Policygenius Names Vice President of People
The company recently received $100 million in funding and has a
relationship with Brighthouse.
Sunday, February 28, 2021
Policygenius Names Vice President of People
Policygenius Names Vice President of People
SEC Halts Trading in 15 Firms Due to Social Media Activity
SEC Halts Trading in 15 Firms Due to Social Media Activity
By
Melanie Waddell
The regulator is responding to "potential attempts to
exploit investors during the recent market volatility," it says.
Cancer and cardiac patients: Most can take vaccine, say doctors
As the government plans to open up
vaccination for senior citizens and those above 45 with co-morbidities from
Monday, TNIE speaks to doctors about who should, and should not take the
vaccine.
Published: 27th
February 2021 11:32 AM | Last Updated: 27th
February 2021 11:32 AM | A+A A-
By Sowmya Mani
Express News Service
TIRUCHY: Ever since the advent of COVID, it
was noticed that people with co-morbidities were gravely affected by the virus.
Therefore, when the COVID vaccination began, experts believed that people with
co-morbidities must be prioritized for vaccination. As the government plans to
open up vaccination for senior citizens and those above 45 with co-morbidities
from Monday, TNIE speaks to doctors about who should, and should not take the
vaccine.
Heart patients, diabetic people, cancer
patients, people with hypertension have been categories as high risk for COVID.
Cancer Patients
Several cancer patients have doubts in their
minds about whether they can take the vaccine or not.
Dr Kirushnakumar, Head-oncology, Meenakshi
Mission Hospital and Research Centre, said that most cancer patients can take
the vaccine.
“Cancer survivors, those who are disease free
can take the vaccine. For patients who are undergoing treatment currently,
those on radiotherapy can take the vaccine. Patients who are taking
chemotherapy, should not take the vaccine immediately. Chemotherapy decreases
immunity by causing a drop in white blood cells (WBCs). In such a situation, we
don’t know if antibodies will develop. They should wait for four weeks after
chemotherapy at least, and must consult their treating doctors,”
The National comprehensive cancer Network
(NCCN) guidelines say that those with active cancer, who are yet to take
treatment, can take the vaccine.
“Cancer is not a problem for the vaccine. In
radiotherapy and medical oncology, there is no contraindication for taking the
vaccine. People who have had a surgery need not take the vaccine immediately.
They should wait for two weeks atleast. Those with hematological malignancies
should wait for three months. If someone is under treatment, it’s better to
consult their doctor,” said Dr Ratna Devi, Radiation Oncologist, Apollo Cancer
Centre.
Cardiac Patients
Most cardiac patients can take the vaccine,
say doctors. Those who had heart attacks in the past need to be vaccinated.
“Heart patients, who are taking blood
thinners can take the vaccine. This includes those on anti-platelet drugs as
well as anti-coagulants. It’s better if they take covishield,” said Dr
Senthilkumar Nallusamy, Chief Cardiologist, Rana Hospital, Tiruchy.
People who had heart attack in the past week
should not take the vaccine immediately, advise doctors.
“Only patients who had a heart attack within
the last week should not take the vaccine. They must wait for a while, and
consult their doctor. Side effects of the vaccine are minuscule and I would
advise everyone to take the vaccine,” said Dr Refai Showkathali, Senior
Consultant Interventional Cardiologist, Apollo Hospital.
Blood Pressure, Diabetes, Cholesterol
“Those with cholesterol, Blood pressure and
diabetes can take the vaccine. Only people who have medication for monoclonal
antibodies must avoid the vaccine. Anyone who had a fever or allergy should
wait for 4-6 weeks before taking the vaccine,” Dr Selvamani, Senior Consultant,
Cardiology, Meenakshi Mission Hospital and Research Centre.
Any patient with uncontrolled Blood pressure
should avoid taking the vaccine.
Who can take the vaccine
• Cancer survivors (who are disease free)
• Cancer patients undergoing radiation
• People taking blood thinners
• People having BP, Diabetes, Cholesterol
Who should not take the vaccine immediately
• Anyone who had a heart attack in the past
week
• Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy
• Those with uncontrolled Blood Pressure
Considering SHOP Coverage for Your Employees?
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17 Team Building Ideas
the team
building kit for managers with team building exercises, activities and games to
build winning teams today!
With employees still reeling from workplace
budget cuts, now’s a great time for new team building ideas. No, you don’t need
an expensive round of paintball to gain the benefits of team building
exercises, but you do need to squeeze the most out of them. In this special
report, 17 Team Building Ideas, we’ll show you how to do that.
17 Team Building Ideas provides teamwork examples, exercises and
tips for leading winning teams. Specifically, you’ll read tips on corporate
team building, team building exercises that can help your team see the big
picture, fun team building games (like Taking the Marshmallow Challenge),
teamwork examples (such as Mayo Clinic’s team collaboration secrets), steps to
creative team building and change management training for your team.
Let 17 Team Building Ideas take your leadership skills to the next
level. Go from being a manager who oversees people to a leader who molds them
into winning teams
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #1
CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES: HELP
CROSS-TEAM PROJECTS SUCCEED, STEP-BY-STEP
Sometimes it’s not clear how cross-team projects
should proceed. Follow these guidelines on corporate team building activities
for accomplishing as a group what individuals can’t do alone.
1. Set up some basic parameters: a goal for
the next meeting, everyone’s role and the type of discussion (e.g.,
brainstorming vs. goal setting). Be sure to include any earlier agreements.
2. Use this series of framing questions.
First, ask:
·
Where are we so far?
·
Can we report the status
of the project’s main elements, listing everything we know?
·
What do we want to
achieve at this meeting, specifically?
3. At the next meeting, ask:
·
What’s the best way to
reach our goal for this meeting?
·
Should we brainstorm or
share what we’ve prepared?
·
How should we best think
this through as a group?
·
Let’s throw around a few
options and work out how to move forward.
4. Make assignments and tap the energy of the
group.
·
What are our action
items?
·
Who’s the best person to
focus on each particular action?
·
How do we make this
happen?
·
What’s our deadline? (This
is essential.)
·
Next steps?
— Adapted from Quiet Leadership, David Rock,
Collins.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #2
TEAM BUILDING TRAINING: LEADERSHIP RX FOR
COACHING YOUR TEAM
Well-supported teams receive the information,
training and rewards they need to keep chugging along. Here are four
prescriptions for coaching your team:
1. Don’t skimp on guidance. Employees are remarkably adept at
developing self-correcting strategies, not to mention workarounds for
obstacles. They’ll be much more effective, though, if you’re in there asking
what they need and providing skilled coaching.
2. Get help if coaching isn’t
in your skill set. You need to model
the attitude you want your team to adopt, but an expert coach can jump in to
help you if the processes for running large-scale projects aren’t clear or you
see conflict within or between your teams.
3. Timing is important. At what point you offer coaching matters.
The beginning is a good time to explain purpose and processes. Use natural
break points—such as thirds or halfway through—to help everybody take stock,
make adjustments and solve problems.
Debrief at the end of the launch, and run a
postmortem later, especially if things go wrong.
4. Watch for coaching aptitude
among your team members. Any
one of them may have the main coaching talent in your group. Draw on it,
develop it and reinforce it. Resist the impulse to feel threatened and squelch
it.
— Adapted from Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth
Wageman, Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss, J. Richard Hackman, Harvard Business
School Press.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #3
TEAM BUILDING EXERCISES: TEST YOUR TEAM’S
ABILITY TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE
People who don’t understand strategy and the big
picture can end up working hard on the wrong things, making poor decisions or
even quitting out of frustration.
Do your people “get it”?
To find out, use this team building exercise to
test their ability to discuss the big picture.
For example, ask each person the same five
questions about strategy to see if their answers line up with yours:
1.
Who are the customers or
customer segments we serve, listed in priority order?
2.
What are the services we
provide now, and which ones, if any, need to change as we implement the current
strategy?
3.
What is our value
proposition and how does it set us apart and give us an edge in the
marketplace?
4.
Which environmental
trends/issues (such as market, economic, societal, political or environmental)
are important to our strategy?
5.
What are three things
your division is doing (and/or doing differently) to support the strategy?
Each question gets at the intent behind the
strategy. There are right answers and wrong ones. And the answers change as
strategy changes.
Good people could be working really hard on the
wrong thing if their understanding of these questions is off base. Your job, as
a leader, is to ensure that everyone in your reporting structure knows the
answers.
— Adapted from The Executive Guide to
High-Impact Talent Management, Steve Trautman.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #4
TEAM BUILDING TRAINING: HELP YOUR TEAM
GET COMFORTABLE WITH RISK
Encourage your team to take risks? The very idea
is enough to make many CEOs shudder.
Because you shoulder the responsibility of
keeping performance high for the entire organization, sometimes you may be risk
averse. Even acknowledging the existence of risk requires you to admit that you
don’t have all the answers. That doesn’t sit well with the image of you as a
fearless, confident leader.
Doug Stern, CEO of United Media, follows an
explicit process anytime he faces a new, risky project, such as selling some of
his company’s assets. He uses the same tactics to help his team evaluate risks
and build its confidence about confronting the unknown:
1. He asks the team to imagine
every bad scenario, even the most
unlikely—what he calls the “darkest nightmares.”
2. He gives everyone a chance
to describe those scenarios in
detail and then to “peer into the darkness” together.
3. The team collectively
devises a detailed plan in
response to each nightmare.
4. After fears are exposed and
dealt with, the team has a
protocol in place for every “nightmare” scenario.
Bottom line: CEOs who hone their skills at engaging
with risk—who learn to acknowledge the fear and overcome that emotion—can also
help others summon their courage and unleash tremendous potential.
·
Adapted from "How
centered leaders achieve extraordinary results," Joanna Barsh, Josephine
Mogelof and Caroline Webb, McKinsey Quarterly.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #5
TEAM BUILDING TRAINING: 10 STEPS TO GET
YOUR TEAM’S MOJO GOING
Need to get your team’s momentum going, so
they’re invigorated and ready for their next
goals? Here are 10 steps blogger Terry Starbucker recommends:
1. Don’t dive in—yet. First, pause and reflect on the year gone
by. Learn from the
setbacks and savor the wins. Talk them over with your team.
2. Analyze your blueprint. Review your plans and projects. Visualize
the full picture,
then describe it.
3. Size up your team. Ask yourself: Is everybody committed to the
plan? Do we have
unresolved issues? Do we need to reshuffle tasks or jobs?
4. Express the goals. Call upon your team to help you articulate
the big goal and three to
five of the fastest or best ways to get there.
5. Raise the bar. Calculate how to do things better.
6. Read your own fine print. In Starbucker’s parlance, the “fine print”
is the flip side of
your strengths. While it’s good to be a “hard charger,” it’s bad to charge
right over your
people or customers.
7. Get out your “virtual
Q-tip.” Sit quietly
without a smartphone or other distraction and take in what’s happening. Then
create this “listening environment” every time you’re with one or more members
of your team.
8. Set an “accountability
meter.” This is not just
the big target your team has to hit. It’s the expectation gauge for every
person on the team.
9. Give frequent feedback. Key your feedback to your accountability
meter and correct course immediately.
10. Remain patient, calm and
open to ideas. Your people and
your customers are looking to you to set the standard as their leader.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #6
FUN TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES: TAKING THE
MARSHMALLOW CHALLENGE
With 18 minutes, 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard
of tape, a yard of string and one marshmallow, Tom Wujec believes he can tell
you how innovative any team is.
Here’s how to conduct his fun
team building game:
After giving a four-member team the list of
supplies mentioned above, Wujec asks them to build the tallest free-standing
structure they can. The only rule: The marshmallow needs to be on top.
“I believe the Marshmallow Challenge is among
the fastest and most powerful techniques for improving a team’s capacity to
generate fresh ideas, build rapport and incorporate prototyping—all of which
lie at the heart of effective innovation,” says Wujec, who is a Fellow at
Autodesk, the leading 2D and 3D technology firm.
He has used this team building exercise with
CEOs, business-school students and kindergartners. And he has learned some
surprising lessons about the nature of collaboration.
Among them:
√ “Ta-da!” can quickly turn to
“Uh-oh.” Most people begin
by orienting themselves to the task, he says. They talk about what their
structure will look like, sketch it out and jockey for a leadership position in
the group.
Wujec says, “They spend most of their time
assembling the structure, then just as they’re running out of time, they
gingerly put a marshmallow on top. They stand back and admire their
work—‘Ta-da!’” Then the entire structure collapses under the weight of the
marshmallow.
√ Rapid prototyping is the name
of the game. Recent graduates
of kindergarten tend to perform best in the Marshmallow Challenge. They produce
the tallest and most interesting structures.
Why? No one spends any time trying to be CEO of
Spaghetti Inc.
Kindergartners, unlike other groups, start with
the idea of the marshmallow and work backward, building multiple prototypes
along the way. Kids get instant feedback with each version about what works and
what doesn’t—in other words, they use an iterative process—so they don’t end up
with a collapsed structure at the last moment.
√ CEOs perform best with an
executive admin on the team. Why? Admins facilitate and manage the process. Facilitation
skills plus specialized skills equal success.
Ultimately, says Wujec, the Marshmallow
Challenge helps people find hidden assumptions, build a common language and
learn how to manage the marshmallow.
— Adapted from MarshmallowChallenge.com.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #7
TEAM BUILDING TRAINING: REVISIT TEAM’S
SIZE AND TASKS
Nothing right is going to happen with your team
if the basic structure isn’t right. Here are some guidelines:
1. Look for signs that it’s too big. The larger the team, the slower it moves. Consider a smaller
team or a tiny executive committee.
2. Dispense with tactical
trivia. Toss everything
except important work that requires collaboration.
3. Enforce healthy norms. Four universal ones: everybody is as
committed as the leader; every issue is on the table; everybody’s voice is
heard; and what you say and do when you’re with the team is the same thing you
say and do outside the team.
4. Have your team review its
structure. Revisit size and
tasks.
— Adapted from Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss, J.
Richard Hackman, Harvard Business School Press.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #8
TEAM BUILDING TRAINING: CONSISTENT
CONTRIBUTORS = GOOD TEAM
Whether a group is planning a conference or
working on a shared budget, the more cooperative the group is, the more likely
it can rise above a challenge. It helps a leader to understand, then, why some
groups cooperate more than others.
In a new study published in the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, two professors find that a “consistent
contributor” makes all the difference.
“The consistent contributor looks for the
collective good first and personal good second,” explains Keith Murnighan, a
professor of risk management at the Kellogg School of Management.
The contributor initiates cooperation, leading
others to follow suit.
“In a larger group, if someone consistently acts
as a friend, it’s easier for others to act as friends and everyone benefits,”
says Murnighan. “In a budget meeting, for example, each person wants the most
for his or her division or department. One person asks, ‘What’s in the best
interest of the organization?’ The marketing department head sees that R&D
is on the brink of a major breakthrough and says, ‘We can make do with what we
had last year, so let’s contribute all of the increase to R&D.’ ”
Bottom line: Encourage consistent contributors on your
team—or add one: yourself.
— Adapted from “Consistent Contributors,”
Kellogg Insight
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #9
TEAMWORK EXAMPLES: ‘FEDEX DAYS’ – MAYO
CLINIC’S SECRET – TEAMWORK AFTER 9/11
1. ‘FedEx Days’: Forget
carrot-and-stick motivators
To get better results, companies don’t need
better managers, says Daniel Pink, author of Drive. They need more radical autonomy among
employees.
The old carrot-and-stick approach is failing, he
says. It’s for work that most Americans aren’t doing anymore.
“It’s good for simple, routine, rule-based
tasks, like turning a screw the same way,” he says. “But there’s 50 years of
science that says it’s ineffective at creative, complex work.
Example: Atlassian, an Australian software company,
holds something called “FedEx Days” once a quarter, on a Thursday afternoon.
On that day, leadership says to software
developers, go work on whatever you want, with whomever you want. On Friday
afternoon, show the rest of the company what you’ve done.
The initiative is called “FedEx Days” because
team members have to deliver something overnight.
In one day, employees have come up with scores
of ideas for new products, fixes to existing products, and other improvements
within the firm.
The approach is radical, says Pink. Leadership
is saying to a capable team, “Let me get out of your way because you’re a
talented human being.”
“What we want more than anything else is
engagement,” he says.
— Adapted from “On Leadership: Poisonous
carrots, blunt sticks,” The Washington Post
2. Mayo Clinic's success
secret: team collaboration
After a diagnosis, patients at the Mayo Clinic
meet with a team of specialists who help them understand what’s happening so
they can decide about treatment together, says president and CEO Denis Cortese.
This kind of teamwork is the stock-in-trade of
Cortese, who won last year’s top leadership award from the National Center for
Healthcare Leadership.
Asked why health care so often lacks the team
collaboration that makes Mayo famous, Cortese traces the problem to medical
schools, where he says students aren’t trained to work in teams. Each student
takes exams alone, and even in clinical practice, most rewards relate to things
you do as an individual, such as specialized procedures and reading X-rays.
What’s more, he says, “doctors are going into
sub-, sub-, sub-specialties where it is easier to build all-in knowledge in
that area where they operate alone. But it is difficult to take care of
patients with five different conditions. That requires teams.”
Can you mimic the Mayo teams on behalf of your
customers? A conference call up front to plan out services? A whole team
descending on your customer’s problem like pit stop mechanics rushing up to
refresh a racecar?
— Adapted from “Dr. Denis Cortese Talks About Mayo
Clinic’s Culture of Collaboration as the Foundation for Patient-Centered
Healthcare,” Modern Healthcare.
3. Teamwork after 9/11
The day after friends, colleagues and family
members died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center, Mark Loehr
asked his people to come to the office. Not to work, but to share their
thoughts and feelings about what had happened and what they should do about it.
In the ensuing days, the CEO of SoundView
Technology encouraged his team to find meaning in the horror by deciding on a
project they all could participate in. Instead of making a group donation to
victim relief, they decided to contribute one day of the technology brokerage’s
profits. In the past, that figure had reached as high as $1 million, a remarkable
contribution. But as word spread about what SoundView employees were doing,
enthusiasm grew and the company ended up donating $6 million.
In a crisis, people look to leaders for
emotional guidance. Loehr helped his team find meaning even in the face of seemingly
meaningless violence and chaos.
—Adapted from Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman,
Harvard Business Review Press
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #10
ENCOURAGE TEAMS TO SHARE WHAT THEY KNOW
A study published in the Journal of
Organizational Behavior points out that companies investing in
knowledge-transfer software aren’t seeing much improvement in their information
flow. One reason: Employees simply won’t share what they know.
“A lot of companies have jumped on the bandwagon
of knowledge sharing” by investing heavily in software, says one of the
authors. “It was a case of, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ But they didn’t
come.”
Unlike knowledge hoarding, knowledge hiding is
when someone intentionally conceals information from a colleague—perhaps out of
distrust, or to undermine the other person.
Authors of the study say that people tend to
hide knowledge in one of three ways:
1.
Playing dumb. Employees
pretend not to have the requested information.
2.
Being evasive. Employees
provide incorrect information or falsely promise to give a complete answer
later.
3.
Rationalized hiding. An
employee might say, “I’m not allowed to provide that information” or blame
someone else for their inability to share.
Keep information flowing in your corridors and
among your teams with these tactics:
·
Increase staff members’
perceptions of their colleagues’ trustworthiness. You can do it by emphasizing
a shared identity, or highlight an example of an employee who followed through
on a promise.
·
Encourage face-to-face
contact and discourage a reliance on email communication.
·
Remove incentives for
employees to “betray” one another.
Building a culture of trust is key in
encouraging employees to share what they know.
— Adapted from “When Knowledge Sharing Turns to
Knowledge Hiding,” strategy+business.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #11
CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING: FOR THE SAKE OF
YOUR TEAM, FIRE THE PRIMA DONNA
If you’re a leader who has a prima donna on your
team (one who produces great results but alienates everyone), what should you
do? It’s simple. Bite the bullet and fire that person.
Here are three reasons why you should:
1. You’ll get more from the
rest of your team. Prima donnas are
productivity and morale killers. When they’re playing their game, everyone
around them is miserable, resentful and spending most of their energy griping
about the prima donna.
Take the diva (or divo, as the case may be) out
of the picture and everyone else gets on with the work. As a leader, you’ll
likely be pleasantly surprised by how much more creative the rest of your team
is when they get to breathe some of the oxygen the prima donna was sucking out
of the room.
2. You’ll send the right
message. While it feels a
little strange to quote Karl Marx, curing a prima donna situation is one in
which the good of the many outweighs the good of the few. By getting rid of the
prima donna, you send the message that the health and welfare of the team is
more important than the ego of any individual.
Most people are motivated by being a part of
something that’s bigger than themselves. You can’t create the conditions for
that to happen when one person is demanding the spotlight. Don't let one bad
apple spoil the whole bunch.
3. You’ll save yourself
headaches. As tough as it can
be to let go of someone who is getting results at a critical time, you’ve got
to do it and look at it as an investment in the long-term success of your team.
It’s like removing a Band-Aid from your arm. You
know the Band-Aid will pull some hairs out when you remove it. You can just rip
it off or peel it slowly. Either way, it’s going to hurt. You might as well rip
it off and get it over with. The same is true of firing someone who’s
established a history of being a long-term source of heartburn and headaches.
Get it over with.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #12
FOSTER TEAMWORK TO CUT COSTS BY SHARING
FINANCIALS
One thing that binds the Zappos team together is
an openness with numbers. It shares vital signs not just on the team level, but
across the entire company.
What are the tenets of a team culture that
values such broadcasts? Speak to the masses. Craft and communicate metrics in a
language everyone can understand. Make deadlines and accountability visible.
At the online shoe company, for example, a
finance class teaches every employee to read a balance sheet.
“Last year, a lot of people in the company
wondered how we did a billion dollars in revenue but didn’t turn a big profit,”
says Loren Becker, a supervisor of training at Zappos. “So we showed everyone
that about half of our money went to buying the goods we sold, a quarter went
to rent and salaries, a quarter went to advertising and other expenses. Pretty
soon there’s not a lot left over of that billion.”
That communication about financials has fostered
teamwork in cutting costs.
Becker hears people saying things like, “Maybe
we can do without these pens.”
“We’ve become a lot more cost conscious because
of our openness,” she says.
Lesson: Broadcast deadlines, goals, responsibilities
and progress for everyone to see. Help team members be more aware of each
group’s objectives.
— Adapted from “The Orange Revolution,” Adrian
Gostick and Chester Elton.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #13
TEAM BUILDING TRAINING: TEACH YOUR TEAM
HOW TO RESPOND TO CHANGE
You’ve laid out how you’re going to hold the
team accountable, and they all understand what’s expected of them. You’ve
planted responsibility squarely in their laps. But you’re not totally home
free.
There’s one more piece of the puzzle left:
responding to change.
Few teams remain static over time. As an
organization matures, so does a group’s mission. Objectives can and often do
change midstream. This can occur when:
·
A team must respond to
an urgent competitive threat.
·
A management shakeup can
lead the team in a different direction.
·
A new technology enables
a team to grapple with new challenges.
·
Some members of the
group leave, and newcomers bring different skills or
backgrounds.
Change can prove especially disruptive if it
deflates or defeats the team’s performance to date.
Teammates who were held accountable for
producing results may now complain: “It was all for nothing,” “We don’t want to
start from scratch” or “This new setup just isn’t fair—the goals aren’t
realistic.”
Managing a team’s disenchantment will test your
leadership skills. Unless you take the easy way out and disband the group,
you’ll need to achieve three quick goals:
1.
Convince the team that
the changes will ultimately benefit them and/or the organization.
2.
Urge the team to work
with you to revise its mission.
3.
Settle on a new set of
accountabilities so that all the members know how they’ll be measured from this
point forward
The key to managing change is not to
overfacilitate. Events can unfold rapidly and unpredictably. Trying to control
the team’s actions or rushing to reassure the group when you’re still unsure
what will happen next can backfire.
A wiser strategy is to unclog the lines of
communication. Alert the team as to what the changes will mean to its purpose
and goals. Promptly inform everyone of new developments.
Tip: Send e-mail alerts to team members whenever
there’s news to report. If you need them to refocus their efforts and deliver
“stretch goals” within a tight time frame, explain in the e-mail the
circumstances and context so that they see how their contribution affects the
big picture. Sending a group e-mail ensures that every team member will receive
the same information.
One benefit of weathering change is that you buy
some time to establish a new yardstick to measure the team’s performance. Don’t
rush to impose a detailed list of accountabilities. Evaluate team members on
their flexibility and overall attitude as much as on their actual work product.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #14
TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES: TIE ‘BONDING’
ACTIVITIES TO CORE VALUES
Next time you’re tasked with coming up with a
good “bonding” activity for your team, take a cue from today’s event planners.
In the past five years, more companies have veered away from outdoor team
building—organized sports and ropes courses—and are trying nontraditional
events.
The best events tie in somehow to a company’s
core values and have a philanthropic element. A few examples:
·
Sign up to work on a
Habitat for Humanity house.
·
Volunteer at a food
bank.
·
Incorporate an element
of surprise by organizing scavenger hunts with puzzles that lead to local
landmarks.
·
Adopt a park, stream or
other space and have a “cleanup” day.
·
Spend an afternoon
assembling kids’ bicycles, then donate them to children in need.
·
Use Volunteer Match
(www.volunteermatch.org) to find ideas to help local charity organizations.
Simply enter a ZIP code and an area of interest and—presto!—a truly great event
materializes.
Tip: Whatever you choose, watch the clock. Longer
than two hours, and participants tire of almost anything
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #15
CREATIVE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES:
DIVERSIFY YOUR TEAM BY JOB, AGE, GENDER
You probably know that a diverse group is likely
to yield the most creative work. But you may not realize just how diverse a
team should be, particularly if it needs to come up with new, innovative ideas.
“Diversity guarantees the best project result
and usually some layer of innovation,” says Gary Curtis, a managing director at
the technology consulting firm Accenture.
Your team needs diversity in three areas:
1.
Job function: “You
need people who can see things differently and not get trapped in their own disciplinary
assumptions,” says Robert I. Sutton, a Stanford University engineering
professor. “People from different disciplines will have different points of
view.”
2.
Age: Younger employees,
or “millennials,” for example, come to the workplace with “a whole different
life experience, especially with regard to technology in their personal lives,”
says Gary Curtis, a managing director at Accenture.
3.
Gender: “A team of all men
is generally going to work in a hierarchical way. If it’s a big team, men are
more comfortable taking their part of the problem and going off and solving
it,” Curtis says. In comparison, a team of women tend to work in a more
communal way.
— Adapted from “Building a new-age workforce,”
Julia King, Computerworld.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #16
FUN TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES: PET
PAGEANTS, COOK-OFFS, UGLIEST EARRINGS CONTEST
Liven up your workplace with one of these
morale-boosting team events:
·
Pet pageant. Employees
post photos of their pets on a bulletin board. Make up categories, and then
have everyone vote on their favorites. Examples: cutest, funniest picture, best
pet/owner look-alike, best pet story.
·
Chili cook-off. Each department cooks up its favorite chili recipe and
enters it into the contest. A panel of “chili experts” selects the champion, or
everyone votes on their favorite.
·
Awful tie/ugly earrings. Everyone comes to work wearing his or her entries. Place a
voting box in the office, and then tally up ballots at the end of the day.
Bring a camera and post photos of the winners.
·
“You ought to be in pictures.” Give employees a photo of a top executive to take
home for their children to draw. (Limit the contest to children age 12 and
under.)
Employees vote for their favorite drawing. Hang the winning portrait somewhere
visible.
·
Create a “spirit team,” made up of employees up and down the ladder. Example: At General Mills, a spirit team seeks out and
identifies activities that build a common culture and encourage positive
feelings about the company. A few years ago, the team suggested doing volunteer
work with a particular nonprofit. Employee satisfaction surveys show
volunteering makes them feel good about their jobs and the organization.
TEAM BUILDING IDEAS #17
TEAM BUILDING EXERCISES: 3 WAYS TO WARD
OFF GROUPTHINK
Collaboration works—until it starts to resemble
groupthink. That’s when healthy dissent evaporates, self-defeating tendencies
surge and negative emotions corrode the group’s work.
Make sure your team is working more like the
Manhattan Project and less like Enron. Three ideas:
1.
Model constructive dissent. Play devil’s advocate and disagree with a unanimous
decision. Benefit: You’ll encourage a reluctant but wise person to speak up.
2.
Have a brainstorming group write ideas on unattributed Post-it
notes. Why? No one knows
whether an idea came from top brass or a low-level player, so people back ideas
with merit regardless of source.
3.
Encourage team members to do self-affirmations. Research by behavioral scientist Tanya
Menon shows that simply listing one’s own personal skills and accomplishments
before meeting with a group enhances one’s ability to let colleagues shine.
— Adapted from “When Groups Don’t Think,” Jake
Mohan, Utne Reader.
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