We all know that collaboration and teamwork are absolutely necessary for a company to get anything done. But are your managers working for the good of the company as a whole, or are they merely defending their own fiefdoms and working for the benefit of their units and/or themselves?

Organizations that are too highly structured – that emphasize autonomy instead of synergy and make differentiation between units far too clear – run the risk of fostering internal competition between managers and the units they head. And this internal strife and bickering can result in serious problems, as it saps company energy, detracts from the company’s vision, and distracts those involved from working to achieve their goals and targets.

You must make sure to teach your managers to work together for the good of the company instead of trying to further their own ends in and of themselves. Here’s how.

•Realize that making sharp distinctions between your business units and having autonomous managers only contributes to this problem.
•Instead of giving your managers ‘total control’ over the units they manage, redefine their roles to represent those units instead.
•Focus on managerial cooperation and stress the importance of teamwork above all else.
•Have everyone, not just the managers, place the entire company first, always.
•Emphasize the entire group instead of individual people.

Is your workplace a strong one? Is it a place where your employees are joyfully and gladly doing more than is expected of them, or are you having to struggle to get them to come to work on time, or at all – or to even keep them with you?

But hold on. The previous discussion begs the question: What makes a workplace a good strong one in the first place? How do we know if our workplaces are strong?

Here are some questions to help you determine if your workplace is something you can be happy and proud about, or if it needs work – or perhaps even a change of management.

1. Do all the employees know what is expected of them? Are these expectations clearly stated on their contracts and/or terms of reference? Do the managers know what to expect of the staff under them?

2. Does everyone have the materials and equipment they need to get their jobs done properly?

3. Do people have the opportunity to do what they do best? Are they being forced to comply with what the company wants and needs from them irrespective of their own skills and abilities?

4. Do people receive recognition or praise for excelling at their jobs? Are people made to feel important, or do they feel like they can be done away with if ‘the wind shifts’? Can people remember the last time they were praised and why?

5. Are people concerned about others as people, not just because they are necessary for work?

6. Is personal development being stressed and not just achievement of work goals?

7. Are people listened to, or are their opinions and concerns simply brushed aside?
If you and other people who work with you can take the time to answer these and other questions truthfully, you may be able to determine the true state of affairs where you work. And even if things may not be as good as you think they are, take heart – at least you know precisely what needs to be done.

Many people have a difficult time finding the motivation to get things done and be productive. The biggest misconception is that motivation will simply fall from the sky and you will have a good productive day at work as a result. Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works. You need to be proactive!

Others wait for something “big” to happen so they will suddenly have the motivation they need to complete a task or push through a tough time. When this doesn’t happen, they lose their focus and fall off the task quickly. Instead of waiting for something to come to you, why not create your own motivation? You can… and it’s easier than you think!

Finding the Little Things to Motivate You
The first thing you need is an environment that is conducive to healthy motivation. What does this mean? Well, it means that you need a clutter-free workspace, a comfortable chair at your desk, and a computer monitor at a comfortable height. Ergonomics is very important when designing the area where you will be working. These little things can zap you of your motivation in a real hurry. After all, how can you be motivated if you have a sore neck and back all the time? You’ll be too busy worrying about carpal tunnel or back spasms than anything else!

Ask yourself honestly: “How much would my attitude change if I worked in a place that I actually liked to spend time in?”

The moment you work in an environment that is congruent with your needs, you’ll nearly instantly find the motivation to get started and follow through.

Identifying Your Motivational Factors
Everyone has different motivational factors so what works for your colleagues may not work for you. Instead, determine the unique things that excite and motivate you. Perhaps you can reward yourself with your favorite snack after completing an important task, or maybe you can have a friendly competition with your colleagues. Whatever it is, give yourself something to work towards!

You’ll find more motivation by sprinkling mini-rewards throughout your day for each little task you check off your to-do list. When you keep your motivational factors simple, you’ll keep the pressure off and get more done in less time.

How to Find Motivation on the Computer
Even your computer can be a source of motivational energy. Motivational desktop wallpapers can help you stay focused while you work. These desktop wallpapers are free downloads that give you motivation at your fingertips. When you think about how often you see your desktop, it makes sense to put some inspiring thoughts and images there. When you are ready to throw in the towel, just take a quick look at your desktop and just might find the inspiration you need to persevere through!

There are plenty of motivational images and quotes, so there’s no shortage of motivation right on your desktop. You can refresh your desktop wallpaper every day, week, or month as you see fit.

Using the power of motivating imagery is free and requires little time. This method is a prime example of finding motivation in the little things. So go get started!

In order to be a good leader, contrary to what many people think, an actual leadership position is only secondary to actually ACTING like a leader. Otherwise, despite your supervisory or managerial designation, they won’t follow you and you’ll be out of your job in short order.

You have to start with performing your duties to the full extent of your capacity – irrespective of whether or not you feel like doing it – day in and day out. Be excellent in all that you do! Not only that, but you have to keep trying to push the envelope. Learn all about continuous improvement and learn to ask yourself how you can constantly do what you do better. Go the extra mile, and not only for yourself but for everyone else as well. Know the areas where improvement is most needed and focus on those areas without necessarily neglecting the others. Push, push and keep pushing!

If you do this, you will become a source of inspiration for others (and that is either a positive or negative thing). They will either be fired up and will try to excel in their own ways as well, or will be shamed into improving or cleaning up their act.

Everyone’s eyes are constantly on you, so you have to prove to everyone time and again that you are worthy of leading the team. Leadership is a moving target in that respect, and one of the only real ways to show that you deserve to be a leader is to demonstrate it day in and day out. So suit up and get ready to start chasing that target!

Few things ratchet up your team’s productivity like enthusiasm – yours and theirs.

It doesn’t matter who does the cheering; it doesn’t necessarily need to be managers cheering workers on. Everyone can cheer, and in fact everyone SHOULD cheer. Just like in any sports event, everyone gets excited to see the progress of the game.

People may decide to focus on cash rewards in order to try to spur productivity, but cash rewards and all other such incentives are finite and subject to upper management’s approval. no manager can ever run out of a supply of congratulations – quite simply because congratulations are unlimited.

Active or passive, however, congratulations must be TRUE and authentic: Timely, Responsive, Unconditional, and Enthusiastic. Congratulations are affirmations that who people are and what they do matter, and that they are making a valuable contribution toward achieving the shared mission. Telling people what a great job they’ve done or presenting an award is an active congratulation. Passive congratulations are such things as stepping aside and letting a team member go forward with a tricky, complicated, and important project, without exercising some sort of control or even offering advice.

So the next time you want to get your team going, instead of slipping them a couple dollars, try cheering them on – and meaning it. The odds are that you and your team will go very far if you keep encouraging each other – and maybe even go the whole nine yards together!

One of the ways leaders bring the best of of the people they manage is through challenging them. Leaders challenge people by bringing them out of their “comfort zones”, and, by doing so, enabling their people to reach successes that they never thought they could achieve. They communicate a vision that challenges people to think and act differently as they pursue a new agenda. Only continuous challenge produces continuous improvement.

Leaders challenge by creating tighter timetables, new assignments, new positions, and new projects. Some specific approaches leaders can use to challenge their staff and bring the best out of them are:

•State a challenging vision. Winning leaders are never satisfied with the status quo and they create an effective vision that challenges everyone to be better. Effective vision fires people up with passion and enthusiasm. It inspires, motivates, and reminds people why they must not quit.

•Demand the impossible to keep people from being complacent and always on their toes, pushing for constant improvement.

•Ask challenging questions. Get people to constantly question the status quo and move it forward.

•Create a culture of continuous improvement, and argue with success. Train your people to never rest on their laurels.

•Benchmark the best. Seek out examples of excellent practices, products, and so on and so forth. Do research into the stories behind them and showcase them for your employees to learn from.

Procrastination: it’s something a good number of us tend to do, no matter what the task. We know that putting something off doesn’t help us and it only makes things worse by adding stress to our lives, but knowing this only makes us procrastinate more.

How can you stop this vicious cycle, use your time more effectively, and get your tasks done sooner?

Here are 5 simple ways to get up and go and stop putting off things that must be done for the sake of bittersweet procrastination:

1. Determine why you delay working on your task. Is it a specific task that you’re putting off, or do you procrastinate everything on your plate? What is it about this task that stops you from doing it?

* Are you scared of failing?
* Do you fear that you’ll fall short of what’s expected of you?
* Are you just lazy?
* Are you resentful of whoever put this obligation upon you?

By evaluating the task, you can better understand what’s holding you back so you can complete the task more efficiently.

2. Make a plan. When you make a step-by-step plan, you are setting a specific schedule and timeline to complete the task.

Write this plan down on paper. Writing this list will help you better organize your thoughts and determine the small steps you need to take to accomplish your goals. Give yourself attainable tasks on a daily, weekly or hourly timetable, as it applies to your situation. You are less likely to be overwhelmed when you’re faced with small, manageable steps.

3. Be Realistic. Be realistic about what you can achieve in your plan. Doing so makes each step clearly attainable and you’ll be less likely to put it off. Knowing your limits will make your goals seem easier and less of a mountain to climb.

4. Just Begin. It sounds simple enough, but few heed this simple tip. Most procrastinators find themselves prone to delaying the start of the task because it seems too overwhelming. Instead, they stress and worry during the final moments before it’s due.

No matter how large or insurmountable the task may seem, beginning with even a small action will build momentum. Simply beginning also tends to put the task into perspective and makes it seem more possible than ever.

5. Take Breaks. Taking scheduled breaks while working on your task refreshes your body and mind. If you go for a 10-minute walk or work on a Sudoku puzzle, you’ll feel re-energize and you’ll be in a better frame of mind to forge on. Breaks, while refreshing, should be taken in moderation; you certainly don’t want to use breaks as an excuse to lapse back into procrastination.

Procrastinating is an ugly habit that many of us fall into. Luckily, this bad habit can be overcome and if you are prone to procrastination you can become more proactive and productive.

Follow these 5 tips, practice them frequently, and with some time and patience you’ll find yourself getting more done, more often.

If you’re drowning in work and can’t seem to make any headway into reducing your workload, then you might be interested in what the famous productivity consultant David Allen has to say. Allen identifies five separate stages that every single person, irrespective of what he or she does for a living, goes through in the course of his or her daily work routine.

It is important to visualize this work process in this way, because if the procedure is circumvented in any way (if, say, a particular step is skipped or steps combined), problems will result and productivity will be negatively affected.

1. Collect things that command your attention. In this first stage, we setup “containers”, whether physical or virtual – in-trays, email folders, actual and virtual trash bins, and so on – in order to help us classify incoming items and contain them until we decide what to do about them. They must be maintained and dealt with regularly, of course.

2. Process what these things mean and decide what to do about each of them. Evaluate each of them by asking yourself if you can or should do anything about it and what can be done.

3. Organize the results. After all the items in your containers have been processed, the items have to be categorized and put away. Delete or store (either file for reference or incubate for future checking) the items you can’t do anything about at present. The items that can be dealt with should be added to your list of projects, calendars, reminder lists – whatever you use.

4. Review these results and make them options for further action. Add the results to the pre-existing picture of your work and modify your plans to keep yourself efficient. You don’t have to do this on a daily basis; once a week will suffice.

5. Finally, do – act on the results and your review of these results. If you have worked on your plans diligently, your path should be clear and you should have little to no problem dealing with whatever pops up in your workday.

You might think that since teams are so obviously important to the success and well-being of not only companies but even the individuals that work there, people might be quite willing to subsume themselves in teams instead of going off on their lonesome. However, some people apparently still want to do things by themselves, despite the obvious shortcomings of doing so.

Why could this be? Renowned business author John Maxwell, in his book “Equipping 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know”, gives us a number of reasons:

1. Ego. There are no supermen or superwomen. So the question is not whether you can do everything by yourself; it’s how soon you’re going to realize that you can’t.

2. Insecurity. Insecurity rather than poor judgment or lack of intelligence most often causes leaders to surround themselves with weak people. Only secure leaders give power to others.

3. Naiveté. Some leaders naively understand the difficulty of achieving big things. As a result, they try to go it alone.

4. Temperament. Some people aren’t very outgoing and simply don’t think in terms of team building and equipping. As they face challenges, it never occurs to them to enlist others to achieve something.

For the person trying to do everything alone, despite any success he or she may have when he or she tries to do so, the game really is over – in many cases even before it has begun. If you want to do something big, you must link up with others. One really is too small a number to achieve greatness.

An empowered workforce is a workforce that is implicitly trusted, supervised far less (bordering on autonomy in some cases), and given more responsibilities then a workforce that is not empowered. An empowered workforce needs less scrutiny and micro-management vis-a-vis a workforce that is not empowered and which is instead forced to perform with threats and negative incentives. Retention and high turnover rates are also a problem faced by companies that resort to the latter; this is a problem that companies with empowered workforces are much less likely to face.

Companies such as Google actively aim to empower their employees. They trust their employees implicitly, enough, in Google’s case, to allow them to devote one entire day a week to pursue their own initiatives. This “leap of faith” works out nicely for Google; a great number of the company’s cutting-edge new products and solutions are developed during this time, all of which contribute immensely to keeping the company at the forefront of the industry.

How, then, to go about it? There are certain ingredients that are essential if you wish to empower your workforce. You will need to put an inspiring vision in place beginning day one. Next, you will need to ensure that your workplace environment is one that inspires and supports continued innovation, experimentation, curiosity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurial creativity. Constant training should be held in order to keep your people (and yourself) honed. Trust is an essential element, as allowing your employees such power will constitute a leap of faith. Make sure to help your people connect their personal goals with the goals of the company – otherwise they will not be inspired to work for its betterment. And last but most assuredly not the least, no matter how cut-throat your industry, always ensure that your people are enjoying what they do!