stavros

Everyone dreams of finding a place to work that is fun, challenging and rewarding. In fact there has been considerable scholarly research on what makes up a “Good place to work”. I’ll write about that at length in another entry soon. Today I want to focus on the more practical aspect of this dilemma and ask: What makes up a good team?

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Now, you may feel that I’ve lured you here under false pretenses. After all the title of this entry is finding the right place to work not building the right team. However, I want to tell you that you already work at the right place and that the real challenge is transforming your existing team into the right team not finding a new place to work.

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Before I continue I also want to stress that team dynamics is the single greatest contributor to both employee satisfaction and productivity. This means that fostering positive team development is a priority to both employers and employees alike so don’t be reluctant to discuss it.

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In fact, discussing it is the key to developing great teams. For example, last year I worked with a small executive team on the issue of group dynamics. First, they completed a few assessments to measure creative style and work preference. Then I designed and facilitated a brief group session to analyze the results and reflect on past experiences and how team dynamics played a role in the results.

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I’m happy to report that my client called me yesterday to exclaim, “That simple exercise changed our company. The results were instantaneous and long lasting.”

Underlying every organization is a set of foundational beliefs and values. Some of these values are explicitly understood and communicated while others remain implicit and unspoken. To further complicate the situation, these values often directly contradict one another as well. This clash leaves the members of the organization confused and uncomfortable when faced with the prospect of making decisions.

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However, we should not try to eliminate the contradiction by altering the values of the organization. Instead, we should embrace them. Contradiction is present everywhere. A work of modern art might embody the resolution of positive and negative space. The punch line of a joke humorously resolves the contradiction a comedian invested so much care and energy to build up.

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Therefore, it is the resolution of the contradiction that is important and not the contradiction itself. If the contradiction is resolved graciously and skillfully we call this beauty. We look for this in our leaders and advisors. If the contradiction is resolved abruptly and harshly part of our values are compromised and we are left unsatisfied.

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So, today I have a challenge for you. Don’t avoid the problems you are confronted with. Seek out the contradictions that surround them. These are your most promising opportunities. Seek them out and try to resolve them with grace and care. The results will be beauty, value and creativity.

-Good Luck

One way to look at the evolution of the study of leadership is through the familiar pattern we have seen across other domains; Person - Process - Press.

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The first question is inevitable "How can we find good leaders?" This assumes that leadership is innate – a talent that one either has or doesn’t have. Therefore the job becomes identifying these special few and appointing them to the appropriate position.

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Next begins the study of leadership as a process. Here the underlying assumption that leadership is innate is tossed and in its place we adopt the hypothesis that leadership can be taught and learned. We begin to study behaviors (like Kouzes and Posner), step by step methods, and greater frameworks to guide our leadership actions.

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Finally, we take a systematic approach and begin to look at culture. Press, an antiquated term meaning psychological climate, is very important in the development of leaders. Certain underlying elements like trust, risk tolerance and others will play a major role in the development of one’s leadership abilities and style.

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The wonderful thing is that all of the above are being studied and put into practice all the time. Collectively we are becoming smarter about leadership both in a “hands-on” way and academically.

There is one single practice that will immediately enhance one’s ability to be creative and innovative. It is the division of the idea generation process and the idea evaluation process.

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The former, idea generation, is called divergent thinking. It entails the production of large quantities of new ideas. The trick is to delay judgment of these ideas until later. This secondary process is called convergent thinking.

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It is important to separate these two steps because it allows many types of ideas to take root and flourish before the best fruits are selected and harvested. For the purposes of continuing this metaphor consider what would happen to a farmer if (s)he cropped all the plants from the field as soon as they sprouted assuming they were all weeds?

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The skills and practices necessary to generate and evaluate ideas are equally important and vastly different. By separating divergent and convergent thinking into two distinct phases, people and teams can consistently produce more innovative results for their organizations.