It’s not easy pulling a group of diverse individuals together to work as a team. Barriers abound in the form of fierce territoriality, incentive systems that reward individual rather than collective achievement, and mistrust spawned by an acquisition, merger or major internal restructuring.

So how do you turn colleagues into collaborators? Present them with an irresistible challenge, advise management consultants Patrick J. McKenna and David H. Maister, authors of First Among Equals: How to Manage a Group of Professionals (Free Press, 2002).

Team challenges fulfill the deep need that most people have to be part of something larger than themselves. But defining a challenge and then inspiring your team to meet it take real savvy. “Managers must first be genuinely interested in helping people excel,” says Maister. “They also have to understand that shifting from individual work to teamwork isn’t an intellectual process; it’s an emotional one. You have to seduce people step by step into collaborating as a team.”

Effective managers use the following five tactics:

1. Share as much information as you can. Share with your team as much information as possible about why their effort is so important to the company. Judith Glaser, CEO and president of New York City-based Benchmark Communications, encourages her clients to “open up your company’s closets. Put the brutal facts on the table—whether it’s ‘We slipped this quarter’ or some other difficult news. You’ll make people want to protect your company.” Sharing information in this manner can spur teams to rally together and establish a shared vision for what they need to accomplish.

2. Ask for their input. Invite team members to share ideas for surmounting challenges. Glaser advises clients to “help people articulate the unique contributions they can offer. Ask them: ‘What are your ideas? What innovation can you bring to this effort?”’

3. Stretch your people. Draw people into a challenge by offering them the chance to use skills they don’t normally exercise in their day-to-day work. By stretching beyond their skill set, people gain experience by thinking in fresh ways—a key ingredient in effective team collaboration. They also can become a great source of innovative ideas.

4. Make it fun, actionable and visible. To put team collaboration into overdrive, inject fun into your team’s challenge. Stacy DeWalt, vice president of marketing at Stamford, Connecticut-based Pitney Bowes, brought 25 people together who had deep expertise in different areas to brainstorm ideas for how to change the perceptions of the firm’s target audience.

She designed her team’s brainstorming session to mimic the TV series The Apprentice, in which CEO of The Trump Organization Donald Trump presents aspiring businesspeople with a challenge and then “fires” mediocre performers. “Our CMO played Trump,” DeWalt says. “He told the group we were out to ‘fire’ our competitors.”

But DeWalt made it clear that there was more to the exercise than just fun. “We told the team that the company would fund their best ideas, so people knew their brainstorming was actionable.”

DeWalt’s reward? Four of the team’s best ideas have found their way into corporate or business-unit marketing plans.

5. Help people feel the challenge. Design exercises that let team members experience their challenge viscerally. Consider the tactics used by executives in General Motors’ Saturn division, when they recently challenged retailer teams to generate new ideas for fulfilling Saturn’s purpose: to “surprise and delight” customers. “We wanted them to experience surprising and delighting at a gut level,” says Chris Bower, manager of retail strategy and customer experience for GM.

So the company designed a core-values training course in which each retail team built a bicycle to learn how best to work together. Next, the teams had to design a “delivery experience” meant to surprise and delight the new bike owners.

After the teams developed their strategies, facilitators brought children from the local community into the room and presented them as the new bike owners. Neither the youngsters nor the Saturn teams knew of the plan ahead of time. “The teams not only surprised and delighted the kids,” says Bower, but they experienced those feelings themselves.

The “surprise and delight” team members themselves experienced during the exercise proved a powerful motivator to solving the challenge they had been presented by Saturn’s leaders.

Give your team a challenge they can’t resist

It’s not easy pulling a group of diverse individuals together to work as a team. Barriers abound in the form of fierce territoriality, incentive systems that reward individual rather than collective achievement, and mistrust spawned by an acquisition, merger or major internal restructuring.

Improve your return on returns

Competitive pressures have forced many retailers and manufacturers to liberalize their returns policies in recent years and gladly accept for a refund just about anything customers regret having bought.

A staged solution to the catch-22

Companies launching two-sided platforms—businesses that connect two groups of users, as credit-card companies do—have often subsidized one group to get it to use the platform. This is a risky approach, because it requires a big upfront investment.

Ship shape

For an employee, a company-sponsored overseas trip could mean mostly fun, with, of course, some work in between. For a chief executive of a company, however, it would be the opposite, and most of the time the fun part takes place in between working or not at all.

Winning: Stay the course…especially if it’s a new one

Q: Sometimes companies need to change even when there is not a crisis forcing the issue. In such cases, how do you keep your people excited about a change initiative after its newness has worn off? Trevor Smith, Singapore

A: You have to stay excited yourself. And not just excited, but obsessed.

If I had a hammer

HASHIM squinted before pulling the trigger. Although the 19-year-old is used to holding Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles in the deep jungles of Mindanao three years back, this particularly weapon was new to him.

Big failure, little dreams

CASTELLANA, Negros Occidental—It is already past noon and yet Edelyn Pineda is still lazing around Sitio Odiong here along with her little friends.

The Morning Meeting: Best-practice communication for executive teams

Does your company’s executive team struggle with chronic communication problems and a lack of shared accountability? Many times when my colleagues and I are called in to help out an organization, we find that these two core issues underlie their problems.

Lessons from the leaders of retail loss prevention

Preventing theft, damage and errors such as food spoilage has long been an unyielding and poorly understood problem for retailers. But a few companies stand out in their ability to limit losses, and if every retailer were as successful as they are, the sector could save billions of dollars annually—as much as $27 billion in the United States alone.

The Jock Correlation in business

WITH many sports headlines today trumpeting organizational and solvency issues with various teams and sports associations across the world, there is often an almost missionary zeal to bring to sports a more “business approach.”

Winning: Developing a successful succession plan

Q: What companies would you hold up as examples of succession planning done right? Robert Handfield, Raleigh, North Carolina 

A: It’s sad to say, but your question would be a heck of a lot easier to answer if you had asked for examples of succession planning done wrong. That trend is gaining such ground these days it’s alarming.

Accounting can be fun

People quick to dismiss accountants as the ultimate bean counters have definitely not run into the likes of Roberto Manabat and Emmanuel Bonoan, the dynamic duo that has redefined the business of accounting in the Philippines. Currently sitting at the helm of KPMG Manabat Sanagustin & Co., the Philippine affiliate of KPMG International, the pair has ably guided Philippine companies through the accounting labyrinth without getting in the way of their business activities.

‘I’ll stop exposés if they stop doing wrong’

Sen. Ping Lacson tells the Quijano de Manila forum why investigation is an essential Senate role 

(Excerpts from discussions of journalists with Sen. Panfilo Lacson at the Quijano de Manila Symposium, October 24, 2007, Cherry Blossoms Hotel, Manila. At the panel were Butch del Castillo and Inday Varona of Philippine Graphic magazine, Amado Macasaet of Malaya, Jimmy Gil of dzBB, columnist Lito Banayo and BusinessMirror Senate reporter Butch Fernandez.)

Idiot Box No More

WHERE life is tangled in knots and snarls in the marooned mountainous areas in Mindanao, 12-year-old Mel Velyn Escobar of Midsayap, a town in North Cotabato, finds hope in Knowledge Channel to pursue her education.

Coaching your team’s performance to the next level

Teams are the workhorses of today’s businesses, but they’re workhorses prone to many ailments, from open bickering and sabotage to resolute conflict avoidance. And even teams that generally plow ahead productively can be improved.

Break the paper jam in B2B payments

Electronic invoice and payment systems have been slow to catch on, even though they offer enormous promise for cost savings, speed and transparency in business-to-business transactions.