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Many of us feel different when we return to work from a break. If you come back with better ideas, more energy and more creativity, it may be because your way of working is out of balance, or perhaps you’re just working too hard.

Sometimes it’s really good to question a convention. Such as: the best way to motivate sales people is to offer them commissions.
Is it really? Some companies have begun to discover that it’s not true. To the surprise of many, these firms are showing that commissions can sometimes do more harm than good – and that getting rid of them can open a path to higher profits.

If you’re operating within a team or contributing to a situation, you have to speak up. You have to ask questions, even at the risk of sounding stupid, and challenge ideas or practices that don’t seem to be delivering on the objectives. If you feel uncomfortable or unclear, it’s your responsibility to sort it out, not anyone else’s. And it’s not OK to keep quiet and then complain about something afterwards.

Organisations are often tied to a teamwork ideology. It’s just ‘the way things are done’ and how we are socially trained to think – isn’t it? There are trends in society that may change the way we think, the most important being the Internet and its applications. ‘Two heads are better than one’ assumes that heads (people) hold information. Of course they do, but in today’s wired world, a big part of the information we use in our daily work has relocated from heads to networks. You can find information either online by using search engines, or via networks that people are more or less loosely connected to (such as Facebook, Wikipedia or LinkedIn).

One of the key elements of leadership is partnership. Not everyone would agree with this; you could argue that, in the presence of a powerful leader, partnership is unnecessary – you will get the job done with or without the involvement of others. But in today’s organisations, this is not enough. You might achieve the result, but at what cost? If you don’t involve others, you leave them disempowered and demotivated. You don’t train them in how to produce results. Your organisation is the poorer, and if you leave, your knowledge and skill leaves too.

As a leader, it’s your job to spot what’s going right. To do that, you must habitually make it your business to find out. So what should you do if something has gone right? Start by finding out precisely what the person did that resulted in a good outcome

Groupthink, a term invented in 1972, is a mode of thinking we engage in when we are deeply involved in a cohesive, task-centred group, when our need for agreement supersedes our need for a decision based on rational information. Groupthink can lead to bad judgments and potentially disastrous decisions, and can also cause us as a group of decision makers to rationalise poor decisions after the fact. It’s a simple and totally inadequate way to deal with difficult issues.

Look at job descriptions in almost any organisation, and you’ll find they’re broad statements of areas of responsibility or maybe lists of activities. Job descriptions like this are concerned with activity rather than output, and fuel the culture of ‘hard work’ and long hours. What you don’t see is a short, complete list of the results you are accountable for producing.

The term team is used a lot in many different contexts, but it is rarely used accurately. The reason it is rarely used accurately is that to understand what a team really is you have to experience it. And experience of teamwork is sufficiently rare that few us have had it.

We’re nearly at the highest level of the seven-level spectrum of leadership consciousness. At this point, the model recognises those who mentor and coach – the people who recognise talent and nurture it. Leaders at this level are motivated by the need to make a difference in the world.