we seek.
When a tension grows and is then used like a slingshot, pain and damage result. If, instead, tension becomes a tool to better the organization, the muscles of a team develop.
The words “tension” and “sensing” are core to Lead Together—self-organizing—teams. They bring attention to anxieties, agitations and anticipations that arise within our bodies. They act as signals. It’s what we do with those signals—consciously or unconsciously—that lead to action.
