So you have some people working on a project together. But are they a team?

1. Purpose

Team members share a sense of why the team exists and are proud to be working on accomplishing its mission and goals.

There’s nothing more motivating than being rewarded and recognized for high performance when you have earned it. Similarly, it is very defeating and disengaging to watch someone who hasn’t worked as hard get more recognition than you. We all instantly know when such an injustice has been committed. But can we tell [...]

Technology has made it so that I can email you much more easily than I can call you. We can communicate virtually just as well as we can connect face-to-face. With the recession cut-backs, many companies have taken advantage of that. Workers have been treated as disposable. Cost-containment is important. It’s the most [...]

External motivators were excellent for the 20th Century. Today, our habit of extrinsically motivating employees is no longer effective – instead of improving performance, the carrot and stick method creates a blockage to innovation. With increasing complexity in our workplace, it is no longer the case that you can increase the incentives to [...]

To make an improvement, you must start with measuring what you have. To truly know the impact of a change, you must evaluate pre and post. But to make the best decisions, you must discover the seemingly unknowable. It’s not impossible, it just requires that you gather lots and lots of data. This [...]

In this May’s issue of HBR, there is an article called Why Teams Don’t Work, which sort of caught me by surprise with the negativity. Because I know a good amount of teams that DO work. But as I read through, I realized I’ve been part of more failed [...]

I have had this post in draft for a while but a recent article claiming it is disingenuous and irresponsible to use psychology at work made the completion of it urgent. Because I am convinced of exactly the opposite. I am convinced it is irresponsible to disregard a large and [...]

The Harvard Business Review Online puts out case studies and even has interactive versions online where anyone can take their shot at being an executive and provide comments on the solution. This month’s case study is especially interesting to me because it’s about layoffs.