As a team leader you have two distinct leadership responsibilities - Managing the Individuals and Managing the Team. Leaders who fixate on managing the individuals tend to have happy teams which unfortunately under-perform in terms of deadlines, quality, customer satisfaction and budgets! Leaders who obsess on managing the team may hit most of these targets but at the expense of team member Alienation, Burnout, Compliance, Disinterest and eventually Exiting (easy to remember - ABCDE!). Great Team Leaders manage both responsibilities. Here is a simple framework with a nice supporting spreadsheet to help you assess and improve your leadership:

I have written quite a lot about the importance of a team's beliefs on their performance and have published some modest research into the beliefs which differentiate 'high performing' teams from other teams. Until today I have not published the questionnaire which underpinned this research. I am now making this questionnaire available here and also, on request, a free spreadsheet tool to help you 'number crunch' and analyse the results from using the beliefs questionnaire with your own teams.

An important free tool which I provide with my new book 'A Systematic Guide to High Performing Teams' is a Team Process Health Check Spreadsheet written in Microsoft Excel. The spreadsheet allows you to rapidly assess each of 16 important team process elements on a scale of 0-3 ranging from 'totally absent' to 'present and effective'.

By observing newly formed and existing teams playing business simulations I have learned some important insights into how team-working 'evolves' and offer here some specific ideas on how you might accelerate this evolution in your own organizational teams.

On the road to Effective Team Collaboration there seems to be two intermediate phases of 'na?ve collaboration' which many teams seem to go through - Hyper-Communication and Over-Delegation.

Team Game Plans are essential when your team is faced with a new and challenging task, such as a business simulation game. To formulate a Game Plan the team must quickly look at their goals and targets and then, based on a shared set of priorities, values, mental models and working practices, come up with a plan for achieving them.

The word 'RAPPORT' is an excellent mnemonic for remembering the 7 key elements of a great Team Game Plan as RAPPORT is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: 'A close and harmonious relationship in which the groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well.'

So to have RAPPORT in your team you need to quickly agree your team's:

ROLES
AGREEMENTS
PROCESSES
PRIORITIES
ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES
RESULTS
TARGETS

I am very pleased to announce the release of my new guide book:
A SYSTEMATIC GUIDE TO GAME-BASED LEARNING (GBL) IN ORGANIZATIONAL TEAMS.

My friend Charles Jennings who introduces the book kindly notes in his foreword that 'it provides a deep analysis and clear guidance to help practitioners develop effective social game-based learning solutions'.

I am pleased to release a new white paper "A Leaders Guide to creating High Performing Teams (HPTs)". This 15-page executive guide, aimed at leaders and managers in all sizes and types of organisation, proposes and explains a pragmatic and comprehensive framework for the necessary interventions required to successfully introduce High Performing Teams (HPTs) into organisations.

** BREAKING NEWS **

I would like to share with you a very simple model I use for helping teams become more High Performing which addresses 4 key aspects of teams - Communications, Alignment, Meetings and Support ("CAMP").

"How do you justify investment in a specific people development activity (e.g. Leadership, Change Management, Learning or Behaviour Change), such as a business simulation game, in a straightforward but credible way"? Here is a simple Excel-based tool which will get you started and which you can easily enhance if you need more.

I am pleased to announce that I have just launched the Dashboard Simulations Blog where I will publish articles on the topics of Business Simulation Games, Informal Learning, Gamification, Experiential Learning and Game-based Learning. It comes pre-loaded with a number of articles the most recent of which is A team game engagement process which guarantees transformative learning.

I am pleased to announce a new high performing team business simulation game, CHAPTER, which in a half-day puts you through your paces as the newly appointed manager of a ten-person team. To keep you on your toes your CEO just made your team the high profile pilot project for High Performing Teams across the whole company! The simulation integrates best practices from Informal Learning, Game-based Learning and Business Simulation.

I have invited leading Business Continuity Management (BCM) expert Pierre Wettergren to write a short guest blog on Bioteams.com to introduce this increasingly critical topic. Over the last 6 months Pierre and I have been collaborating on the design of a customisable BCM Simulation Game for Teams, which we call BCM eMATCH which allows them to run a virtual business and "what-if" the impact of different BCM strategies in response to changes and shocks their market conditions and internal operations.

This article explores how you can create and quickly deliver short Values/Behaviour Clarification Questionnaires to engage business communities on leadership development and change management programmes about key values and the critical behaviours needed to support them in order to improve individual and team performance.

Over the part few years I have been running in-house business games with a number of major enterprises who form executive teams for a global enterprise for a three year period over a single (intensive) day. So far 15 teams, of different levels of seniority, have fully completed the games. Based on observing and analyzing performance in these games I believe I have uncovered 6 critical differences between top performers and the rest in the areas of leadership and decision-making.

Most approaches to project management concentrate on the tasks which need to be successfully completed to achieve the project goal. Important as this is, it is at most only half of the story of successful project management. The C3 approach addresses the hidden side of project management - the people-collaboration-end-result perspective and is also a powerful tool for conducting a quick project healthcheck.

I had a fascinating conversation with Rini Das, CEO of Pakra Games, where we discussed my work on business games and how it related to the theories and practices of bioteams which Rini subsequently published here.

Over the last 6 months I have been designing, testing and piloting an exciting new Change Management Game for leaders and teams which lets them experience what it is like to lead a complete 9-month change management project over the course of a single day. The development process forced me to think through what I really believe to be the key principles of change management in a sufficiently clear and concrete way to be able to design an online/offline game round them. Here is what I ended up with:

Strategy and Business Magazine has just published an excellent in-depth article "The Dueling Myths of Business" based on the work of scenario planning expert Betty Sue Flowers who worked with Royal Dutch Shell PLC and the world of big government where she helped draft many influential scenario planning reports.

ISEE Systems, a leading developer of business simulation tools, have published reviews of two of the new Dashboard Business Simulation Games developed using the ithink platform. These team games enable companies to share their own best practice (learn from others) in a way that really sticks and to put staff into difficult but realistic decision-making situations where if they make a mistake it does not cost the business!

There are two neat tools you can use to quickly turn excel spreadsheets into online simulations, what-if models and dashboards. They are Simulate from Forio and Crystal Presentation Design (formerly known as xcelsius) from SAP. Here's the lowdown.