Inspire Potential

Your teams are the most powerful unit of performance in your organisation. In most teams there is scope to increase productivity and performance by at least 30%. This blog sparks your thinking around how to enhance your team’s diversity and, consequently, their productivity and innovation. In fact, research demonstrates the correlation between a diverse team and its creativity and performance. The one thing that will make your team diverse is diversity of thought. People who think differently can bring creative new perspectives to the team, which will consequently make the team more innovative. So how do you achieve diversity of thought? One way is recruiting people with different experiences and backgrounds, different cultures and ages. Another way is having people with different personalities and motivational drivers, as they will bring attention to distinct aspects and perspectives on a matter depending on what they value most. In recent years, there has bee

Appendix to: New Ways to Speed Up Your Team's Trust https://ameliafullpotential.blogspot.com/2019/05/new-ways-to-speed-up-your-teams-trust.html According to Bruce Tuckman, a psychologist who studied the stages of team development in 1965, there are 5 phases a highly effective team goes through. These are: 1. Forming 2. Storming 3. Norming 4. Performing 5. Adjourning Forming This is the first stage, when everyone is introduced with their role and background. People tend to be excited, as it’s a new start, and very polite, as they are just getting to know one another. At this point, the team discusses goals, timelines, ground rules, individual goals and members’ skills. Although it is not a productive stage, it is a very important one when it comes to establishing relationships between colleagues. Often, however, people tend to be overly nice when they meet and the team is only exposed to the positive attributes and strengths of members. What many don’t realise i

Teams who work together are often put together for and dismantled after a project, which means that you will be colleagues only for a short amount of time. The challenge becomes to fast-track collaboration and teamwork for maximum performance for the time of the project, until each individual goes their own way. In this series, we will discuss three tools that will help your team know what each person brings to the group, how to communicate effectively and how to avoid conflict. By recognising the value of fellow team members, collaboration and acceptance of diversity will drive optimum performance. Diversity is not only intended as cultural, ethnical, and so on, but also in terms of personality, intelligence type and motivational values. The challenges businesses face when it comes to building a solid and productive team are: overcoming a lack of trust between members, resolving conflict and tensions, keeping information from others and effective communication, engagement lev

A leader sets the tone for their team’s work and performance, as many HR professionals and consultants know. This article will focus on what leaders and managers can do to improve the effectiveness of the people working with them. We will give you three ways for you to explore and practice how to fasttrack team performance, without adopting the usual team building games. Find more ideas on teams here and more ideas on leadership here . 1. Know yourself Among the qualities of a leader, self-awareness is one of the most powerful ones. Knowing your strengths and your weaknesses and being open about them serves for self-development. It will allow you to have greater impact on your team, as they will be able to connect with you more easily and at a deeper level if they recognise that you are just as human as them. If you are willing to learn from your weaknesses and use them as indicators of development opportunities, you improve your leadership effectiveness in a short amount o