Smartbrief

Don’t Overload Your Team Ecosystem With Star Players

August 31, 2017

You want a team loaded with star players, right? What leader wouldn’t want a team filled with high-performing folks?  Isn’t a team stacked with rocks stars is a good thing? It depends. Research into team performance reveals a surprising element: you can have too much of a good thing. Consider the study reported in Gartner’s […]

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4 Tips for Staying Humble

January 16, 2017

One of the biggest egos in the cartoon world belongs to the character Plankton from the Nickelodeon cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.  Plankton’s over-inflated sense of worth (and his never-ending quest to steal the coveted Krabby Patty recipe) leads him to run roughshod over the inhabitants of Bikini Bottom. To wit: It’s funny in cartoon-land. But the […]

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4 Ways to Make Better Leadership Decisions

December 5, 2016

Kendra* is a newly promoted vice president of IT at a rapidly growing mid-sized firm. She’s been working overtime to staff up her department to meet the demands of her company’s growth. With each job candidate Kendra interviews, she feels the pressure to make job offers quickly. Her team is swamped, but she knows that […]

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10 Simple Phrases that Cast Sunlight

October 12, 2016

Last week I wrote about how we are naturally drawn towards positive people because they inspire us. In nature, that’s called the “heliotropic effect,” which describes how plants grow or move towards sunlight. This week, I penned a similar piece, but this time from a leadership angle. I bet you can easily think of managers […]

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Are Unspoken Issues Creating Mischief on Your Team?

September 29, 2016

When the results of Google’s research on team effectiveness (called “Project Aristotle”) were revealed earlier this year, the conclusion was surprising: the best teams have just one thing in common. Factors such as clear goal-setting and team member dependability are certainly important, but they’re not what definitively sets great teams apart from their average counterparts. […]

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