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Winning Teams on the Football Field and in the Office

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Winning Teams on the Football Field and in the Office

Teams, teams, teams. They're all the rage these days. Whether you love-em or loathe-em, you'll have to learn to live, not only with them, but within them. You career will depend on it. Here are five strategies for building a high-performance team.

Manage by adultery.
It's a term coined by Chaparrel Steel to describe its management philosophy of treating workers like adults instead of children. People are hired, not to do mindless jobs, but to put their brains to work. Management's job is to give the team or work group a mission; see that they get the necessary resources, provide feedback and encouragement; and then turn them loose to be creative problem solvers.

Hire people who care.
When evaluating prospective employees, a major airline brings all job candidates together in a room and asks each person to make a presentation. Everybody thinks that the company officials are evaluating the person making the presentation. But in reality, the company is evaluating the candidates in the audience to see who are attentive and supportive as others are presenting. It is a strong signal that these people have the ability to care about others and are potential candidates to hire.

Make sure there is a scoreboard.
One critical difference between a group and a team is that a team knows what constitutes a win. Players in sports know instantly where their team stands and whether they are winning or losing. This information then affects how they are going to play the rest of the game. But in most organizations, employees may work for weeks and months and never know where their team stands and if they are winning, losing, or just hanging in there. Like sports teams, business teams should also have scoreboards. Then team members would have some idea how close they are to a win and what they need to do to make it happen.

Don't encourage employee dependence.
The Romans had an interesting practice regarding ownership. After building an arch, the engineer in change was expected to stand beneath it as the scaffolding was removed. If the arch didn't hold, he was the first to know. Effective leaders also keep ownership where it belongs?in the team. If the leader keeps running in and lifting the weights for his team, they are never going to build any of their own muscle. The trap in becoming a "hero leader" is that every time you pull a rabbit out of a hat, you generate more dependency from your team. Important: Astute leaders welcome their employees to discuss problems and solutions, but never let them leave their problems with the leader.

Set up your team to win, not be slaughtered.
If your team is faced with multiple tasks or problems, don't always tackle the worst ones first. Conventional wisdom says prioritize your tasks and then begin tackling your most important problems, solve them and then move on to smaller ones. This approach ignores the fact that the biggest problem is usually the hardest to tackle. Therefore, if not prepared mentally, team members are more likely to fail, become demoralized, and give up. This is not permission for all of us procrastinators to put aside our tough assignment. Rather, it allows us to gain the confidence to first experience success on a smaller level before going for "the big one."

If we don't know it, how can we do it? Paul "Bear" Bryant, the legendary football coach at the University of Alabama, said winning team members need to know the following:

Tell me what you expect of me.

Give me an opportunity to perform.L/li>

Let me know how I'm doing.

Give me guidance where I need it.

Reward me according to my contributions.

I couldn't have said it better than Bear Bryant. Do you have a winning team?

Marcia Zidle, the 'people smarts' coach, works with business leaders to quickly solve their people management headaches so they can concentrate on their #1 job ? to grow and increase profits. She offers free help through Leadership Briefing, a weekly e-newsletter with practical tips on leadership style, employee motivation, recruitment and retention and relationship management. Subscribe by going to http://leadershiphooks.com/ and get the bonus report "61 Leadership Time Savers and Life Savers". Marcia is the author of the What Really Works Handbooks ? resources for managers on the front line and the Power-by-the-Hour programs ? fast, convenient, real life, affordable courses for leadership and staff development. She is available for media interviews, conference presentations and panel discussions on the hottest issues affecting the workplace today. Contact Marcia at 800-971-7619.

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In The News:

Preparing for the eventual widespread conversion to IPv6, the Nmap Project has updated its namesake security scanning tool so it can scan IPv6 networks using a variety of novel techniques.

Alcatel-Lucent is set to give Cisco and Juniper another run for the money in core routing 10 years after its initial attempt failed.

A new variant of SpyEye malware allows cybercriminals to monitor potential bank fraud victims by hijacking their webcams and microphones, according to security researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab.

Sony on Tuesday showed a digital media hub that uses Wi-Fi to connect its PCs, tablets, smartphones and PlayStation game consoles, a product that it hopes will be part of its comeback.

Advanced technologies such as HAMR could mean disk drive capacities from 30TB to 60TB by 2016, according to a new report by IHS iSuppli.

Google said Tuesday morning that it has closed the deal to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion

YouTube and German music royalty collecting society GEMA have appealed the outcome of a lawsuit filed by GEMA against YouTube, in which a German court ordered YouTube to inspect the titles of uploaded videos to filter out potentially copyright-infringing content.

Google has finally closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, and will now start working on new devices while keeping Android open, it said on Tuesday.

Trusteer expects malware used to attack several German bank sites to be reconfigured for banks in other countries

Former OMB intelligence chief Michael Daniel will take over as the debate over CISPA, for example, heats up

Sidecar, a born-again startup whose founders hail from Internet media services company RealNetworks, Tuesday is launching an eponymous app for iPhones and Android smartphones that's designed to make it easier for people to share videos, photos and more while talking on those devices.

A pair of Microsoft-backed industry groups applauded the ultimatum European Union antitrust regulators issued to rival Google over alleged anti-competitive practices.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said Monday that its application system for new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has reopened, more than a month after it was brought down because of a software glitch.

EMC has acquired Syncplicity, an enterprise file-management service provider, for an undisclosed sum.

A judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined that a Kodak patent asserted in a complaint against Apple and Research In Motion is invalid, Kodak said on Monday.

The security vendor Trusteer is warning banks to look out for a sophisticated Trojan capable of emptying the account of an online customer.

Named late last week to replace Howard Schmidt as the top White House cybersecurity adviser, Michael Daniel is a 17-year veteran of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and has been its intelligence branch chief for the past 11 years. But he has stayed largely under the radar, even in the cybersecurity community.

Traditional mobile phone plans are now on the wane in the U.S., but the country's biggest carriers are still bringing in more money and leading the world in revenue, according to a report based on first-quarter results.

Schools in the U.S. will need broadband speeds of 100 Mbps per 1,000 students and staff members by the 2014-15 school year in order to meet a growing demand for Web-based instruction and a skyrocketing number of student-owned Web devices, according to a new report by a trade group representing state education agencies.

Voyager Mobile, the startup that had planned to launch last Tuesday but said it was delayed by an attack on its website, went live on Sunday with an unlimited voice, text and data plan for US$39 per month.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider the petition of Joel Tenenbaum, a former doctoral student at Boston University who faces a fine of US$675,000 for illegally downloading 30 songs.

As Avaya continues its transition from a hardware company into a communications and collaboration software provider, it is going through some growing pains, including a shakeup of executives and uncertainty around a potential initial public offering that's been rumored for months.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has hired Paul Ohm, a privacy advocate and critic of current online privacy practices, as a senior privacy adviser for consumer protection and competition issues affecting the Internet and mobile services.

Salesforce.com, which has placed ample emphasis on its Chatter social networking application, will actually begin providing real-time chat functionality as part of an imminent upgrade to its family of cloud-based software, according to a company document.

The Nasdaq computer system that delayed trade notices of the Facebook IPO on Friday was plagued by race conditions, the stock exchange announced Monday. As a result of this technical glitch in its Nasdaq OMX system, the market expects to pay out US$13 million or even more to traders.

There are many ways you can use Twitter to help build your business. For example, you can track trending topics, leverage Web analytics, and tap some 50 million daily users.

International medical vendor Mediq was expanding in a big way by acquisition and needed a standard email platform across its business, but the project's cost and the complexity of doing it alone was so daunting that the company called on outside help that costs it less in the long run.

Samsung is blocking a hack of its S Voice digital assistant software that allowed any Android phone running Ice Cream Sandwich to use the app.

Advanced Micro Devices aims to improve the quality of high-definition video and 3D graphics on equipment in casinos and hospitals with its new R-series processors, which the company announced on Monday.

Mobile operators that want help keeping their subscribers happy can get it through a new managed service from Alcatel-Lucent, the company said on Monday.

Malware writers have used Crossrider, a cross-browser extension development framework, to build a click-fraud worm that spreads on Facebook, security researchers from antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab said on Monday.

Now that Google has gotten permission from China's Anti-Monopoly Bureau to acquire Motorola Mobility, the companies are expected to complete their merger by the middle of this week.

IT management executives from large corporations worry most about how to manage employee-owned devices safely and securely, according to clients of the Directions on Microsoft analyst firm.

Silver Peak today upgraded the software for its WAN appliance to handle automated optimization for TCP and non-TCP traffic, 512,000 simultaneous connections for 10 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) infrastructures and support for a bunch of common hypervisors.

IT managers grappling with bring-your-own-device policies can expect to see an explosion in the number of smartphones and tablets used by employees.

The big cable companies know that if they want to stay relevant in the wireless market, they can't do it on their own.

Version 3.4 of the Linux kernel was officially rolled out Sunday, in what maintainer Linus Torvalds called a "calm" release cycle.

Google has "a matter of weeks" to address four antitrust issues identified by European Union antitrust regulators. If Google addresses these issues the case can be solved by a so-called "commitment decision" instead of formal antitrust proceedings resulting in a fine, said JoaquAn Almunia, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy.

Yahoo has agreed to sell off about half of its stake in Alibaba Group back to the Chinese e-commerce giant as part of a US$7.1 billion deal, the two companies jointly announced on Monday.

If the numbers at StatCounter are accurate then the world has a new Web browser champion: Google Chrome.

The chief of AT&T Mobility can't wait for Windows 8 tablets to hit the market because they'll fuel demand for Windows phones.

IBM is offering employees who are nearing retirement a one-time opportunity to take advantage of a program that would guarantee their employment through Dec. 31, 2013.

Europe's top court has ruled that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright.

Your boss wants it yesterday, but it better be good when judged by the standards of tomorrow. Your customers want every feature they can imagine, but don't you dare confuse them by giving them all the buttons they want. Your fellow programmers want your code documented, but they just respond "tl;dr" to anything you write.

After all the attention, clamor, and expectations Facebook is now a publicly traded company worth $104 billion. With shares trading at a hundred times earnings, Facebook is under a lot of pressure to increase the profit that it brings in. In other words, now the fun begins.

Microsoft is abandoning the 'Aero' user interface with Windows 8, calling the UI that debuted in Vista and continued in Windows 7, 'cheesy' and 'dated.'

Company claims system requirements will be the same as those of Visual Studio 2010 despite performance increases

The NFL has big stadiums, big players and big games, but when it comes to computer systems, the league's vice president of IT doesn't use the word big.

Despite interoperability trials and demonstrations involving alternative data center fabric standards, a non-standard fabric technology is said by proponents to be at the front of the pack.

Taiwanese smartphone vendor High Tech Computer said on Sunday certain models of its newest smartphones have passed U.S. Customs and are being released to its carrier customers, after the company previously warned of a delay in product shipments because of an International Trade Commission (ITC) order.

So.cl, an experimental research project from Microsoft, that combines social networking and search to promote learning, is now accepting all users interested in joining the site.

Email managers have a lot at stake. After all, the volume of global electronic messages sent via email dwarfs all other forms of electronic communication, including social networking. Since the inception of electronic mail, which, according to some Internet historians, can be traced to a small mainframe app called 'MAILBOX' from the mid-1960s, human-to-human messages have been created, transmitted and stored in electronic format. But early email administrators could hardly have envisioned the complexity of current email infrastructure and the concomitant maze of technical, security, business and regulatory challenges.

Pakistan late Sunday reversed a block on Twitter in the country over material it considered anti-Islam, the country's interior minister said.

Technical problems at the Nasdaq exchange affected the trading of Facebook shares on Friday, the much-anticipated day of its IPO (initial public offering), Robert Greifeld, chief executive of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc., told reporters on Sunday, according to published reports.

Chinese regulatory authorities have approved Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility, paving the way for the deal to close within the week, company officials confirmed Saturday.

In the latest move in a complex series of patent-related cases, Apple filed a motion in a U.S. district court late Friday to ban Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the U.S.

Apple's plans for a Bluetooth 4.0-based iWallet could be the beginning of the end for the venerable cash register.

An Italian court has upheld a a!900,000 (US$1.2 million) fine imposed on Apple by Italy's competition authority for allegedly violating consumer protection laws, Italian media reported late Friday.

The mobile gift-giving app Karma announced Friday it has been acquired by Facebook. The announcement came shortly after the markets closed on Facebook's first day as a publicly traded company.

The U.S. International Trade Commission issued an import ban Friday on any Android devices from Motorola that infringe one of Microsoft's patents.

The prospect of cyberwar means the U.S. needs to 'rethink every aspect of defense,' says one summit presenter

At any given moment today, on-the-clock employees are updating their social media status, reading feeds and networking on business media sites. Moments can stretch to minutes: A recent study by the Ponemon Institute found that 60 percent of social media users spend at least 30 minutes a day on these sites while at work.

HP is expected to announce a large layoff at its quarterly investors briefing on Wednesday, losing as many as 30,000 employees. But for now, the company isn't talking about its plans.

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Given the complexity of today's applications, it's folly to suggest that the future role of the CIO is less technical and more businesslike, columnist Bernard Golden writes. If anything, it's the opposite -- the business side of the enterprise should embrace technology.

Twitter has announced support for "Do Not Track," immediately implementing it to halt online tracking of users who trigger a setting in their browsers.

The first hours of Facebook's IPO got off to a shaky start today with the share price wavering around the $40 mark, never gaining the astronomical momentum many had anticipated.

Fully 95% of 600 businesses surveyed by Cisco permit the use of employee-owned smartphones and tablets at the office and found productivity gains for workers who use their own hardware.

Perhaps the Next iPhone won't be called iPhone 5 but the Zombie iPhone, in honor of the new spate of rumors that the late Steve Jobs is still with us in a sense, as the chief designer of the upcoming handset.

The company has now set things straight again and all content on the iTunes Store a including music and apps a now displays the word "jailbreak".

Symantec originally thought that at its peek the Flashback Trojan was generating around $10,000 a day by hijacking ad clicks. Now, new research suggests the developers may only have earned $14,000 during the time that the malware was active.

A hacker who claims to hate both Anonymous and notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack that the bittorent website has been suffering for the last 24 hours.

When Windows 8 comes out later this year, the new Start screen and Metro-style apps will likely be the first changes you'll notice, but those aren't the only things that are new. Microsoft is also making some serious security enhancements to help keep your system safer and to improve Windows' ability to combat viruses and malware. It just may be the biggest improvement to Windows security yet.

Three winners of an academic competition at the University of Rochester to create the most innovative and useful applications for IBM's Watson cognitive computing systems were announced yesterday by Big Blue.

Facebook's initial public offering, or IPO, hits Wall Street Friday, and is one of the most highly anticipated tech stock offerings of the past decade. Everyone, it seems, wants to be in on the action. And it's possible to do so--after the big boys get their hands on it first.

'If the product is free, you are the product.'

Conmen in Manchester have been selling bottles of water, cans of Coke, and even potatoes under the pretence that they are iPhones.

HP is looking to cut at least 25,000 jobs in a bid to reduce costs and return to growth, according to media reports.

Adoption of Android tablets and smartphones in large businesses has been "severely limited" because of the complexities of managing the various Android models and versions, market research firm Gartner said in an evaluation of 20 mobile device management software vendors.

Cisco's Wireless Networking Business Unit doesn't actually talk so much about wireless networking these days. Increasingly, its message aimed at IT groups is about the broader concept of "mobility."

Hewlett-Packard on Wednesday announced the OfficeJet 150 Mobile All-in-One portable printer, which the company called the world's first mobile multifunction device that can "print, copy and scan on the go."

Despite the rumors, developers are focused on making apps -- and money -- from today's Android

Apple is in talks with China Mobile, according to the carrier's chairman Xi Guohua, although an agreement is yet to be reached.

The question of whether CISPA is really necessary might arise in the wake of a Department of Defense announcement last week that as many as 1,000 defense contractors -- and possibly thousands more -- may voluntarily join an expanded program of sharing classified information on cyber threats with the federal government.

If you're a Verizon customer upset that your next smartphone contract won't include unlimited data, Sprint would like to remind you that you have an alternative.

In retaliation against Internet Service Providers (ISPs) blocking some video-sharing and torrent websites like The Pirate Bay under Indian court orders, Anonymous, the "hacktivist" organization, today took down the websites of the ruling Congress Party and the Supreme Court of India. Anonymous, which in the past has been credited with taking down the websites of the MPAA, RIAA, the FBI, the US Department of Justice and child pornographers, took down these sites in what is understood to be DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

The University of Kentucky says it has reshaped its business intelligence capability by adopting SAP's in-memory system, HANA.

The head of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tells a congressional panel that the landmark reform bill signed last September is already yielding significant results, but defends litigation in tech sector as a sign of vigorous innovation.

If you haven't developed a corporate Bring Your Own Device policy, or if the one you have is out of date, these tips will help you address device security, IT service, application use and other key components of an effective BYOD policy.

With Facebook's long-anticipated IPO expected to hit on Friday morning, the company set its initial share price at $38 today.

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