Winning team cultures start with a group focused on the goal and trusts each other implicitly. Longtime college football coach Bronco Mendenhall has built winning team cultures — on and off the field — at two major universities by unifying his players and coaches around the Whole Brain® Thinking framework 

Team building is one of the most important jobs for any manager. After all, unified and collaborative teams are exponentially more powerful than any one person alone. And one of the best ways for managers to bring teams together is by emphasizing communication and team-building activities.

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.

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.

The workplace has changed dramatically in just a few years. Millions of people have shifted to hybrid and remote schedules while new technologies continue to change how work is done. All of this disruption puts stress on organizations and the people in them. As they look to adapt to the future of work, leaders must pay particular attention to change management in remote working.

Leading a team of introverts, ambiverts, and extroverts isn’t easy because they might react differently to the exact situations. You might feel inclined to try to move everyone to your preferred approach. But managing introversion and extroversion in the workplace requires a more delicate and deliberate approach to ensure everyone feels valued for who they are.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." – Aristotle