Executive Coaching High-Performing Teams

What supports teams to make good decisions – and to make them efficiently? What kind of leadership is required to support the quality of collective decision-making? And will that quality be compromised in the absence of a “central guiding authority”?

Tapping the promises of diversity of thought, crowd-sourcing, and of co-created, open innovation hinges on answers to these questions which have been at the center of much fascinating research. One different perspective is presented in “The Smart Swarm” by Peter Miller, a highly fascinating exploration of how animal swarms communicate and “negotiate” to make collective decisions.

What Miller and others find is that swarms do a really fine job at mastering the complex challenges they face. In fact, their strategies are so effective, that approaches to solve highly complex problems such as the optimization of airline networks are modeled on swarm tactics.

To put it provocatively: Bees tend to better than most teams in many ways. One area where bees excel is the friendly competition of ideas. (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…)

Imagine you are in a room with loud music. Next to you is a friend who hardly hears what you have to say. You have two choices: Yell louder – or turn down the music. What will you do?

Many times, our workplaces are just like that: Too much competes for our attention – deadlines, last minute request, surprises. A constant level of high urgency acts like noise. Fechner, a physicist born in eighteen hundreds, formulated a “psychophysical law”. What matters, he found, is the signal-to-noise ratio. If you want to get heard – you need not speak louder. You can turn down the music.

Many teams and leaders we coach are tempted to act with more effort – to yell louder. This takes the form, e.g., of working harder, sending more emails, scheduling more meetings. What’s your favorite? And what, on the contrary, would it look like to reduce the noise? (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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“A great truth is a statement whose opposite is also a great truth.”
Niels Bohr

I am a fan of Roger von Oechs “Creativity Whack Pack”© and recently found myself adding cards to his deck that I thought might be a nice addition.

We have seen many teams and individuals struggle and lose momentum because too much time is spent debating everyone’s “small truth”. (more…)

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…)