I was directed to this article in the New York Times that summarizes a study that was done on the effectiveness of online learning as compared to the traditional classroom approach. Check it out.

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom

Stephen Goldberg

Leadership Question of the week of October 05, 2009

How can a leader facilitate the process of getting people to work and collaborate better together even though they may not necessarily like each other?

Answer:

It is often difficult to avoid assigning people who dislike each other to a team that needs to work together in the achievement of a specific objective.

It is evident that people in a team who dislike each other will cause the teams to perform below the level of success of a more compatible team, let alone a dream team. The degree of inferior performance will depend essentially on two factors, namely:

1)      the number of persons disliked in a team

2)      the degree of existing dislike

The challenge for the leader who works with the team is to get the team to overcome disliking each other. This may be more or less difficult to achieve. It may be less difficult when the leader can substitute some persons. It will be more difficult when substitution is not possible for any reason, such as the need to keep a person on the team because he is the only expert available for the particular situation.

Whatever the particular situation, the better qualified the leader is as a facilitator the more effective is he going to be in getting a team to improve individual as well as collective performance.

Many times leaders and managers are faced with people in their teams who do not like each other and get along well. This can be a big impediment to teamwork and improved performance.

This week's leadership and team development question is

How can a leader facilitate the process of getting people to work and collaborate better together even though they may not necessarily like each other?

Please post your answers here in a our forum in the members area that you can join for free.

Last weeks leadership and team development question of the week was

How does a leader get his team to improve performance by utilizing the qualities and strengths of each person?

Answer from Fritz Glaus.

The question implies that a good leader is successful with his team in two ways.

1. Team members are aware of their individual and collective qualities and strengths, i.e. they know not just themselves but also each other, because a high performance team requires a team spirit based on open and genuine exchanges between all members. It  is through the exchange of personal information between members that they are each enabled to fully appreciate and fully utilize their personal qualities and strengths.

2. The team improves performance on an ongoing basis without having to be reminded continually by the leader about the need to perform. This means that the leader has established an atmosphere of trust between him and his team.

A leader who achieves the above demonstrates the participative style of leadership. In other words, he is not bossy or directive but asks for views and opinions of this team members. He does not continuously check up on what and how individual team members are doing but works on the basis of mutual trust. This is particularly effective under difficult economic conditions where maximum efficiency and time saving is required, because the leader gets better and quicker performance from his team and also saves time for effective planning and executive innovation on his part.

All the above combines to make the leader an exceptional one in to-day’s world where most leaders are action types who like to issue directives and who wrongly assume that they don’t have time to invest in the practice of participative leadership.

Fritz Glaus

Here is a link to an article on leadership from Forbes.com that was written by a leader who seems to be doing a good job doing what Fritz suggests.

How To Stay Free And Creative As Your Company Grows

Five steps for not getting swamped by the business side of business.