I recently had a webinar about my new book Help Desk Manager’s Crash course, and many of the participants wanted to know more about teambuilding. I thought it’d be nice to share my primer here, and then dive a little deeper into activities that work, and finally into how to teambuild with peers and up the organization.

Go first – As manager, you have to go first, show that you’re vulnerable, that you’re human, and that your team can trust you. If you aren’t willing to go first, why would anyone else want to contribute?
Share something folks don’t …read more

One of the best ways to create a team atmosphere is to play with your team, and let them play with you. It’ll let them see a more personal side of you, and see you as the fallible human being you are, instead of the robotic machine managers sometimes can be perceived as.
Play requires you to be vulnerable and let your hair down. It may be uncomfortable at first, and it may feel forced.
DO IT ANYWAY!
How can you play with your team?

Trivia Days – Send out a trivia question (no Googling allowed) and give the first correct respondent a …read more

Pizza is just pizza.
Pizza isn’t teambuilding.
Jeffrey Brooks reminded me of this over the past week. Quoting Jeff: “I’ve never eaten a piece of pizza and thought ‘I feel closer to my family.’ Have you?”
Of course not.
Pizza is just PIZZA.

Sure, your team has to eat, so why not pizza.
Used in small doses, like when you really need them to skip lunch, pizza might make folks a little happier.
Just don’t confuse pizza (or any other food) with teambuilding.
Unless you’re making a pizza together that they can take home to their family.
Pizza isn’t teambuilding.
Extreme pizza & wings courtesy of the pizza review

Wendy Terwelp shared an excellent article about how to deal with slacker co-workers. The only tip in the article is the most important one I share with each member of my team as a first step:

Confront the slacker’s slacking behavior – If you don’t care enough to talk to the person slacking, then why should your manager care enough to take your complaints seriously? Sure, it doesn’t always work. You have to try or it doesn’t matter to me as your manager.

As a manager, I am not always available to micro-manage every slacking co-worker. YOU are in the best position …read more

Note: This is a guest post from @Stephen, editor of Business Development in Context and a co-founder of the work.life.creativity forum. You can follow him on Twitter at @hdbb_stephen. This post is inspired by a book I have recently read, Results Through Relationships, by Joe Takash. I highly recommend this book, for managers and those who aspire to become managers.
Moving Toward Collaboration
Collaboration is a hot buzz-word these days with the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of a host of online sharing tools. There is however, a lack of training in collaboration and team-building in many businesses. With the …read more

Lisa Haneberg recently shared a brilliant list of 5 simple reasons managers fail. #1 came as no surprise to me.
Fail to build positive and trusting relationships.
So simple, yet often completely missed by many managers. Management is a team sport folks, and if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t be a manager.
If you get that point, then let’s talk about this a little more. Who should you build relationships with, and how should you build them?
Here’s a few ideas on how to build positive and trusting relationships. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
First, build a relationship with each …read more

There are lots of ways you can make great decisions. I’ve got 3 big ones:

Interpret the Information
Know your options
Know your negotiables and non-negotiables

I credit Steve Bannister with the first tip. He does a great job sharing his 4 tips to interpret information:

Rumor (Steve calls this rumour, he’s from Canada, I’m from Wisconsin)
Belief
Opinion
Fact

Great advice! You must know how to interpret the information in front of you. I would argue it is the first step in making a great decision.
Another important key to making great decisions is knowing what options are available. What the worst that could happen? What’s the best that …read more

“Great leaders of the most successful companies in the world are great stewards.” – Jason Jennings

Those words rang in my ears as I left the 2008 HDI Annual Conference a few weeks ago, and they are still bouncing around in my head today.
Jason Jennings shared a great message, about how the organizations he studied all had a few key things in common, and sealed the deal with the quote I share with you above.
Great leaders…are great stewards.
So simple, yet so profound. Let’s break this down to try to understand what it all means.
What is a great steward?
A great steward puts …read more

This is a guest post from Michael Kanazawa.
When things get stressful, we often throw out phrases automatically to try and get beyond the issues for the moment without really doing what is right. But often these phrases don’t do much to help in the moment and don’t’ solve the true issues either. There are a few sayings that we hear in business all of the time that are about as ineffective as parents yelling at their children, “do it because I said so.” Even worse, these sayings in business cause people to make poor decisions and undermine their own leadership …read more

“It’s better to train your people and have them leave than it is to not train them and they stay or they don’t get training and they leave.” – Phil Gerbyshak
OK, so it’s no shock I’m a HUGE proponent of training. I write at 3 blogs frequently (Slacker Manager obviously, Make It Great! and Joyful Jubilant Learning), attend as many conferences as I (and my day job) can afford, subscribe to about 300 blogs, 1 great podcast, and read as many books as I can, as often as I can.
In recent conversations with many other smart managers, we had a …read more