If you ever played sports or a musical instrument, then you know how much these endeavors revolve around practice. Hours and hours of practice. Despite the fact that tournament games and music recitals get all the attention, it’s the hours of practice and drilling that really underpin any successes in those fields. And regardless of how much you lamented the time spent honing your fundamentals – executing the basics over and over – you can’t deny the fact that it made you better.

Team building events, motivational books, communication classes — they all leave us with a wealth of information and excited about the things we’ve learned. Upon finishing with any of these trainings we’re brimming with enthusiasm and telling whomever will listen about how we’re going to change the way we do things at work and in our lives. At least that’s how it is for the first few days. Then things often slip back into their normal place, and all that great, juicy info we absorbed (and often paid for!) sinks back into the recesses of our minds. Just like your…

The concept of feedback is something that comes up often in our team building and corporate training programs, and nine time out of ten, participants say that they want their feedback one way — straight up. Don’t beat around the bush, use metaphors, or hem and haw, just give it to me straight, they say. Fire it off — I can take it. But what people say and what people want – or are ready to handle – are often quite different. I mean, if I were to write myself as a character in a crime novel, I’d be the…

Unless you’re in a tiny startup or mom ‘n pop small biz, large groups are the norm for most organizations. These might be departments, divisions, or teams — and if you’re like many organizations, you make sure these groups meet on a semi-regular basis. Often these meetings go very much the same way. The most vocal, outspoken, and extroverted individuals state their piece and the rest of the group nods along in semi-compliance. Meanwhile, as you don your manager hat, you may be wondering to yourself what the more soft-spoken or reflective members of the group have to say on…

Email has pervaded almost every moment of our working lives. If we’re not writing emails, we’re watching them stack up in our virtual inboxes, which are  full of messages ranging from the mundane to the five-alarm fire. And this is the problem.

We’re a species of walkers. Evolutionarily, we have spent the bulk of our development in nomadic tribes, walking the earth in search of resources, using our spatial reasoning skills to navigate our landscape. Today, we spend the bulk of our modern lives in wheeled office chairs and rely more on Google Maps for navigation and GrubHub for food foraging. This is a shame, though, because we were designed to move.

We’re all in sales, like it or not. And most of us don’t like it. When we hear the word sales we often conjure up images of oh-so-smug and sleazy car salesmen or aggressive, boiler-room type telemarketers. Or Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross espousing the importance of the ABCs — Always. Be. Closing. Some of us have traumatic relationships with sales. For me, it began with having to sell tickets to my pop-warner football games – me, a sweaty palmed and trembling twelve year old awaiting door-to-door rejection (sadly, my parents accounted for the bulk of my sales). For…

Steve Jobs’ legendary hiring practices and recruiting philosophies — which he developed over the course of five thousand separate interviews — were iconically captured in the following quote (you can find more team building quotes here): “I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream … A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.”

Team building quotes are a great way to rally your troops and get people motivated to work together. The power of a well-crafted turn of phrase is undeniable. Whether you’re a facilitator, manager, trainer or coach, incorporating a quote or two into your repertoire is a great idea. Below you’ll find a large list of quotes for your next team building event. From the boardroom to the locker-room, these classic quotes about teamwork and the strength of the whole over the individual are sure to inspire.

Once I was asked what one thing an individual could do that would improve his or her ability to solve problems. My short answer…Be curious! I learned the importance of this virtue while serving on the roster of certified mediators for the supreme court of Virginia, which included some very interesting experiences at the general district court level. One of my favorite cases involved a representative from an animal shelter and a woman who had recently adopted a cat. The animal shelter was demanding that the cat be returned because the new owner had apparently violated the terms of the adoption…

Did you realize we spend close to three hours of our work week dealing with conflict? According to a 2008 survey by CPP , publishers of the popular Myers-Briggs® assessment, conflict accounts for 2.8 hours of our work week. When you add up the hours and multiply it by the average hourly wage of $17.95, we’re talking about $360 Billion dollars in paid employee time. With that in mind, it’s important for managers to address conflict meaningfully. And that does not mean stifling it.

With Gallup reporting that the average work week is closing in around 47 hours – almost a full work day more than a five day work week in terms of time – it brings up the ever present question of work-life balance. And let’s face it, it’s true that a balanced life includes more than just work. But what I want to address in this post is the sense of discontent inherent in the question of work-life balance. There is this belief that a clear dividing line is necessary to achieve a healthy and happy life, one that is not…

In Jim Collins’s iconic book Good to Great, he takes the old Greek parable of the fox and the hedgehog and uses it as a metaphor for describing companies that attain greatness. The fox, in it’s crafty way, knows many little tricks, tactics, and ploys which it employs against it’s quarry. The hedgehog, on the other hand, it’s coat bristling with quills, knows one really big trick — one that foils the fox every time. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, it’s easy to get caught up in creating new programs, products, and projects, with the aim of using all…

True happiness at work pretty much boils down to one word: flow. Flow is the name of the book by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (mee-hy cheek-sent-mə-hy-ee), wherein he describes “a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” (source) Furthermore, Csíkszentmihályi contends that being in this state of flow is the key to happiness, and that a state of flow is often associated with the best moments of our life. Imagine the time you raced down the…

The common wisdom to creating a high-performance team is to populate it with members who have high IQs and who are the best in their respective field. Unfortunately, this isn’t always possible. More importantly, this common wisdom is flat out wrong. How else can you explain the poor team decision making that occurs in the upper echelons of businesses, governments, and other organizations? These institutions are not dictatorships, meaning they make their decisions in groups or committees — often chock full of really bright people. Enron was full of brilliant folks who, together, made some really horrendous decisions. Despite our…