David Burkus Presents by David Burkus

01.02.2024

How To Manage Team Conflict

Conflict within a team is an inevitable part of any work environment. The diverse perspectives, ideas, and solutions that team members bring to the table can often lead to disagreements and conflicts. However, it's important to remember that team conflict...

12.19.2023

5 Questions Great Leaders Always Ask

It may seem like leaders need to have all the answers. Presumably, they became leaders by being smart, hardworking individual contributors who had the answers most of the time. But while knowing what to do is important, great leaders believe...

12.11.2023

How Can Teamwork Fail?

Teamwork is a constant in organizational life. You will work on teams for the majority of your career. Some of those teams will be an uplifting, engaging experience—but most will be an average or even a draining experience. Because most...

12.04.2023

6 Tips For Effective Teamwork

Teamwork is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results. However, effective teamwork doesn't just happen; it requires careful planning and implementation. This episode provides six tips for effective teamwork that will help you build a high-performing team. These...

11.20.2023

3 Tips To Improve Leadership Skills

Great leaders aren’t born, they’re made. While it’s tempting to look at stories of great leaders and just assume they’re received some divine or genetic gift that turned them into exemplars, the truth is much more nuanced. Leadership is a...

11.13.2023

Building Psychological Safety At Work

Psychological safety is the bedrock of a high-performing team. It's more than just trust; it's about fostering a climate of mutual trust and respect. Building psychological safety at work is not a one-time event, but a continuous process that requires...

11.06.2023

5 Ways To Motivate Your Team

Every team leader knows the importance of keeping their team motivated. The more motivated your team, the more productive they are, and the better results they deliver. Research suggests that the more powerful form of motivation is intrinsic, flowing from...

10.30.2023

Trust In High Performing Teams

Trust is the bedrock upon which successful teams are built. High-performing teams are characterized by an elevated level of trust. This trust in high performing teams manifests in four distinct ways: teams trust each other to deliver, they trust that...

10.23.2023

4 Types Of Team Conflict

Conflict on a team is inevitable. On diverse teams, where individuals come from varying backgrounds and possess differing opinions, those opinions will clash often in the form of disagreements and conflicts. Understanding the types of team conflict that can arise...

10.16.2023

The Foundation of High-Performing Teams

High-performing teams are often perceived as having extraordinary talents and capabilities, but they are not that different from regular teams—at least in terms of composition. Research indicates that high-performing teams are not just about having exceptionally talented individuals. Instead, they...

10.09.2023

Best Icebreakers For Team Meetings

Icebreakers are not just games or frivolous activities. Many people have memories of cringeworthy and awkward games played under the pretense of “team building.” I was one of them. But the research on icebreakers is pretty clear. Icebreakers are powerful...

10.02.2023

The Single Best Team Building Exercise

Team building and understanding each other's behavior are crucial elements in creating a strong team culture and creating a high-performing teams. But many leaders struggle to find and deliver effective team building exercises. There are many too choose from, and...

09.25.2023

What Great Managers Do Daily

Managers make the difference. Middle managers especially play a crucial role in employee engagement and performance. However, many managers lack proper preparation for their role, and companies often fail to invest in robust leadership training. Great managers understand that their...

09.18.2023

One-On-One Meetings With Employees

One-on-one meetings with employees are a crucial aspect of effective leadership. Organizations spent countless hours, money, and other resources trying to find the most qualified talent on board, and then spent more money to keep that talent motivated and engaged....

09.11.2023

How Does Diversity Affect Teamwork?

It’s often said by teams that “diversity is our strength.” We take for granted the idea that diverse teams bring more lived experiences, ideas, and solutions to the table. When asked, “How does diversity affect teamwork?” most leaders assume that...

09.04.2023

The Skill of Active Listening

Are you a good listener? You may think you’re a good listener—maybe someone even told you were a good listener. Or maybe not. As a leader, this is a very important question. So much of your ability to solve the problems...

08.28.2023

How To Earn Respect As A Leader

Margaret Thatcher once famously quipped that “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.” As a leader, the same could be said about respect. If you wonder if you’re team respects...

08.21.2023

What Great Leaders Do

In a world of growing complexity and seemingly constant crisis, we need great leaders more than ever. But when you look at the stories in the press or check the staggering numbers of burnout and disengagement in surveys, it seems...

08.14.2023

How to Make Employees Feel Respected

Leadership is about relationships. And the cornerstone of just about every relationship is respect. When employees feel respected, they are more engaged, motivated, and productive. But many managers struggle to convey their respect to team members. Consequently, colleagues often experience a...

08.07.2023

How To Overcome Resistance To Change

Employee resistance to change is one of the most perplexing and challenging issues that business executives encounter. Senior leaders have mapped out a change initiative and, in the process, gotten themselves excited about the future only to find the rest...

07.31.2023

Create A Sense Of Purpose On A Team

With work and life becoming more intertwined than ever, people increasingly seek purpose through work. So, leaders are being called upon to create a sense of purpose on a team. When team members feel that their work is connected to...

07.24.2023

Creating Shared Identity On A Team

Creating shared identity on a team is crucial to building a high-performing one. Shared identity refers to the extent to which team members feel the same sense of who they are as a designated group. It indicates whether or not...

07.17.2023

Create A Sense Of Belonging At Work

A sense of belonging on a team is crucial for its success and productivity. Belonging is that sense of acceptance and inclusion when people feel they can bring their authentic self to work. When team members feel included and valued,...

07.10.2023

How To Make People Feel Heard

One of the most common complaints among disengaged employees is about not feeling heard, not being seen or recognized for what they do, who they are and what they are experiencing. As a leader, a lot of this frustration may...

06.26.2023

How To Avoid Burnout At Work

Demands at work have been piling on in recent years. Including the demand on employees to continue to do more with less. And those demands come with a lot of potential burnout at work. Burnout at work is a series...

06.19.2023

How To Get A Team Aligned

So much of the struggle of working on teams comes down to one key task: getting a team aligned. Aligned teams lead to better engagement, performance, and retention. Getting and keeping a team aligned is a key task for leaders...

06.12.2023

Building A Culture Of Trust On A Team

Trust is the foundation of any successful team. Without trust, team members will not feel comfortable sharing their ideas, taking risks, or admitting their mistakes. Building a culture of trust on a team is crucial for achieving better results, higher...

06.06.2023

The Surprising Benefits of Conflict in the Workplace

Conflict in the workplace is often seen as negative, but it can be productive if managed well. In fact, lack of conflict on a team is the real negative. When teams lack conflict, it means that either everyone on the...

05.30.2023

What Makes a Team Smarter?

One of the most fascinating concepts in the study of teamwork and collaboration is the concept of collective intelligence—the idea that when teams collaborate exceptionally well, they tap into a reservoir of knowledge and abilities that exceed the sum of...

05.22.2023

What Science Tells Us About Motivating Your Team

Keeping a team motivated is the one of the most important aspects of a leader’s job. It’s also one of the most misunderstood aspects of a leader’s job. Many organizations still equate “motivating your team” with “designing the right incentives.”...

05.15.2023

What Makes Employees Happy At Work?

As long as people remain the center of organizations, attracting, retaining, and motivating those people—keeping them happy at work—will be one of the most important elements of a leader’s job. Work is central to our lives. For most adults, work...

05.08.2023

5 Habits Of High-Performing Teams

The world runs on teams. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another happen more efficiently and at higher quality because we work in teams. The number of teams we form, and the size of those teams...

04.30.2023

Why Great Teams Embrace Failure (and How to Do It)

Failure is feedback. And that maxim is nowhere more true than on teams. When individual team members or the whole team experiences a failure, how they respond can be the difference between a team that continuously improves and enhances performance,...

04.24.2023

4 Common Mistakes Managers Make

Managers make the difference. Senior leaders set strategy. But middle managers and front-line managers make the difference in whether that strategy gets executed…and in whether or not people are engaged and motivated in an organization. According to Gallup, 70% of...

04.17.2023

5 Simple Ways To Become A Great Leader

When you start out your career, you’re most often an individual contributor. And in that role your knowledge and skills are most important. But if you do that role well, you’ll likely be asked to consider becoming a leader. And...

04.10.2023

How To Be A Great Team Player

Our world requires collaboration. Just about every job now requires collaborating on teams and every employee’s calendar is full of evidence of collaboration. In one study, up to 85% of participants’ work weeks were spent working in direct collaboration or...

04.03.2023

3 Keys To Good Teamwork

Teams are how work gets done most of the time. In a knowledge work economy, up to 85% of an average employee’s time is spent in collaboration with other people—on one team or on multiple teams. And that makes effective...

03.27.2023

Building A Positive Team Culture

Teams are a central part of our work experience. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another happen more efficiently and at higher quality because we work in teams. The number of teams we form, along with...

03.20.2023

4 Ways To Build Inclusive Teams

At the core of teamwork is the need to solve problems. And when generating solutions, the more diverse a team you have, the more ideas you can generate. Sort of. The rationale behind diversity being a strength on teams is...

03.13.2023

4 Keys To Effective Team Communication

Communication is what makes a team a team. Otherwise, it’s just a group of individuals working away at their desks, handing work up to some unnamed boss. In reality, people don’t work in a vacuum. And much of one individual’s...

03.06.2023

Celebrate Small Wins On Teams

Progress is a powerful human motivator. But unfortunately, many teams mark progress only when projects are complete or big milestones are crossed. They don’t often celebrate small wins that build up to those big completions. But recent research suggests that small...

02.27.2023

What Makes A Psychologically Safe Team?

One of the most consistent findings in organizational behavior over the last decade has been just how significantly team performance is affected by psychological safety. A psychologically safe team is one where team members feel comfortable being themselves, expressing their...

02.20.2023

What Makes A Team Great?

Work is teamwork. And it’s no secret that some teams truly are greater than others. A recent meta-analysis combined research conducted on over 200,000 teams in a variety of industries in order to answer that question. Across 274 dimensions of performance...

02.13.2023

How To Foster Collaboration On Teams

As the world grows increasingly more complex, so will its challenges—both globally and for any given organization. To solve bigger and more complex problems, you need a bigger and more complex team. And to do that, you will need to...

02.06.2023

How To Build Trusting Teams

Learning how to build trust at work is critical if you’re going to be successful as an employee, a manager, or an effective leader. If you don’t have trust, it’ll be more difficult to communicate and coordinate with your peers...

01.30.2023

6 Leadership Myths That Are Ruining Your Team

We all arrive at leadership with certain preconceptions about what makes a successful leader. Sometimes we form an idea of what great leaders do based on historical leaders or modern-day leaders who are always getting media attention. Other times we form...

01.23.2023

5 Challenges All Teams Face

Teams face a lot of different challenges. Leading a team involves leading through many challenges. You’re given performance objectives. You map out a plan of execution with your team. But pretty quickly, you will run into challenges—both seen and unseen....

01.16.2023

Developing Emotional Intelligence As A Leader

We’ve known about the importance of developing emotional intelligence as a leader for some time now, but there are still some misconceptions about exactly what emotional intelligence is (or is not) and how to increase it. Emotional intelligence isn’t just...

01.09.2023

5 Questions Leaders Should Always Be Asking

Leaders don’t need to have all the answers. That sounds counterintuitive. There is a lot of pressure on leaders to have the right answers and to solve problems that team members can’t solve on their own. In fact, most leaders were...

01.02.2023

How To Motivate The Unmotivated

Motivation can vary wildly on a team. At any given time, a few people might be highly motivated, while others are totally unmotivated. Ideally, there are times where everyone is motivated at once, but sadly there may be times when...

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