Team culture: the 3-colour technique
Stumble It!The cultures of organisations and teams can be colour coded according to Jerry Connor and Lee Sears authors of “Why Work is Weird”. Red is achievement oriented, Yellow is people focused and Blue values Professional Expertise.
Most teams have a dominant colour but with shades of the other two.
This approach can be very helpful as the first stage in harnessing culture in a positive way is always to recognise it.
Red teams value "getting on with it" and achieving the task
Attributes that are successful in red cultures include drive, focus, directness and practicality. In this kind of culture, activity and achievement are highly valued.
Yellow (humanist) teams tend to be people focused
They value consensus and involvement. Decisions tend to be taken through discussion and it is seen as important that each individual can air their views. In this kind of culture, upsetting or alienating people will be strongly discouraged.
Blue (professional) cultures value professional expertise
They promote and reward the best trained and most skilled expert, and tend to devalue attributes not directly linked to the profession itself (for example in a hospital medical excellence may be valued but not management skills).
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Related Online Collaboration Techniques Articles
A simple trick for improving phone meetings
Create a single frame video conference using a peopleclock
I discovered this very simple technique in an article in the Harvard Business Review, Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger. One of the problems of audio-only conferences is keeping concentration when you lack any visual stimuli.
Improve team conference calls with a very simple trick
Create a single frame video conference using a peopleclock to help participants concentrate and engage better.
Can you define collaboration
perhaps but it won't help you produce it in your team!
Wikipedia makes an attempt at defining “Collaboration”. It comes from the Latin 'co' meaning 'with' and 'labore' meaning 'to work' and means 'to work together'.
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