Group items tagged

Blog by Gwen Teatro, You're Not the Boss of Me is name of blog, September 14, 2014. Identifies five elements that I believe are right on for real teams: 1. Everyone on the team clearly understands its purpose 2. Individuals on the team each know their roles in fulfilling the purpose 3. Individuals on the team see their roles as being no more, or no leass important than anyone else's 4. We pay attention to the team dynamic every time a new member is introduced 5. The team works together until its purpose is fulfilled.

Interesting and VALUABLE links-rich how-to blog post by Wade Foster at Zapier, a distributed company, June 27, 2013 on managing remote teams. Identifies excellent resources elsewhere assembled by practitioners in remote work places. Identifies three key things: team, TOOLS (great list for work team), and processes for success. Team--hire doers, hire people you can trust, trust the people you hire, hire people who can write, hire people who are okay without a social workplace Tools--Campfire for virtual office; Sqwiggle, a persistent video chat room that takes a picture of you every 8 seconds which people can see on their computers and instant video chat; email, Trello for joint to-do list; GitHub for issues and pull requests; iDoneThis for daily digest of accomplishments--notes that "it is great for personal use as well because it can help build habits." Also Chrome profiles, LastPass Enterprise, Draft for easily versioning drafts, and Google Docs, Hello sign (for signatures without hassle of scanning, etc.), and Google Talk Processes--everyone does support on regular schedule to stay close to customers; a culture of shipping, weekly hangouts, weekly learning, monthly one on ones, culture of daily feedback

Article by Robert Whipple, on how to overcome distance in building trust. "How can a leader effectively use technology to build trust and cohesion in a decentralized team environment? * Clarify a strategy for how communication should be optimized for their particular team dynamic. * Ensure all team members are trained to use all the different communication methods properly and have the proper equipment to use it easily. * Have a well understood policy for when to use each type of communication. What sorts of communications need a permanent record? When is it important to be able to see a person, face to face? Some decisions are not clear cut, but it is important for the leader to teach the team what to consider when making the choice of how to communicate. * Model the behavior you wish to see."

Digest of ideas by Gwen Teatro, You Are Not the Boss of Me, reprinted 9/7/14, originally written in 2010. Very interesting look at the Fifty Discipline by Peter Senge. "There was a time when everyone was jumping onto The Learning Organization bandwagon. This usually happened when times were good, when organizations felt a little more ebullient...Budgets were cut....wisdom and decisions would only come from the few and learning for the many was a luxury no one could afford." Learning Organization components 1. Vision--shared--may start with one person, it must be embraced and shared by all. Can be simple, i.e., Zappo's Delivering Happiness 2. Team learning--in an age where shared leadership is or will become critical, the need to understand the dynamics and functional operation of teams is pretty great--how team members communicate with each other, how they manage conflict, and how they examine their successes...and their failures 3. Personal Mastery--taking the time to study and understand our reality and our purpose 4. Mental models--dangers of clinging to and operating from narrow perspectives--assumptions and biases in our thinking 5. Systems thinking--paying attention to the connections between and among a variety of elements that make up the whole.

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

Interesting blog on skilledup for learners by Nick Gidwani from 9/14/13 on the Team Treehouse, an onlline course site for learning web design, coding, and more. Their approach includes using digital badges for incentivizing learning.

Great page discussing advantages and features of different team chat apps

Reflection blog post by Nancy White on 1.9.13 on her Project Community course that she co-taught at the Hague. Offers many insights including this jewel below on what the learning design must bring together: "The other aspect of the design was to bring three elements together: sense making discussions about the subject matter (synchronously in class and asynchronously on the class website), insights from weekly "guests" shared via 5-10 minute videos (to bring a variety of voices), and action learning through small group experiences and team projects. I know there are strong feelings about team projects, but building collaboration skills was part of the course learning objectives, so this was a "must do." And we spent time talking about the how - -and reflecting on what was and wasn't working as a vector for learning these skills."

Blog by Harold Jarche, April 30, 2012. This excerpt IMO justifies why women (and everyone else!) needs to know how to work in social networks to learn and to help others learn and apply their "capacity for action" in their workplaces and elsewhere. They can transform their workplaces through enriched learning practices. They may not have the HR title but they can still role model organizational learning on a small scale at least. Excerpt: "Individual learning in organizations is irrelevant, as work is almost never done by one person alone. Knowledge, Senge said, is the capacity for effective action (know how) and it is the only aspect of knowledge that really matters in business and life. Value is created by teams and mostly by networks of people. While learning may be generated in teams, this type of knowledge comes and goes. Learning really spreads through social networks." Excerpt: It shows that the company never gave any thought to organizational learning. ■Are employees narrating their work in a transparent environment? ■Does the daily routine support social learning? ■Is time made available for reflection and sharing stories? "Narrating their work in a transparent environment," "support social learning," and "reflection" are all linked to other resources.

White paper by Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk, and Nancy White, April 21, 2008 on Building a collaborative workplace "THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP Leadership is a keystone for establishing supportive collaboration cultures, especially in teams and communities. This is based on how leaders mainly embed their beliefs, values and assumptions in the fabric of their organisation. There are six main behaviours that leaders display that mould the organisation's culture.[3] What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis-are they paying attention to collaborative strategies and behaviours from team, community and network perspectives? How leaders react to critical incidents and organisational crises-are they sacrificing long-term goals for short-term fixes which sabotage collaboration? Does fear of connecting to the larger network keep them from tapping into it? How leaders allocate resources-are they investing in the collaboration capability? Is it attentive to all three types of collaboration? How leaders express their identity through deliberate role modelling, teaching, and coaching-as our leaders collaborate, so do we! How leaders allocate rewards and status-are your leaders rewarding individual or collaborative behaviours? Or both? How leaders recruit, select, promote, and excommunicate-are collaborative talents sought and nurtured?"

Simple but true tips for managing virtual groups--can use free tools to communicate; essential to communicate clearly in writing and to really READ emails/proposals; and weekly meetings--if only to check-in--boost momentum and esprit de corps. By Ilan Mochari at Inc. writing up Scott Berkun's lessons learned at Word Press when he was managing a virtual team.

blog post by Natalia Castaneda, 8/28/14, at Leadership Learning Community. Good reminder of how to take strategic plan and use it as a guide to implement. "1.View planning as an ongoing process It may be that you have to focus on the process first, trying to see what is the best way to implement an agile strategic planning process in your unique context Set 90 day goals, to keep the process dynamic 2.Keep it simple: "Simplicity allows people to act"[2] The plan should have three main components: identity (organizational vision, mission and values), goals (strategies and goals), and implementation (the actual plan) In terms of the implementation, it is helpful to think about not only the team members who will be implementing a given task, but also a 'champion' who is basically a project manager who is responsible for ensuring that the task gets completed 3.Create accountability among the organization's leadership team Organizational leaders should make strategic planning part of their responsibilities and develop accountability systems to ensure that the process is running well"

great review of impact of Slack group chat tool on offices and productivity, Annalee Newitz, March 9, 2016.  

MIT and Harvard have teamed up to offer MOOCs, and this month Stanford, Princeton, U of PA, U of MI have created a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

interesting article by Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, November 4, 2014 on how to help groups make better decisions. Eight suggestions are made: 1. Silence the leader 2. Prime critical thinking 3. Reward group success 5. Assign roles 6. Appoint a devil's advocate 7. Establish contrarian teams 8. Delphi Method

interesting job of the future--professional triber--someone who puts together project teams on demand

Really great tips for working virtually by Haley Hoffman, May 4, 2015

great article on Slack and maybe some barriers to using it

Great article by Carol Kinsey Goman on the impact of business silos and how to tear them down. No date. Actions to take: Reward collaboration; focus on innovation; communicate transparently; encourage networks,create alignment, mix it up in teams; focus on the customer; get personal;