Teams & Culture Articles - Steve On Leadership

Planes, Chutes, and Seinfeld

Photo by Thomas Park Most of us are looking for anything to feel good about these days. One thing I do to feel good is to look for and appreciate high quality. Here are three "quality" observations this week involving planes, parachutes, and Jerry Seinfeld that all make me smile. A Tip of My Hat to American Airlines. On Saturday my wife, Patti, returned home from New Orleans where she had gone with a few high school friends. Even though the weather on this end was a little rough, all went well on her non-stop return flight to [...]

By Steve Wood|2022-03-16T13:30:32-04:00March 16th, 2022|Books, Just Plain Interesting, Team Leadership / Teamwork, Teams & Culture|

Watch The Stories in Your Head

Has this ever happened to you? I was at the gym yesterday on the Stairmaster when I saw a woman I thought I recognized named Linda. Within a nanosecond, though, I realized it could not be her because she passed away this past Fall. But then my brain shifted instantly into remembering Linda’s wonderful life story – but it was only my memory, my narrative of her life, not the total narrative. I’ll bet this happens to you, too – you see someone you think you recognize and it isn’t them, but then “pop”, you think about the person and [...]

By Steve Wood|2022-02-03T20:01:51-05:00February 3rd, 2022|Credibility & Inspiration, Team Leadership / Teamwork|

What Harry Potter Can Teach Us About Us

J.K. Rowling Photo by Daniel Ogren Sometimes our search for who we are is just plain entertaining. Because of my vintage, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that until recently I knew nothing about Harry Potter. I knew the author J.K. Rowling was a billionaire and that her Harry Potter franchise was huge. But that was it. Then I listened to a Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam about sorting hats and personality tests, and I got sucked into the Harry Potter vacuum. A few days after I heard this podcast I actually watched Harry Potter and the [...]

By Steve Wood|2020-05-14T15:38:51-04:00May 14th, 2020|Hiring & Team Composition, Learning Styles & Skills|

To Collaborate Think “Outward” – 6 Skills

What makes for effective collaboration? I pondered this question while reading Elton John’s new autobiography, Me, and seeing how he worked on hundreds of collaborations. I also re-read an article on how Pixar got started and the incredible collaboration required when they made their first full-length movie, Toy Story, in 1994. These stories made me curious about effective collaboration and here are two resources I discovered that deepened my understanding. Six Skills Needed to Think "Outward." In a recent Harvard Business Review article called Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration, Professor Francesca Gino, shares her research into collaboration at Pixar [...]

By Steve Wood|2020-03-05T13:39:55-05:00January 9th, 2020|Team Leadership / Teamwork, Teams & Culture|

Is Work-Life Balance Baloney?

I wonder if this young woman we saw working at a museum has a work-life balance – she doesn’t look very happy. More about her in a moment. Let me say this right up front - I have never really understood the work-life balance mantra that we employers are supposed to embrace as we try to recruit Millennials. To me it is like achieving Nirvana, that Buddhist transcendent state of mind when an individual has no suffering, no desires, no sense of self, and you are released from the “effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth.” I [...]

By Steve Wood|2019-09-27T08:36:04-04:00September 26th, 2019|Team Leadership / Teamwork, Teams & Culture, Uncategorized|

Can Improv Help You Coach Your Team?

Until a few weeks ago I never thought of connecting improv theater techniques, like what you might see on the show Whose Line is It Anyway? to coaching a team member. That changed when I listened to Alan Alda read his book If I Understood You, Would I Have this Look on My Face? . In this book Alda describes how he uses improv basics to teach scientists, professors, and doctors to relate and communicate better with their audiences, investors, students, and patients. Before I share how you might progress through a coaching session, let’s look at a few improv [...]

By Steve Wood|2018-09-21T09:18:22-04:00September 18th, 2018|Team Leadership / Teamwork, Teams & Culture|

No More Negative Waves, Coach

I lunched this week with a senior banker friend, who I used to work with many years ago. During lunch he shared a coaching challenge he is having that is the same challenge managers from several industries have shared with me – he has a younger commercial loan officer who is “okay,” but is not “stepping-up” – not trying to find larger loan customers and not taking responsibility for some things he should. Sound familiar to you? I suspected after talking with him that my friend was not a Connector Manager-Coach, but likely one of the other types of coaches [...]

By Steve Wood|2018-09-21T09:20:16-04:00August 30th, 2018|Team Leadership / Teamwork, Teams & Culture|

Hey Coach, What’s in This for Me?

If you played sports, I want you to think back to the best coach or coaches you ever had. If you didn’t play sports, think about the best manager you have had or have now. I’ll wait a minute – do it, I’m serious. Now, what was “it” they did that made you remember them? My “Mad Dog’ Coach I Remember. The one coach that stands-out for me was my high school football coach in Middletown, RI, the late Joseph “Joe” Magliocco, who we players referred to affectionately as “Mad Dog.” I was a military kid and my sister and [...]

By Steve Wood|2018-08-16T10:23:22-04:00August 16th, 2018|Credibility & Inspiration, Team Leadership / Teamwork, Teams & Culture|

Why Sellers Might Flip-out and Overvalue Things

Human behavior can make us flip sometimes. A few weeks ago when I was visiting our Rhode Island market I had interesting conversations with two of our team members. In the first one I learned that Dave, one of our Providence team members, was a part-time realtor. That by itself was not really notable, but what I learned next was. Dave told me that he specializes in being a “buyer’s broker”. When I asked him why, he said, “Because buyers are almost always happy after the closing and often invite me to their first house party. Sellers, though, are almost [...]

By Steve Wood|2017-11-30T10:48:31-05:00November 30th, 2017|Team Leadership / Teamwork|

I Am Grateful for Thanksgiving Laughter

Photo by Toa Heftiba Yesterday in Church our Pastor gave a children’s message focused on gratitude. After asking the children what they were grateful for, she passed around a clipboard asking each of us to share something we were grateful for. I wrote down “meaningful work”, which I am grateful for every day. Since yesterday as I thought about all the stress in the world these days, I have reminded myself how really grateful I am for good laughs – something we have always had around our family’s Thanksgiving table over the decades. So this week I thought [...]

By Steve Wood|2017-11-20T15:03:05-05:00November 20th, 2017|Credibility & Inspiration, Team Leadership / Teamwork|