About the menu above...

If you click on an item and it doesn't seem to go anywhere, it will do so soon. This site is growing fast and will continue to grow and change often. We invite you to join the group and receive e-mail alerts as major changes occur and new things are added.

This website was officially born on 4/24/09. We're feeding it and having fun watching it grow.

Come and be a part of the Heart of Excellence Family!

Our Blogs:

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Trevor Gay

Simplicity

Join Trevor in his never-ending quest for Simplicity.

A generous helping of thoughts and ideas on how to make work and life better by "keeping it simple."

Dave Wheeler

The Change Exchange

Dave has a passion for making life better for working single parents. Visit his blog for thoughts and ideas on the subject. Join the discussion and share your ideas.

Dan Gunter

Self-Leadership hosted by Daniel Whispering Eagle

Where does effective "change" really begin? With leadership. And were does real leadership begin? By learning to lead ourselves. Join the discussion on Self-Leadership. Share your thoughts and experiences today.

Tools and Ideas for Excellent Teams

Welcome to the "Team" area of our website. In our combined years of working businesses, organizations, and teams of various types, we have seen some of the best and some of the worst. And we've watched some teams go from "worst to first," transforming themselves and accomplishing the seemingly "impossible."

In this area we will be sharing a few of the ideas and tools we have found helpful along the way. Check them out for yourself. Use what you can. Feel free to drop us a note and share your experiences with using them. We'd love to hear from you.

-- The Heart of Excellence Team --

Silent Brainstorming Exercise/Tool

An excellent (and fun) tool for helping a team generate multiple possible solutions to multiple problems in a very short time.

Team Struggling with Making Decisions and Prioritizing After a Brainstorming Session?

Here are three tools Trevor likes to use to help teams come to consensus on the priorities:

(1) MUST/COULD/SHOULD

Get the team to agree through discussion what they must do, what they could do and what they should do.

A variation of this is:

(2) NOW/SOON/LATER

This is especially useful when thinking about the urgency or not of issues. Get the team to discuss and agree by consensus what needs to be done now, soon or later.

Finally,

(3) TOTAL/PARTIAL/NO

This technique is about giving the team an idea of what power they actually have to deal with issues. It is usually surprising that teams can often have total control of some issues and those issues where they have no control they can "shelve."