effective teams

At Interaction Associates, we work with clients to achieve greater and more sustainable levels of business return on investment, by delivering a different ROI — Return on Involvement™. The primary way that we do this is by helping our clients to create cultures of involvement by developing a type of leader that we call the Facilitative Leader. They are best defined as leaders who demonstrate:

1) strategic thinking,

2) excellent collaborative skills, and

3) self awareness.

As the economic climate grows more challenging, business leaders worry about productivity and performance. In business, agreements are the links that connect strategy to execution, and ensure the urgent and necessary work gets done.

In his white paper, How Much YES Do You Need?, Jay Gordon Cone provides a model and an array of tips to ensure you are getting enough agreement to execute well, and succeed.

A work team's productivity and performance are affected by the team's structural interdependence, and its team members' use of collaborative skills.

In his article, "All for One and One for All," Jay Gordon Cone provides a model and a simple checklist to help you assess if your team is performing up to par --- and decide what to do if it's not.

With the tools provided in "All for One and One for All" by Interaction Associates Senior Consultant Jay Gordon Cone, you'll learn:

If you were to survey almost any professional group and ask who is working in a formal or informal matrix organization, chances are you'd see most hands in the air. Even if their companies have a formal organization structure aligned to market segments, products, or functional groups, most people have to contend with satisfying competing needs from multiple constituencies. All too often, the result is finding the "least worst" option rather than building agreements and reconciling the differences to serve all parties' needs and interests.

My daughter Hannah plays volleyball. It's a significantly more complicated version of the game I remember playing in gym class. It still involves six players on each side, but once the ball is served, they move around the court in choreographed sprints that look fairly chaotic to the untrained eye.

According to a recent Reuters report [27], nearly half of British workers polled say their bosses are incompetent, make poor decisions, and lack confidence.

What’s more, of those who say their bosses don't know what they are doing, 83 percent said that management's poor decision making damages morale, half say it hurts productivity, and 19 percent say it hands competitors an advantage.

OK, I'll admit it: I love Donald Trump's The Apprentice.

Jay Gordon Cone explains what "collective intelligence" is, and the why it's a crucial ingredient for team success.

Note: This is the first in a series of articles on how your team can incorporate the principles of collective intelligence.

Are you challenged by having to balance learning and getting work done? Consultants have begun to address that challenge by practicing "action learning", "applied learning", and "after-action review" — all ways of "learning by doing". Learning by doing provides a number of benefits, including decreased classroom learning time, focused transfer of learning to current business issues, and a way to evaluate the impact of new knowledge and skills on work as it occurs.