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Meet Paul
Paul is an expert at showing corporate teams how to be more unified and more collaborative. His proven team building program is guaranteed to bust through the silos as he shows your team how to be as unified as the players in a great orchestra.
A-list corporations have been using Paul’s team building program for almost two decades, his audiences include Microsoft, RBC, Goodyear, ING, Heineken, FedEx, PwC and P&G.
What I learned about team chemistry that you need to know
Does your team have chemistry?
You know, that “thing” that many of us look for in our personal relationships, with our friends, or even where we work.
In our personal relationships, it’s what we look for to know that we’ve met someone special. It’s often more of a happenstance – we meet someone and it’s there - or it’s not. We can tell. It’s almost instantaneous. We have chemistry with them. We’re on the same page; it’s as if our minds are connected. There’s a certain ease.
However, chemistry is much more difficult to achieve at work.
We’re on the lookout for it. That’s because people don’t want to be on just any team, they want to be on a team that has chemistry.
Why? Because having chemistry between team members allows special things - things that surpass the ordinary - to happen. These are the things that get you excited about going to work everyday.
Having chemistry on your team is like having a team on steroids. You know it will be successful. You can conquer anything.
But it’s elusive, hiding somewhere. Can you make it happen?
Maybe. Just maybe…
What my pizza adventure taught me about people
This article was originally published in October of 2015 in my newsletter and has been re-published here just for you. It was originally titled: The Great Pizza Adventure.
6 things you need to combat chaos at work
I have spent a lifetime on teams --except I never called them teams.
The word “team” has a bit of a sports feel to it, and I was in the music world. So the “teams” I worked with were bands, ensembles, orchestras, theatre companies, quartets, and quintets.
Same idea though - they were groups – groups of people working towards a common goal.
Bosses, coaches, managers go to great lengths to assemble “teams” of people that they think will win, i.e. bring in the most profits, make sales, solve a problem, help them reach a goal.
But we know that despite the best efforts of those folks, not all teams are created equal.
So whenever I come across one that is working really well, I like to explore how they do it.
Recently I came across a team that did do what they were supposed to do in a very unlikely part of the world and in a very challenging situation.
You could do it by yourself but should you?
Maybe you’re a bit like me in that you’re pretty independent when it comes to doing your job.
After all, you and I have spent years becoming proficient, knowledgeable and responsible in order to be able to do what we do.
There’s a certain satisfaction, a sense of pride, when you can do things without relying on others.
As children, we were taught to be self-reliant – strong and capable. And it’s still going strong. Google “children and self–reliance” and you’ll see there are reams of information on how to create an independent child.
Then there are the quotes we often hear that re-enforce the necessity of being self-reliant.
“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.”Napoleon Bonaparte
You usually hear this when someone is complaining about a task they entrusted to someone else that didn’t go so well.
“Survival of the fittest” – This is a phrase that originated from Darwinian evolutionary theory, inviting us to make ourselves the brightest and the best in order to succeed.
“No one can really pull you up very high - you lose your grip on the rope. But on your own two feet, you can climb mountains. “Louis Brandeis
You get the idea.
But there’s a downside to all this.
Sometimes we can be too independent, so much so that it costs us.
How to make your people more cohesive.
I’ve been lucky. I've been part of a cohesive team. I have played in the same musical group for 27 years. The group is the Evergreen Club Gamelan.
Evergreen is not famous like U2, Coldplay or the Rolling Stones. I'm pretty sure you haven't heard of us. But we do have a bit of a following and a reputation for being great at what we do, including several CD’s, many concert tours and a couple of Hollywood film sound tracks.
While we’ve had many great things happen to us over the years, it hasn’t been the quickest path to financial freedom. Yet, many of the members have been in the band since it started more than 30 years ago.
Why is that? Why would people be part of something for so long when the financial incentives are low?
Because being part of a cohesive group is a powerful experience. It satisfies so much of what we look for in our work and, dare I say, even in our lives.