Potentials Realized - Teams365 Blog

TEAMS365 #2152 – Team Building Tip #262: What's Getting in the Way?

11/21/2019

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you to consider the question – “What’s getting in the way?” As a team, what are the things which have obstructed you from what’s really important?

It’s at this time of year that we may become really clear about the SHINY RED OBJECTS which have become an alluring focus but may not have translated to business results. OR WAIT? Have they?

It can be important to think about activities not only from an immediate impact, but also in terms of the longer-term activities and seed-planting work which needs to go into bigger projects. For those reading the Teams 365 blog who are solopreneurs you will probably know what I mean. Many times, we take on creative projects which may not be revenue generating but actually are key in moving the business forward. The challenge is to make sure that there is a good balance between those activities which need to happen NOW and generate revenue, as well as those activities which are key to business growth but may only pay off in the long run.

This week consider the question – What’s getting in the way? Is it a closed road, or an important detour?

What do you need to say YES to? NO to?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing
Phone (416)996-8326

As we step into the end of the year, get your planning on with the PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner or Coaching Business Builder
Looking to enhance your virtual conversations? Webinars? Pick up a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations at Amazon.

TEAMS365 #2151 – Systems to Anchor and Scale

11/20/2019

As we move towards the end of the year, it’s an opportune time to focus in on the systems in your work. Systems help us automate routine tasks and also create consistency. Systems help us with information sharing and leveraging tasks and processes. This is key when people and projects may move not only in an office but move to different locations.

As we move to year end, it can be an important time to dedicate some focus on anchoring in the systems we have been using, developing others and/or making sure systems and focused.

This year I’ve mentioned systems several times. They are an important part of keeping a remote or global business running consistently, ensuring that our customer or clients experience is the same from location to location.

In larger organizations, systems are likely to be well established, but in start ups or smaller organizations it’s likely that they are not as well developed.

You might consider the systems you have as it relates to sharing of information around projects, special initiatives and tasks. One of the challenges as teams move into the remote space is that information flow may not be as smooth. If you have people needing to access information and work on shared documents or with shared information what needs attention. This may involve nomenclature around how documents are saved and where things get digitally filed. IT may also involve a mindset shift around how items get documented and shared.

Communication (Internal/External, team communication)
Performance
Goals
Projects
Marketing/Business Cases/Case Studies

What else?

If you have not taken a look at this month’s Effective Virtual Conversations call which I held on November 4th around Remote and Virtual Team Tools, do take a look. In the 25-minute call I share five key areas you will want to explore and possibly incorporate with your team – from communication tools, to team development tools, to project management tools.

What is the one tool you know you can’t live without? For me, I would say it is Zoom. Whether I am leading a group session or hosting an individual coaching session, Zoom allows me to seamlessly move throughout calls all day long, seeing my clients without having to travel (sometimes thousands of miles to see them!). While travel is a passion for some, having spent the better part of my first decade plus of my working career travelling for a living, I so appreciate getting to reconnect with places without having to physically go there.

Wishing you the best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing
Phone (416)996-8326

As we step into the end of the year, get your planning on with the PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner or Coaching Business Builder
Looking to enhance your virtual conversations? Webinars? Pick up a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations at Amazon.

TEAMS365 #2150 – The Last Mile of the Year

11/19/2019

We’re about six weeks away from the end of the year, a time which I like to frame as the LAST MILE of the year. It’s at this point where we start getting really clear on what needs to get done, what needs to get carried forward and what needs to get delegated.

Today’s post is an encouragement to think about what you want to accomplish in the last six weeks of the month. As we consider the last mile there may be many areas we want to consider including:

Projects:

What are the projects which still need attention?
What are the projects which need more resources to wrap up?
What has moved out of scope and needs to be readjusted?

One-on-one time with your team:

When was the last time you held 1-1's with your team?
What are conversations which need to happen before year end?

Team Events:

What team events need to happen before year end?
What supports do they need individually? Collectively?

Planning and Performance Events:

Have you already prepared your 2020 plans – at the organizational, team and individual levels?
When did you last hold a performance conversation with each team member? Ask for feedback yourself?

Stakeholder Events:

What stakeholders do you want to reach out to?
What conversations and/or collaborations are important to have?
What updates are important to provide?
Who do you want to set meetings up with before year end, or at the start of the year?

Communication and Reporting

What reports need to be completed?
What information needs to be shred with others?
What reports need an update?
What tasks have you been putting off? What needs an update?

Other Items:

What other items need to be wrapped up?
What do you need to put in hold or closed off on?
What are you going to do to capture lessons learned and lessons to carry forward?

The last couple of weeks of the year can feel like a whirlwind, and sometimes the important tasks get set aside and missed, including time set aside for the team. In one of my newsletters this month I included 8 different ways to wrap the year up with groups and teams – link to newsletter here.

What daily steps do you want to take going forward to get important items focused on?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing
Phone (416)996-8326

As we step into the end of the year, get your planning on with the PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner or Coaching Business Builder
Looking to enhance your virtual conversations? Webinars? Pick up a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations at Amazon.

TEAMS 365 #2149 – Effective Virtual Conversations #120: Creating More Memorable Virtual Calls

11/18/2019

This week’s blog post focuses in on the important topic of retention, or memorability of calls.

It’s likely that the call you are hosting today is one of many virtual sessions people are dropping into. What are you going to do to make it memorable?

As I shared in Teams365 15 Effective Virtual Conversations Tip #37 – As Suzuki Writes: “We make things memorable when things are novel, surprizing, emotional and attention grabbing”. What are the things you can be doing to create this?

A couple of things that we can do to make it memorable include:
Jazzing it up – including a video you have created or something a creator has shared on YouTube. (Always be sure to confirm usage rights, and when in doubt, reach out!).

Provide an opportunity for people to talk about their experiences in smaller groups. Check out if breakouts are an option in your platform. If so, could you build in a 5-10 minute section where people share how the topic connects to them and what they can do.

Prime people for the fact that the call is going to be different than usual. Let people know what you can expect. Start your call off differently – perhaps with something more personally involved than others. Note that as people are coming onto a call it may take them a few minutes to get grounded. We may be unfocused based on what we are experiencing.

IN addition to talking about the topic, are there some graphics which can be incorporated into the session? What additional follow up can people engage with? Note that you may want to consider both pre and post work.

As I shared earlier this year in my March 2019 Effective Virtual Conversations calls, Ebbinghaus did initial research on what we retain and what we remember. He created what is now known as the forgetting curve. In essence, as time progresses, as days progressed, we remember even less.

And so how can we boost that? There are several things that he found really made a difference. The meaningfulness of the information, the way it's represented, as well as some physiological factors, stress, sleep, et cetera.
Using some of the techniques I’ve outlined in the first part of the blog post may also help to boost retention. What do you want to incorporate to support enhanced retention?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing
Phone (416)996-8326

As we step into the end of the year, get your planning on with the PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner or Coaching Business Builder

Looking to enhance your virtual conversations? Webinars? Pick up a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations at Amazon.

TEAMS365 #2148 – Week in Review

11/17/2019

Here we are again at the end of another week. This week’s focus has been on FOCUS and starting to consider year-end activities. If you didn’t catch all the blog posts this week, here’s a chance to catch up.

Take a look back at the following blog posts:

Enjoy your review!

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of multiple books including Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development.
Pick up a copy of Volume 1 of the Weekly Journaling Prompts in a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.

TEAMS365 #2147 – Weekly Journaling Prompt #76

11/16/2019

This week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt invites you to consider the question “I want to let go of….”. As you consider this year (or the last while) what are the things you want to let go of or release?

Enjoy your reflections!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of multiple books including Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development.
Pick up a copy of Volume 1 of the Weekly Journaling Prompts in a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.

TEAMS365 #2146 – Flashback Friday: Plan A Virtual Co-Working Session

11/15/2019

Very shortly I will be leading a new podcast entitled the Remote Pathways Podcast™ with my co-host Michelle Mullins. As many of you know from my writing here, I’m passionate about remote work in all it’s shapes and forms.

Earlier this year, in July, I completed a new writing project I have entitled “Remote Pathways” I’ve alluded to it in several posts already. It is somewhat modelled after a “choose your own adventure”, exploring the different remote and virtual professional pathways we can find ourselves working within.

From leaders who manage teams which work remote most of the month, to project teams which span the globe, from remotepreneurs leading virtual businesses, remote work is on the rise.

We’ll be following many of these trends and taking a deeper dive into the adventures of the Digital Dozen™, twelve different types of remote professionals. I hope that you’ll join us and will follow along at the new website – link to RemotePathways.com.

With so many professionals jumping into the remote workspace, I am hoping that the years of writing on remote work, and virtual teams here at the Teams365 blog will be of service.

With that in mind, I wanted to highlight an earlier blog post - Teams365 #1729: Plan a Virtual Co-working Session

As we move into fall, it can be very useful for teams to continue to put attention around getting things done WHILE connecting. A favorite activity I continue to facilitate is GET IT DONE afternoons, which really become Virtual Co-Working Sessions. They are a derivative of the virtual retreats I have been offering for teams, business owners and leaders since 2007.

Virtual co-working sessions may range from one-hour sprints, to four-hour blocks, to full day sessions.

Three considerations to making a virtual co-working session work include the following:

1. A platform where you can all meet, see each other and converse for periods of time.

Streaming is often best; however, others may appreciate the ability to take their work on the road and call in at time.

2. Focus – collectively and individually. Consider these questions:

What’s bringing you together today?
What’s the focus – is it to do something collectively or individually?
What outcomes do you want?
How do you want to break it down – meeting every hour for check-ins? Meeting more frequently?

3. Scheduled Checkpoints

A way to share and keep the momentum going throughout the day. I have found that virtual group and team sessions have been the seeds for some amazing new ideas and cross-pollination. Be sure to build in blocks where people are not only checking in around what they are doing, but also consider the value of building in some time for sharing of learning or insights.

Looking for inspiration on what you might do in a virtual co-working session? Consider these ideas – they are all real programs I have facilitated over the years:

One-hour virtual sprints for planning on the team or individual level
30-minute brainstorming/innovation sessions geared to create new product and or service ideas
Four-hour GET IT DONE sessions where groups of solopreneurs connect virtually to take focused action once a month on things on their list. Check-ins are once an hour.
Four to eight-hour Virtual Retreats, where each hour has a dedicated focus and theme to explore and/take action on. For example, an hour dedicated to creating a business plan, an hour to marketing approaches, an hour for project work).

Looking for a facilitator to host your next virtual co-working session? Contact me to learn more about this service I offer.

What could a co-working event look like for you?

Warm regards,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success focusing on the Remote Space
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.
Launching today - the Remote Pathways™ Podcast

TEAMS365 #2145 – Team Building Tip #262: RESULTS FOCUS

11/14/2019

This week’s Team Building Tip takes us into another check point -this week around your results focus. As indicated in the posts over the last couple of weeks as we step into the new year it can be valuable to consider where we want to focus and what we want to focus on.

Part of this decision gets us to think about what are the RESULTS we want to FOCUS on?

Consider the following in your next team meeting:

How are we doing with all of our annual/quarterly goals?
What needs attention?
What has given us the most impact this year?
What activities have detracted from our purpose/vision/goals?
What distractions have we faced?
What’s going to help us magnify and accelerate our results?
What is absolutely critical for us to complete before year end? What do we need to say NO to in order for this to happen?
What may we need to shift?

Enjoy the conversation!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success focusing on the Remote Space
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.
Coming soon - the Remote Pathways™ Podcast

TEAMS365 #2144 – Planning for and scheduling the last one-on-one conversations of the year

11/13/2019

As we step into the “last mile” of 2019 (i.e. the last six weeks, give or take a few, especially if your business shuts down for the holidays), one of the key activities you will want to make sure you build in time for is a set of year-end one-on-ones with staff. While many organizations have moved to an ongoing feedback and performance management culture, it can be important to ensure that final one-on-ones don’t get forgotten in the rush of year-end.

Some of the elements you may want to include in your final one-on-ones are:

A look back at the key highlights for the individual this year.
Reflections and sharing on key performance witnessed – things that they did very well, times when you saw their strengths in action.
What were their major accomplishments? What skills and experiences were learned/acquired? How can this support them going forward?
Discussion around areas for growth and improvement in the new year.
Looking ahead to the new year, what are the key priorities based on organizational and department goals?
What are their key learning goals? Where do they want to grow? What changes do they want to make?
Support needs for the new year.
Learning needs for the new year. Identification of any areas they would like to acquire more skills within in their work.
Goals they have for themselves and their career.

What other items might you include in your year-end one-on-ones? Every team and organization is different. While not all of these categories may reflect the type of performance conversations you typically have, it can be useful to invite your team to consider the bigger context of their work (i.e. how has this year helped them with future career aspirations).

While it’s top of mind, I hope that you will take a few minutes to make note of the questions you want to include in everyone’s discussion.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success focusing on the Virtual and Remote Space
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.
Coming soon - the Remote Pathways™ Podcast

tEAMS365 #2143 – Creating Focus in The Last Mile of The Year

11/12/2019

From the time we get out of bed to the time we turn off the light, we are faced with a slew of decisions which need to be made every day.

Creating enhanced focus in the last six weeks of the year (what is often referred to as the “last mile”) can help a team, and organization, soar through the last part of the year, rather than frantically work to the end. This has been a focus of three of the annual coaching groups I host - The Learning Lab and Design Studio, the Coaching Biz Growth Lab, and the Teams365 Leadership Lab

Today’s post gets you thinking about several areas you may have some level of control over:

#1 – Decide and communicate what the key priorities are for the end of the year. What is an absolute MUST complete? What can be let go of (if anything) in order to make sure this can be completed.

#2 – Weed out the elements of work which are distractions and/or not adding value. This may be part of a wider discussion and review of your results for the year/decade. In the bigger picture, what could be let go of, in service to the work that really needs to get done?

#3 – Consider who is best tasked to do the work. There is often a fallacy that “everyone needs to be involved” or everyone needs to collaborate. We don’t want to collaborate for collaborations sake. Who is best suited to run with which tasks? Does everyone involved understand the timelines and contingencies (i.e. what needs to get completed first, next etc.?).

#4 – Consider questions around AMPLIFICATION and/or x ing your work (as in 10xing). What’s going to help to ensure success? What will that take?

#5 – Where has scope creep occurred? It’s inevitable that projects expand during their life cycle. Sometimes they expand too much. Where has scope creep occurred and what needs to be brought back into focus? Is there need for an extension or a part 2 of the projects you are working on?

#6 – Where can digital distractions be minimized? Recently, I shared a post on digital distractions – Teams365 #1933. Read it here. What are those distractions and where can these be minimized?

What’s going to help you thrive through the last part of the year?

Wishing you the best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success focusing on the Remote Space
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.
Coming soon - the Remote Pathways™ Podcast