David Burkus Presents

Keeping a team motivated is the one of the most important aspects of a leader’s job. It’s also one of the most misunderstood aspects of a leader’s job. Many organizations still equate “motivating your team” with “designing the right incentives.” But more than four decades of research into self-determination theory have revealed the limits of these types of extrinsic motivators and offers a wealth...

As long as people remain the center of organizations, attracting, retaining, and motivating those people—keeping them happy at work—will be one of the most important elements of a leader’s job. Work is central to our lives. For most adults, work occupies the majority of waking hours. And being happy at work can make a big difference in whether those hours are a drain or not. And, by extension, whe...

The world runs on teams. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another happen more efficiently and at higher quality because we work in teams. The number of teams we form, and the size of those teams has increased exponentially since our ancestors formed teams to chase down prey. And so has the importance of building teams that perform well together. You’ve probably felt what it’s like...

Failure is feedback. And that maxim is nowhere more true than on teams. When individual team members or the whole team experiences a failure, how they respond can be the difference between a team that continuously improves and enhances performance, and a team that falls apart. And research backs this up. One of the first studies of psychological safety focused on how teams responded to failure. Am...

Managers make the difference. Senior leaders set strategy. But middle managers and front-line managers make the difference in whether that strategy gets executed…and in whether or not people are engaged and motivated in an organization. According to Gallup, 70% of an individual employee’s engagement is determined by the manager of her team. In turn, this means that managers have a significant impa...

When you start out your career, you’re most often an individual contributor. And in that role your knowledge and skills are most important. But if you do that role well, you’ll likely be asked to consider becoming a leader. And in leadership, the methods you relied on to be a great employee don’t often help you become a great leader. Those skills will rarely help encourage and coach others to be g...

Our world requires collaboration. Just about every job now requires collaborating on teams and every employee’s calendar is full of evidence of collaboration. In one study, up to 85% of participants’ work weeks were spent working in direct collaboration or a result of collaboration with a team. But it can be difficult to collaborate with people whose perspectives, preferences, and personalities ar...

Teams are how work gets done most of the time. In a knowledge work economy, up to 85% of an average employee’s time is spent in collaboration with other people—on one team or on multiple teams. And that makes effective collaboration and good teamwork a top tier skill. Whether you’re currently a leader or looking to become a leader, focusing on developing your teamwork skills—and the level of teamw...

Teams are a central part of our work experience. Jobs that could have been solitary at one time or another happen more efficiently and at higher quality because we work in teams. The number of teams we form, along with the size of those teams, has increased dramatically in recent decades. And much of a team’s performance comes down to its culture. Yes, the talents and skills of individuals matter....

At the core of teamwork is the need to solve problems. And when generating solutions, the more diverse a team you have, the more ideas you can generate. Sort of. The rationale behind diversity being a strength on teams is solid. When you’ve built a team of various perspectives, experiences, skills, and abilities, each person brings that variety into discussions and more diverse ideas get generated...

Communication is what makes a team a team. Otherwise, it’s just a group of individuals working away at their desks, handing work up to some unnamed boss. In reality, people don’t work in a vacuum. And much of one individual’s work requires coordinating with one or more teams. Effective team communication makes individuals and teams dramatically more productive. But unfortunately, a majority of emp...

Progress is a powerful human motivator. But unfortunately, many teams mark progress only when projects are complete or big milestones are crossed. They don’t often celebrate small wins that build up to those big completions. But recent research suggests that small wins celebrated regularly are a more potent way to keep teams engaged and motivated. In a landmark study from Teresa Amabile, participa...

One of the most consistent findings in organizational behavior over the last decade has been just how significantly team performance is affected by psychological safety. A psychologically safe team is one where team members feel comfortable being themselves, expressing their ideas and opinions, and taking risks without fear of being punished or ostracized. Teams with high psychological safety lear...

Work is teamwork. And it’s no secret that some teams truly are greater than others.  A recent meta-analysis combined research conducted on over 200,000 teams in a variety of industries in order to answer that question. Across 274 dimensions of performance and over half a million individual team members, the researchers found that, in most fields, performance differences of teams followed a po...

As the world grows increasingly more complex, so will its challenges—both globally and for any given organization. To solve bigger and more complex problems, you need a bigger and more complex team. And to do that, you will need to foster collaboration in the workplace. But the enhanced need for collaboration brings a paradox. According to a recent study summarized in Harvard Business Review, team...

Learning how to build trust at work is critical if you’re going to be successful as an employee, a manager, or an effective leader. If you don’t have trust, it’ll be more difficult to communicate and coordinate with your peers or colleagues. If teams lack trust, it’s difficult to achieve true collaboration and create performance greater than the sum of each individual’s talent.  A team isn’t...

We all arrive at leadership with certain preconceptions about what makes a successful leader.  Sometimes we form an idea of what great leaders do based on historical leaders or modern-day leaders who are always getting media attention. Other times we form a picture of great leadership based on our own past experiences—both leaders we’ve worked under and even what attributes got us promoted in...

Teams face a lot of different challenges. Leading a team involves leading through many challenges. You’re given performance objectives. You map out a plan of execution with your team. But pretty quickly, you will run into challenges—both seen and unseen. And while most of these challenges are unique to the work being done and the team doing that work, some challenges are universal for teams. These...

We’ve known about the importance of developing emotional intelligence as a leader for some time now, but there are still some misconceptions about exactly what emotional intelligence is (or is not) and how to increase it. Emotional intelligence isn’t just about having “soft skills.” And it’s not a set of mindfulness practices.  Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and control yo...

Leaders don’t need to have all the answers. That sounds counterintuitive. There is a lot of pressure on leaders to have the right answers and to solve problems that team members can’t solve on their own. In fact, most leaders were promoted into a leadership role because they had many more of the right answers than others in the organization. And the further up the hierarchy you go, the bigger the...

Motivation can vary wildly on a team. At any given time, a few people might be highly motivated, while others are totally unmotivated. Ideally, there are times where everyone is motivated at once, but sadly there may be times when everyone is demotivated or burnt out. All this means that an inescapable part of a leader’s job is to motivate the unmotivated. The good news is that leaders don’t have...

One of the core tasks of team leaders is keeping motivation and inspiration high. This doesn’t mean all great leaders are charismatic and inspiring. In fact, the opposite is often true. Motivating employees isn’t about what you say to them, it’s about understanding what they’re seeking from work. And while understanding the unique desires of each team member might take a while, there’s a proven mo...

Teams today are asked to do more and more with less and less. The demands on their time have only increased. And so has their uncertainty. That leads to a lot of stress, potential setbacks, and failures. Overcoming these obstacles requires building a resilient team. And that starts with understanding what a makes a resilient team. Resilience isn’t toughness. Resilience isn’t about continuing to ta...

One of the great mysteries of the modern workplace is that we still assess performance on an individual level, when so much of one’s ability to produce results depends on their team. Work is teamwork. Which means that how well a team communicates and collaborates has a significant impact on how well individuals perform. As a team leader, that makes coordinating collaboration a key part of your rol...

High-performing teams didn’t just perform a little better, they performed up to ten times better than normal teams. And the explanations for it hint at more secrets. High-performing teams don’t get these results because they act a little different. They do several key things totally differently. In this episode, we’ll outline four secrets that high-performing teams know that normal teams tend to l...