Improving Team Performance
Soft Skills and Hard Work: Four Ways You Can Start Creating a Better Team
Want to create a great team on your own? Good luck! Just kidding. It’s not impossible for one ethical, well-intended, authentic person acting alone to help turn around a team. How? To create a great team, first you have to be a great teammate. Developing a truly strong team that trusts and respects each other,…
Read MoreLeadership Teams Are Team #1
How to recognize your top team to improve workplace culture Every member of the leadership team is an expert. They know their lines of business. They hire and develop their work teams. They inspire their people to greater and greater personal and professional accomplishments. And they fail, time and time again. Why is the leadership…
Read MoreThe Power of Clarity
When I work with clients on managing changes to their processes and cultures, I more often than not run into some of the same issues over and over again. One of those is issues has to do with the lack of clarity they create around roles. Even when people are aligned around a goal or…
Read MoreImproving Communication in the Workplace (Effective Communication Starts at the Top)
The leaders of an organization set the tone for behavior in the workplace, including how to effectively communicate. When a leader models the attitudes and behaviors that support effective communication among team members a powerful lesson can be taught about how to act in one-on-one conversations. Respect is an attitude that is very strongly reflected in…
Read MoreHow to Boost Employee Morale: What’s a Manager to Do?
When we talk about how to boost employee morale, it’s critical to understand what actually we mean by morale. It’s difficult to improve what we cannot clearly define. Morale doesn’t perfectly equate to motivation, but to a much broader and sweeping attitude about the work we do. The first thing that’s important to understand is…
Read More6 Ways to Improve Team Effectiveness and Performance
If you’re a leader in your organization, you likely spend a lot of time trying to come up with or implement ways to improve team performance or team effectiveness. Team improvement ideas abound, but we think we have some valuable suggestions based on proven tools such as The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team™ and…
Read MoreThe Performance Management Process
For any organization to achieve its stated goals, a clear performance management process is vital. However, it’s a process that’s rarely understood, and it’s often applied in a way that fails to produce its intended results — the high level of employee performance that is so important to an organization’s success. In fact, a survey…
Read MoreNonprofit Leadership Development Under Tough Conditions — The Continuing Story of the San Diego Humane Society and Integris
Integris is proud to be engaged in a purpose-driven, organizational development project that has partnered us with the San Diego Humane Society (SDHS), a nonprofit organization with a 100-year history that is undergoing a profound change. This is our second blog post describing this incredible, ongoing, evolving partnership. It’s something that has allowed us to…
Read More7 Ways to Make Great Team Decisions (Plus 1 You May Want to Avoid)
Making team decisions with buy-in from every team member (even if they disagreed initially) is difficult in the best of times — and impossible in a team that lacks trust. If you’ve reached the third level of the the pyramid of The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team™, your team has the beginnings of a foundation…
Read MoreConflict at Work Can Be Healthy — Here’s Why Your Business Desperately Needs It
We’re often taught that conflict at work means opposing others, and opposition leads to resentments, rivalries, and unpleasant consequences. That might be true if conflict is carried out badly, gets personal, or is based on petty office politics — motives matter. Carried out in the right way, in a discussion surrounding ideas, engaging in a…
Read MoreChanging Organizational Culture: 5 Ways to Effect Lasting Culture Change in Your Workplace
Changing organizational culture can seem like a battle, like a trudge up an enormous hill with seemingly no end, especially when you’re not sure where to begin. Most HR folks who are trying to figure exactly how to change company culture in a meaningful, lasting way, struggle to come up with a clear method that…
Read MoreBuilding an HR Strategy That Works — 3 HR Strategies Every Human Resources Director Should Know
The key to success in any industry is strategy — and HR is no different. Building an HR strategy that’s effective can be a significant struggle, especially given the way many other departments and employees still view HR. For decades, non-HR folk (and this includes our own colleagues) often got the feeling that what we…
Read MoreCommunicating with the C (Conscientiousness) Personality Style
They get it done right! If you need someone to double check your work, to ensure that every “i” is dotted and “t” is crossed, look no further than your colleague who is a C or Conscientiousness style on the Everything DiSC Workplace® model. That includes those who have secondary styles such as CS and…
Read MoreCommunicating with the S (Steadiness) Personality Style
They keep the peace! The meeting is getting tense. People are talking over each other. And then someone calls a time-out and says, “can we just step back for a minute? I think we have some common ground we’re missing.” Chances are that person will be an S (for Steadiness) on the Everything DiSC Workplace®…
Read MoreCommunicating with an i (influence) Personality Style
i Styles Keep it Lively! People communicate differently based on their styles and preferences. And taking the Everything DiSC Workplace® assessment is an important first step to help you better understand why you find you really click with some teammates while you have to work harder to connect with others. For example, consider the lively i…
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