Creating Connections

It's all too common. Agendas conflict, personalities clash. People get hired for their great skills who turn out to have major issues. Whatever the source, when a colleague (or subordinate or boss) is driving you up the wall, it's up to you to figure out how to cope.

Exiling them to a desert island probably isn't an option, but here are six strategies that can help:

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Meeting virtually is a necessity in today’s global economy, and doing so has plenty of advantages. Organizations can gather experts together regardless of geographic location, companies can give employees greater flexibility in where they work, and virtual technology can reduce the negative effects of hierarchy, allowing more equal participation among colleagues. But when things go wrong on virtual teams, it can get ugly fast.

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According to researchers at Duke University, habits account for about 40 percent of our behaviors on any given day. 

 

Understanding how to build new habits (and how your current ones work) is essential for making progress in your health, your happiness, and your life in general.

 

But there can be a lot of information out there and most of it isn’t very simple to digest. To solve this problem and break things down in a very simple manner, I have created this strategy guide for building new habits that actually stick.

 

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Can we really judge a book by its cover? When it comes to making snap judgments about others, it turns out, we may be pretty good at doing just that.

 

We've all heard the truism, "You only make one first impression." It's true -- and these impressions may be more powerful than we would imagine.

 

Our brains take in a huge number of verbal and non-verbal cues almost instantaneously when we meet someone (or just look at a photo of them) to calculate powerful impressions that are often as accurate as the impressions we form over longer periods of time.

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Authors Rob Cross, Peter Gray, Shirley Cunningham, Mark Showers and Robert J. Thomas discuss how the most effective organizations make smart use of employee networks to reduce costs, improve efficiency and spur innovation.

 

Download an award-winning article on how to make employee networks really work. The traditional methods for driving operational excellence in global organizations are not enough. The most effective organizations make smart use of employee networks to reduce costs, improve efficiency and spur innovation.

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We learned how to give feedback. One important step this team took to improve its performance was to create a sort of social contract. They agreed to a number of behaviors they wanted to hold themselves accountable for. The team started practicing a "scoring" technique to track how well they practiced the behaviors individually, and learned how to give feedback to explain their scores for each other.

 

Teams like Litster's often include a number of common elements in their "operating agreements." Some items might include avoiding blame, looking for the root cause of a problem, communicating messages even when they're hard to say, and receiving messages without defensiveness even when they're hard to hear.

 

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The workplace today is much different from the workplace of 30, 20, and even 10 years ago. Open office designs, in-house baristas, and for many organizations bosses managing from across the country are now the norm. Between video conferencing, email, and instant messaging, physical proximity to the office is no longer a requirement. Companies are hiring based on talent and fit, not if someone can be in their chair 24/7. This change has led to entire teams being spread across time zones, states, and even countries. While it can be tricky to report to a remote manager, I’m here to tell you it’s possible.

 

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A simple view of negotiation presents a cold transaction between what one person has and what the other person is willing to pay for it. If the price is right, the deal gets done.

 

As anyone who has recently bought a car or sold a house knows, however, negotiations are rarely so dispassionate. As soon as the checkbook comes out a flood of emotions comes out with it—fear, anxiety, competiveness, anger, annoyance—all of which can influence what either side is willing to accept.

 

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Plenty of people work from home occasionally, and plenty of managers work with people in different offices. But what if no one is in the office? What if your entire company consists of people working wherever they want to work?

 

That’s the reality for a growing number of companies that find central real estate unnecessary. Managing an entirely virtual team can be a challenge, but a few strategies make it quite possible, so you can reap the benefits of this new model.

 

“It is a big recruiting draw for the right type of person,” says Lisa Breytspraak Jasper, managing partner of IT strategy consulting firm Thought Ensemble, whose 13 employees are all virtual. “It allows us to lead our lives very flexibly”--and still get stuff done.

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