Posts by Danicka Brown

Building Top Teams: When Vision and Reality Collide There is an old saying that “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the ideal and the real never goes unpunished.” (Goethe)  And so it is with the collision between vision and reality. Vision is an idealized state—something to which companies aspire. Vision is formed when…

What represents the first critical waypoint in a Top Team’s journey is the articulation of a uniting common purpose and a clear and agreed vision of a desired future—in other words, what the team is truly FOR. There is always a beginning. Even for experienced teams that have worked together for years, there are those times…

On of the greatest differentiators between adequate teams and top teams is in the harnessing and integrating of their members’ collective intelligence (CI) and wisdom accomplished through the process of deliberate and focused dialogue. Thinking about our lives as educated and smart adults, we take various experiences throughout our lives and continually integrate these discrete…

Being a C-level player has never been more difficult. Major changes in the marketplace, increased competition, and the ability to recruit and retain top talent are among the most daunting challenges facing executive teams. The balancing act of increasing competitive advantage while decreasing risk, of managing growth while bottom-proofing the company, and of maintaining the…

This Thursday, Oct 27, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Dr. Patricia Wheeler for the Leading News teleforum.  Leading News is a partnership between Marshall Goldsmith, one of the world’s best-known leadership development experts, and Patricia Wheeler, one of the top executive coaches and educators in the country. The subject was about Top Teaming…

“There is no one ‘right’ type of team or structure.  It completely depends on what a team is tasked to do –again, what it is FOR.” Since the corporate environment today is not business as usual, a Leadership Team must continually re-examine and re-define how they work together as a team.  This begins with two…

The nature of the games for leadership teams has changed. But have the teams themselves changed to meet the challenges of an increasingly competitive environment? Senior teams face great volatility, uncertainly, complexity and ambiguity these days. And the speed of change has accelerated, as well as global interdependence and interconnectedness has increased. For these reasons…

High-performing teams have been the aspirational gold standard for teams for the past 15 years.  Who could argue with the importance of creating a clear vision and mission for a team?  Who could debate the necessity for clarifying roles and responsibilities, creating good work processes, demanding accountability, and pushing hard for clear communication between team…

Top Teaming: A Roadmap for Leadership Teams Navigating the Now, the New, and the Next ™ provides a roadmap to help your Leadership Teams and executives at all levels successfully navigate the new normal environment of increasing complexity, volatility, and change. It is focused on making your groups of smart leaders into those super-performing teams that…