Recommendations for HR and L&D professional from the FlashPoint Team
Keeping up with new topics and opportunities in the L&D and HR fields is a daunting task. Not only does change happen at an ever-quicker pace, there’s such a variety of information that it can be hard to find a place to start. We're challenging ourselves as a team to regularly share what we’re reading to help keep you up to date.
Team Effectiveness Read:
Google Spent Years Studying Effective Teams. This Single Quality Contributed Most to Their Success (Inc)
This article is a quick read that’s essential for anyone who works on a team or seeks buy-in from leadership that building and maintaining effective teams is critical to success.
Google has performed various studies amongst its ranks on teamwork, leadership, and success. The latest study—Project Aristotle—examines Google’s teams and what contributes to their performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings note one insight specifically: Researchers found that the team’s success wasn’t necessarily linked to the individual leaders or people on the team. What mattered most was the way the team worked together, and the most important factor contributing to a team's effectiveness was psychological safety.
Coaching Read:
Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Built Trust and Get Extraordinary Results by Judith E Glaser
In a world where collaborative work is essential to success, conversational intelligence is a critical skill for coaches and leaders alike. Conversational intelligence is all about “we-centric” leadership, not “I-centric” leadership; it’s the skill that allows us to connect, engage, and navigate with others. It directly relates to the goals and methods of coaching -- the goal of each is to gain empathy for each other, a higher level of understanding, a binding level of trust, and a commitment to action that leads to better results.
Leadership Read:
To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink
The basis of this book is Pink’s assertion that a seller is someone who persuades others to take action, not just someone who wants another to buy something. In other words, a seller is someone who influences others. Sound familiar? Leadership, ultimately, is about influence and so is sales.
We are consistently struck by the connections between this book and The Leadership Challenge®. Pink breaks down the elements of influence and persuasion, from understanding your audience to focusing on serving more instead of selling more, in a way that can help any HR leader or leader in general to think differently about their interactions with others.
Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash
