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The secret ingredient that makes some teams better than others

The secret ingredient that makes some teams better than others
Running a software company in Boston, I recognized — and my board told me — that we needed to reposition the business. Our product was too bland, too generic to stimulate excitement or loyalty. I needed a team to help me, and I ended up working through the problem with a motley crew: a young web developer, a seasoned and eccentric media executive, a visual artist, and me. We spent a week in the private room of a burger joint, exploring options, rejecting easy answers, pushing one another to find something none of us could see. Looking back, I recall that intense period as one of the most thought-provoking learning experiences I’ve ever had. You could argue that we had a lot of brains in the room — and we did. In a fascinating study of collective intelligence, Thomas Malone, together with a team of MIT researchers, analyzed groups that proved exceptionally effective at creative problem solving. Reading the research, I can see my old team. Teaching Empathy Mortar and Bricks Related:  Team effectiveness

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team So Rozovsky started looking for other groups she could join. A classmate mentioned that some students were putting together teams for ‘‘case competitions,’’ contests in which participants proposed solutions to real-world business problems that were evaluated by judges, who awarded trophies and cash. The competitions were voluntary, but the work wasn’t all that different from what Rozovsky did with her study group: conducting lots of research and financial analyses, writing reports and giving presentations. The members of her case-competition team had a variety of professional experiences: Army officer, researcher at a think tank, director of a health-education nonprofit organization and consultant to a refugee program. One of her favorite competitions asked teams to come up with a new business to replace a student-run snack store on Yale’s campus. Rozovsky’s study group dissolved in her second semester (it was up to the students whether they wanted to continue). Photo

13 Ways to Encourage Conflict at Work Have you sabotaged your team’s results by playing peace-keeper? While no one wants to spend their time in a hostile work environment, a certain amount of conflict is healthy. It’s the friction that creates the fire. If you give your people permission to disagree respectfully, they’ll come to better solutions, solve more problems, and spot more gaps than they would if playing nice was their highest priority. Here are 13 ways to encourage healthy conflict at work. All change involves some pain. So ditch the peace-keeper mentality and avoid stagnation by encouraging healthy conflict.

re:Work - The five keys to a successful Google team Pod. Work group. Committee. Autonomous collective. A group of us in Google’s People Operations (what we call HR) set out to answer this question using data and rigorous analysis: What makes a Google team effective? Over two years we conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers (our employees) and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams. We were dead wrong. We learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google: Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? If you answered “yes” to the five questions above, congrats! Psychological safety was far and away the most important of the five dynamics we found -- it’s the underpinning of the other four. Turns out, we’re all reluctant to engage in behaviors that could negatively influence how others perceive our competence, awareness, and positivity. Googlers love data.

✔ Effective Communication in a Team - part 1: my 5 general rules Note: This article is based on my Editor’s note from the 11th issue of the Polish edition of the Productive! Magazine. Being extremely happy with the changes that we've implemented by the end of last year in the Nozbe team, I often think that there are still things that can be improved. For example... communication. Between individual departments (e.g. customer service - programmers), between heads of departments and, of course, between me and each of my employees. It's all about effective communication Communication within an organization is a tool that boosts productivity. It's also the best "weapon" in the hands of each leader. Based on my own experience of managing a growing team, recruiting new people, working with clients and business partners, I've created a list of rules that may help improve in-company communication. General rules of effective communication 1. If you tend to make mistakes in emails and you're using Gmail, set the delay send option. 2. 3. 4. 5.

✔ Effective Communication in a Team [part 2]: my 7 rules for improving interpersonal relations In my last article on communication I've discussed about my 5 general rules of communicating within a team. We talked about the importance of being prepared, of writing clearly, choosing the right communication channel... and also body language.. and even spicing it up with emoticons or memes. Now let's talk about the importance of building strong interpersonal relations with your team in order to communicate even better. As you know, my entire Nozbe team works remotely - we all work from home. That's why we decided to have an all-company meeting in person every 6 months. This is one of the moments we can build stronger relationships with each other and these help us communicate through tasks better throughout the year: Rules related to interpersonal relations 1. Effective communication has to respect any differences in terms of characters, mind-sets, abilities, etc. 2. ... or rather: their careful expression. At work, slip-ups, mistakes and conflicts can occur. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Google Finds That Successful Teams Are About Norms Not Just Smarts | Hunter Walk Which Google employees has made the biggest impact to the company over the past decade? Besides the familiar choices of Larry and Sundar, I’d nominate Google’s outgoing CPO Laszlo Bock. Under Laszlo’s direction Google’s hiring and management assumptions have been challenged by real data, resulting in transformative shifts such as *not* assuming college test scores are a predictor of success as a Googler. Another important question was “What makes a team successful (or not)?” It would make sense to start with some assumption that a team’s success is tied to its composition in some fixed way. ‘‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. What did the research – called Project Aristotle – eventually discern? What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. So what were the norms of successful teams? Update Like this: Like Loading...

re:Work - Guide: Understand team effectiveness Much of the work done at Google, and in many organizations, is done collaboratively by teams. The team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience most of their work. But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction. Following the success of Google’s Project Oxygen research where the People Analytics team studied what makes a great manager, Google researchers applied a similar method to discover the secrets of effective teams at Google. Read about the researchers behind the work in The New York Times: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Pourquoi certaines équipes sont-elles plus intelligentes que d’autres Anita Wooley, spécialiste de l’étude des comportements de groupes, Thomas Malone, directeur du Centre pour l’intelligence collective du MIT et le psychologue Christopher Chabris, nous expliquent dans une tribune pour le New York Times ce qui fait la qualité d’un groupe sur un autre. Pour cela, ils convoquent une étude de 2010 menée par Alex Pentland du MIT (cf. « Big Data : vers l’ingénierie sociale ? ») qui montrait que certaines équipes réussissaient mieux que d’autres, même si elles n’étaient pas spécialistes des sujets qu’elles devaient traiter. Les chercheurs ont ensuite tenté d’en comprendre les raisons. Une nouvelle étude vient de reproduire ces conclusions, mais en la précisant, notamment en faisant travailler les équipes pour moitié en face à face et pour l’autre en ligne. Comme le souligne Derek Thompson pour The Atlantic, ces études battent en brèche bien des attributs qu’on accorde généralement aux collectifs. Hubert Guillaud Signaler ce contenu comme inapproprié

Les 5 clés des équipes qui réussissent Recevez un extrait de notre guide de survie aux réunions pour transformer vos réunions en moments funs et productifs ! Aujourd’hui, j’aimerais partager avec vous une découverte pour le moins étonnante. Comme vous l’avez compris nous sommes passionnés par le collaboratif et le travail en équipe dont nous parlons régulièrement sur ce blog. Et bien nous ne sommes pas les seuls. Figurez vous que le très sérieux MIT s’y intéresse également de près comme le démontre les recherche d’Alex Pentland. Effectivement Alex Pentland, éminent chercheur au MIT a mis au point un objet pour le moins atypique. Il a mis au point un badge sociométrique qui permet de capter les interactions que l’on a avec les autres. Alex Pentland collecte ensuite toutes ces données pour les analyser et identifier les facteurs qui font qu’une équipe est performante. Et voilà donc selon lui les caractéristiques des équipes qui réussissent : Voilà donc les secrets pour une équipe performante.

Le secret des équipes performantes Recevez un extrait de notre guide de survie aux réunions pour transformer vos réunions en moments funs et productifs ! Jim et Michèle Mc Carthy ont mené une drôle d’expérience. Ils ont étudié pendant 2 ans le fonctionnement de plus de 60 équipes. Chaque équipe avait 5 jours et 5 nuits pour : Former l’équipePartager la vision du produitSe mettre d’accord sur la façon de fabriquer le produitConcevoir et fabriquer le produit De cette observation, ils ont tiré une sorte de manuel de l’équipe idéale. Les patterns (ça va parler à ceux qui font de l’architecture logicielle) : ce qu’il faut faire, les positions à adopter pour que l’équipe fonctionne au mieux dans une situation donnéeLes antipatterns : ce qu’il ne faut pas faire ou les fausses solutions.Les protocols : procédure à suivre dans certains moments clés de la vie d’une équipe (partager une vision, décider…) Précisons quand même qu’il s’agissait d’équipes de développement logiciel. Exemple : je me sens inquiet, heureux et triste.

La gentillesse comme facteur clé des équipes efficaces selon Google La gentillesse comme premier facteur de réussite des équipes efficaces Le titre du livre de Franck Martin "Le pouvoir des gentils" publié en 2014 chez InterEdition est explicite : la gentillesse devient une valeur sure du fonctionnement efficace des équipes. Une nouvelle confirmation du pouvoir des gentils vient des résultats du projet Aristote de Google qui a été lancé en 2012 par Julia Rodovsky une ancienne chercheuse d’Harvard et nouvelle analyste au sein des Ressources Humaines. Le travail de Julia Rodovsky a commencé par des recherches académiques, des centaines d’interviews des collaborateurs de Google pour analyser de nombreuses caractéristiques des individus, leur personnalité (Introvertion, extravertion), leur mode de communication et de leadership, la parité homme femme, le partage d’intérêts, le fait qu’ils se voient en dehors du travail ou qu’ils déjeunent ou pas ensembles….. Les clés des équipes efficaces sont les suivants, par ordre l’importance

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