Joseph Flahiff

"Working in a team is not always something easy" is the understatement of the year. In my work with teams as a teamwork expert and coach I find that real collaboration is rare. The best we often can hope for is cooperation, but what I most often see is actually what 3 year old kids do before they learn to share, it is called Side-By-side-play. This is, I won't mess with your stuff, you won't mes... Read more

The best thing you can do is to ask the people who work in the warehouse to start thinking about it and on a regular, periodic basis review and discuss how they might work better. I encourage people to put a meeting on a calendar, once a month at least to come together for an hour or 90 minutes (typically takes a good 90 minutes) to discuss ideas for improvement.
The reason to ask the people wor... Read more

Here are some thoughts on creating a Flexible workplace:

Above all creating culture takes time. Don't think you are going to be able to enact a policy and things will change. culture is the collective understanding of the group as to how people will react to specific situations. As a leader you must talk about it, a lot.

If you aren't talking about your new flexible workplace culture so m... Read more

Leaders believe that multi-tasking is a good idea. They believe it is better for their teams to start lots of projects, and they think it is a good idea for them to work on multiple projects at the same time. It isn't! Multitasking makes it take longer to accomplish any project for some key reasons.

1) you lose time to context switching. When we switch contexts we loose focus, we have to pa... Read more

Here are some thoughts happy to expand on these over the phone if you would like:

Verbal acknowledgement is one of the strongest forms of recognition and is completely free. But it can be hard to do. Try this. Ask one of your team members, "Can you help me out. Who are two people who have done something that you really appreciate?" They will name a couple. Then you go to those people, individua... Read more

I am Joseph Flahiff, Founder of Whitewater Projects, Author of Being Agile in a Waterfall World: a practical guide for complex organizations. I have been quoted in and written for SearchCIO, and TechRepublic. I also blog for www.CIO.com. As a consultant my clients include: Tableau Software, Expedia, Wirestone Media Marketing, and the Washington State Office of the CIO and The Washington State De... Read more