If you're like the majority of us out there you may have not yet settled on your New Year's Resolution. But don't worry, it’s never too late to get started or rethink your goals entirely. So many people set resolutions in January only to have forgotten or decided to already stop them by February. 

It is hard to focus when you're hungry. We've all been there, feeling "hangry" and irritable because we need food. Now imagine being a child in school, trying to learn and grow, but struggling because you're hungry all the time. That's why the Herrmann team was so excited to partner with The Kind Mouse during our recent retreat in Tampa, Florida.

Every team invariably runs into communication issues in the workplace. No matter the cause — a language barrier, different communication styles, or simply a misunderstanding — effective teams must diagnose and overcome these communication challenges.

For most of my professional life, I’ve worked with software product development teams, as a business analyst and product manager. That means I get to collaborate with several different people to accomplish anything.

As a result, I’ve built a love-hate relationship with meetings:

I love meetings when they help my team build products and customers solve problems.

I’m not a fan of meetings that don’t make progress toward those outcomes, which seem to be most of them.

I suspect a lot of you can relate, so here are some thoughts on meetings, why they’re important, what challenges they present, and how you can make your meetings work with the help of Herrmann’s Stop & Think app in Microsoft Teams.

As organizations strive to build diverse and inclusive workplaces, it's important to understand the role that cognitive diversity can play.

Your team is trying to solve a thorny problem or generate a breakthrough idea. How do you approach the challenge? What’s your go-to creative tool for collaborative brainstorming sessions? 

Everybody thinks differently, but few organizations can leverage cognitive diversity as a strategic advantage. The ways individuals think guide how they work. The ways in which groups of individuals think, guide how the teams they form work. The ways that groups of teams think (and work) make or break the companies that they work for.  

One of our Certified Practitioners, Miranda Troy,an executive coach and co-owner of Adaptive-Talent Leadership Services discusses how to maximize your talent by harnessing cognitive diversity with the Whole Brain® thinking model. 

In a recent webinar, our Head of Content Ashley Blackburn shared strategies for using your Whole Brain® to ignite demand. She had a look at the Whole Brain® Model and discussed some specific strategies on how to use this to ignite demand for your target audience. She also gave participants insight on how to build Whole Brain® Campaigns and strategies, including how to apply these insights to their work.

Burnout is a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. Many of us are familiar with this feeling, whether during the extended pandemic or through the social conflicts seen in many communities across the country and around the world.

Diverse, cross-functional teams are more likely to accomplish the most impactful work that organizations perform these days. 

When you’re part of such a team, you have to figure out how to effectively leverage your various approaches to collaborating, solving problems, and making decisions.

Whole Brain^® Thinking provides great insight that can help your team figure out how to make the most of your team’s diverse thinking preferences- but those insights are only helpful if they’re readily available.

That’s where Stop & Think comes into play. If your team spends most of its workday in Microsoft Teams, the Stop & Think integration provides you easy access to the key information from your team member’s shared HBDI^® profiles. It also provides guidance on how to take advantage of all the insights those HBDI^® profiles provide.

Here are five common scenarios when your team can use Stop & Think to maximize your effectiveness.