Is someone not pulling their weight yet expecting to enjoy the fruits of your group’s hard work?  Here are five tips to prevent freeloading.  Avoid the unattractive, energy-sucking role of the nag.  Instead increase the chances of bringing out the best talents and temperament in everyone. That makes work more productive and life more fun.

1.    Meet in person at least once
Face-to-face meetings are more likely to build relationships than meeting virtually, by phone or online.  After making a connection in person we are inclined to bond with the group and want to follow through.

2.    Establish rules of engagement
As a group create ground rules that involve rewards and penalties.  If, for example, someone doesn’t meet a deadline and doesn’t explain in advance, offering an alternative to make up for the loss, will the group drop that person?

3.    Agree on a few vital commitments
As a group, prioritize top goals and tasks.  Rather than agreeing to many assignments, settle on a few that are important to each member.  Success begets more success – and group esprit de corps.  Over-committing then missing goals makes one feel guilty and avoid teammates. It brings down the whole team.

4.    Create a visible task tracking system
Create a way that all committee members must record their progress on a task and view others’ progress. Such transparency affects each member’s reputation with others on the team.  The most successful self-managed teams have a specific top goal and a  short, prioritized list of concretely-described tasks – each with a lead person and timetable. All these elements are easily viewable by all members.

5.    Provide an automatic reminder system
Create a way that members receive reminders for key deadlines, perhaps by email. This system may also include notification when other team members have completed tasks or provided information that’s needed for a member to take the next step.

This is my lightly-adapted version of Ken Thompson’s tips for “stopping team freeriding.”  As the author of Bioteams and an expert on team dynamics and virtual collaboration Thompson has a treasure trove of  Me2We tips including two of my favorites, Five tips for a perfect meeting and The seven beliefs of high performing teams.  Hear Ken’s interview and discover more about the power of self-organizing (Peer2Peer) groups.

Mmm. How will you be describing yourself say five years from now? Or at least one part of you. From the Greek word “opiso” meaning “hereafter” April Groves crafted the word “opi”: Picture the future you, “written in the present tense.”

This seems to me to be a powerful way to visualize an end goal for my life by writing it as if it is true now. That description can be my daily touchstone.

April’s Opi: “After many wildly successful years in real estate, I have left my brokerage to my partner… It was the only way to accommodate the bookings for the next book tour and speaking schedule. Not to mention the trip my husband and I have planned with the children to Europe.”

April tapped Robyn McMaster for her Opi: “Today, I’m checking in to discuss new ideas with scholars currently retreating at the MITA International Brain Based Center, now headquartered in a three story building adjacent to the Lodge at Woodcliffe. Dr. Ellen Weber and I are working with 35 international brain based scholars, currently completing Executive MITA Brain Based Certification.”

Robyn tapped me to offer my Opi. Spontaneously written, here’s “Future Me“:

I am facilitating collaboration-centered (rather than design) charrettes around the world to hone “Me2We” methods with other’s insights (perhaps you) – ways two or more people can accomplish more together than they can on their own. Our Moving From Me To We blog + podcast is now a crowdsourced global community that, among other tools, creates tagged video vignettes of success stories. With the input of Paul Hawken’s Wiser Earth team we’ve created the third evolution of the online social network where people are sharing and collaborating and voting on favorite on Me2We methods. Out annual and local gatherings are a great way for people to finally meet face-to-face.

One of my favorite outcomes are the growth of partnerships between extremely unlikely allies. Our alliances with other communities such as Renaissance Weekend, The Ted Conference seems to have speed such diverse alliances. We’ve interviewed many of you and many of you have interviewed each other and wound up collaborating. What a joy it’s been to watch. Robyn’s been a real inspiration along the way.

Perhaps our sharing our Opis and encouraging others to write them will evoke entrainment to bolster our way to making the next chapters of our lives the memorable adventure stories we seek.

In the spirit of Me2We, I’m tagging

• Ken Thompson, Swarmteams

• Diane Danielson, Downtown Womens Club

• Aaron Strout, Mzinga

• Ori Brafman, The Starfish and the Spider and Sway

• David Sibbet of The Grove

• Aliza Freud, shespeaks

“Visualization and belief in a pattern of reality activates the creative power of realization.” – A. L. Lindall

“We lift ourselves by our thought. We climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always everywhere.” – Orison Swett Marden

Have you ever been on a team where things just fell apart? Or was dominated by complainers (or worse) or endless, circular talk or caused another risk? Or one person (perhaps you) got stuck doing most of the work? Wouldn’t life be more fun and productive if we understood how to create higher-performing and happier teams? Especially in a convergence culture.

Birds do it. Bees do it and so can we, as collaboration expert, Belfast-based Ken Thompson has proven. His methods have been been successfully use by groups as diverse as the Northern Ireland band Kharma45, a forum of day-traders, a hospital and WIMPS – a countrywide movement to get the youth re-involved in politics. After studying virtual and in-person businesses, teams and other groups, Ken discovered why some succeed and others fail. In fact he’s launched a new program, based on the principles of nature, called Swarm Teams. Consider it the next mobile step after Smart Mobs. You can use it to recruit mobile online groups to promote your cause, or product or community. It’s about turning audiences into communities.

Yet, in this podcast Ken describes the questions and steps he used to get individuals animatedly talking about how they could help each other – thus becoming a team.

Then hear how you can attract avid swarms of support. With Ken’s SwarmTeam technology:

1. Any group member can take the lead (Are you an Alpha Swarmer?)
Any member can broadcast to the group, create their own swarms, invite others to them and create links and content.

2. Integrated Messaging across phone and web
The ability to message every member of your swarm in one click on any device without worrying about how they are connected.

3. Small is Beautiful …..and Big is Powerful
“Swarm Communities” are multiple swarms on common topics of interest providing scale yet maintaining the small group dynamic.

4. You can reach the many through the few
Engage individuals within their communities via their trusted relationships.

Even when injured, Cody McKibben was a steadfast, creative and savvy teammate to launch this blog with his elegant design (thank you, again Cody!) so, from first-hand experience I recommend his insights on the power of teams and mastermind groups. I found his post via one of my heroines, Penelope Trunk who thinks us boomers stink at being team members.

Busy bees. Yep. “The busiest ‘hive’ is the (formerly) student “hive,’” notes Mark Brooks, to the surprise of few who go online. More people check in more often at Facebook than at any other online social network. But few people guess the name of the second busiest hive.

Except the time-pressed mothers who seek advice or simple comfort from each other at CafeMom. This online community launched just last year yet it is the most active site for women. From fertility to photo albums, from recipe swapping to marital guidance, even from autism to politics, moms are turning to each other to share at over 25,000 groups they’ve created. In a variation of that saying “follow the money”, “follow the moms.”

The deeper the passionate need or interest the more fervently active the hive.