Category Archives: Teamwork

Leadership Mints Series Sampler: Align Your Teams To Teem

You’re the leader of a baseball team packed with enormous hitting talent: three to four times the hitting talent on most teams. But wait.

All’s not well in this hitting paradise.

Your hot-hitting team, fortified with eight players hitting over .313, finishes the season in last place –40 games BEHIND the winning team in your division.

No way!!

That’s so far-fetched that could never happen.

No way, you say.

Just check the baseball history books.

You’ll find the ragged-pitching, hot-hitting Philadelphia Phillies in 1930 suffered through 102 lost games and finished 40 games behind the pennant- winning St. Louis Cardinals.

What happened?

These  Philadelphia Phillies were bat rich and pitch poor. Their hitters were blazing hot. But their pitchers were freezing cold.

The Phillies pitching staff gave up a whopping 6.7 earned runs per game and allowed more than 500 hits more than the Cardinals.

Teams teem with balance.

No wonder aligning talent throughout the organization into a well-knit, cohesive, balanced team is a key leadership skill.

To enhance your skills in aligning teams to teem with balance, consider purchasing a 280-page book that is available now on Amazon.com.

It is titled THINKING LIKE A LEADER.

That book on thinking like a leader is the first of three books in The Leadership Mints Series designed to help leaders refresh their feeling for leading with short stories (called Leadership Mints) you can grab ‘n go  like a candy mint.

The two others books focus on leading with empathy LOVING LIKE A LEADER and leading with civility SPEAKING LIKE A LEADER.

 

FLOWER POWER: BEE-ING A LEADER

Think of yourself as a bee pollinating flowers every morning when you make your Friendly Five rounds. That’s the way Walt Disney characterized his leadership style.

Disney compared himself to a bumble bee “going from one area in the studio to another to stimulate everybody.”

Pollinating the blossoming of others is an instructive metaphor for the essence of a loving leader.

No wonder the most effective leaders schedule no formal meetings for at least the first hour “in the office.”

(This is an excerpt of a newly relaunched book titled
LOVING Like a Leader now available on Amazon.com

That’s why the most effective leaders invest in the Friendly Five every day Continue reading

Teams Teem With Balance

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to spark teamwork. Reading time: 3:23

      You’re the leader of a baseball team packed with enormous hitting talent: three to four times the hitting talent on most teams.

      baseball_pitching_gripsBut wait. All’s not well in this hitting paradise. Your hot-hitting team, fortified with eight players hitting over .313, finishes the season in last place –40 games BEHIND the winning team in your division.

      No way!! That’s so far-fetched that could never happen. No way, you say. Just check the baseball history books.

      You’ll find the ragged-pitching, hot-hitting Philadelphia Phillies in 1930 suffered through 102 lost games and finished 40 games behind the pennant- winning St. Louis Cardinals. What happened?

       These  Philadelphia Phillies were bat rich and pitch poor. Their hitters were blazing hot. But their pitchers were freezing cold. The Phillies pitching staff gave up a whopping 6.7 earned runs per game and allowed more than 500 hits more than the Cardinals.

     Teams teem with balance.  That’s why the most effective leaders realize you need the balance of both the offense and defense to win in sports, in business, in life.

Continue reading

Making Yourself Heard in the Jungle

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to collaborate more productively. Reading time: 2:02

       Swinging from the vine, Tarzan’s yell trumpeted throughout the jungle, blasting his personal signature in the movies with an ear-piercing, attention-commanding roar.

      tarzan Yet in reality, Tarzan’s yell was comprised of three different male voices collaborating together to record cinema history.

      Tarzan’s Scream Team is an instructive metaphor for the way the most effective leaders collaborate to assure their collective message is heard, understood and acted upon by the broadest set of followers.

      Collaboration enhances overall performance. In the jungle and in the sky. Take a look at the North Star. It’s revelatory to note that

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TEAMWORK: Reflecting Off Each Other

By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to strengthen your focus on teamwork. Reading time: 3:23

          Look closely at a single feather of a peacock’s tail and you’ll see a dull brown color. But, collectively, those dull colored individual feathers display a spectacular array of colors. a peacock extraOut of many individually lifeless feathers comes collectively one brilliant blast of beauty.

         Physicists call this phenomenon “Diffraction.” The colorful plume blossoms like a bouquet of flowers from the way light is diffracted from and through each of the other dull brown feathers.

          Leaders call this phenomenon – the power of teamwork- where the power of many strengthens the scope and significance of an individual entity. Out of many, one. E pluribus Unum.

          No wonder the most effective leaders know how to fan the peacock’s plume—COLLECTIVELY– rather than simply focus on managing each feather individually. After all, an ant weighs one ten-thousandth of an ounce yet collectively all ants on earth weigh more than all the humans on earth. Continue reading