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Management Tips
Karaoke - The New Team Building Secret
Need to build some camaraderie amongst your team members or your staff? How about a gathering at a karaoke joint. Karaoke is the current team-building rage. People have fun, act silly and bond. How about a karaoke night at your next work retreat. Just sing your favorite Aretha Franklin or Neil Diamond tunes in front of the troops, and the least that will happen is you'll feel a little foolish, the most that will happen is...well, who knows? Go ahead, belt one out.
-adapted from Fast Company
A Few Helpful Titles
Are you looking for some good ideas for the office to increase motivation and efficiency? Here are the books businesspeople most often turn to:
Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
- Good to Great, by Jim Collins
- Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey
- Execution: The discipline of getting things done, by Ram Charan
- Who Says Elephants Can't Dance: Leading a great enterprise through dramatic change, by Louis Gerstner
- The Profit Zone: How strategic business design will lead you to tomorrows profits, by Adrian Slywotzky, David J. Morrison and Bob Andelman
Adapted from www.detnews.com
Some Strategies for Nudging Your Creativity
Most people brainstorm to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems or issues. In order to have a successful brainstorming session you must make sure that an "anything-is-possible" attitude rules. Brainstorming can be done alone or in a group. Here are some guidelines that will help make your brainstorming sessions as productive as possible:
- Define your problem and or set your goal for the session. If you don't know exactly what problem or issue you're facing, it's unlikely that you will be able to solve it.
- Establish some rules or guidelines and don't change them. If you decide that no ideas will be judged during the session, then you'll have to be careful that you don't censor your own ideas by judging them as no good before you let them come to the surface.
- Meet your goals. If you decide that you are going to brainstorm for an hour, or to come up with 30 new ideas, don't quit after 45 minutes or when you reach 23 ideas.
- Be outrageous. Don't worry about coming up with the perfect idea or an acceptable idea.
- Don't get in a hurry. Brainstorming will set its own pace and you should respect it.
- Make the atmosphere exciting. Show some enthusiasm.
- Try to generate as many ideas as possible so that you will have a lot to choose from.
- Be fearless. Don't give in to your fear of rejection or failure.
- Try and get a new angle on a familiar problem.
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-adapted from Opportunity World
How to Get Everyone on Your Team to Work Together
Are the members of your team griping and complaining about their manager? Do they seem to want a lot of things they're not getting, like higher pay, more time off and higher positions? Are they bickering and jealous of one another?
If you're a manager, it can be easy to think that no one cares about all the hard work that you do. Do you feel like the old team spirit just isn't there anymore?
If you think that your team members have fallen into an us vs. them mode, then you better do something, because if you don't, poor communications and attitudes of resistance and shaky work quality can result. You will have to be careful that the old labor-management antagonism doesn't slip into your workplace and destroy any hope you have of restoring true collaboration, teamwork and enthusiasm.
Lots of times that antagonism is shoved under the surface until a situation arises that really requires cooperation and effort, and when that occurs the true monster raises its ugly head. So when you see the us vs. them attitude coming down the path straight toward you, it will probably pay off to give the problem your total attention.
One of the most important things for you to guard against is the possibility that you have already been drug into the us vs. them way of thinking. Are you talking about "them"? If you are, you need to remember that the employees represent the company, and whatever their attitudes are, you better pay attention. Try to think about talking with your employees, not "to" them.
If this divisiveness is taking place and you're in charge, you will probably have to speak to it, and the sooner the better. Talk to your employees about what the problem is, and when you find out, figure out a way to solve it.
-adapted from entrpreneur.com
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