Speed dating with no dating but lots of speed:  All fun and serious teambuilding activities starts with the same thing. The leader says: Please stand up and enter the floor. The leader should not tell them what to expect. Don't tell them about the method. Don't tell them to be anxious or safe. You are their leader and they should have confidence in you. So tell them the headline, the cause, why they are leaving their chairs to stand up together.  Please get up and enter the floor For your information you must have an objective inviting everyone out on the floor. This objective could be learning how to handle a new system, coping with stress, your company culture or the team and the way they work as a team. And you want them to talk about it in pairs. Why this? I mean why talk about a vital topic in pairs? Well, first people tend to open up easier when they only have one to talk to. But there is another reason too. People always remember what they said themself. So if you come ...

12 fishmongers and their leader became the start of a global cultural revolution:  FISH! films, books, posters, soft toy and team exercises have been a source of inspiration in many, many companies worldwide. The iconic fish shop World Famous Pike Place Fish has been an inspiration ever since the first fish was thrown in 1965. The 12 fishmongers just sat down in the back room and talked about how they could become world famous. World fame does not come by itself. It must be created every single day. Therefore they continued to meet out in the back room and talk about business for half the meeting time and about their manner of doing what they did for the other half of the meeting time. Every second Thursday. All year. A relatively simple recipe. But even though it sounds simple, there are not many who have succeeded in doing what the fishmongers did. FISH! is an  invitation  to re-awaken the self-trusting, creative spirit within each of us. FISH!  inspires  ...

Have you ever heard of a man named Vic Cianca? If the name doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry: he’s one of the many unsung heroes of the world who make their communities just a little bit better by virtue of being themselves. Vic Cianca was a traffic cop in Pittsburgh who was beloved for his, shall we say, unique ways of directing traffic every day on the job. Rather than just standing there, pointing the way with his arms, he truly made the job his own–from pretending to fall asleep when distracted drivers failed to move, to pleading with traffic to keep going, to even using legs and other limbs to direct cars, Cianca turned this one intersection into his own Jester’s Court every day he worked. He even gained some notoriety for his antics: not only did everyone in the city love him, but his passion and humor even made it into the hit 1980’s movie Flashdance , where he served as inspiration for Jennifer Beals’ would-be dancer. Sadly, Vic Cianca passed away in 2010 at the age of 92, ...

  Sådan sikrer lederen, at  medarbejderne kan lide hinanden og kan de lide deres arbejde:  Når medarbejderne kan lide deres kolleger kan de også lide deres arbejde. Nogle mennesker hader at gå på arbejde. Det skyldes, at de ikke kan lide alle deres kolleger eller ikke kan lide chefen. Det kan lederen gøre noget ved. Men umiddelbart lyder det ikke nemt, at få mennesker til at holde af hinanden, have det sjovt sammen, nyde hinandens selskab. Men hvad nu hvis lederen kan skabe et fællesskab, hvor alle kan lide hinanden? Løsningen kommer her: Lederen kan bruge FISH! som er det enkleste og billigste redskab på markedet. FISH! består af film, bøger, plakater, hæfter, fisk, øvelser og planer for at skabe et fællesskab med gode relationer - og god hjælp til at komme i gang og holde det ved lige. Enhver leder kan gøre det selv - uden at blande eksterne konsulenter ind i opgaven. Først lidt forhistorie. Det var Pike Place Fish i Seattle som skabte deres fællesskab i den nu verd...

And this is exactly what the four FISH! practices will do to you and your team. The four practices can help any individual and any team to become ‘friends’. Well, ‘friends at work’ at least. The four practices are BE THERE, PLAY, CHOOSE YOUR ATTITUDE and MAKE THEIR DAY. These fabulous four are not just smart headlines. They are interrelated and they are very practical. They are interrelated in the sense that you have to use all four simultaneously. You can not leave out one of them or just go with one of them.  They are practical in the sense that everyone can practise them daily - alone and in the team. FISH! delivers a series of methods and exercises easy to use - and fun too. The leader does not have to invent ways to keep on talking about FISH! - lots of material has been invented. Why is it vitally important that your employees are friends or ‘friends’ at work? The answer is quite easy - and you know it already. People like what they are doing with people they like. The opposi...

5 FISH! Philosophy Strategies for Avoiding Burnout:  For many people, they think that burnout is the same as stress, but that’s not entirely accurate. Stress is acute – we experience it in-the-moment due to a particular trigger. But burnout? Burnout is more long-term. It stems from accumulated stress over time, and often manifests almost like a depression: you may feel perpetually exhausted and anxious. You may feel like you can’t catch up on sleep, or that nothing brings you pleasure. You have trouble concentrating and connecting with people you love. Burnout takes time to set in, and also takes time to heal, and it’s often caused by long-term workplace stressors (although it can definitely be caused by non-work-related concerns such as marital problems or ongoing crises). What can you do if you’re feeling burned out at work? Here are five things you can do as a coworker or manager to help yourself and others find relief: 1. Take care of yourself (physically and emotionally) One o...

Play can’t be forced:  How Children Can Teach Us to Play “The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression,” says Play expert Stuart Brown. Far too often, we think of play and work as being mutually exclusive concepts positioned on opposite ends of the same spectrum, and that’s why we so often hear from people that Play is the most difficult-to-grasp pillar of the FISH! Philosophy. But Play is not mutually exclusive from work; instead, it’s something that can be integrated into our workspaces and our work processes to help improve the quality of our ideas, our outputs, and our collaborative processes. If you’re struggling to wrap your head around the idea of what Play looks like in the workplace, let’s remove the idea of “the workplace” entirely and take a step back to a time when Play was a natural way of being: childhood. Children are the ultimate experts in Play, and adults could learn a thing or two about it from them: after all, we all need to play, and humans (and animals...

Every departmental meeting, team meeting, kick-off meeting needs the participants to hear new things, learn new things and understand new things. This does not happen when the leader is talking everyone to sleep. As you know, nobody learns anything when they are bored or have fallen asleep. Hence this helping hand in the form of a collection of MEETING JOKERS, who create awake and fresh and enterprising employees who are given the opportunity to reflect on what they see, hear and perceive. The manager must therefore accept that the employees challenge and provoke and twist what they have heard. This does not mean that the decisions must therefore be overturned or annulled. This means that all employees must understand and internalize (take it in) and make the 'news' their own. The manager is also not going to hear everything that is said. But there is nothing new in that. What is not said in the conference room is said at the coffee machine or even later - at home. The 'new...

A friend of mine has a job in a local community. She is head of Human Resources. She has lots of transactions with her leader on a daily basis. The leader happens to be quite aggressive. Last week my friend fainted from stress and was taken to hospital with a stroke that paralysed half of her face. My friend is very dutyful and may be a sensitive woman but this incident is without discussion pure terror. The incident happened at work during daytime. And this is not the first time employees meet terror from this leader. Local newspaper has had several articles about the horrible leader. No colleagues stod up helping my friend. Nobody did a thing. Lots of people knew about it and nobody stopped the leader from repeated actions. This terror is not OK This is not OK at all. We can’t accept a leader with a temper like this, a behaviour this aggressive and a series of consequences like this. I suggest that time has come to introduce a leaders license. I know that lots of companies are able t...