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How can you make brainstorming fun?

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Brainstorming|How can you make brainstorming fun?What is brainstorming?

Brainstorming is used as a method to generate ideas to solve a problem. It is a creativity technique done in groups to find a solution for a specific problem. It puts together the list of ideas given by the member in a free-thinking environment. Brainstorming is popular mostly in design teams because they have to think out of the box and in every direction. By brainstorming, we can cover the problems with many ideas given by the members and can have many creative ways. You can have every imaginable solution to the problem.

Some rules that can help your team in brainstorming:

  • There should be a facilitator who can conduct the meeting.
  • Give a chance to everyone to give their creative ideas.
  • There should be a time limit given to them to think.
  • Let them ask questions from you about the topic, the clearer they will be about the topic, the more creative ideas you can get.
  • You can encourage weird ideas too, do not shut the person down, listen to them. Maybe you can consider their ideas.
  • Build on others ideas, make someone else’s idea more creative.
  • Do not make it a fish market, allow everyone to speak but one at a time.
  • Do not be negative or give immediate judgment.

Brainstorming can be fun for some people, but some people do not like it because they are too shy to speak or introverts. Extroverts can speak too much and can dominate the introvert. The leader of the team should lead it in a solution-focused environment. There are ways by which you can make the brainstorming fun like a pinboard, and everyone can participate.

Warm-up activity

Give their brains a little break. Your brain should be clear to generate creative ideas. You can give them the activity at the start that can help them in brainstorming. Ask your participants questions that can help them to open their minds. Give them a silly question like what will you do if your sunglasses were x-rayed vision, once they start thinking about the ideas, it means they are ready to be creative.

Outside of the box

Sometimes the office environment can be stressful, and it gets impossible to think creatively. Take your time outside of the office. Take them to a coffee shop, or an amusement park. Take them anywhere that can help them in generating creative ideas and can think outside of the box. Changing the environment of a person can help them in their creativity. It will be a fun and creative trip where everyone will be giving their ideas in a not so boring environment. Everyone can get comfortable and comfy in that environment, and no one will have that office pressure, they can have their time to clear their mind from other problems and think creatively.

Ask for the worst ideas

You always ask your team to give you good and creative ideas but now ask them to give the worst and terrible ideas for the situation. Write the problem on the board and ask them to start giving the worst idea they can think of. The ideas can be stupid, but maybe you can think of something creative from that idea.

  • It will create a fun environment; everyone can laugh.
  • A positive feeling around the meeting.
  • There will be no pressure and time limit.
  • People can get more comfortable.

Looking for a problem from an opposite perspective can help you a lot. It can give you real ideas, and you can always make them a little better.

Get colourful

Maybe it has been a long time since you and your team picked up some colours and markers? Give your team colour books and colour pencils. Even if they are not good with drawing or doodling, tell them that it should not be the perfect art piece. A study shows that doodling can help you to alert your mind. Doodlers perform 29% better than non-doodlers. Many people can start daydreaming while doing a boring task. Colouring can help them in being creative. So next time you get a lot of colour books and markers for your meeting.

Walls can talk

This technique is best for boring meetings. Write down the problems or project your team needs to work on each wall. Write questions on the walls. Give your team members the pad of sticky notes and tell them to walk around the room, see the problems and write any solution that is coming to their mind anonymously. Set a time limit of 10 to 15 minutes. Encourage creative thoughts. In the end, you can gather everyone’s suggestions and can work on it as a team. You can ask the team member to vote for a better idea.

Bring an outsider

Your team consists of mostly the same people. There is a group of the same people with the same minds every week. The same ideas, same patterns, and disagreements. Everything repeats it selves when you are with the same people every week. Why not change it a little bit? Bring an outsider in the meeting. We all know a designer will only think like a designer, by bringing another person who is not known to the environment can give their honest opinions and ideas, and he can be work as your customer. You can know your customers’ point of view. You can bring any person from your office, but he should not be the person who knows your work, that is how that person can come up with unique ideas from an entirely different perspective.

Be different

Choose any of the ways you want to make your meeting fun and creative. No one likes to sit in a boring meeting and generate ideas like the old style. Take them out, make them think out of the box, give them colours, help them get comfortable. These things can surely help your team to get creative and you can and the best ideas. Everyone loves a little bit of weirdness. Get that creative person out of you and start brainstorming!

Conclusion

Brainstorming is often considered difficult particularly for people who are not creative; however, if all the above-mentioned approaches are adopted, one will be able to expand his/ her thinking capacity and be able to brainstorm the ideas.

Ways to Boost Employee Morale

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Employee Morale|Ways to Boost Employee MoraleIn a world where we are constantly working hard and striving to be the best versions of ourselves, it’s integral to keep the atmosphere of a workplace in its most positive state and morale at its highest level possible. A lot of employers struggle with this, especially as there is no one solution to please everyone. All employees are different and respond to different things so while it’s ideal to try and tailor morale boosters to each specific employee, this becomes near impossible when the number of employees in one workplace reaches double, triple, or even quadruple figures. Small businesses may find this easier as there are usually a smaller amount of employees to look after; but even then, choosing the right method to boost morale can be tricky.

Naturally, employees who are happy are more likely to perform better. This will only benefit the business so surely it’s a given to make an effort to keep employees happy, right? In order to do this, below are a few ways to help boost morale in the workplace and hopefully keep the large majority of your employees happy.

Praise

It’s a proven fact that children who are personally praised by an authoritative figure for doing well, perform better in school, in extracurricular activities or at home. So, why should this be any different for adults? Receiving praise for doing well is always a good feeling and makes one feel like they’re excelling. A more personalised method of praise like an in person interaction, works wonders and is easier for small business and large businesses. It only takes a few words, a smile and a gentle pat on the back on a regular basis to boost morale.

Team Building Activities

Whether it’s a team building retreat or an activity one day that involves getting all employees together and encouraging space for a friendly competitive spirit to come out can prove to be both fun and beneficial for your employees’ ability to work together. The fun side of it is also likely to boost morale and improve chances of employees genuinely enjoying their jobs.

Bonuses

Not all businesses are able to give every employee a bonus at the end of the year, but it is a great incentive to perform well on the job. It can also make employees feel like they are appreciated, which is incredibly important.

Showing Gratitude

Being thankful for someone’s hard work and actually showing genuine gratitude for it is so simple but works wonders for an employee’s motivation and morale in the workplace. Whether it’s being grateful for the extra work they agreed to do or for not making a fuss about having to do some employee drug testing, showing gratitude for your employees can go a long way.

The Qualities Of A Good Team

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article |Team Management|The Qualities Of A Good TeamAny business is going to be made up of teams, and the quality of those teams is going to determine to a large degree the success of the business. If you are hoping for the many myriad teams in your business to operate and function as you would hope them to, then there are many things you can focus on to be sure that they are as good as you would hope. One way to begin is to start thinking about what kinds of positive qualities you are likely to want or need in a good team. As long as you are aware of these, you can try to instill them a little more, and you should find that your teams are much more likely to do well and so improve your business performance in no time too. Let’s take a look.

Skilled Individuals

Any team is only as good as the people within it. That is a simple enough thing to realize, but it is something nonetheless which you are going to have to think about if you are to make sure that your teams are going to be as strong as you would hope. The matter of finding the best individuals you can for a team is complex and varied. First of all there is the initial recruitment process, whereby you need to make sure that you are filtering out those who are less than ideal for your team. Professional help from the likes of DSC Personnel could be the way to go here, as could having a clear image of what kind of individuals you are hoping to hire. Then it’s just a matter of ensuring that everyone is in the right team within the business, so that their skills are going to be put to the best possible use.

Shared Values

The more that these individuals have values in common, the easier they will find it to work towards a common goal. For that reason, you need to try and put people together who seem to want the same kind of result or output, as that is going to be a much more successful team on the whole. If you can encourage them to share their values and to discover their similarities here, you will find that it makes a huge difference to how well they work together, and the kind of results they produce as a team.

Delegation

Finally, any good team needs to know who is going to do what and why. As long as there is someone in charge who can divy out the tasks and delegate where necessary, you will find that the teams are going to work out much more successfully on the whole as a result of that. Delegation is an indication that the team is working well, and that everyone is in the right place, which is absolutely something you are going to want to aim towards if you want teams that work well.

Recommended Resource – Building Team Power


Building Team Power: How to Unleash the Collaborative Genius of Teams for Increased Engagement, Productivity, and Results

by Thomas Kayser

About the Book

Building Team Power by Thomas Kayser examines the structural mechanisms and behavioral traits that combined to create highly collaborative teams. Thomas provides practical, detailed methods for leaders at every level of the organization to foster and enhance the collaboration between team members in six critical areas:

  • Mutual Trust
  • Decision-Making
  • Consensus Building
  • Conflict Management
  • Delegation Effectiveness
  • Team Problem Solving (two scenarios)

Benefits of Using this Book

StrategyDriven Contributors like Building Team Power for its immediately actionable insights into enhancing team collaboration at any level within an organization. We found Thomas’s methods to be deeply insightful, originating from sound academic principle and refined with real world experience during his thirty years at Xerox. Building Team Power is highly prescriptive, complete with process flows and charts that convey to the reader how to implement the team building methods.

If we had one critisism of Building Team Power, it would be that the procedure-like formatting of the methods provided would be impractical to implement in a team setting. That said, we believe the book would make an excellent tool to create management training courses and teamwork checklists and guides.

Building Team Power embodies many of the principles StrategyDriven recommends in building highly aligned and accountable organizations. Additionally, it mirrors many of our decision-making best practices. For these reasons, its academic foundation and real world refinement, and its implementability, Building Team Power is a StrategyDriven recommended read.

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 15 – An Interview with Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 15 – An Interview with Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World explores the challenges and solutions to effectively managing multinational teams. During our discussion, Susan Bloch and Philip Whiteley, authors of How to Manage in a Flat World: 10 Strategies to Get Connected to Your Team Wherever They Are share their insights with us regarding:

  • overcoming communications challenges associated with geographic separation, time-zone differences, and cultural dissimilarities
  • leveraging cultural diversity to benefit the team and improve its outcomes
  • efficiently transitioning the team through its forming, storming, norming, and performing phases of development
  • providing feedback and performance reviews

Additional Information

Susan and Philip’s book, How to Manage in a Flat World, can be purchased by clicking here.

Final Request…

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About the Authors

Susan Bloch, co-author of How to Manage in a Flat World, has coached top teams in many of the FTSE100 and Fortune 500 companies across the globe over the past 20 years. A truly global citizen, she has lived and worked in five countries; South Africa, North America, Israel, the United Kingdom and India. She is currently Chief Learning Officer at the Aditya Birla Group. Prior to that she worked at Reliance Industries in the Retail Division, as Chief Culture Officer. Before coming to India she was Partner and Head of Thought Leadership at Whitehead Mann in London where she was operating as an executive coach, working with executive teams and conducting board effectiveness reviews. Previously she was global head of executive coaching for the Hay Group. A Chartered Psychologist, Susan has co-authored, How to Manage in a Flat World, Employability, and Complete Leadership (translated into Mandarin, Vietnamese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Greek) and has produced a number of research publications.

Philip Whiteley, co-author of How to Manage in a Flat World, is an author and journalist, specializing in management, particularly the areas of leadership, motivation, and strategic people management. He has written numerous articles for The Times, Personnel Today and Coaching at Work among other titles, and has appeared on BBC Newsnight discussing the portrayal of the workplace in the media. He is author of People Express, Motivation, Unshrink the People and Complete Leadership and his books have been translated into six languages. Now based in the UK, Philip has previously worked in Latin America.