A positive work environment and promote teamwork isn’t always easy to achieve. Are you that manager who gets called in every year by HR because if your staffs’ low engagement scores. Or perhaps you’ve inherited the shell shocked survivors of yet another transformation. Well if, so you have come to the right place. Today I’m going to share with you my three top tips for getting a team from the cast of The Office to the cost a offices they don’t make TV comedies about.

Today we are talking about creating a positive work environment that promotes teamwork. Let’s get started.

Tactic number one is to stop threatening your team. Now I know you’re not running towards them with a knife. At least I hope you’re not running towards them with a knife. It does impact on how our brain functions though. Let me explain.

Tactic 1 for creating a positive work environment that promotes teamwork

The two bits of our brain that we are really interested in for this conversation is the bit here. Your cortex, that’s the part of your brain that is logical and reasonable. We often call it the director of the brain. It’s the part of your brain that can make sensible decisions. It can learn, can. It can close a deal. It’s the part of your brain that we really want to work with when we’re at work.

A Bit About Brains

But at the back of our brains here we have something called our amygdala. The amygdala is a fantastic piece of kit to have in your brain. What your Amygdala does is look for information that tells us there’s a threat. For example, imagine you are walking down a road in the middle of the night. You hear footsteps running towards you. Your amygdala kicks in and senses danger. It shuts down your cortex. This is not the moment where you want to be thinking about the impact of changes in policing policy. Instead, it forces your body to push all your energy into your large muscle groups. This allows you to fight or flight. Flight means, run the hell away! It’s really, really useful if you like to walk down dark in the middle of the night. However, you amygdala has a problem. It can’t distinguish between you running towards your staff member with a knife, or an unreasonable deadline.

So number one, when I say stop threatening your staff is think about the language you use. Too often, I go into businesses where managers say things like, close this deal or you’re out of here. All of these things get the Amygdala going and then shut down the clever piece of your brain.

My tip number one: Stop threatening your staff.

Tactic 2 for creating a positive work environment that promotes teamwork

You won’t really believe me when I tell you what my tip number two is. It begins with giving everybody the highest possible performance rating. This work comes from a man called Benjamin Zander. He the director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He also ran a course for musicians. At the beginning of every semester he announce that everyone would be receiving an “A”. All the students need to do this term is prove they are worthy of it.

A Real Example

I want to tell you about a client of mine who was brave enough to try the strategy. This team that had big marketing budgets. They had been top performers for years and years. However their sales figures had been on the slide for a number of months. To compound it all they were going through a massive renovation. That meant that they were crammed into awful little offices. They had no way to show off their products.

What their manager said was that they had all met there target for month. All of the would receive their performance bonus for month. All they had to do was prove to him that they were worth getting it. You know what? The team, had not only their best sales month but that best sales year even without having a showroom.

My tip number two. Make sure you’re giving you team an “A” before they begin. All they have to do is tell you why you were right.

A Question for You

We’ve talked about my two top tips and now it’s your turn.

Think about the best boss you had. What did they do to create a positive work environment and promote teamwork? Write your answers in the comments below. We want to see what we need to doget that pumping environment in our offices.

Tactic 3 for creating a positive work environment that promotes teamwork

If you are like me and you are massive fan of Chip and Dan Heath. You might have already heard about my strategy number three: look for the bright spots.

Think about performance of all the sales people in your organization. Some of them are doing great. However there’s might be one person who is failing dismally. Managers tend to focus time on that person who’s doing dismally. Whereas we should be, they posit,on asking whatthose amazing performers doing differently. Then we can do more of that and push it through the whole organization. This is a great strategy for helping people boost their performance. In addition, if we rant about the poor performer their amygdala switches. on Their cortex switches off. Therefore, it almost guarantees that the poor performers are going to fail.

We can’t go and our ask those high performers what they’re doing, they can’t tell us. What we actually need to do is watch them. However, I do mean sitting there with a piece of paper and writing down everything that happens, every minute. You’ll be able to spot what it is that they do differently to their peers. After that, you can make sure it’s something that everybody in your team is doing.

Those are the 3 Tips for creating positive work environment and promote teamwork

In conclusion , those are my three top tips. You can turn your team from the cast of The Office to the cast of an office that isn’t a TV comedy show.

An extra

I’ve got even more for you. Click on this link. You will find a quiz that can tell you how happy your team is. It also gives you even more tips.

Don’t forget. Add your thoughts on how to create a positive work environment and promote teamwork in the comments below!