Team-building Toolkit for Disruptive Times

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Team-building Tool Kit-25 Ways to Work Smarter Together in Disruptive Times
Empowerment + Engagement + Accountability=Results!
(Including 15 bonus links)

© Irene Becker, Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ | (IQ-EQ-SQ) Reach-Resonance-Results
3Q Leadership™ Blog- 41,000+ Social Media Followers & Growing!  


Toolbuilding Toolkit

It was a pleasure to present on Effective Team-building at Project Management and Business Analyst World.  Given the importance of team-building and the growth of project based teams, I hope that this toolkit-a  of  team-building tips, REACH™, 3Q Edge™ and bonus links will be of service.

Project Manager or Leader?  Both! Here are 25 Team-building Tips for Working Smarter Together!

 

1. Have a clear mission. Start with the common anchor, the objectives and values you share.  Internalize them, mention them, and ignite them because they are the fuel for your greatest individual and collective potential.

 

2. Make sure that roles, responsibilities and accountability are clearly defined.  If you are working with an agile team/project team where roles change, this in itself is a new type of role that must be explained.  Clarity is king and buy-in from members is queen.

 

3. Develop a team charter.  Team members need a strong sense of belonging to the group that will build trust and commitment. This sense of commitment is reinforced when the team spends the time to develop team norms or relationship guidelines together.


4. Lead, don’t micro-manage. Make sure that all team members feel that they are a critical part of the team’s success. Make sure roles, responsibilities and accountability are clear, but do not micro manage. If process helps execution, use it.  Process used as a substitute for poor leadership, lack of trust will ultimately impede or undermine that potential of the team. Get the right people on your team, empower them, engage them; help them with their professional/personal development and hold them accountable.

 

Align & Motivate Empathize
Delegate & Monitor Plan & Control

 

 5. Develop your ability to use care-frontation. Don’t shove problems or conflicts under the rug where they can fester, brew and explode in overt or covert ways.  Conflict is a healthy sign.  Use it to build connection.  Remember conflict that his not expressed, festers, brews and ultimately destroys everything in its path. Use shared values and objectives to break down barriers and to also help team members build strong intrinsic motivation so that they focus forward when times are tough.

 

6. Ready to react? Stuck in stasis?  Worried about driving in reverse?  Ready to go into fight or flight?  R-E-A-C-H™ reset default patterns of thinking, communicating and doing that are no longer working for you.  Yes, brain science confirms that our brains are neuro-plastic (we can rewrite default patterns).  Bonus, every time you R-E-A-C-H™, you are also building your 3Q Edge™/Advantage. Read more

Is Your Potential Engaged or Derailed? | Cheat Sheet and Self Test

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5 ways to optimize your potential…AND a self-test to determine if your potential is engaged or derailed. (Including 10 Bonus Links)

© Irene Becker, Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ | (IQ-EQ-SQ) Reach-Resonance-Results
3Q Leadership™ Blog- 41,000+ Social Media Followers & Growing!  

 

Chillies

  1. Reach.  Use tools, strategies that help you redirect focus, and focus faster in the face of change, challenges and opportunities. Focus is the mother of success and creativity is its kissing cousin. Like money or nuclear power focus can be used to optimize or derail potential.  Simple tools, geared to your personality, your learning style, your career or organizational objectives can help you focus faster, better on what really counts while helping you learn, ideate, communicate and collaborate faster and better. Build reach, focus on what will help you learn, collaborate and succeed forward.
  2. Empower. Ideation, communication and collaboration are the new anchors of success. Take control over your potential. Find a collaborative partner, an executive coach or advisor whose only agenda is your success; and whose skills and experience can help you not only get greater clarity around your potential while helping you also see the potential in people and ideas/opportunities around you. Develop new ways of thinking, communicating, doing and failing forward that will drive empowerment and engagement at the speed of change. Recognize that your power to learn and relearn is pivotal to your success and the success of those you lead. Teach-Learn-Do-Lead.
  3. Actualize potential by seeing the forest for the trees. See the bottom line. Potential is optimized by our ability to feel that we are contributing.  Understanding your own purpose, and helping those you lead see the purpose in their work, their skills their abilities is critical to leading forward both in terms of employee engagement, stakeholder engagement and the csr initiatives that will continue to become more important to successful organizations and their footprint in the marketplace and community. Remember that purpose = profit
  4. Communicate more effectively across competitive lines, cultural lines and in the face of conflict or challenges in communication and career. Put your money where your mouth is.  Your verbal, written and digital/social communication counts.  Learn how to best position your words in a way that empowers, engages others.  Start developing communication skills that will help you optimize your potential and the potential of others. Develop the communication skills and marketing collaterals that can help you move past career transition or other blips in the road, faster and better.  Use your self talk, your thoughts, your words to build better relationships, improved collaboration with yourself, your direct reports, colleagues, bosses, vendors, and stakeholders.  Use YOUR words to communicate, collaborate and LEAD forward
  5. Harvest your potential and the potential of others.  See your challenges, strengths, wins and failures with new eyes that optimize and catalyze your potential. Let go of anger, frustration, reactivity or stasis.  Embrace your ability to harvest the best in yourself and others.  Communicate, collaborate and LEAD forward by developing 3Q strengths that drive reach, resonance and results at a speed of change. Learn to use not only your strengths but challenges and failures to build three key strengths that you can actualize under stress:  Q1 IQ (Intellectual capacity-Ideation)  Q2 Emotional Intelligence (Perceiving, Reasoning, Understanding and Managing Emotions | Self Awareness and Awareness of Others) Q3 Spiritual Quotient- The alignment with and to your highest values, purpose and power. )

 

Quick Self-Test: Is Your Potential Derailed or Engaged?

Derailed Engaged
  • Easily fatigued or exhausted?
  • Working   in a messy or disorganized space or fashion?
  • Disinterested   or frustrated by our job?
  • Easily   stressed, angered or in a constant internal state of strife?
  • Frustrated   with your direct reports, and stymied by teambuilding problems, turf wars or   passive aggressive behaviors that derail team dynamics and results?
  • Stuck   in a negative rut, seeing no way to improve your performance or the   performance of others?
  • Easily   confused or frustrated by the actions of others?
  • Focused   on who is against you rather than how you can build collaboration,   cooperation and results?
  • Frantically   putting out fires and reacting to emergencies?
  • Disengaged   unable to think of ways to drive greater engagement and productivity?
  • Energized, motivated?
  • Working   in a neat organized space and with a modus operandi that maximizes results?
  • Engaged,   empowered and challenged by your work?
  • Using   challenges and strengths to learn, lead and communicate better and faster?
  • Helping   those you lead optimize, humanize and monetize results by finding new ways to   improve ideation, learning, communicating, collaborating…doing.
  • Constantly   looking for ways to use both strengths and challenges to improve the way you   learn, communicate and collaborate?
  • Focused,   energized and ready to meet goals and objectives?
  • Developing   the reach and resonance you need to succeed through verbal/inter-personal,   written/ digital -social communication?
  • Responding,   rather than reacting to challenges using them to develop new ways of   thinking, communicating and doing that help prevent emergency situations?
  • Do   you have good ideas for increasing engagement and productivity; ideas you   will build upon, use and execute?

If you answered yes to one or more of the derailment questions it is time to optimize your potential! Go back to the five steps, and find the most important step you can actualize now. The importance and imperative to see your strengths and challenges with new eyes that can help YOU optimize YOUR potential is real, doable and critical!

 

More on optimizing your potential in disruptive times?  YOU Betcha!

Remove the Wall to Your Greatest Potential
The Empowerment Compendium
The Purpose Equation
How to Build Better Communication NOW!
From Now to HOW:  Building Social, Virtual and Cross Generational Communication
Ten Ways to Lead and Succeed in Times of Complexity and Change

More?  Yes!
I Will NOT Be Broken-The Call to Build a Better Future (Intro to my forthcoming book)
Extraordinary Women  (Extraordinary Women TV-Shannon Skinner)
From Pain to Gain in Life and Career (The Best People We Know Radio Show-Deb Scott)
Against All Odds:  A True Story of Courage, Hope and Success 

 

Enough?  Almost!  If you are in Toronto, I hope you will join me for the following events.  If you are in London and NYC…stay tuned, coming to you later this year!

Effective Teambuilding in One Hour |  Project World,  June 10th  Metro Convention Centre

3Q Leadership | Canadian Institute of Management Symposium, June 13, Sheraton Four Points

 

 Are YOU Ready to…

Get re-inspired by what you can achieve at the speed of change/challenges? Recharge, refocus, repurpose, repower?
Build YOUR 3Q Leadership, Career, Business Development or Talent Optimization Edge?

Irene Headshot

Irene Becker | Just Coach It | The 3Q Edge™
Executive Coaching, Consulting, Training & Keynotes with a 3Q Edge™
Face to Face | By Telephone, Skype or Video Conferencing
Twitter @justcoachit Tel: (1) 416-671-4726
Skype: beckerirene

Guts, Gusto, Integrity

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Guts, Gusto, Integrity | 3 qualities you need to succeed as a leader
New Edition: Over 350 bonus leadership links and one excellent podcast!

© Irene Becker, Just Coach It-The 3Q Edge™ | (IQ-EQ-SQ) Reach-Resonance-Results
3Q Leadership™ Blog- 41,000+ Social Media Followers & Growing!  

 

 This post was originally published on Salesforce.com (without the new bonus links)  

Guts, Gusto, Integrity

After a 20+ year career that encompassed being the first woman CEO of a steel company in Canada and working in the USA, France, England and with clients across the globe, I developed a model for individual success in challenging times that I call the 3Q Leadership Model  correlated with guts, gusto and integrity.

The model reflects my learning after some incredibly challenging career and life events that took me from the mountain of success to starting again from ground zero.  The challenge became: how do you optimize strengths while also learning to use changes, challenges, stressors (even failures) to build critical strengths to help you grow at the speed of change today?

Here are three qualities you need to succeed as a leader, three qualities that speak to 3Q Leadership™.

Quality One:  Guts

Stay focused, positive and in a state of mind that drives ideation, innovation, communication, collaboration (the sticky stuff of 21st century business development success) by developing or evolving your own mantra. Use these three words in your self-talk, with your team and colleagues.  Imprint them in your mind so that when you face a new challenge and want to look at it in the same old way you do an automatic reset.

It takes guts to look at a situation with new eyes, but if you do not, you will be sucked into old ways of thinking, communicating and doing that may not take you forward.  It takes guts to decide to be relentlessly solution focused and to look at every problem as the conduit to a brilliant solution.  It takes guts to wait for the automatic fight or flight stress reaction to pass, so that you can focus on using the problem in a way that takes you forward.  The caveat remains, that each gutsy move, each time you circumvent fight or flight and think in a new way, you are developing improved focus, strategic thought, ideation, and upping your ability to learn and re-learn.

Quality Two:  Gusto

Do you have what it takes to develop business in a disruptive economy?  Business development is all about relationship building.  The heart of the client relationship, the heart of all the relationships that will help you succeed is made up of the gusto, the desire to build, repair and grow human relationships of trust and understanding. Relationships start with you; you are the MVP (most valuable player) in the sandbox.  Business development 101 tells us that the client relationship is the most important linchpin for success, and while this remains true, building the client relationship means developing a communication style that evokes reach and resonance with your team members and your clients. It means learning to hone your words, your body language your presentation skills to fit each person you are communicating with.

Start building a new set of soft skills by searching for what other people really want (rather than what you think they need to hear).  Come to the center of the table by finding the common denominator (values, objectives) that you share and can build upon.  Gusto is healthy.  Positive communication is contagious and will help you build a community of purpose (like-minded people with shared values), objectives, your success team of constituents, colleagues, clients, social and digital networks. Learning to communicate with gusto across social, digital, cross-generational or cross-culture boundaries is a skill you must and can grow and develop.

Quality Three: Integrity

Do you want to build new and better strategies that will help you play in a sandbox of quicksand that can just as easily pull you down and put you out? The secret to success is timeless; create value for others.  Creating value for others means offering a service or product that does exactly that.  It does not mean over selling, up selling, trying to manipulate.  It does mean understanding what your client/prospect needs, how he/she needs the information to be presented for it to resonate, and having a focus on building a relationship that will continue to grow and evolve and be a model of service, integrity, and value that will help you gain and keep traction in the sandbox.

Business development means having a mind-set, skill-set, and follow-up processes that fill your suspect and prospect pipeline while nurturing and growing relationships with existing clients).

Get bold. Build your 3Q Edge™. Move forward by learning to use your strengths and challenges to actualize:

 

  1. Q1-Guts: Improved ideation, strategic focus, the ability to learn-relearn and fail forward
  2. Q2-Gusto: Emotional intelligence, communication, collaboration, risk tolerance, resiliency
  3. Q3-Integrity: Integrity of purpose, communication and action that can start a contagion that will take you forward faster, smarter and better!

 

More on developing 3Q Leadership™skills that GROW at the speed of change?  YOU Betcha!

Actualize YOUR Greatest Potential NOW! Cheat Sheet of Practical, Powerful 3Q Tips
Restore Your Roar
From Pain to Gain:  Ten 21st Century Leadership Lessons Learned
The Thriving Organization:  Ten Steps Out of Jurassic Park
The DNA of Business Success in Disruptive Times
The Individual and Organizational Imperative to Do Good in the World
Sneak Peak:  Intro to my forthcoming book!

More?  Yes!
Over 300 articles on Great Leadership and 3Q Leadership
PodCast::  Expanding Your Leadership Capacity (Interview by JoAnn Corley)

Enough?  Almost!  If you are in Toronto, I hope you will join me for the following events.  If you are in London and NYC…stay tuned, coming to you later this year!

Effective Teambuilding in One Hour |  Project World,  June 10th  Metro Convention Centre
3Q Leadership | Canadian Institute of Management Symposium, June 13, Sheraton Four Points

About Irene

 Irene HeadshotIrene Becker helps smart people communicate, lead & succeed forward smarter, faster happier by building 3Q skills that GROW at the speed of change/challenges. Executive Coach, Consultant, Trainer, Speaker and Writer, Irene is a trailblazer whose unique R-E-A-C-H™ methodology and 3Q Edge™ focus have helped forward-thinking people and organizations in Canada, USA and Europe develop communication, leadership and career skills that grow at the speed of change and challenges.  First female CEO of a steel company in Canada, Irene Becker has a track record of accomplishments in business and in the community at large.  Her first book, I Will NOT Be Broken-The Call To Build a Better Future debuts later this year.


Guts, Gusto, Integrity 

Irene Becker | Just Coach It | The 3Q  Edge™

Leadership Growth, Talent/Career Optimization and Business Development in Disruptive Times
 Executive Coaching, Consulting, Training & Keynotes with a 3Q Edge™
Face to Face | By Telephone, Skype or Video Conferencing
Twitter @justcoachit Tel: (1) 416-671-4726
Skype: beckerirene