Tag: Team Leadership Skills

When you focus on building community in the workplace or your organization, you create cohesive, highly productive teams that support and elevate each others’ efforts.

No Sense of Belonging? Focus on Building Community in the Workplace

Written by Louise Santiago. Posted in Community of Practice.

There’s a huge chasm between being assigned to work together as a team and having a sense of belonging that comes from building Community in the workplace. Case in point, there was a team I had been hired to coach and right away I noticed there were a few team members that felt it was enough to show up, compare  notes, and call it good. Sound familiar? 

Together we began building a Community of Practice for this team — a group of people who share a common concern and are committed to working together. Even the team members who initially were hesitant about leaving the sidelines began to see that they had been vastly missing out and, in essence, robbing themselves and their coworkers of something extremely valuable — Community!

Even if your job seems mundane, your attitude and behavior at work determines, in part, how physically and emotionally healthy you are. It’s possible to do nitty gritty work and still have a sense of fulfillment, satisfaction, and belonging that elevates WORK to COMMUNITY. Let’s see how that happens.

Team Leadership Skills

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How Effective Team Training Is Powered by Social Learning

Written by Louise Santiago. Posted in Social Learning Spaces.

effective_team_training“In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.” – Albert Badura

Many leaders are increasingly frustrated by the time and money wasted on traditional types of training. These seminars, workshops, and webinars, while packed with helpful information, rarely lead to tangible results. If you lead a team, finding the best way for your team to be fully engaged in what they are learning should be a priority. Which is why many organizations are looking at social learning as the real powerhouse behind effective team training.

Although the term is relatively new, social learning has been a powerful vehicle for human progress throughout history. According to ideas proposed by learning experts, such as psychologist Albert Bandura, we learn primarily via interaction and shared experience. 

One increasingly popular example of a social learning forum is YouTube. YouTube users upload their own content, on a topic of their choosing, and the content’s credibility is mainly determined by the popularity and rating of the video from those within the community. This highlights a key difference—social learning is self-regulatory. (Interestingly, an article from Wegner and Trayner comments on how some online communities mirror aspects of Communities of Practice). 

Community of practice, Team Leadership Skills

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No matter the size of your business, you can use the principles of social learning in the workplace to bring your employees closer together to work as a cohesive team.

Social Learning in the Workplace Sparks Creativity & Increases Productivity

Written by Louise Santiago. Posted in Social Learning Spaces.

When did you learn the big concepts that molded you into the person you are today? Were they learned in an academic lecture room or in a relaxed social context? For the most part, didn’t we learn our roles, responsibilities, and expectations from our family, neighborhood circles, and intimate discussions with teachers, trusted coaches, and advisors? Knowing this, the questions arise: How can this be translated into the workplace? How can social learning in the workplace help your team be more productive?

As CEOs and team leaders, you most likely recruited your team based on their individual merit. However, to make your collaborative project wildly successful you need a cohesive team that is fully engaged and invested in the work they do together. Yet, without an open atmosphere conducive to learning, each team member remains an individual. Before we identify how to do this, we need to establish whether employing social learning in the workplace is right for your organization. 

What types of businesses and organizations can benefit from social learning in the workplace?

Productive Team Meetings, Team Leadership Skills

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How to Keep Team Members Engaged — Social Learning Spaces Make it Easy!

Written by Louise Santiago. Posted in Social Learning Spaces.

As a team leader, are you wondering how to keep team members engaged, when your team lost some of its cohesiveness and enthusiasm? Try Social Learning Spaces!Is your team fully engaged in their work as a team or are they distracted? Really, who can blame them if they are distracted? This last year has brought major upheaval in how teams interact and in how work gets done. There’s no going back to normal and maybe that’s a very good thing. If you’ve been wondering how to keep team members engaged, there is a new and exciting opportunity for you! I believe leaders can use this time of transition as an opportunity to re-engage their teams through social learning spaces.

What exactly is a social learning space and how can you use it to help your team members be more fully engaged? 

Team Leadership Skills

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Center for Learning Leaders

Louise J Santiago, PhD
Executive Coach and Organizational Consultant

Where Leadership is Intentional Work

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