Stumble It!

Roger Fisher, the world's leading expert on win-win negotiation, describes the power of having Lateral Leadership skills which let you get the job done when you are not the boss.

Roger Fisher identifies three fundamental problems with collaboration in organisations and what you can do to fix them:

1. Lack of personal skills
2. Not knowing what good collaboration looks like
3. Not knowing how to influence the behaviour of others

The logic runs like this:

Firstly if you lack personal disciplines and cannot organise yourself you are going to find it even harder in a team.

Secondly even if you have good personal skills it is no guarantee you can collaborate well.

Thirdly even if you are collaborating well the team will not succeed unless the other members are doing the same and for this to happen you need influencing skills.

Roger shows how ‘telling’ does not inspire others to learn new behaviour and offers three practical methods which work much better in successfuly influencing others:

1. Ask a good question
2. Offer your own thoughts and invite people to build on them
3. Do something which will serve as a model for better behavior

Roger suggests that for peer collaboration to work well a team must pay close attention to 5 key dimensions in the following sequence Purpose, Thinking, Learning, Engagement and Feedback.

I strongly recommend this book to anybody leading teams whether you are a team leader with formal authority, or are a team leader without formal authority or even just a team member.

Tags: self-managed teams

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Bioteams Books Reviews

Effective Brainstorming: Top Tips

March 18, 2008 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

Brainstorming, despite the popularity of the term, is one of the most challenging collaborative activities to carry out. While most people think they know how to brainstorm, very few really understand how to consistently make a session work. Ken Thompson and Robin Good share some of the secrets gleaned from "The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm"

Buy it now from:
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Amazon.Co.UK

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