Group items tagged

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has become the world's most definitive source on practical information for building teams. The book's impact extends beyond business schools, churches, non-profit organizations, professional sports teams and the military. * When you work with a team it is important to understand the dynamics. When you understand what can hinder the team then it is easier to understand ways to help rebuild/strengthen the team - Vail*

Make sure your team-building event has a purpose. You've probably been involved in a team-building exercise at some point. Perhaps it was a weekend retreat, or an afternoon at the climbing gym learning to rely on one another, or a day on the golf course getting to know everyone.

We talk a lot about personal productivity tools at Lifehacker, but sometimes you're not the only person who needs to get things done for a project or job to be a success. This is a review of free tools to support online collaboration. I've used several and found more to try out here!

His book helps team members to realize the importance of emotions when working with a team. I use this book in my administration class because we must always remember the human factor when working in groups to accomplish a task.

Asana is the shared task list for your team. The place to plan, organize & stay in sync. Free for up to 30 team menbers.

This looks like a great way to keep a project team organized and informed. The tutorial was helpful and gave a nice overview of the system. Free is also a wonderful feature!

For a simple, light Project Management tool, Asana worked great to keep a list of tasks and when they were completed.

Very informative article from the Harvard Business Review. Using many real life examples, this article reviews the problems and solutions to managing a multicultural team. Problems can be overt such as language and accents to something subtle such as how to deal with conflict. Four categories were identified by the researchers that could create barriers to effective teamwork. These categories are direct versus indirect communication; trouble with accents and fluency; differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority and conflicting norms for decision making.

I think that one thing that was interesting is that it stresses being careful in how you establish groups and subgroups otherwise you may see a strengthening of differences. It is something that I see in the classroom all of the time. Kids break up based on common culture, language, or backgrounds.

Here is a nice article on emotional intelligent. I like the topic very much.

Peggy, this is a great article and definitely something I can use in my workplace. I think acknowledging how teams deal with and use EI is great in helping create strong interpersonal relationships. Thank you for sharing!

I appreciate this too. One of the things I was curious about after our EI discussions was how best to share knowledge of EI, self-awareness and empathetic communication with team members. It seems to me that rather than just using the techniques we have learned ourselves, we should share them with others as well, so that they understand the approach and the improved empathy is able to move both ways. So this is great to have some advice about that specifically.

The author cites examples of successes coming after clients and teams allow themselves to be vulnerable to expressing emotions.

Principles to explore with your team.

This is a great tool to help teams get organized and get in synch. Us this tool to organize your time and projects.

This is a video from the EDUCAUSE 2011 Conference where Loyola University presented its modification to Project Risk -- a game where your team competes against others to complete a project. It' an interesting resource about using game learning to teach PM. You can learn more about it at http://www.successfulprojects.com/Store/ProjectRiskBoardGame/tabid/68/Default.aspx.

Here is a free communication plan template laid out in Microsoft Excel. The template was provided to Microsoft by PCub3d, a project management consulting company.

Pivotal Tracker is an award-winning, simple, effective, agile project management tool that allows your team to collaborate around a shared backlog of stories in real time.

The British Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) provides the Risk Multimedia infoKit that can help teams planning their projects identifying, preparing, and managing risks.

Just in case someone has been living under a rock, I'm adding this. I can't tell you how many times people at work email files hundreds of times when we could all just collaborate in Google Docs. We used Google Hangouts to chat in former projects and could actually see when each other was typing something. Love it!

I agree with Jen. While GoogleDocs is a great time saver I wish you could do more with formatting, pasting, etc. The formatting also differs if you download the doc onto a Mac which can be a pain when working with a group. Overall, though I think it is a worthwhile collaborative tool.

Good call. My team spent an entire meeting demonstrating how to use Live Meeting via Outlook, only to later find out that it costs our company each time we initiate a call. I mentioned Hangouts as an alternative, and nobody had any idea what I was talking about, despite the fact that all of my teammates have Gmail. Yikes! Sometimes its scary how much we don't know!

It is a OK article. I read it for a short summary.

Michael Greer's site that composes a list of questions as the project moves along. It starts with identifying lessons learned from other projects in order for the team to be refreshed for the new project.

I liked the idea of preparing responses in advance of a face-to-face meeting. That gives people the opportunity to reflect and provide quality answers.

These are good suggestions, but I think it would be even better to also instruct team members to jot down issues and solutions as they come up. I find that when we wait for a debrief after one of our huge events, many of us recall some of the problems that came up over the past months, but not all. There have been many times we've sat there looking at each other saying "what was that thing we had to deal with a few months back?" Sometimes we remember, sometimes we don't. Or conversely, we remember the problem, but didn't document exactly how we solved it and have to recreate the solution in the following year's event. So definitely something to be said for documenting feedback in the heart of the matter rather than in a recap, and reviewing the list in the recap meeting rather than trying to reconstruct it then.