Recently, CNNMoney and Wired ran a story about Steve Jobs and what it is like to work at Apple. Specifically, a key highlight of the article was about the internal drama that surrounded the failed MobileMe application that came out with the launch of the iPhone. The purpose of [...]

Over the past several years, there has been a rise in virtual working teams and a rise in fluid teams. A fluid team is one composed of individuals who work together to complete a project, but once finished, they disperse and go their separate ways to work on different projects, often with different people. This [...]

Servant leadership is a leadership theory that focuses more on the followers than the leader him/herself. The concept of servant leadership comes from Robert K. Greenleaf in an essay that he published in 1970, where he wrote:

In Part 1 and Part 2, I described how group norms can have a strong effect on team performance. With this blog post, I want to ask and address, how do these norms develop and is there anything that can be done about it?

Team norms are basically relationship guidelines that develop gradually. Team members develop particular ways of interacting with each other over time until those habits become behavioral expectations. A team can have high performance norms or low performance norms… in addition to norms around things other than performance… such as communication, decision-making, or dealing with conflict. [...]

I have previously written that one of the ten things effective teams have in common is norms. A few weeks ago, Wired magazine ran a write up of a study recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that illustrates the power [...]

There are many reasons for conflict within a team or between teams. One way to simplify the source of the conflict is to examine whether the conflict is task-based or if it stems from a relational issue. This separation is often helpful because, generally speaking, task-based conflict is productive [...]

I previously wrote that purpose is one of the signs that your team is effective. Whether you are a leader of a company, a function, a department, a team, a family, or simply leading yourself, you are more effective when you have a sense of purpose. Purpose is having [...]