Brainware Vault: Recent Episodes
Elena Newton & Jeb Hurley
Summary A combination of global pandemic and a new generation of employees are driving a realignment of the employee-employer dynamic. As people re-examine their work priorities, enlightened CEOs and senior leaders increasingly recognize that managers who understand and effectively influence human behavior deliver better results. Behavioral science is moving front and center as executives rethink […]
The post Three Ways Behavioral Science Will Shape the Future of Leadership Development first appeared on Brainware Vault.
In his article, Employee Surveys Are Still One of the Best Ways to Measure Engagement, Scott Judd, the head of People Analytics at Facebook, observes that “…surveys are starting to look like diesel trucks, collecting dust in the age of electric cars.” Employee feedback surveys first emerged in the 1920s, along with scientific management and […]
The post Brain Science is Turning Feedback Inside-Out first appeared on Brainware Vault.
The role of employee voice in organizations – whether in the form of work-related complaints, participating in decision making, contributing new ideas, or providing feedback – has been a topic of discussion and debate for over 200 years. The industrial revolution fueled the drive towards a greater employee voice via organized labor. The information era […]
The post The Cost of Leader Silence first appeared on Brainware Vault.
I enjoy the privilege of mentoring a broad cross-section of people who are at different stages of their careers. One of the most notable trends in those conversations over the past ten years has been a shift away from focusing on a career path and corporate ladder climbing aspirations toward finding meaning and purpose at […]
The post Meaningful Work – Purpose by Design first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Virtually every leader touts a deep belief in teams and teamwork and preaches the importance of it. The research that supports their enthusiasm is incontrovertible. Yet, most organizations do little to train their team leaders, especially first-level leaders, in how to develop and maintain high-performance teams. This high-say-low-do approach to team development results in an […]
The post Predicting Team Performance: Stop Flying Blind first appeared on Brainware Vault.
It would be the unusual leader who would admit that they don’t aspire to build energized engaged teams that deliver exceptional performance. Yet, results too often fall short of aspirations. When I ask team leaders about the gap between their aspirations and reality, they give a variety of reasons for their team’s performance. A few […]
The post Aristotle’s Mirror: Leadership Reality Undistorted first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Why we do what we do is one of the most interesting, and at times perplexing, questions for behavioral scientists, leaders, parents, and anyone else that deals with the mysteries of motivation. To start to understand motivation, we can visualize it as a continuum with motivations that are part of our nature (intrinsic motivators) on […]
The post Solving the Mysteries of Motivation at Work first appeared on Brainware Vault.
How do you continuously improve your sales team’s performance? The traditional answer was to put in place a tough, heroic sales leader who embraced an aggressive sales culture, high-pressure pay-for-performance, intensive training, and constant culling of weak performers – practices that emerged after WWII and were refined in the 1980’s corporate world. In today’s sales […]
The post Peer Coaching and Sales Team Performance first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Strengths-based leadership, employee engagement, and growth mindset. Recent years have been fruitful for management guru’s and the consulting firms that promote their ideas. As a team leader participating in the roll out of those three ideas (and many other fads during the 1990’s and early …
The post Got Purpose? first appeared on Brainware Vault.
When Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” he was advocating that organizations could improve their performance through better metrics. I would argue that Drucker got it right, but that he should have added “and what you measure matters the most.” Many teams fail to measure the most critical predictors […]
The post Are You Measuring what Really Matters? first appeared on Brainware Vault.
“The only way to discover your strengths is through feedback…” —Peter Drucker During my first experience as a team leader, I had a great manager who was way ahead of his time in his leadership development practices. In an era of annual reviews and forced rankings, he was a coach and mentor who set the […]
The post Choosing the Dark Side – Why Leaders Avoid Feedback first appeared on Brainware Vault.
If you’ve ever played the game of golf you quickly realized that there are countless ways to hit the ball wrong, and far fewer ways to achieve a consistently good result. Coaching conversations are much the same. There are many ways to create conversations that produce results that range from awkward to disastrous, while finding […]
The post Improve Your Coaching Conversation Game first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Feedback is the breakfast of champions. Top organizations don’t treat it as an activity to be added to already busy workdays – seeking feedback and proactively responding to it is a habit that forms an integral part of the culture, norms, and values of the best teams and organizations.
The post Want Performance? Get Feedback. first appeared on Brainware Vault.
In his HBR article What to Do About Mediocrity on Your Team [icon name=”external-link” class=”” unprefixed_class=””], Joseph Grenny observed, “The toughest test of a manager is not how they deal with poor performance — it’s how they address mediocrity.” Over the course of many, many conversations with team leaders from around the world, I’ve found […]
The post The Challenges of DIY Leadership Development first appeared on Brainware Vault.
In increasingly dynamic, complex business environments, helping people develop their strengths, build new competencies, and work collaboratively to deliver results has become a business imperative. In response, many organizations make significant investments in executive-level coaching. This coaching is typically provided by external groups focused on developing behaviors to improve senior-level teams and individual career prospects. […]
The post Coaching Strategies to Improve Team Effectiveness first appeared on Brainware Vault.
In his HBR article, “To Reduce Burnout on Your Team, Give People a Sense of Control“, the author, Andrew Wittman, observes that team dynamics play a key role in workplace stress. He argues that “being part of a team can be a quick road to disappointment, frustration, and burnout, especially when some team members work harder […]
The post Article Review: Reducing Team Burnout first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Complex global business environments, and the need for agility in both decision making and execution, are driving organizations towards ever greater collaboration and teamwork as the means of resolving challenges and creating competitive advantage. Most leaders agree that one key component in ensuring effective team functioning is the content and quality of communications to, and […]
The post The Importance of Transformational Team Communications first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Many teams struggle with a fundamental conundrum: how do you get disciplined execution along with innovative, creative solutions? It often seems that any efforts to improve one-dimension causes losses on the other one. Disciplined execution stymies innovation; by its very nature, innovation and creativity are …
The post Why Your Team Needs to be Agile first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Many factors influence performance and wellbeing at work, including professional and personal goals, job design and flexibility, skills and competencies, and perceptions of fairness and trust across key relationships. For many organizations and teams, the simultaneous pursuit of performance and wellbeing can feel like chasing conflicting goals. In his comprehensive review of recent Human Resource […]
The post The Connection Between Team Performance and Wellbeing first appeared on Brainware Vault.
For organizations in search of talent, people born between 1977 and 1994 matter because a) there are a lot of them; and b) by 2020, their generation will make up 50% of the global workforce. This generation’s career aspirations, attitudes about work, and comfort with technology will define the work culture of the 21st century. […]
The post 4 Steps to Motivating Millennial Teams first appeared on Brainware Vault.
As organizations become more team-centric, and as globalization drives interaction across regions and time zones, the use of virtual teams has grown rapidly (SHRM, 2012). For organizations, the advantages of being able to leverage talent and resources across geographies and time zones can be a source of competitive advantage. For the individuals chosen to lead […]
The post Too Many Cooks In Your Virtual Team’s Kitchen? first appeared on Brainware Vault.
The nature of team work has rapidly evolved over the last 25 years. The decline of organizational hierarchy, and the rise of global, cross-cultural work, have multiplied the challenges of building and leading teams. Conventional wisdom often prescribed hard work and long hours as the …
The post How to Succeed as a 21st Century Team Leader first appeared on Brainware Vault.
At the start of the new year, people who acknowledge the reality of their waistlines often start their list of New Year’s resolutions with a goal to exercise more. Similarly, many organizational leaders who acknowledge that the people in their organization are not as engaged …
The post Three Actions to Increase Team Engagement first appeared on Brainware Vault.
The reshaping of organizations that began at the turn of the century continued this year at an accelerated pace. How organizations respond and reshape themselves based on team leadership trends will determine their trajectory: greatness or mediocrity.
The post Team Leadership Trends 2018 first appeared on Brainware Vault.
I recently conducted a workshop on building highly-effective teams with a group of service leaders and their team members. During a coffee break, one of the leaders and I were chatting about the challenges of team building, and he asked me a great question, “How do I make sure that I’m hiring the right people […]
The post Getting the Right People on your Team Bus first appeared on Brainware Vault.
About ten years ago I was appointed CEO of a mid-size software company – one that had been the leader in its field for nearly twenty years but was now struggling. The Board’s assessment was that the company lacked innovation and a compelling product strategy. My first few weeks confirmed the Board’s view, but as […]
The post Unhappiness at Work is Harmful to Your Health first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Lean teams are the benchmark for best practices in manufacturing and field service organizations. With their emphasis on autonomy, continuous process improvement, and value creation, the appeal of lean teams has broadened to include most every function in today’s flatter, leaner organizations. Yet, despite the popularity and well-documented benefits of lean teams, many fail to […]
The post Current Research: Lean Team Values and Relationships first appeared on Brainware Vault.
If you lead teams for a long enough time, you are likely to recruit or inherit a ‘lone wolf’ – a talented, capable individual who has a tough time fitting into your team. Smart, capable, and willing to challenge the status quo, you see their value; yet, often they are high-maintenance and disruptive to the […]
The post Team Leadership: Taming the Lone Wolf first appeared on Brainware Vault.
A good friend of mine is the CTO at Cloverpop, a Silicon Valley start-up that has developed a revolutionary online platform for measuring, accelerating, and improving decision making. Recently, Roger and his engineering leadership team were debating how to best evaluate the performance of individual developers and engineers when results were delivered by teams. Regardless […]
The post Team Relationships Drive Team Performance first appeared on Brainware Vault.
How often have you heard observations like “my people don’t seem to be fully engaged” or, “my team needs more energy”? While the symptoms of a team lacking engagement and energy may be easy to identify, practical solutions that are easy to implement are hard to find. I did a Google search on “motivating teams” […]
The post Shift Your Team’s Motivation into High Gear first appeared on Brainware Vault.
The same pressures that motivate expert teams - high-stakes and elevated expectations - may also result in behaviors that undermine their performance.
The post The Paradox of Team Performance Pressure first appeared on Brainware Vault.
All teams face challenges in their quest to be effective. The reality for virtual teams is that they face greater complexity and uncertainty as they strive to overcome the barriers of time, distance, and communications. When successful, virtual teams enable the best talent to come together to amplify energy, competencies, and creativity. But, the challenges […]
The post 4 Steps to a Successful Virtual Team first appeared on Brainware Vault.
During my 25-plus years in large organizations, I have participated in dozens of leadership training sessions, along with a handful of leadership coaching experiences. Reflecting on those many training sessions, I struggle to recall many ideas that drove actions that led to meaningful, measurable results on my team or teams around me. In contrast, nearly […]
The post Training vs. Coaching: Which Path to Developing Better Teams? first appeared on Brainware Vault.
In their HBR article To Address Gender Bias at Your Company, Start with Teams, Todd Warren and Michelle King point out that, like so many unsuccessful change initiatives, altering diversity and inclusion habits proves far harder than leaders initially anticipate. The authors argue that the key to addressing gender equality starts with team behavior. They […]
The post Gender Equality and Team Performance first appeared on Brainware Vault.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu observed that the challenge of leading a small army versus a large army is largely a matter of “dividing up their numbers” and “signs and signals”. In modern terms, this means instilling the structures, communications, and processes that are necessary for scaling an effective small force into a […]
The post Team Leadership Lessons from the Navy SEALs first appeared on Brainware Vault.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of working alongside an IDEO team on a project for a consumer audio company. Two learnings stand out from that experience. The first was the way the IDEO team balanced a disciplined design process with creative thinking. The second was their instinct to collaborate and learn, even […]
The post Exceptional by Design: Teamwork @ IDEO first appeared on Brainware Vault.
If you aspire to lead, then at some point in your career you will likely find yourself responsible for turning around a troubled team. The trouble may come from within the team, external forces, or both. For me, it was both. My first GM role was leading the turnaround of a loss-making business unit, within […]
The post The Discipline of a Team Turnaround first appeared on Brainware Vault.
As one of the world’s most visible and valuable companies, with a corporate motto of “Don’t be evil”, the bar is high for Google in terms of expectations at all levels. The February 25, 2016 article “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team”, published by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charles Duhigg in […]
The post Google’s Habits of Highly-Effective Teams first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Cross-cultural teams have become the norm in virtually every multi-national company and many smaller companies doing business globally. Building a highly-effective cross-cultural team can be one of the most challenging, and rewarding, opportunities for a team leader. Early in my career, a Japanese ...
The post Leading a Cross-Cultural Team first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Despite the number of years since my first team leader experience, there are a few memories that come back as though they happened yesterday. I recall the feeling of satisfaction that came with my promotion from Product Manager to Senior Product Manager. I remember my sense of excitement when the company announced my new role […]
The post My First Team Leader Role: How I Got it (Almost) All Wrong first appeared on Brainware Vault.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” —Aristotle, 384–322 BCE Aristotle’s observation about human behavior and motivation speaks to the essence of leadership. As a leader, it is our habits that determine the expectations we create and the experience that we deliver. Those behaviors, whether conscious or […]
The post The One Habit first appeared on Brainware Vault.
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams, 6th President of the United States Why do we do what we do? Insights from ancient philosophers to modern-day behavioral scientists show us that the answer is as complex as the question is […]
The post Three Keys to Motivation at Work first appeared on Brainware Vault.
Too many team leaders gamble on the performance of their team without having put in place solid team fundamentals. During my research, I uncovered many reasons for team leaders taking shortcuts in building their teams — from too little time due to competing priorities and their company’s obsession with quarterly results, to believing that they […]
The post Don’t gamble With Your Team Fundamentals first appeared on Brainware Vault.
About this blog This is the first of four posts which are excerpts taken from my recently published book, The ONE Habit: The Ultimate Guide to Increasing Engagement and Building Highly-Effective Teams. My doctoral research on human motivation, engagement and team performance was the basis for the book. Following the first four foundation posts, “Notes […]
The post What Makes Exceptional Team Leaders Different? first appeared on Brainware Vault.