Well, I am back after taking a few weeks off from my normal blogging routine. I hope you have enjoyed the summer as much as I have.

So, I thought I would jump back in with a concept I introduced in a webinar I conducted last week on The 4 Costliest Mistakes Senior Leadership Teams Make. It's a concept I call "getting stuck in always having to be right."

"The conduct of a company's leadership team is directly correlated with the organization's long-term performance."

In her article Lessons from Team Fumbles, Susan Lucia Annunzio goes on to say "Once-venerable institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland paid the ultimate price for the behaviors of their leadership teams."

Some of the behaviors Annunzio is referring to includes:

What is the purpose of this complimentary webinar on August 11th?
In just 57 minutes your senior leaders will learn specific ways to avoid or address some common, costly mistakes, and help them achieve a major shift in how their teams perform.

Senior leadership teams are the single most influential factor that impacts employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Have you ever watched a 400-meter relay team work?
On a good team, their hand-offs are impeccable.

In fact, given two teams of equal quality runners, the team with the more efficient
hand-offs always wins. The same holds true in the work place.

Inscape Publishing just launched the Everything DiSC 363 for Leaders, and my clients love it.

They love it for three reasons.

(1) It combines the best of a 360 degree assessment and the power of DiSC.

(2) It does away with the often useless, open-ended responses raters can give, and instead gives raters a set of choices to select for open-ended questions - making the feedback behavioral based and more valuable for the leader.

In my previous blog post, I talked about the 4 reasons why team building fails and how it is important to be aware of those common pitfalls so that you can design a program that makes a positive impact on your team.

Team building can have a profound effect on the way teams collaborate, but to achieve that level of success you must incorporate The 4 P's of Strategic Team Building.

The concept of "team building" means different things to different people. Over the past 9 years I have spent a ton of time with hundreds of clients and thousands of people creating successful team building programs. Our shorter programs may span only four to eight hours in duration, and our programs focused on helping teams make a significant shift in how they collaborate may last over 9 months.

Regardless of how long the program is, I have always defined team building in three ways:

1. It is a tool to help accelerate team formation.

I have written quite a bit in the past about the importance of providing feedback to team members. In fact, in a recent blog post, I termed feedback as "the glue that holds alignment together."

But what happens when feedback just doesn't work?

When performance isn't meeting expectations, and a team member has been provided with consistent and transparent feedback, the next step in trying to help a team member make behavioral change is constructive discipline.

Interested in learning more about the latest and greatest Everything DiSC Application Library Programs? Then join me for an upcoming virtual showcase led by publisher Inscape Publishing.

The showcases involve taking the profile (Everything DiSC Sales, Everything DiSC Management, or Everything DiSC Workplace) as pre-work, and then participating in an interactive 90-minute webinar.

Here are some upcoming showcases:

Ahhh overwhelm. It's that moment in time where you feel stuck. Where there is so much going on you don't know where to start.

The stories that play inside our heads are ones that sound like:

"I have too much to do. I'll do it (the important thing) tomorrow."

"There are no jobs out there."

"I don't have time to develop knowledge about new topics, ideas, and legislation"

"I'm not experienced enough for that role"

"It's faster to do things than to train others to do it"