High-Performing Teams: Assembling a Dream Team

High-performing teams are essential for success in any organisation because they’re able to achieve their goals more efficiently and effectively than other teams.
There are several ways to ensure efficiency and productivity, leading to above average performance:

• Communications: It’s essential to establish clear communication channels and protocols to ensure everyone’s on the same page e.g. video conferencing and instant messaging tools.
• Expectations: Define roles and responsibilities, project deadlines, and deliverables upfront to prevent confusion and ensure everyone’s working towards the same goals.
• Ways of Working: Embracing cultural differences and respecting different working styles is crucial.
• Transparency: Establish trust with team members by being transparent, delivering on your commitments and remaining responsive.
• Technology: Take advantage of available technology such as project management software and document-sharing tools to streamline communication, track progress, and ensure everyone remains aligned.

Source • Gordon Stewart for Institute of Project Management

What Makes a Good Manager?

Newsflash: The most productive people don’t always make the best managers – but why?

The difference between a good individual contributor and a good manager hinges on 6 key abilities:
• Being open to feedback and personal change
• Supporting others’ development
• Being open to innovation
• Communicating well
• Having good interpersonal skills
• Supporting organisational changes

What does this mean for most organisations?
The problem is that they hope their new managers will develop these skills after being promoted, but that’s exactly when overwhelmed new managers tend to fall back on their individual contributor skill sets.
This should come as a wake-up call to many organisations that put off any leadership development efforts until someone is promoted to a supervisory position.

💡The bottom line: Start your leadership development efforts sooner.
Then, when you promote your best individual contributors, you can be more certain that they’ll become your best managers.

Source • Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman for hbr.org

Online Learning & Remote Work: Digital Empowerment

Remote work options have proven instrumental in attracting and retaining underrepresented groups, including women.
A McKinsey report revealed that 71% of companies acknowledge the positive impact of offering remote options in attracting and retaining more employees from diverse backgrounds.

In many parts of the world, women face cultural, societal or logistical challenges that make traditional education inaccessible.
Both online learning and remote work are helping level the playing fields, offering women educational and career opportunities they might not otherwise have had.

The growth and adoption of industry micro-credentials have emerged as a powerful tool in empowering women by providing them with the means to acquire digital skills quickly and transition into higher-paying jobs.
They also provide them with a path to re-enter the workforce after a long career break, and allow them to acquire the new skills required to address the changing nature of jobs.

Online learning and remote work are driving a transformative shift, creating more equal opportunities for women in a society that has long grappled with gender disparities.

Source / weforum.org

Writing: Battle or Symphony?

Writing a novel, or maybe writing anything, is a war between two parts of the writer, which are both simultaneously detrimental and helpful:

• The patient, ethereal, understanding artist, who knows that projects of this magnitude take as long as they take and that the best surprises happen when you’re waiting and lingering in moments;

• The impatient child, drumming their fingers on the table, bouncing their legs, needing to hurry, desperate to get to wherever it is we are all supposed to be going.

Social media heightens the feeling that people are waiting for you…or that they’ve forgotten about you.
It’s not writing, not accomplishing something with the actual writing, which [can] cause this despair: it’s publishing.

Source / memoirmonday.substack

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These wise words from novelist Richard Mirabella touch on a very important point:

As a creative, it’s easy to let other people and social media add to the pressure to rush your book or creative project to the publication stage, particularly when you see the attention others are receiving for their work.

So, here are 3 reminders:
• Be gentle with yourself
• Create for yourself
• Work at your own pace