Has the Nature of Change Somehow Changed?

How often have we heard the phrase, attributed to Isaac Asimov, “The only constant is change?” Has the phrase “change” itself become another management cliché—and thus something to be “managed?” Has change really become somehow less difficult, unsettling, and disruptive? Or has it become more complex, less predictable, and more ambiguous in nature? A very…

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TOP TEAMS: BEING FULLY IN THE GAME

As we continue to work with Leadership Teams around the world, our experience is confirming and expanding our thoughts set out in the book Top Teaming: A Roadmap for Leadership Teams Navigating the Now, the New, and the Next. We see very few true “dysfunctional teams” – and those stand out like sore thumbs. What…

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Shaving the Tiger: Understand and Recalibrating the Default Setting of a Team

Part of understanding the collective self-knowledge of a team is to understand its default setting—what it is likely to do when under stress or when operating on automatic pilot. When under pressure, teams that have a history of operational focus go directly to the numbers, root-cause discussions, and Excel spreadsheet examinations. Health-care teams almost immediately…

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Top Teaming: Learnings from the Aspen Institute

For those of us who like to/need to feed our minds, the Aspen Institute is a gourmet cafeteria.  Some of the best minds from all disciplines meet in mostly informal settings to converse, debate, collaborate, and deepen thinking about issues that matter most – physics, medicine, geopolitics, business, music – all in the beautiful setting…

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Top Teaming: Unraveling the Virtual Team

Johanna and Karen are members of a global OD team comprised of smart people from pedigreed backgrounds and strong corporate experience.  They are both highly interdependent and highly matrixed as they, and the other 8 members of their “team” support various businesses across a fast-changing, highly pressured global organization.  They rely deeply on one another.…

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Top Teaming – An Informed Point of View

“The measure of a person’s intelligence is not is what she/he knows, but by the quality of the questions he/she asks.” As we continue to work with Leadership Teams across a variety of industries, we repeatedly observe some key similarities among successful leaders. One of the most often observed, but rarely written about traits of…

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TOP TEAMING: DEFINING AND MANAGING THE CRITICAL INTERSECTIONS

Matrixed organizations are designed to maximize flow of products or services by minimizing the numbers of redundant functions within divisions and by increasing collaboration between operational and functional areas. Yet matrix and often global organizations are often seen as unwieldy and hard to navigate. This is where the process of identifying and managing critical intersections…

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The Person of the Leader: Being Conscious and Deliberate

The Person of the Leader: Being Conscious and Deliberate “Great teams are made up of people who are committed to being even better leaders.” Our book Top Teaming is about how to raise the bar of already good teams into what we have described as Top Teams—teams that succeed and thrive even as the world around them…

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Building Top Teams: One Size Does Not Fit All

Once a team has begun the process of articulating its senior purpose – what it is FOR, it then needs to define what kind of team it must be to accomplish it. There is no textbook answer. Simply put, the type of team that is needed and how members must operate together depend completely on…

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