

	TEAM BUILDING INFORMATION

Team Journaling

The very effective tool of keeping a journal can be used in your workplace as well as at home. It is a powerful tool that can enhance our lives and support our personal and work well-being. Whether you journal your personal work experiences and goals, or use team journaling, journaling can easily be applied to your work environment.

The idea of team journaling is to incorporate journaling as a means to assess and track past, current, or future projects and goals. To get started, pick a team moderator, the person(s) who all journaled information will pass through. They will coordinate and monitor the journaling process to keep it on track, and moving in the team's designated direction and purpose.

As a group decide the purpose and goals of the team journal. Then date and write those down. Next decide what vehicle you will use to record your journaling in. You can use a blank book, and pass it from person to person or keep it in a designated place. You can journal on the Internet via a group list, at http://www.yahoo.com, or on a web log, called a blog, see http://www.blogger.com. You can also create a private message board on your company's website. Any of these systems allow an exchange of ideas, feelings, thoughts, and experiences of the goals and directions you have already determined.

You will want to set some boundaries that will need to be respected and adhered to during this process. Date these and write them right under your purpose and goals. For example, there should be no personal attacks regarding ideas or personalities. Keep what is a fact separate from what is a feeling. Having feelings is OK, just don't confuse what is a fact and what is a feeling. At all times agree that respectful expression and disagreement is adhered to. You may want to limit the amount of content anyone can journal at any one time, say a paragraph, or a page. Set any other project guidelines that the team decides to incorporate.

As you begin your team journaling project you may find that the original purpose and goal changes or evolves. You may also find your guidelines need to be added to or modified. In your journaling process meeting in person or via conference can be added to update and relate how the journaling process is working or being effective toward the team goal.

Creating a series of questions related to the team goal and purpose can be an effective way to start the journal process. These questions can focus and motivate individuals, and inspire the creative writing and thinking process. Or making statements and asking if these are agreed to or not is another way to start the process.

The team journal can become an integral part of any companies process to achieve greater clarity and focus about purpose, goals and intentions. The process of team journaling also can create new relationships with the people involved.

Doreene Clement is the creator of, The 5 Year Journal, a journal where you can journal your life in one book for 5 years. You can tour the book at http://www.the5yearjournal.com

dkcomni@aol.com 480.423.8095

Feel free to pass this along to your friends. If you want to see my column, About Journaling, to subscribe http://www.the5yearjournal.com

MORE RESOURCES:
»
»
»
»

RELATED ARTICLES

Presenteeism - present in body absent in productivity
Presenteeism is alive and 'not well' in many businesses today. It will visit your business or may even be present as you read this article.

Team Member Feedback: A Priceless Communication Tool
Feedback is such an important communication tool. Openness, honesty, candor, trust -- all of these are hallmarks of high performance teams and organizations.

Corporate Team Building
There is a WHOLE lot of talk these days about Corporate Team Building. There are many, many options: vacation packages, rope courses, on-going office games, ice-breakers, etc.

The Secret of Successful Events
Reed Employment made a survey of their clients and compiled a report called Motivating People at Work. This revealed that social events that were both organised and paid for by employers have risen by 31 percent.

Teamwork in the Workplace: A Definition
A tight knit team is a group of competent individuals who care deeply about each other. They are fiercely committed to their mission, and are highly motivated to combing their energy and expertise to achieve a common objective.

Listening Between the Lines
Have you seen the tee-shirt with the slogan, "Talk to the hand 'cos the face ain't listening?" Do you feel it's like this sometimes when you are trying to get through to people? But just how good a listener are you? Do you actually "listen between the lines?"So often we hear about a problem, and immediately jump in. We want a quick fix.

Getting Team Discussions Moving in The Right Direction
Group discussions are where much of the creative work of teams is accomplished. Ideas and problem solutions from all team members are the desired outputs of group discussions.

Team Communication Critical To Success
I'm often asked, "Why is my team always fighting fires instead of preparing for changes?" Finding the answer may take some digging. Here are a few possibilities.

Creating Unity In Your Company
The other day I got a call from a friend of mine about an earlier conversation we'd had. Here's what we talked about: Years before he had started a company which has now grown to the point where it has many offices across the USA.

Trust: A Critical Factor to Your Teams Success
True or false? Teams that practice good teamwork contribute to an organization's success.Not only "true" but blatantly true.

Story Telling With a Purpose
For a brief time, I tried to sell life insurance. And, the operative word was 'tried' I can assure you.

Motivation - Dont Make Your Team Uncomfortable
The people in your team may feel a bit uncomfortable whenyou sit down and spend time with them, particularly ifthey're not used to it. They might not be used to you doingit or perhaps a previous manager didn't do it.

3 Steps To Successfully Build A Team In Any Program
Any x by y matrix plan has one big risk..

Nine Ways to Contribute to Project Team Success
The world of work has changed. It used to be that most of us worked as a part of a process, whether on an assembly line, managing interactions with Customers, or any one of a thousand other processes.

Landscaping Business; Employee Relations
There are few industries or service type businesses, which are more labor intensive then that of the Landscaping Profession. Whether it is the installation of new landscape designs or the maintenance or mowing of the existing properties; it is done by people power working with the proper tools.

The Team Process
We live in very progressive times, one only has to look around at the changes on the internet each day to see that this is true.We see changes also happening within the world around us as well, sometimes for the better sometimes not.

A Team That Gleamed
Too many techies get a bad rap for lacking teamwork and communications skills. The stereotype is that while techies are great at what they are trained to do, they cannot parlay their knowledge onto others.

Brainstorm
Ever lost for ideas while working in a group? One of the most often-used technique for generating many ideas is Brainstorming. Alex Osborn, a partner in an advertising agency, developed brainstorming techniques years ago in 1941 to help his employees to come up with many, many ideas for their advertising business.

Effective Team Building For Organizational Success
"Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives.

High Performing Teams: 10 Things You Want To Know About Building A High Performing Team
"Conflict becomes politics, commitment becomes 'Only if it's in my best interest', accountability becomes 'Only when it serves me,' and results just fall by the wayside."- Patrick Lencioni, author of "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team", speaking about dysfunctional teamsBased on my experience as a manager, a member of many teams, an HR professional, and a coach, below are 10 things you want to know about high performing teams.