Friday, February 21, 2014

7 Tips to Create an Effective Team

To ensure success in today's workplace, building effective teams is essential.  Successful teams are able to produce results greater than if each member was to work individually.  Here are seven tips to implement to create an effective team in the workplace:
  1. Build a team with the right skill set
      2. While it may be tempting to build a team based upon relationships and complementing personalities, it is important ensure the team has the right skill set.  If the skills required to accomplish the task are not present in the team it will be extremely difficult to produce optimal results.

  2. Begin with a clear purpose
      3. Clarity is crucial.  Vagueness of goals decreases the effectiveness of teams.  How is it possible to achieve the end goal if it is unknown what it is?  By creating clear goals and developing a common purpose team members are able to work together to accomplish these goals instead of trying to further their own agendas.

  3. Establish norms
      4. By establishing norms you are deciding which behavior is okay and which is not.  Is it acceptable for team members to be ten minutes late to meetings?  Are you allowed to talk about the project with people outside of your team?  Establishing norms ensures everyone is on the same page.

  4. Build trust
      5. If team members lack trust they may be more willing to withhold information which is detrimental to the team.  By building trust team members feel safe to share comments and ideas with others.

  5. Encourage conflict
      6. Most people believe conflict is bad.  However, lack of conflict signals apathy and disengagement.  It is important to focus on creating cognitive conflict not affective conflict.  Affective conflict is interpersonal conflict and has a negative impact on teams.  Cognitive conflict, on the other hand, encourages teams to critically think about ideas and is beneficial to teams.

  6. Incorporate humor
      7. Sometimes working on a team project becomes too tense and serious.  Alleviate the intensity with humor.  Engage in simple pranks.  Laugh about mistakes.  Watch a few YouTube videos.  Incorporating humor allows team members to take a step back and refocus on what is important. 

  7. Establish buy-in
      8. By establishing buy-in, each team member becomes more fully committed to producing results. Buy-in can be established by listening to and implementing ideas and feedback and creating a sense of fairness when making decisions. Team members feel a greater duty in pushing the team to success when they are personally invested in the results.

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Friday, February 14, 2014

Surviving Valentine's Day Single

In honor of Valentine's Day, I'm going to share a few tips on how to survive the day as a single person.  Whether you love love, hate the reminder of your singleness, or are just apathetic about it all, hopefully you can find something to improve your day.

1. Throw a Party!
Go out to dinner.  Have a movie night.  Go bowling.  Host a game night. Whatever you do, invite all your single friends and have a grand time!

2. Have a Night In
If partying isn't your thing, or you have no friends, treat yourself!  Order take-out, cozy-up in a blanket, and have a Netflix marathon.  Buy those shoes you've been eyeing online.  Finish a craft project.  Cuddle with your pint of Ben & Jerry's.  Take the night to focus on YOU.

3.  Serve Others
Even if you don't have a valentine, you can help someone else who does!  Take your co-worker's shift at work so he can take his girlfriend to dinner.  Help your best friend make cookies for her husband.  Or you can make cookies and give them as valentines to your friends and neighbors.  Buy flowers and hand them out to random people.  Strive to make someone else's day a little bit brighter!

4. Improve Yourself
Begin a new hobby.  Read a book.  Tackle a challenging recipe.  Do something that makes you better than you were yesterday.  If you dislike being single on Valentine's Day, set goals on how you plan on changing your relationship status for next year.  Maybe you will talk to that cute boy in class.  Or take a country swing-dancing class.  Or find the positive things in life.  Others are drawn to happy, ambitious people.  Focus on improving yourself and have fun along the way.

Whether you're spending the night in or out, with friends or by yourself, enjoy it!  Don't let others' happiness make you miserable.  By doing more of what you enjoy, happiness will follow.
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Friday, February 7, 2014

Sochi 2014

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, have not begun flawlessly.  Journalists and reporters arrived to Sochi only to discover conditions were far from optimal.  Hotel rooms were incomplete, water was unsafe, and some roads were unfinished.  Naturally, reporters did what they do best, and shared the news with the world with their various news agencies and Twitter accounts.

One journalist who is not even in Russia is capitalizing on what he likes to call #SochiProblems.  Twenty year old Alex Broad, a journalism student in Toronto, created the Twitter account @SochiProblems during an otherwise slow news day.  His account consists of retweets from journalists in Russia and his own witty commentary.  The following tweets are only a sampling of what this account has to offer:



@SochiProblems has really taken off in the past three days.  It was started on February 4, 2014, and now (February 7) it has over 275 thousand followers.  This official Sochi 2014 Twitter account trails behind Sochi Problems by over 100 thousand followers.  It will be interesting to see how the games play out -- hopefully the $51 billion spent for the Olympics will be more evident in the the events than the hotels.

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