Mark Samuel

In the dynamic landscape of modern workplaces, fostering a sense of unity, collaboration, and shared purpose is necessary for the growth of any organization. This is where competitive team-building activities can offer a strategic approach to not only boosting employee morale but also enhancing productivity. This blog dives deep into competitive team building, unveiling its …

5 Competitive Team Building Activities in the Workplace to Boost Morale and Productivity Read More »

Team building plays a crucial role in fostering strong relationships and boosting productivity. Team building helps team members develop trust, communication, and collaboration skills, which are important for working well together. A strong team can accomplish more than a group of individuals, as team members can share their strengths and support each other in spite …

Know Your Team Better with These Essential Questions for Team Building Read More »

Management consultant Peter Drucker said, “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Tracking performance sheds light on our businesses and provides direction for making effective decisions. Common assessment factors include leading indicators for success, key performance indicators and anything required by regulatory and licensing bodies. However, not knowing how to read those measurements and analyze …

How Executive Teams Can Measure Success Like The Best Read More »

Building team relationships sounds wonderful as a starting point for creating a high-performance team, but in reality, it doesn’t work. Building “relationship trust” doesn’t directly translate to “execution trust” or what I now refer to as “credibility”—the most essential quality for high-performance execution. A team of 30 managers in three different functional teams had so …

Building Team Relationships For Higher Accountability Read More »

One of the tools that project managers use to help them manage their projects better and more efficiently is a work breakdown structure (WBS). You might have heard the term work breakdown structure and had questions about how you could implement it on your next project. We’ll define a WBS, the types, and its elements …

What is a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)? Read More »

When we were forced to leave the office and take our work home, a lot of leaders were concerned about the productivity and accountability that might be lost from this new working environment. However, we learned that people were much more accountable and dedicated to their jobs while working from home than was ever thought …

The Overlooked Secret To Retention: How To Build Familial Teams Read More »

For decades, corporate team building has consisted of style inventories, communication skill building and teamwork games like ropes courses, trust falls and escape rooms. While these activities might bring a team closer together as friends and are certainly fun activities, they have little if anything to do with actually building job-related teamwork.  Building effective teams …

The Missing Pieces In Team Building Read More »

In my 35 years of consulting with business teams to lead breakthrough change efforts, I’ve learned one surprising thing: Professional business teams act like amateurs! If you want to learn about high-performing teams, pay attention to teams that have to perform well together. The success of sports teams, dance companies and music groups depends on their teamwork, …

Why Most Business Teams Are Amateurs, And How To Become Professional Read More »

High-performing teams are the goal of every company. A team or whole organization that is hyper-focused on its goals, achieving exceptional business results, usually consists of people with specialized skills and complementary expertise. They work together at the highest levels to consistently outperform their competitors.    If your team couldn’t currently be described as high-performing, fear …

6 Best High Performing Teams Books Read More »

For a business to be successful, it’s essential that its employees effectively communicate and work together to ensure that tasks are done correctly. But language is a complicated art, and miscommunication can always occur, even when people are trying to make themselves as clear as possible.  But while miscommunication can’t always be avoided- especially in …

5 Workplace Miscommunication Examples (& How to Avoid Them) Read More »

For most business owners to have continued success, they need to employ individuals they believe can help further their company’s growth. However, even with dedicated personnel, it can still be challenging to find the right fit. Building a successful team is more than just putting talented people together and saying, “Here, figure it out.” It …

5 Best Examples of High-Performing Teams Read More »

“The Last Dance,” an HBO documentary about the Chicago Bulls, tells us a lot about teamwork. When Michael Jordan first joined the Bulls, he was the star of the team. He was excellent at his craft and they won more games because of it. But they never won the NBA championship. That is, until Phil …

How to Be a Team Player in Business Read More »

A renowned basketball coach once said that the inherent strength of a team is found in each member. And that the unique strengths of each member are what makes the group a team. Phil Jackson was talking about the importance of multidisciplinary team synergy relative to basketball players using different skills and tactics in unison …

The Importance of Multidisciplinary Teams Read More »

By Mark Samuel – Organizations are only as successful as the teams who move them to success. The difference between being a high-functioning business team and a low-functioning business team is the difference between achieving breakthrough success and producing stagnant results. It’s the difference between experiencing team harmony and getting stuck in interpersonal conflict. It’s …

7 Habits of High Functioning Teams Read More »

By Mark Samuel – While many companies are starting to plan their journeys back to the office, many are making coming back to work optional for their employees and some organizations are simply staying virtual. In my 35 years of helping organizations build high-functioning teams, I never once thought virtual team building was possible, let …

The Best Virtual Team Building Activities Read More »

Cross-functional teams haven’t always been popular, but nowadays we know organizations can’t get breakthrough results without them. When departments operate in functional silos, they simply don’t have the knowledge, awareness, or resources to help the organization move to the next level. An organization that doesn’t have cross-functional teams is like a person whose arms and …

Cross-Functional Teams: Challenges & Tips Read More »

By Mark Samuel – A cross-functional team is any team that includes members of multiple departments.Creating cross-functional teams in your organization can be a great way to reduce breakdowns, improve business execution, and attain breakthrough business results. But you have to be aware of the 5 common dysfunctions of cross-functional teams if you are going …

5 Dysfunctions of Cross-Functional Teams Read More »

Companies of all sizes benefit from what successful start-ups already know. Cross-functional teams can be a goldmine of innovative ideas and productive collaboration. Suppose you can minimize the dysfunction of creating teams with employees from different departments and different levels. In that case, you can get a lot done that benefits the whole company and …

Tips for Developing a Cross-Functional Team Read More »

Cross-functional teams (CFTs) are groups of employees from different functional areas within a company or business. Another word for cross-functional is cross-departmental. For example, a CFT could include individuals from marketing, sales, research and development (R&D), engineering, human resources (HR), and more. These teams can serve as an organization’s primary hierarchical structure or as working …

What Is A Cross Functional Team Read More »

By Mark Samuel – What is a Cross-Functional Team? Business organizations are riddled with silos. A silo is when functional teams or departments don’t communicate or work with each other, and act as solo entities within the same organization. This causes many problems within the organization such as communication and execution breakdowns, wasted resources, and …

6 Advantages of Cross-Functional Teams Read More »

By Mark Samuel – Business teams are always looking to be better together, to be more productive, to get along better, and to achieve successful business results. One of our favorite ways to get breakthrough business results quickly and easily is to form a cross-functional team of managers. This article will give you a step …

How to Set Up a Cross-Functional Team in 5 Steps Read More »

By Mark Samuel – What are team agreements? Team agreements are agreements that are co-created by the members of a team about how to behave, communicate, and work together on a team. Related Article: The Missing Link for Business and Culture Transformation Business teams are often treated like a group of individuals working together, rather …

Team Agreements: What You Need to Know Read More »

By Mark Samuel & Stacia Topping – Agile has proven to be such a valuable process and tool for technology companies that organizations in other industries have adopted it with success, as well. But our world continues to change, causing the business environment to speed up, become even more integrative and require an accelerated need …

How Agile Can Transform Itself For The New Decade Read More »

By Mark Samuel – What is a business team? A business team is any team that works together for a common goal, typically for a business organization or company.Business teams aren’t any different from other teams like sports teams or musical groups. When looking at Organizational Development around how to effectively operate as a business …

Business Teams 101: Definition, Building, & Execution Read More »

By Mark Samuel – In the field of organizational consulting, there are certain principles about achieving high performance that are considered common knowledge. I received my master’s degree in organizational development, and when I began my career as a consultant, I applied the principles and practices I’d learned in university and from mentors exactly as …

Common Knowledge About High Performance — Debunked! Read More »

By Mark Samuel – We’ve all experienced team relationship breakdowns, especially at work in our teams and organizations. We try to address those team relationship breakdowns by implementing teamwork and trust-building exercises, style assessments and communication processes. But so often, those relationship breakdowns don’t experience any permanent shift. Why is that? This article will help …

Team Relationships: How to Understand & Improve Them Read More »

By Mark Samuel – The word “priority” can often be a point of confusion for leaders and employees at all levels within an organization. Some of the common comments I hear include “We have too many priorities,” “We make everything a priority,” “We decide on a few priorities, but don’t stick to them” and “We …

Removing the Confusion About Business Priorities Read More »

By Mark Samuel – Most team consultants talk focus on individual habits, styles of communication, and personal accountability, but hardly anyone ever mentions team habits. “I felt like I was banging my head against a wall the last two years. We’ve implemented team building programs, Agile processes, and competency-based training, but while a few pockets …

Team Habits: The Missing Link for Business Transformation Read More »