Team Building Information |
|
Team Journaling
The very effective tool of keeping a journal can be used in your workplace as well as at home. It is a powerful tool that can enhance our lives and support our personal and work well-being. Whether you journal your personal work experiences and goals, or use team journaling, journaling can easily be applied to your work environment. The idea of team journaling is to incorporate journaling as a means to assess and track past, current, or future projects and goals. To get started, pick a team moderator, the person(s) who all journaled information will pass through. They will coordinate and monitor the journaling process to keep it on track, and moving in the team's designated direction and purpose. As a group decide the purpose and goals of the team journal. Then date and write those down. Next decide what vehicle you will use to record your journaling in. You can use a blank book, and pass it from person to person or keep it in a designated place. You can journal on the Internet via a group list, at http://www.yahoo.com, or on a web log, called a blog, see http://www.blogger.com. You can also create a private message board on your company's website. Any of these systems allow an exchange of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experiences of the goals and directions you have already determined. You will want to set some boundaries that will need to be respected and adhered to during this process. Date these and write them right under your purpose and goals. For example, there should be no personal attacks regarding ideas or personalities. Keep what is a fact separate from what is a feeling. Having feelings is OK, just don't confuse what is a fact and what is a feeling. At all times agree that respectful expression and disagreement is adhered to. You may want to limit the amount of content anyone can journal at any one time, say a paragraph, or a page. Set any other project guidelines that the team decides to incorporate. As you begin your team journaling project you may find that the original purpose and goal changes or evolves. You may also find your guidelines need to be added to or modified. In your journaling process meeting in person or via conference can be added to update and relate how the journaling process is working or being effective toward the team goal. Creating a series of questions related to the team goal and purpose can be an effective way to start the journal process. These questions can focus and motivate individuals, and inspire the creative writing and thinking process. Or making statements and asking if these are agreed to or not is another way to start the process. The team journal can become an integral part of any companies process to achieve greater clarity and focus about purpose, goals and intentions. The process of team journaling also can create new relationships with the people involved. Copyright 2003 Doreene Clement All Rights Reserved Doreene Clement is the creator of, The 5 Year Journal, a journal where you can journal your life in one book for 5 years. You can tour the book at http://www.the5yearjournal.com [email protected] 480.423.8095 Feel free to pass this along to your friends. If you want to see my column, About Journaling, to subscribe http://www.the5yearjournal.com
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Intercultural Team Building Internal business structures have been radically transformed over the past few decades. Changes in areas such as communication and transportation technology and shifts towards global interdependency have resulted in companies becoming increasingly international and therefore intercultural. Trust: A Critical Factor to Your Teams Success True or false? Teams that practice good teamwork contribute to an organization's success. Building a Successful Team Once you've set a goal for yourself as a leader - whether it is to create your own enterprise, energize your organization, build a church, or excel in sports - the challenge is to find good people to help you accomplish that goal. Gathering a successful team of people is not only helpful, it's necessary. How To Help A Sick Team Become Healthy Team Building Question: Manage Expectations to Reduce Everyday Frustrations Just today my partner Russ and I sat down to hash out a nagging frustration. It took a little bantering back and forth [not without some rise in emotional tension I'll have you know] until we got at the heart of the issue. Unmet expectations! Stop and look back at the last time you were frustrated with your life or business partner. Odds are it was because he/she did not meet your expectations. Expectations of? Leaving the toilet seat up or down Making the bed Meeting you at the restaurant on time And so on. These expectations can be small or large, simple or complex, pertinent or absurd; the point is that somewhere in your head you expected something different to happen than what did happen. So, most every time you find your level of frustration on the rise it is because your partner acted contrary to one of your myriad expectations. Now that you've become more or re-aware of this what can you do about it?besides hoot and holler? The first step is to identify what the expectation is What Every Manager, Parent, and Teacher Should Know About How to Unify Employees, Families, & Youth Project Head Start has been successful not only for the youthful students, but for the teachers, supporting staff, and families as well. My first job while still in college was as a Teacher's Assistant during the summer of 1968. Years later I was a Mental Health Consultant with Head Start in the US Virgin Islands. Although a bit bias, I have nothing but respect for Project Head Start and their teachings. Empower Your Trainees One of the most memorable quotes that I heard from a trainer came from a man I knew named Rizal: Franchisor Award Programs; Ideas and Innovation Franchisors should also be heavy on the award side of motivational material. Award certificates and plaques should be given out to franchisees who perform above expectations. Each franchisor needs to take a look at their business model and find ways to best motivate the team. In our franchise company we came up with several ideas and continually innovated to find new ways to use awards to strengthen or franchise family. Awards will be given out for: Leadership ? Do The Simple But Important Things Why do we human beings complicate things? Is it that we don't believe that simple things work. From years of working with leaders at all levels and many different sectors here are the simple yet powerful steps you must take if you want to be a brilliant leader. Feedback - How to Make it Effective Let's look at the detail of giving feedback. Whether you want to reinforce behaviour - Confirming feedback or change unacceptable behaviour - Productive feedback, there are certain steps you need to follow to make it work. How Leaders Unlock Potential in Teams Leaders are faced with unlocking the potential in the people that they lead and motivating the individual is a key part of this process. Motivation is not something that is done to an individual as they already posses it. What a leader does, to benefit the whole team, is to release, or unlock, it. Here are seven ways leaders unlock potential in people. Working as a Winning Team It's a great sunny day so it's time to get out and enjoy the weather. Many of us would like to, but we have projects due, tasks that need to be done, people that we need to see, and money that needs to be made. What if your company gave you that time off as compensation for the great effort that you gave to the team to finish a project on time? Creating a Winning Staff Team As a business owner, I've had staff come and go over the years: some have done extremely well, and others not so well. During the time I was involved in running my business, I found some weaknesses in myself that tremendously affected things that were going on, especially from a negative point of view. It was not uncommon for me, whenever something was not going well, to ignore it. Sometimes I would hope it would go away, or maybe ask somebody else to solve it for me, whatever was going on. Team Building Seminars: Why New Teams Struggle With over 25 years of research and experience, we have observed countless groups struggle with activities in our Team Building Seminars. These groups all had the same common denominators, whether they were strangers or intact work teams, that became apparent during the first activity in which they were asked to work effectively together. You are Excused from Training Trainers, please picture this... You are presenting in a new location to a new group. You are prepared for a one day workshop. Your materials are ready and you are "on". Things seem to be going well. You are building a nice rapport with the class and the pace of the training is right on schedule. About two hours into your day one participant starts to demonstrate disruptive behavior. This individual begins talking to the person beside him during the lecture. A few minutes later, during an activity this gentleman is doing everything in his power to take people's attention away from the subject at hand. As the calm cool trainer you are, you try to work with him to no avail, and his behavior is really starting to affect the others in the workshop. You've got about one hour to lunch, and you are now behind on your timeline?For the sake of the training, what do you do? Leadership, Genuine, Meaningful and Productive One of the best lessons I have learned is the impact and importance of leadership. It is so easy to identify dysfunctional leadership in a company (or of a governmental entity!). Many times, the common misconception is that the executives in the "ivory tower" sit around and relax, while the "workers" do all the work. Of course, happy and motivated employees are essential to a company (I still teach that in seminars that I conduct). But I have observed and learned that it is the leadership in an enterprise that makes the difference ... and that is not exclusive to commerce. Effective Brainstorming Most managers simply herd some people in a room with a flip chart and call it a brainstorming session. Yet there is a definite process that maximizes the size and quality of the idea pool. While there are hundreds of valid techniques for doing this, below are just some of the important concepts leaders should consider. How To Encourage Ideas From Your Team At Meetings You're at a meeting with key staff. You want some new ideas to address the topic. Looking around at this group of creative, ambitious, bright people, you say, "Let's get some fresh ideas on this. Who's got something?" Building Successful Work Relationships--Playing In The Same Sandbox Remember playing in your childhood sandbox? If you enjoyed being outside for most of the day, you could play in the sandbox for hours on end-shaping and pouring the sand or mixing it with a little water to form a castle or hill. Children enjoy playing with sand or dirt and learn at an early age how to make the most of this play time activity. 12 Tips and Reminders for Team Members To Enjoy Their Team Experiences More 12 Tips and Reminders for Team Members To Enjoy Their Team Experiences More |
home | site map |
© 2005 |