The Dot Com Miner

Each and every business whether big or small should have some objective and for attaining that goal they work together in teams or groups. The process that enables the group to achieve their goal is known as team building. Team building means proper selection of persons that works together to achieve a certain goal.

Team building is of equal importance whether it is a sports team or team that works for a company. Both have some goals to achieve. The team building process involves three stages: Clarification of goal, identifying the problem or matter and finding a solution for it.

There are different approaches that heighten teamwork level of your organization. In personality-based teambuilding the team members will have to fill-up a questionnaire that helps them to learn about personalities of other team members. It mainly includes their decision making power, their knowledge level and other things related to their personality. In activity-based teambuilding, the teams are asked to perform some difficult task in outdoor settings. The various skills of the team members are examined under skills-based teambuilding. In problem solving-based teambuilding, all the members of the team, work jointly to identify the problem and after that find a solution for it.

There are many benefits of team building to the organization. It helps in maintaining healthy relationships among team members. When different people work together it encourages their creativity level that brings new and advanced ideas.

While working in a team the employees find no difficulty to accept changes. Team building helps people to know each other.

Author presents a website on team building. This website provides information about meaning of team building, advantages of team building to organization, team building process and approaches to team building. You can visit his site on business intelligence

The biggest time management mistake you can ever make is
forgetting your closest partner in life. The one who stays
with you all the way from cradle to grave. The
one who drives you through your daily and nightly routines,
who runs all your habits. You want it or not, this partner
of yours is the real manager of most of your time. His name
is Your Subconscious Mind.

You and Your Subconscious Mind make one tightly bound team
in everything you do. Whatever big or small project you
undertake, you two depend critically on each other. And
unless you both work in the same direction, your team hardly
makes any big progress.

But how do you align those directions? Like in any team,
communication is the key. You need to communicate to Your
Subconscious Mind the specific target you want to hit and in
what time frame. Of course, you can take the lead and set
the direction to go. Yet, you still need to convince Your
Subconscious Mind to follow you in that direction and hit
your target.

The challenge is that Your Subconscious Mind has a stubborn
and inert personality. If you just tell him what to do, he
does not listen you well. He already has strong opinions
about what you should be doing instead. After all, he is the
one who holds all your beliefs that you absorbed throughout
your life up to now. And he has a comprehensive toolbox of
routines and automatic reactions to get you through your
day.

But don’t give up on this challenge. If you manage to
convince Your Subconscious Mind to drive you in the
direction you want to go, he has the power to make you
unstoppable! The power that can keep you on course through
the storms of every day distractions and interruptions.

But how? How do you convince Your Subconscious Mind to help
you? You need to learn how to communicate in the way he
accepts and understands. That special way of communication
with Your Subconscious Mind is what goal setting techniques
and skills are really all about.

While there are finer points that you can pick up in books
or on my site, here is the core essence of goal setting
techniques as a way of communicating with Your Subconscious
Mind.

The most critical element of goal setting is WRITING your
goals. For a number of reasons, this writing process is
absolutely necessary for Your Subconscious Mind to take them
seriously. Writing is the basis of the communication.
Anything less than a clearly written goal will be discarded
as unimportant noise.

Note that the goal writing process is a two way
communication. When you write your goal, if Your
Subconscious Mind does not accept that goal as reasonable,
he will try block your hand until you actually write
something more realistic.

The second critical element is about the way you formulate
the goal when you write it. You want to get your point
across to Your Subconscious Mind most directly and
effectively, in the language he understands best. That’s why
you need to follow certain rules of goal writing.

In particular, formulate your goal in present tense, as a
complete sentence that starts with “I”. Make the goal as
measurable and specific as you can. Correct and rewrite it
until it is crystal clear.

Set a specific time frame. Set it by finishing your sentence
with a deadline that you honestly think you can meet.

Keep those notes in a safe place and come back to them
often to review and correct your written goals. Keep
thinking about them throughout your day.

Finally, take a few minutes right now and actually write
down three to five of your most desirable goals. Reconnect
to that important partner of yours and start communicating.
Right now, and from now on.

Sergey Dudiy, Ph.D., is a time management writer and
web entrepreneur, founder of
Time-Management-Guide.com, the definitive guide to
personal time management and goal setting.

He also publishes free
Time Management Fortress newsletter, dedicated to
building a stronger foundation for your success skills.
Subscribe today and get a free copy of his report
Getting Unstuck When You Have Too Many Things to Do or Under Pressure.

If you reprint this article, your notification at
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The most critical job of a manager, when you boil it all down, is communication. To be successful, a manager has to be effective in communicating one-on-one, in writing and in groups. While weakness in any of these three disciplines will compromise the ability to lead, the weakness most often seen in managers is in group communication. And it’s the most conspicuous.

Group communication can be one of a manager’s most powerful assets. When presenting to a group, he or she has its full attention - at least at the start. The trick is to keep it.

Rather than dreading or being reticent about it, managers should seek out opportunities to present to anyone in the company. The best way to develop any skill is through repetition. This particular skill also helps to increase personal and professional exposure.

Unfortunately, corporate presentations and sales presentations are usually either:

1. Mildly competent, or

2. Career killers

The advent of new media and technology that facilitate communication and improve our ability to convey our ideas also can have the opposite effect. If a manager has a propensity to dig a hole for him or herself in a presentation, PowerPoint can be an earthmover on steroids that will bury the presenter totally.

On the other hand, managers who are adept at presenting and public speaking can communicate even more effectively and convincingly with these tools.

A Near Death by PowerPoint Experience:

We’ve all endured them … PowerPoint presentations that drone on forever. I call this “Death by PowerPoint”.

One of my near-death by PowerPoint experiences occurred in the northwest corner of Newfoundland, Canada. A company that I used to work for had a small factory there. I had flown there with the company president, a few fellow officers and Bill Drellow, the freelance writer who I tapped to edit my most recent book, “The Lost Art of General Management”.

After touring the plant with the staff and making the general niceties with the production folks, we settled in the conference room for the homestretch … the PowerPoint presentation.

The projector warmed up, the presenter clicked on his computer, and I saw something that almost killed me on the spot - the little box in the lower left corner of the frame that read, “Slide 1 of 101″. That’s right, 101 slides!

I didn’t have the heart to pull the plug on their presentation and ask them to get to the point in 20 slides or less. The team had worked very hard to improve that factory, and they deserved the chance to relate the pride of their accomplishments on their own terms. So there I sat, contemplating forms of suicide (remember Airplane, the Movie?) to end the pain of nonstop listening.

The moral of this story is that all we walked away from this presentation with was the impression that they worked hard and that they presented 101 slides! Beyond that, I couldn’t have recalled three things they had tried to communicate to us 15 minutes later.

The Ten Elements of a Great Presentation
1. Before you do anything else, identify a maximum of three key points you want the audience to remember.

2. Determine why your audience should remember these points, so you can communicate that, too.

3. Open your presentation with the “why” in such a way that it takes no more than one minute to explain. If you can’t explain to the audience why your presentation is important to them within one minute, you’ve lost them.

4. Never forget that the audience cares less about what you have to say than you do.

5. Remember what you learned in fourth grade: Speak at an appropriate rate. Not too slow or too fast. And project your voice.

6. Communicate broadly through body language as well as spoken language.

7. Don’t use the podium unless you’re stuck reading a speech and it’s the only source of light. It’s easy to create the impression you’re holding on to it for dear life. Speakers who walk around a podium instead of rigidly standing behind it show more confidence, differentiate themselves from other presenters, and are more interesting to watch. Walking, talking and gesturing at the same time also is a great way to hide the yips because all the adrenaline doesn’t go to the throat.

8. Be so well-rehearsed that it doesn’t sound rehearsed. There’s no substitute for preparation.

9. Review your presentation with a trusted colleague or two to ensure it says what you think it says and is easily understood.

10. When using slides -

Organize your presentation so the titles of the slides alone tell the story. Any other text should simply support the title.

Don’t overuse distracting gimmicks like animation.

Never read the slides word for word. Their only purpose is to reinforce what the audience is learning.

Never spend more than two minutes on a slide.

Finally, and most importantly, prepare your presentation so that you don’t actually need any slides. If you can be effective without slides, you’re a great presenter. If you can do that, you can use slides to enhance your presentation, rather than leaning on them like a crutch.

My editor goes even further than I do when it comes to relying on slides. An experienced speechwriter, he feels that slides should only be used when they contain the faces of alleged perps and the audience is morning roll call in the squad room!

The Three Types of Presentations
There are three basic types of internal presentations that managers should be adept at delivering. There are numerous hybrids, but the three basic internal presentations are:

1. The Vision, Mission, Goal Presentation

2. The Results Presentation

3. The Change-Initiative Presentation

The general theme that can always be used and tailored to suit any of these types of presentations follows this pattern: “Who we are, where we are going and how we are going to get there.”

There also are three general types of external presentations:

1. Customer Presentations

2. Supplier Presentations

3. Investor/Banker Presentations

The purpose of external presentations usually is to influence the outcome of a negotiation. Thematic elements include “What’s in it for you” and “How we can do this together.”

Again, presentations should always start with “Why this is important to you (the audience)”.

I can’t emphasize enough that if you want to succeed as a leader, you must master the art of group presentation. If you just aren’t comfortable with it, there is only one way to cure your discomfort… do as many presentations as possible! Comfort and an air of controlled self-confidence will only come from experience. The more you avoid developing your presentation skills, the heavier this anchor will become on your career.

Take a course, join Toastmasters, or buy a video/CD on the subject. Start with easy small group presentations and continue to work your way up until you are comfortable regardless of how many people are in the room.

I have made it a requirement that each of my direct reports take a course in public speaking. The ones who jumped to the task without delay have shown amazing progress… not just in their speaking skills, but in their leadership. Why? Because the skills I have outlined become part of their general way of thinking, talking one-on-one and writing. Soon, they all become significantly stronger communicators who incorporate “why this is important to you” into their communications.

Free PowerPoint First Aid Kit

This First Aid kit is a voiced over PowerPoint presentation that walks a presenter through the creation of their presentation and offers a templated structure for creating the presentation. To receive your free PowerPoint First Aid Kit, just send an email to rob@robwaite.com and list “PowerPoint First Aid Kit” in the title of the email. Your email address will only be used to email you the First Aid Kit and will then be deleted from our system. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose whatsoever.

Rob Waite is a senior executive with over 20 years of leadership experience in domestic and international business. His successful track record includes start-ups, turnarounds, multinational strategic partnerships and global business expansions with Fortune 500 companies.
Rob is also a successful author, dynamic speaker and a business strategist. His most recent book is The Lost Art of General Management, was dubbed “a must read for anyone who wants to be unstoppable in business” by one well-known CEO. Rob also developed and produced a one-of-kind interactive virtual seminar The Six Figure Job Search that guides executive level job seekers through the entire job search process. Also, joining such luminaries as Bill Gates, Donald Trump and Suze Orman, Rob is a contributing author to the Walking With the Wise series from Mentors magazine.
Rob has been a senior executive with both Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies.
You can learn more about Rob, his books and programs at http://www.robwaite.com and at http://www.sixfigurejobsearch.com