Category Archives: Food for Thought

Food for Thought: Team Dysfunction

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Teamwork is the ultimate competitive advantage.  Fostering teams is a direct route to higher performance and a healthy organization.  While teams may encounter all sorts of conflict and discord, Patrick Lencioni (author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and business expert) suggests that the obstacles to team success boil down to five issues:

  1. Absence of Trust
  2. Fear of Conflict
  3. Lack of Commitment
  4. Avoidance of Accountability
  5. Inattention to Results

Here are some articles we’ve been reading while thinking about ways to keep our team healthy and successful:

Click here to read about Team Dysfunction

Patrick Lencioni has created an assessment to measure your teams’ strengths and weaknesses in these five key areas – allowing for targeted improvement.

Try it with your team today!

Food for Thought: Interpersonal Influence

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When thinking about behavior in business, there are many ways to measure and compare the way we naturally act.  One common metric is assertiveness – whether we are inclined toward passive, passive-aggressive, aggressive, or assertive behavior.  All of these styles have an effect on those around us, and our relationships with them.  We need to be aware of the behaviors we are exhibiting in order to shape positive relationships.

Click here to learn more about Interpersonal Influence – a collection of articles about how our behavior effects others, and how we can use that knowledge to improve our relationships.

Available at the HRDQ Store, the Interpersonal Influence Inventory is a learning tool that will show individuals their Influence Style, and provide guidance on how to increase their assertiveness to produce successful interactions in and out of the workplace.

The Interpersonal Influence Inventory can be used as a standalone training instrument, or it can be incorporated into a more comprehensive program on communication or leadership.  It also makes an effective component in training programs for a variety of topics, including coaching, management, and supervisory skills.

With the Interpersonal Influence Inventory, you’ll be well on your way to improved communication and better results throughout your organization.  Get your team started today!

Food for Thought: Leadership

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A recent survey indicates that leadership skills are the highest training priority for U.S. businesses in 2012.

Here are some article we’ve been reading about leadership training.

At HRDQ, we believe that interpersonal skills are instrumental to the development of leaders. Check out HRDQ’s LeadingSuccess, a program that is proven to develop the interpersonal skills that managers, supervisors, and team leaders need to have a direct effect on employee performance.

Food for Thought: Emotional Intelligence

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Managing your emotions doesn’t always mean keeping them in check. By understanding our emotions – what causes them, how we show them, and what affect they have on ourselves and others – we can make better decisions about how we interact with those around us.

HRDQ has recently made available a great online tool for measuring and improving your Emotional Intelligence. The Emotional Intelligence Skills Assessment (EISA) measures your “EQ” on four scales: Perceiving, Managing, Decision Making, and Influencing. Our staff all took the assessment recently, and we’ve all found it to be a great platform for reflection and self-improvement, as well as a reminder of how important emotional intelligence is in, and out of, the workplace.

Here are some articles we’ve been reading about emotional intelligence.

How will you improve your EQ?

Food for Thought: ROI

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How do you know that training is worth it?

We know that training and professional development benefit employees.  But how does that benefit compare to the time and resources put forth by organizations?

There are many factors to consider when answering this question – a lot of which are qualitative measures.  Author and ROI expert Patti Phillips offers methods to determine the return on investment in training programs in her new book, The Bottomline on ROI.

As developers of training products, we’ve been thinking about ROI, too.  Here are some articles we’ve been reading:

http://goo.gl/qm9IH

How does your organization maximize ROI?

Food for Thought: Values

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Does your company have a common organizational language for values? Our staff recently played our newest product, The Values Edge System, An Exercise in Personal and Team Discovery, and that has us talking about what it means to connect personal values to organizational strategy. We’ve put together a stack of articles on values in the workplace for you. Do you know what values drive your actions? What about the values that drive your organization?

Check out some of the articles we’ve been reading about values here.