Executive Coaching High-Performing Teams

With all the hopes and promises of open innovation, team-based creativity, and peer-driven collaboration, effective ways to increase collective intelligence are hotly debated. One repeatedly replicated finding is that IQs of individual members don’t correlate with a group’s collective intelligence – measured by its ability to solve complex problems and to make effective decisions.

In other words, teams are more than just a collection of top talent.

This month’s recent Harvard Business Review adds a stunning piece of data to the debate about what makes a team smarter. More women! (more…)

As recently reported by the New York Times, Google unleashed its analytical power in-house as a part of Google’s management effectiveness project. Applying its data mining genius, Google dug through thousands of performance reviews and other forms of data evaluating managers’ effectiveness in its “quest to build a better boss”. (NY Times, Mar-12-2011)

What qualities would a company identify, you may wonder, that has for many years been named one of the most innovative organizations? That relies heavily on technology and innovation? That brings together a broad range of creative, interdisciplinary experts? That thrives within ever faster innovation cycles? That embraces work style diversity, decentralized collaboration, and virtual team work?

Before reading on, take your guess: What was their number one finding? (more…)

When does a boss go from being difficult to being dysfunctional? And what can you do if the dysfunctional boss is your boss?

My coaching work with Suzanne (not her real name) began in an effort to help her get along better with her manager, Bill. Since this is a fairly common coaching goal, I set out to do the things that tend to help clients in this situation: helping Suzanne see things from Bill’s perspective, exploring how Bill’s personality might trigger frustration for Suzanne, role playing around how Suzanne could adjust her behavior to better meet Bill’s needs.

Over time, though, what has emerged is less a picture of Suzanne as inflexible, but more that her boss, Bill, is largely responsible for the problems. (more…)

Imagine, when interacting with our team members, we had the luxury of systematically trying different cooperation strategies to find out what works best in the long run. Is it treating others the way I wish to be treated? Or the way they wish to be treated? Is it exclusive competition, the tight grip on self-interest, or is it rather generous yielding to the higher cause?

In his seminal work “The Evolution of Cooperation”, Robert Axelrod did just that – vary hundreds of cooperation strategies, evolving them over time, tracking their successfulness. His book, published 1984, did not only change how we view cooperation – it still bears powerful implications for how teams can successfully collaborate today, and for leaders aspiring to create collaborative team environments.

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In just a few decades the nature of work – what we do and how we do it and with whom – has radically transformed itself – triggered by technological and business model innovation, globalization, and changing expectations of the next generation of employees and co-workers. To tap the promise of growth & innovation, the human side needs to be addressed. Talking to more than 1500 CEOs of global organizations, IBM consultants found that these leaders cited creativity and integrity as the top two leadership qualities required to lead in the new economic environment. (Source: IBM’s Global CEO Study 2010)

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We developed Collaborative Coaching after facilitating hundreds of focus groups, interviews, and training sessions in organizations with thousands of employees and leaders.

Over and over we have heard similar themes, across industries and geographies, about human dynamics at work: (more…)