Articles

The most important attribute of a high performing team – its cohesiveness – can also bring the team undone. A cohesive team needs to guard against the corruption of its decisions by the groupthink syndrome. The primary protection against this aberration is for team leaders to ensure that the team has a healthy diversity of…

As a leader you influence the performance of the people you work with – both positively and negatively. When I reflect on the different bosses that I had during my own career, I have no doubt that some people managed to get more consistent high level performance from me than others. So what’s the secret…

I’m always bemused by the negativity associated with conflict. Recently I was talking to a friend who is a senior manager about how important it was for organisations to be comfortable with conflict. His immediate response was “oh that sounds interesting, but we don’t have much conflict around here”.  In his mind, conflict was bad.…

In the run up to the 2013 Federal Election the Government was beset with a leadership problem that, from an outsider’s viewpoint, was about choosing between a cohesive Cabinet team with an unpopular leader and a possibly dysfunctional Cabinet team with a popular leader.  In politics, popular leaders are an electoral asset, while internal process…

The pioneering management thinker, the late Peter Drucker, recommended a pragmatic approach to team building that started with asking the question, ‘what kind of team?’ His advice was to remember that most human work is and always has been carried out in teams, and so we are not dealing with a new phenomenon. With any…