Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Simon Oates of Succeed at Life

Working and academic life is filled with teams of all sizes and skills. Being able to work among people is considered a crucial aspect of entrepreneurship, and one of the desirable qualities of anyone involved in personal development. Here are my 7 top tips that will transform you from a team hater into a team leader.

Tip 1: Split the work evenly, clearly and minimize overlap.The major advantage of a team is the extra workload it can cope with, but this bonus is wasted when the team is sat together around a laptop producing one piece of output. When I walk around my Universities’ Business School, I often see 5 or more MBA students sitting round one computer. One student will be typing; another talking and 3 people sat there contributing absolutely nothing.

Only by letting team members work on their own chunk of work will you truly be able to harness the productivity bonus of working in a team. Having sole responsibility over their section will also give a boost to their motivation (& ego) and encourage creative thinking. Slight imbalances in levels of contribution will be forgiven but vast differences can cause tensions so speak up as a team member if you feel you have been given too much work or someone else has. This may be difficult in a work situation so call attention to the difference in workload indirectly. One way of doing this is to ask another team member ‘Oh, so what are you doing again?’ in an innocent and genuinely curious tone. After you’ve listened to their reply, get some paper and rather verbally make a list to yourself of what you’ve got to do, clearly itemising each piece of your task. If there is a big enough imbalance then someone should notice, but the fact you hadn’t ‘complained’ means you’re still seen as a focused team player.

Tip 2: Have a constant meeting schedule. A regular nightmare of teaming is arranging constant meetings; a logistical impossibility that usually the Chair or team leader has to cope with. However one method distributes this issue among the team, and this is tip 2.
This technique is ideal if you’re at university where students have roughly the same timetables each week. It can be used to completely eradicate the issue of arranging to meet up; and yet I constantly see students fail to take advantage of this. As a result they spend a lot of their time texting and emailing teammates to arrange their next meeting time. Shame. You may need to arrange extra meetings when tight deadlines are involved but the consistent meetings could be seen as the backbone. As well as ensuring there’s regular communication between the group members; regular meetings totally shift the responsibility from the chairperson to the individual team members. which makes your job (as leader) easier.

Tip 3: Make everyone feel important. An extremely important tip to help drive and motivate others to succeed is found here: The Key To Getting What You Want: Making Others Feel Important

Tip 4: Never blatantly oppose someone’s ideas, (Indirectly call attention to it by ‘stumbling’ upon a bad consequence). The result of mixing lots of ideas together in a team is that from time to time you’ll disagree with a member’s contribution. Your instant reaction could be to challenge them; “Are you sure that’s right?” which may sound nicer than ‘You’re wrong’ but has the same negative consequences.
Even if you refrain from verbally responding its likely your face will screw up or you’ll give some other indication that you disagree, so simply go along with whatever they say; be enthusiastic about it. You need to see how to change their opinion from their point of view, so for the time being; adopt their point of view. If their suggestion was bad enough then it would result in a negative consequence. What you must do is talk through the idea enthusiastically until you ‘hit’ upon this negative consequence, seem disappointed at this bad point that seemed to come out of nowhere, and then instead of denouncing your opponents idea, you can then talk as if YOUR opinion was wrong, and then it’d be far easier for them to just admit their mistake and continue, so have let them save face. They are more likely to concede to someone on their side who they think wants to support their idea, rather than someone who is opposed to them. In apposing someone’s ideas, there’s also the chance they may get aggressive. Side step around pride; use tip #4.

Tip 5: Learn names. You may laugh at this point; “Well of course I know everyone’s name in the teams I work with”. Consider yourself the exception. The rest of us have all been in a situation where we’ve felt there are too many people to learn, or where one member has a heavy accent and a foreign name. From now on, I never want you to have to use that last excuse.
We’ve all pretended to hear someone’s name after asking twice and giving up because of the embarrassment. It’s a bit shameful of us, but importantly, it cripples that person’s role in the team.
If you’re an important member of the team; you’ve just effectively cut off one of your great resources. You’ll now casually avoid starting conversation with this person, and indirectly push them out of the group as they become less involved with decision-making. As soon as you learn someone’s name; they’ll be suddenly ‘opened up’ as a source of help and you will sometimes feel as though you’ve gained an extra team member!
So from now on when you’re in that situation, don’t stop at the second attempt. Say: “I’m sorry I haven’t heard that name before, can you spell it?”. Afterwards, look at what you’ve written again and make sure you remember it.

Tip 6: Praise as heavily as a teacher would. A key concept in management that is recognised nationwide is that a dog will behave well for treats, but would simply resent the whip. Do you give treats or use the whip? Or both?
When I talk about ‘the whip’, I mean embarrassing, criticising (even if it’s quite ‘constructive’), humiliating, condemning and undermining someone. It reads like a terrible list of words yet you’ll find you do a couple of them in some minor shape or form. This is acceptable, but you do you want to be just acceptable? Wouldn’t you prefer to be brilliant and inspire brilliant work from your teammates and earn some respect from them?
Its so easy to criticise and you may not realise how often to do it. But you can count on one thing, the target of the criticism will remember. Fortunately the same applies to compliments. One small compliment has the opportunity for a real turn-around in someone behaviour, yet you may not even realise you’ve given it. Learn to pay effective compliments, compliment everything someone does well, even if just subtly. You’ll be rewarded with optimistic teammates with a ‘can do’ attitude. And remember; “If you think you can, you can”.

Tip 7: Lead the team
This is such an big principle that it has been given it’s own post: Learn To Lead: How to make others do what you say

Photo countesy of clearlyambiguous

Read more from Simon Oates at His blog, Succed At Life , or subscribe to his feed.

I’ve been thinking deeply over the last few weeks about team work. Why? I have my own reasons, but the biggest reason is that I have become very adept at recognizing a team-oriented person by the way he or she acts and speaks.

You might wonder why I bother with this. It’s because I’m a team-oriented person who believes that working with a great team is very crucial to any company’s success. Further, working in teams can help all the team members personally because they can learn from others and, at the same time, share their own knowledge.

I must admit that many years ago I thought that I was the smartest guy in the world. Thinking about it today causes me to laugh out loud at my former self.
A few years ago I was a young man with big dreams. Today I see the things differently; today I have the passion to learn from very smart and special people.
I can summarize and say that my experiences in the workplace have taught me that collaboration is required for success.
Everyday I meet many people who say to me things like, “you are a cleverer guy than I am,” or, “I don’t have the ability to [fill your ability] like you.” Hearing these statements causes me to feel bad–really bad. The knowledge that some people do not believe in themselves and do not know how to leverage their special abilities inspired me to write this article.
I try very hard in every meeting to find the special ability of each team member so I can connect those special abilities to one specific goal.
Today I go into every conversation fully aware that I am not the smartest person  in the room.
Usually, there is at least one person in the room who knows more than I do about some particular facet of the topic of conversation. I believe that every human is an expert in something and if this person is an expert on the current topic of conversation, he or she is the smartest person in the room at that particular time. Moreover, I try very hard to know my partners’ and friends’ abilities before meeting them so I can identify the smartest person in the room and listen to him or her from the first second to the last.
So here are my tips for listening and learning from every conversation:

• Know your partners – know their pros and cons. Learn from their pros and help them with their cons. It’s a win-win situation for you and for them.
• Listen – people love to talk, but, more than that, they love to be heard. Listen to your partners until they have finished speaking and then think deeply about your response. Remember that every word from your mouth is creating the next sentence.
• Learn – everyone has something to offer you. Learn to listen and remember that it’s all the small things that make the big difference.
• Write – write your thoughts from and reactions to this conversation. Call it a meeting summarization or whatever you want, but spend some time on this process.

photo by tomsaint

When I was a child (around the age of 12), my parents used to tell me how important it is to read books.  I hated to read books, and, to be honest,  I didn’t read them at all!  I researched all of my school essays on the internet and, after editing, I turned them in and got A’s on most of them.

Today, I have more than 60 books on my shelf and read at least one, and usually two books a month.  So what happened? I have no idea. I don’t really remember exactly when I decided to start reading books.   What I can say honestly is that I was a real idiot for wasting so many years when I could have been reading amazing books.

I’ve spent a substantial amount of time thinking about books, both before and after reading them.  At the moment, I’m in the middle of a “reading frenzy”, as I’m reading a lot about marketing, and particularly about on-line marketing.  At times, when I’m interested in a particular subject matter, I’ll read 4 – 5 books before considering whether to read more, or to move on to another subject.

Finding time for reading was not an easy task.  In the beginning, I tried to read for 30 minutes every morning before doing my chores.  Unfortunately, this didn’t work very well because I consider reading to be part of my “leisure pie.”   Nowadays, I read before going to sleep but I’m honestly thinking about   returning to my previous routine because these days, reading is not only part of my leisure pie – it’s intellectual input for me.   With the last few books I read, I started writing brief reviews in a notebook, and I’m thinking of writing a formal review of some of them on Amazon.   Up to this point, I’ve only stopped reading one book at the mid-way point.   I’ve found that sometimes a book is like a movie in that, if you lose faith (or interest) in the middle, there’s a chance that by skimming through the rest of it (or for a movie – if you keep watching), something “golden” will arise at the end.

So how do I manage my reading list?
Each book that is recommended to me is automatically added to my wish list on Amazon.   On this list I keep notes about who recommended each book so that I can thank him or her after reading it.  Every month or so, I buy  5 – 6 books about a specific topic and have them shipped to me.  I must admit that I am currently very inspired by personal recommendations by people whom I really respect.

photo by tbisaacs

Bill Gates

Speaking before an audience is not as easy as you might think. Most people will tell you that speaking in public is one of their greatest sources of anxiety. In the past few weeks I’ve thought a lot about speaking in public.  I’ve never really wanted to be a professional speaker, but I know the importance of being able to speak in public, and it’s something that I would like to do in my spare time. Here are some pointers for people like me who are looking to sharpen their public speaking skills.

1. Do it for fun – Most people want to speak for two reasons: money and\or reputation. If you are the person who is looking to be paid for speaking, be aware that you must be familiar with how the industry works before you start asking for money. As I see it, most of the people who speak for free do so for only one reason: to leverage their reputation.
2. Speaking is like having something to speak about – Most of the time speaking supports a product or a business. If you have a product for which you’re trying to gain exposure, you’ll need to speak in public to promote it; it’s a great idea. If you are a consultant or you offer some service to the public, speaking can help drive business to your customer base.
3. Speak a lot and speak for free – Unless you have professional experience, you must build a track record of provoking audiences successfully.  In the beginning, you will do it for free, but over time you will be able to ask for expense reimbursement, and, later on, to be paid for the actual speaking. You will have to subjugate your ego for the first few months and speak for fun. Volunteer at social events, promotional events, and coffee-chat events to gain experience and confidence.
4. Speaking is not profession – People who speak for a living, do so while maintaining a professional career.  The ability to share some of your own experiences in your speeches is very important.
5. Speaking is not only for fun but is also valuable too – Yes, there is an undeniable thrill of being on the stage before 100 people trying to deliver your message in 30 minutes. The skills you learn over time are very valuable, and, most of the time, you will enjoy the experience.

photo by loritingey