Self Improvement

Your team is simply a group of individuals brought together to achieve a goal. And each individual on that team may have different expectations of what has to happen to reach that goal. When you're working on a team, it's important to clarify expectations about the nature of each person's involvement in reaching the goal. This means making sure everyone understands team roles and responsibilities. Put simply, people should know what to do, and how to do it.

A good leadership development plan has three key characteristics. When you've finished creating your plan, you should evaluate it to be sure it has each of these characteristics:

No matter where they're found in an organization, innovators are a vital part of a company's structure. They keep the organization focused on the future. Innovation leaders are often the people who really push their company to develop a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation.

One of your first tasks when building a team is to establish team goals. Typically, you can do this in one of two ways. You can establish the goals yourself, or you can elect to take a collaborative approach and involve your team's members.

A collaborative approach can help to build a stronger team in several ways:

The top 3 barriers to effective listening are distractions, misinterpretations and attachment to personal beliefs and values.

These barriers can prevent you from getting or understanding the message you are hearing.

1. Distractions
 

We get distracted by what is going on outside (our surroundings) and inside ourselves.

What’s outside that distracts us while trying to listen to someone? Noises, temperature, or what other people are saying or doing.

As a manager, one of your jobs is to turn your employees into leaders. To do this, they need to know what's expected of them, and when they're succeeding. Think about your role as a leader. How do you know when you're successful? How do you know you're "hitting the mark?"

The way you reply to e-mail messages can have a major impact on your work and business relationships.

To ensure you reply to an e-mail message appropriately, you should always

Managing your team during each of the stages of team development can be a challenge. Each stage will require different skills and strategies for motivating team members, making decisions, delegating authority, and dealing with conflict.

The stages of team development are sequential and developmental. Each stage has issues that must be resolved before the team can move to the next stage. An effective project manager recognizes the stage a team is in, and manages accordingly.

Being able to deliver successful presentations is a valuable management skill. Getting your message across effectively is crucial and can have an impact on both your credibility and your work.

You may have to make presentations to senior managers on behalf of your team, or to outside organizations on behalf of your company. In either case, you will be expected to perform well.

Businesses do not operate in isolation. Managers need to understand the impact that the surrounding business environment has on their own organization.

Managers can use the STEP (social, technological, economic, and political) model to help identify the factors in the broader environment that will affect their business. This model groups the factors into these categories: