Team Leadership development: nurture good followers
Stumble It!John Austin, writing in his excellent blog, Tag your Team, references research by Robert Kelley on ‘followership’ which examines two different traits of behaviour in team members: critical thinking and pro-activity.
By analysing these on two independent axes Kelley was able to identify 5 stereotype followers – sheep, alienated, survivors, effectives and yes-people.
The research showed that effective followers add value, focus on goals and take initiative: in other words the best followers are those people that could be leaders.
“Teams in which every team member has the skills to lead have great potential to excel”.
This resonates very well with the bioteam's cornerstone of distributed leadership and every member a leader (in different domains).
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Bioteams Books Reviews
When not to collaborate
A team of one is sometimes best. It might sound like heresy but sometimes the most effective way to produce something is not through collaboration. Collaboration is best for tasks which cannot be fully achieved by a single person – if a job can be completed best by one person then to collaborate to do it will only make it worse.
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Related Team Leadership Development Articles
The Three Laws of Teams
Isaac Asimov, forecasted the coming age of Robots and developed the famous Three Laws of Robotics. Asimov's laws can be easily adapted to teams to determine if your team is Performing or Inverted (a team where the individual, team and other member priorities have got muddled).
Collaboration requires Organizational Intelligence
Is your team smart enough to collaborate.
Harvard Professor, David Perkins, in his latest book, King Arthur's Round Table, discusses the importance of "organisational Intelligence" and "developmental leadership" and how the absence of these leads to coblaboration rather than collaboration in organisational teams.
Team Collaboration: Funny Video Icebreaker
"For the Birds" from Pixar is a hilarious 3-minute cartoon video which I have used many times as a ice-breaker with teams, networks and groups. It is a great way to make people laugh, relax and quickly open up a really good discussion on some very important team-related issues. Make sure you watch right to the end with the sound on!
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