Every team has one: the non-team player, the one who constantly complains or doesn't pull his weight or is simply a jerk of toxic proportions. Actually, many teams have a few of these people, but the damage even one can do to team performance is striking. Academic research on the impact of bad apples go decades back. A recent study by Will Felps, a professor at the Rotterdam School of Management in the Netherlands, was cited on National Public Radio as finding that one bad apple can cause team performance to tank 30- to 40 percent. Maybe managers should do something about that one bad apple.

 

These days when we talk about effective leadership it's fashionable to emphasize themes of happiness. How often do we hear that happy employees are more productive, or that harmonious teams perform better. These ideas aren't wrong, but without clarification they risk oversimplification. "Happy" doesn't mean cheerful and content, and high-performing teams are "harmonious" in only the broadest sense of the word.

 

When I last wrote about this topic, I went to admittedly laborious detail about the literal impossibility of "creating" a sense of urgency in a team. This post was based on a forum discussion of the same title. The continuing discussion includes a remark that my observation is, while accurate, "entirely unhelpful."

 

As we all know, there's a lot of information out there-from magazines to blogs, there is more content than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime. I don't even have time to read Page Six anymore, which says a lot. Sure, a maddening percentage of it is either garbage or recycled garbage. The problem is that a lot of it is stuff you could use. The biggest worry is of missing something useful that you didn't realize you needed to know.

 

Leadership is no popularity contest, to be sure. However, the workplace is after all a social environment. It makes sense, therefore, that leaders with positive informal social connections with their direct reports turn up with better results.

 

  Have you seen John Chambers recently? How can you avoid the guy - he's in the tech publications, business publications and the New York Times.

In the Journal, he talks about Internet 2.0 and small councils that can act fast using video and collaboration. In either Fast Company or Wired he talked at greater length about how these things work. In the NY Times on Sunday in the Corner Office which is, incidentally, pretty consistently worth reading, he says"

"I'm a command-and-control person. I like being able to say turn right, and we truly have 67,000 people turn right. But that's the style of the past. That was great when you were a single product, when the market was moving slower and one executive or an executive team could run the whole company.