Tools To Create A Workplace You Love Imagine, for a moment, a workplace where you and your co-workers: * Share a clear and common purpose. * Conduct open and respectful conversations. * Easily build commitment to new ideas and approaches. * Use simple tools to guide decisions, actions, and accountability. * Find opportunities to innovate, learn and grow. * Have complete trust and confidence in one another. This workplace does exist―a workplace where people think differently and achieve their goals, crush the competition, turn customers into enthusiastic fans, and love going to work every day. It's called a Collaborative Workplace and it starts inside this book. Follow the story of an almost fictitious finance grad as he experiences four different workplaces. You are likely to find your own workplace among them. Then, get the Breakthrough Tools you need to make the shift to a Collaborative Workplace wherever you are and regardless of your job title. Creating a Collaboration Breakthrough is not only doable, it is essential in today's highly chaotic, competitive, uncertain, and ever changing business landscape. The only question is: Do you have the courage to make it happen?
Identifies the importance of a conscious, planned and shared collaborative environment that promotes teamwork, creativity and enthusiasm, revealing counter-intuitive facts while sharing research-based examples that identify the essential components of an effective team. 15,000 first printing.
Learn to tap into a team's collective brainpower to reach breakthrough results. This guide presents a proven process for organizations to build teams that go beyond surviving to thriving, no matter whether the goal is charitable fund raising or new project development.
Research, design, and development firms are actively recruiting anthropologists and other social scientists, as ethnographic research becomes more central to the creation of appropriate new products, services, and marketing strategies for U.S. and global markets. To be successful designers, professionals must learn new processes, develop training programs, modify communication styles, and share their methods to make their work possible. The current volume is written by social scientists, designers, and entrepreneurs who create new products and services. They provide frank and insightful discussions about the opportunities and challenges facing researchers and designers who are learning to collaborate. The book highlights several major topics in order to focus on critical aspects of the industry's highly related features. It provides background information about ethnography, decsribes and analyzes the industry, presents case examples of working practices and discusses emerging methodology based on three fundamental kinds of projects (discovery, design, and evaluation). The book suggests ways emerging design professionals can (1) improve their own performance, (2) change the working processes of the industry itself, (3) contribute to basic ethnographic research, and (4) craft training programs for the next generation of professionals.
The problems we face in the 21st century require innovative thinking from all of us. Be it students, academics, business researchers of government policy makers. Hopes for improving our healthcare, food supply, community safety and environmental sustainability depend on the pervasive application of research solutions. The research heroes who take on the immense problems of our time face bigger than ever challenges, but if they adopt potent guiding principles and effective research lifecycle strategies, they can produce the advances that will enhance the lives of many people. These inspirational research leaders will break free from traditional thinking, disciplinary boundaries, and narrow aspirations. They will be bold innovators and engaged collaborators, who are ready to lead, yet open to new ideas, self-confident, yet empathetic to others. In this book, Ben Shneiderman recognizes the unbounded nature of human creativity, the multiplicative power of teamwork, and the catalytic effects of innovation. He reports on the growing number of initiatives to promote more integrated approaches to research so as to promote the expansion of these efforts. It is meant as a guide to students and junior researchers, as well as a manifesto for senior researchers and policy makers, challenging widely-held beliefs about how applied innovations evolve and how basic breakthroughs are made, and helping to plot the course towards tomorrow's great advancements.
Making progress on complex, problematic situations requires a new approach to working together: transformative facilitation, a structured and creative process for removing the obstacles to fluid forward movement. It is becoming less straightforward for people to move forward together. They face increasing complexity and decreasing control. They need to work with more people from across more divides. In such situations, the most common ways of advancing—some people telling others what to do, or everyone just doing what they think they need to—aren't adequate. One better way is through facilitating. But the most common approaches to facilitating—bossy vertical directing from above or collegial horizontal accompanying from alongside—aren't adequate. They often leave the participants frustrated and yearning for breakthrough. This book describes a new approach: transformative facilitation. It doesn't choose either the bossy vertical or the collegial horizontal approach: it cycles back and forth between them. Rather than forcing or cajoling, the facilitator removes the obstacles that stand in the way of people contributing and connecting equitably. It enables people to bring their whole selves to the process. This book is for anyone who helps people work together to transform their situation, be it a professional facilitator, manager, consultant, coach, chairperson, organizer, mediator, stakeholder, or friend. It offers a broad and bold vision of the contribution that facilitation can make to helping people collaborate to make progress.
A breakthrough book on the transformative power of collaborative thinking Collaborative intelligence, or CQ, is a measure of our ability to think with others on behalf of what matters to us all. It is emerging as a new professional currency at a time when the way we think, interact, and innovate is shifting. In the past, “market share” companies ruled by hierarchy and topdown leadership. Today, the new market leaders are “mind share” companies, where influence is more important than power, and success relies on collaboration and the ability to inspire. Collaborative Intelligence is the culmination of more than fifty years of original research that draws on Dawna Markova’s background in cognitive neuroscience and her most recent work, with Angie McArthur, as a “Professional Thinking Partner” to some of the world’s top CEOs and creative professionals. Markova and McArthur are experts at getting brilliant yet difficult people to think together. They have been brought in to troubleshoot for Fortune 500 leaders in crisis and managers struggling to inspire their teams. When asked about their biggest challenges at work, Markova and McArthur’s clients all cite a common problem: other people. This response reflects the way we have been taught to focus on the gulfs between us rather than valuing our intellectual diversity—that is, the ways in which each of us is uniquely gifted, how we process information and frame questions, what kind of things deplete us, and what engages and inspires us. Through a series of practices and strategies, the authors teach us how to recognize our own mind patterns and map the talents of our teams, with the goal of embarking together on an aligned course of action and influence. In Markova and McArthur’s experience, managers who appreciate intellectual diversity will lead their teams to innovation; employees who understand it will thrive because they are in touch with their strengths; and an entire team who understands it will come together to do their best work in a symphony of collaboration, their individual strengths working in harmony like an orchestra or a high-performing sports team. Praise for Collaborative Intelligence “Rooted in the latest neuroscience on the nature of collaboration, Collaborative Intelligence celebrates the power of working and thinking together at the highest levels of business and politics, and in the smallest aspects of our everyday lives. Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur show us that our ability to collaborate is not only a measure of intelligence, but essential to solving the world’s problems and seeing the possibilities in ourselves and others.”—Arianna Huffington “This inspiring book teaches you how to align your intention with the intention of others, and how, through shared strengths and talents, you have every right to expect greatness and set the highest goals and expectations.”—Deepak Chopra “Everyone talks about collaboration today, but the rhetoric typically outweighs the reality. Collaborative Intelligence offers tangible tools for those serious about becoming ‘system leaders’ who can close the gap and make collaboration real.”—Peter M. Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline “I have worked with Markova and McArthur for several years, focusing on achieving better results through intellectual diversity. Their approach has encouraged more candid debate and collaborative behavior within the team. The team, not individuals, becomes the hero.”—Al Carey, CEO, PepsiCo
Organizations are only as productive as the interactions that take place between individuals, teams and divisions. This book is a short, engaging guide for dramatically improving the quality of these interactions. The four 'keys' that Judith Katz and Frederick Miller provide offer a framework and a common language for creating an open, honest and supportive workplace, one where people aren't afraid to speak up and where everyone feels respected. The four keys are: - Lean into Discomfort: Be willing to move beyond your comfort zone, and help create an environment where others feel the same way. - Listen as an Ally: Try to find ways you can support fellow employee's ideas. - Share Your Intent and Intensity: Make it crystal clear how committed you feel to any idea you raise. - Share Street Corners: Your perspective - your corner - is only one point of view. Actively encourage people from other ""corners' to offer their perspectives.
Although doctors, nurses, and administrators differ widely in their training and outlook, they share the same patients and the goal of providing safe and effective care. This book provides novel strategies for fostering collaboration among these diverse professionals. Each approach is illustrated by a case example and supported with practical tips for implementation. These strategies will help healthcare teams leverage their unique talents, improve patient care, and reconnect with the ideals that attracted them to a career in healthcare.
Collaboration Begins with You Everyone knows collaboration creates high performing teams and organizations—and with today's diverse, globalized workforce it's absolutely crucial. Yet it often doesn't happen because people and groups typically believe that the problem is always outside: the other team member, the other department, the other company. Bestselling author Ken Blanchard and his coauthors use Blanchard's signature business parable style to show that, in fact, if collaboration is to succeed it must begin with you. This book teaches people at all levels—from new associates to top executives—that it's up to each of us to help promote and preserve a winning culture of collaboration. The authors show that busting silos and bringing people together is an inside-out process that involves the heart (your character and intentions), the head (your beliefs and attitudes), and the hands (your actions and behaviors). Working with this three-part approach, Collaboration Begins with You helps readers develop a collaborative culture that uses differences to spur contribution and creativity; provides a safe and trusting environment; involves everyone in creating a clear sense of purpose, values, and goals; encourages people to share information; and turns everyone into an empowered self-leader. None of us is as smart as all of us. When people recognize their own erroneous beliefs regarding collaboration and work to change them, silos are broken down, failures are turned into successes, and breakthrough results are achieved at every level.
