Archive for March, 2009

Teamprofile tool

Friday, March 20th, 2009

TEAM PROFILE How well do you know your team?

A key part of Leadership is communicating with and motivating people you work with and it’s worth spending some time thinking about who you work with and how they respond to situations.

What drives others?

Think about how each member of your team behaves particularly when decision making under tight deadlines, or when the stakes are high:

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  • Risk – are they a risk taker?
  • Time – do they need lots of time to think or do they prefer to act?
  • Decisions – are their decisions based on consultation or instinct?
  • People – how important is consensus to them in moving forward?
  • Projects – are they process oriented or do they favour relational aspects?

The differences in these behavioural preferences reflect the individual’s key drivers and what is important to them to be in place to move forward.  Recognising and responding to these can have a big impact on how the individuals respond. It aids you in planning communication strategies both with them as individuals and collectively as a team.

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When the going gets tough, the tough get going

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
What does that mean? When the going gets tough, the tough scarper or does it mean the tough get into action? I like to think it means the latter. As we struggle with the vicissitudes of the current economic climate it’s good to learn lessons from how a great leader reacted in very different stressful circumstances.
I’m inspired by the great explorer Shackleton. In 1914, Shackleton led an Antarctic expedition which found disaster and Shackleton’s leadership meant that all his team lived to tell the tale.
And it’s quite a tale. The ship got stuck in the ice. For ten months. Then the ship was crushed by the ice. The men had to camp on the ice for four months in the darkness of the Antarctic winter. When summer arrived, they launched their three lifeboats. Four months later they landed on a very inhospitable Elephant Island. Shackleton took five men and sailed eight hundred miles over heaving seas in a lifeboat and had to cross a frozen mountain range on South Georgia before they could summon help. Oh, and then Shackleton immediately set about organising the mission to rescue the men he’d left on Elephant Island!
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