It’s conceptualised as a bouncing ball, with the downward motion being about development and creating the team, and the upward bounce being about performance and sustaining the team.
Tag: Teams
#2. Failure to deal constructively with frustration, disappointment, and conflict.
Relationships always deteriorate until we learn how to navigate and resolve dark emotions.
Destructive strategies include clamming-up, blowing up, or withdrawing.
Teamwork always degenerates when unresolved issues percolate.
Dan Rockwell provides a series of reasons why teams fail. For me, failure to deal with frustrations stood out the most.
The number of attendees should not exceed the number of people who can have lunch on two medium pizzas. Small teams are better than large teams, even if it hurts your ego. Meetings with many attendees are information sessions where most attendees are passive.
This one will sweep them away. I play Island Survival with year 4, 5, and 6s either at the beginning or end of the year and it is always a hit! They often ask for it again. It’s a great game that allows for problem solving, justification, reasoning, creativity and cooperation.
Emily Fintelman shares an activity designed to help students work collaboratively. What I like is that it is as much about the solution as it is about the process. In some ways it reminds me of the use of different ‘ingredients’ with the Iron Chef challenge. I was also left thinking about ATC21s‘ focus on collaborative problem solving.
There were two points that stood out to me from David Marquet’s presentation on distributed leadership:
Move authority where the information is
And
Create the environment for thinking
This has correlation with Adam Grant’s discussion of creating a culture where givers can prosper.
Sam Walker lays out his findings in his latest book, The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World’s Greatest Teams. Initially, he expected to find a magical combination of factors such as exceptional skill, brilliant coaching and remarkable strategy. Instead, he discovered something completely different: the 16 teams with the longest winning streaks across 37 elite sports succeeded because of a single player — the captain of the team. These captains were not only not the best player, but also possessed all or most of seven characteristics rarely associated with great leaders.
Sam Walker argues that successful ‘captains’ are not the usual. In his research, he identified seven key behaviours:
they are relentless
they are aggressive
they are willing to do thankless jobs
they shy away from the limelight
they excel at quiet communication
they are difficult to manage
they have excellent resilience and emotional control
Moving forward, he suggests dropping your preconceptions about leadership, looking for those who deflect praise onto others and are focused on team goals, even if this is critical of current practices. This has many correlations with the work of Leading Teams.