After Action Review: Is There an Elephant in the Room?
After every major event, good organizations and teams take a moment and very deliberately review what happened in an After Action Review. In this way, they can keep getting better. It’s a great process, but there’s an elephant in the room that can keep it from working. Today we’re going to talk about what that […]
How to Train the New Guy
Being the leader is a challenge, but it can be even more challenging when you have new people join the team who don’t yet know how to contribute. In the next two minutes I’m going to show you a way to pull the new guys on to the team and quickly turn them into productive […]
Book Notes: Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Give people more money and they will perform better right? Actually, no. Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, throws cold water in the face of standard management thinking. In fact, he lists seven reasons why the reward/punishment model is a bad idea if you are trying to motivate your teammates. In this post […]
Book Notes: Quiet
You are a member of a small group of survivors that has just crash-landed a float plane in remote sub-arctic Canada. You have been able to salvage 15 items from the plane, but you can’t take all of them with you. So as a group, you must rank order the items based on their importance […]
Span of Control: The Leadership Secret of Captain Ahab
Captain Ahab is famous in modern fiction for his maniacal pursuit of the Great White Whale, Moby-Dick. He gets a lot of bad press for his poor leadership style, and things didn’t end up going very well for most of the crew by the end of the book. But there is one thing that the […]
How to do Team Building the Fun Way
Trying to get off the ground with a new team? Looking for a way to get some bonding going sooner rather than later? Want to make it fun? Developing a sense of team within your group is critical to do early on. If you dive right into a project without building the team, you may […]
Book Notes: Leaders Eat Last
The book title caught my eye because it’s something the Army has been doing for a long time. One evening, while observing Marines eating dinner in the field, author Simon Sinek noticed that as a matter of routine, the most junior Marines ate first. The highest ranking ones, the leaders, ate last. Through this simple […]
Book Notes: Turn the Ship Around!
Recently while researching leadership topics, I came upon an interesting video on YouTube. In it, author L. David Marquet, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, relates how he turned the Navy’s conventional leadership paradigm on its head, and in doing so ended up not only becoming a better leader himself, but leaving a powerful legacy of better leaders […]
Motivating with a Kitchen Utensil: The Golden Spatula
It was frosted toaster pastries and sugar-coated sugar bomb cereal for breakfast. Again. We have to do better. We were camping with the Scout troop, and while the outing was a lot of fun, the meals had become pretty uninspiring. Everyone knew we could do better, but the enthusiasm just didn’t seem to be there. […]
Quantifying Fun
How to Measure the Unmeasurable “OK,” I said, “I agree it’s a good idea to try to have fun at our weekly meetings, but how do you make a concise goal out of that? How do you know when you have achieved fun?” Read on, and we’ll look at two ways you can take a […]