That’s a wrap! Here we are at the end of January. Another month whizzed by. I hope that you will take 10-15 minutes to reflect on, and write out, your responses to these questions:

Reflecting on the month of January:
What were my major achievements this month?
What do I want to celebrate?
As I consider my goals (and resolutions) I made at the start of the year, how am I doing with these on a scale of 1-10? Which ones are becoming new habits or something I can check off?
Which goals need to be let go of or changed?
What habits have supported me this month?
As a leader, what have I noticed about my team this month?
As a leader, what notes should I make about performance issues (if I haven't done it already!)
The thing that has helped me be most productive this month has been ______
The thing that has helped me be most successful this month has been ______
The thing that has helped me be happiest this month has been ________
The thing that has helped me be most healthy has been _______
What have I noticed about my work/productivity/results and/or relationships during the winter months (if you are in the northern hemisphere) or summer (if you are in the southern hemisphere)?
How I’m doing with my theme of the year (how I am living it, embodying it).

Looking ahead to February:
The project I want to get started
The project I most want to wrap up is...
I want to leave ______ in the month of January
My priorities are:
Our team priorities are:
My goals are
My teams goals are:
I want to......
I'll be really happy at the end of February when….
As a reminder, our themes this month at the Teams365 blog included:
The 2018 Kickstart – 8 Days of Focus on Goals for 2018
Goals and goal setting
Mindmapping
Be sure to check out our weekly quote and Sunday video!
As we step into February our attention here at the Teams365 blog is going to turn to Relationships, Collaboration and Trust. See you next month!

Goals are important but they are likely to fall by the wayside or collect dust unless we regularly revisit them. As a former global leader in charge of a regional team, it was common for our annual plan to be 30 pages or more. Distilling this down into chunks, and actionable steps, was a large part of my work. Translating that with my team to almost ten different country contexts was the next part of the goal road map.

Having a set of goals is a lofty ideal, but they will just collect dust if we don’t breathe life into them.

Coaching is grounded in the notion that accountability is important. Creating opportunities to revisit and adjust your goals is an important part of accountability

In thinking about different ways to work on goals with your colleagues this year think about creating different types of accountability mechanisms. This could include:
Accountability partners – where different team members are paired together and meet together themselves virtually once or twice a month. As a team you might decide to have accountability partners meet for a quarter or the entire year.

Using an app to track your progress - Check out these articles which highlight several goal app trackers
A few weeks ago, I pointed to this article by Elise Morneau which covers 5 different goal setting apps. Read her article here.
Entrepreneur's 6 apps that help you stick to your goals. Read it here.

Journaling - While I have been a lifelong journaler (think 3 decades and journals from 15 years of living in different countries) I am amazed by the bullet journal movement which has swept through. Journaling can take all shapes and forms - How can writing about your focus support you and your goals?

What does accountability mean for you? What can it look like as it relates to creating accountability around your most important goals this year?

With best wishes,
Jennifer

As a virtual facilitator it’s important to be flexible. It’s likely that the unexpected will happen. Whether it’s the connection is going down or time zone conversions haven’t been made correctly, things inside, and outside of our control as the conversation leader can happen.

 In today’s world we talk a lot about agility, a term which is becoming overused. When writing EVC last year I chose to use instead the term nimble. Being nimble as a virtual facilitator could mean:

1. Having a back up plan just in case the platform you were going to use is switched last minute
2. Being comfortable with change (as it will inevitably happen)
3. Being flexible to adjust the game plan depending on the needs of the group
4. Knowing your materials and having a big picture overview so you know what can be adjusted. If there were 2-3 things for people to take away from the call what would they be?

What are some other things that we can do to be nimble?
One of the most important things I find with my work is to really know my material (or the roadmap of elements), know the platform as much as I can, and be present for what the group wants. The more we can encourage engagement and interactivity the more it becomes the group’s/team’s call, which usually is a good thing.

Make a list of half a dozen things you can do to enhance your “nimble factor”.

Have  a great start to your week,
Jennifer

One of this week's most popular blog posts was Wednesday's post on another way to plan and goal set using MindMaps. Since I started my business back in 2004 I've been a raving fan of Mindmaps. I use them for project planning, content creation (i.e. planning blog posts), brainstorming, and even in designing one of our newest programs for leaders  - The Teams365 Leadership Lab.
Take a look at this week's short 2 minute video, bringing to life my writing this week on this alternative approach to goal setting and planning. Kudos to Tony Buzan who is credited to being the original creator of this great approach.

How might you use Mindmaps in your work? As a team?

Enjoy your Sunday,
Jennifer

This weekend's goal quote comes from Andrew Carnegie. He wrote,
"If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes".

As you look to the goals you have set yourself this year, or for this quarter, how do your goals draw in your attention, boost your energy and pull you forward?"

Enjoy your weekend and be sure to check out this weekend's Sunday blog post.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Today’s Flashback Friday post takes us to a post to Teams365 #765 -  “Goal Success for 2016”. In it I make reference to, and link to a 2015 article I wrote called “Five Goal Setting Elements” (view that here)  I thought it would be very fitting for our final Flashback Friday post for this month where we have focused on goals.

In the next few days I’ll start wrapping up our focus on goals and start looking to our themes for February – relationships, collaboration and trust.

It's likely that a majority of you, and your team members, have set some goals for yourself this year, and some may be wondering, how will I be successful?

he Five Goal Setting Elements article covers these five points:. You can read the article here. T
1. Choose what
goal setting framework will work for you  - whether it's SMART goals, check lists etc, choose an approach that works for you.
2. Consider the timelines around the goals. Which ones are a priority when?\
3. Goal Visibility - as I wrote earlier, keep your goals visible - whether they are on your phone, your desk or your fridge.
4. Accountability and support - who will help you be successful?
5. Celebration and Recognition - what will you do to recognize your movement towards the goals? What milestones have you set for yourself? How will you celebrate along the way?

Several other factors are often mentioned  in terms of goal achievement include :
* making sure your list of goals is not too long
* sharing it with others

and for team leaders, whether it's your goal or team members goals:
* Giving an opportunity for each team member to share what their key goals are for the year and what's important about that.
* helping team members know how their goals interface with, and impact other goals such as KPIs, team goals or corporate goals.

As we go to wrap up our focus on goals in a few days, what is important for you to consider putting into practice or making a regular habit.

With best wishes,
Jennifer

This week's Team Building question asks you to consider "How do you have each other's  backs?".

Teams are often as strong as their weakest link. Teams which excel are committed to each other and are able to catch up the slack when others need support.

Being able to do this is dependent on:
1. Team members knowing each other, and what they do;
2. Team members also having skill sets so they can do what they do
3. Having communication and other performance processes so the team knows how everyone is doing, easily, and with detail;
4. and their being the flexibility and ability to help each other on the team. Some environments are structured so there is no advantage or encouragement to "Team" with others

What is the state of your team in these four areas?

How do you have each other's backs?

What areas do team members need support in now?

How do you let others know when you need support, and what kind?

What opportunities are there for team members to learn more about what each other does, so you can see how skills overlap?

Enjoy your conversation, and be sure to check out past Teams365 Team Building Questions here.

Enjoy your Thursday,
Jennifer

We’re almost through the third week of the new year. Can you believe it?
Today’s post is on habits. I'd like you to think about the habits that help and hinder you in your work as a leader or a team member. Habits are things that we do unconsciously and it's been said that it can take up to 66 days to develop a new habit. That's a long time but really we want to ingrain behaviors so that we're doing them really almost subconsciously.

Habits are behaviors we often do unconsciously on a regular basis. Think about some of your regular habitual practices – rolling out of bed and checking your phone first OR taking a flight of stairs on your way into the office OR heading into the coffee shop downstairs before stepping into the office. These are things we routinely do, almost on autopilot.

In recent years there have been some wonderful books on t his topic including:
Better Than Before  – Gretchen Rubin
The Power of Habit – Charles Duhigg
High Performance Habits – Brendan Butchard

In today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world, supportive habits are great as they often feel like we can do on auto-pilot. It's how we do things. There are other habits, like sitting for extended periods, social media surfing, not keeping meetings focused, which we slip into that could be tweaked with more intentional focus.

My invitation this year is for you to think about "what is the one habit you want to cultivate?". Maybe that's something you're doing already. Or maybe it's a habit that you haven't been practicing regularly. What's the one thing you want to cultivate. And I would invite you to start tracking yourself.

One of the tools that I use is a habit tracker as a bullet journaller if I find it incredibly useful just to get in front of me. And as a visual learner as well it's key to have ideas on paper. So, enjoy your process. I look forward to hearing about how it goes.

What are the habits which are helping you in your work right now? What are the things that are giving you traction? What are the habits that you have brought from the last year that really, really, aren’t working?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

A week ago Sunday I included a short video about SMART-E Goals, followed by a One-Page Plan framework. Not every team member will find that the SMART goal framework is going to work for them. Some team members may be bigger picture thinkers, or find the SMART goal framework to be too constricting. Another tool you might includes for support to goal setting and/or program design is the MindMap.

The MindMap concept was created by Tony Buzan, and invites a more creative and iterative process of capturing ideas. It is used in a wide variety of corporate settings from project planning, to goal setting, to writing. Individuals can create their own MindMaps and Teams can have their own as well.

MindMaps start out with putting a central hub and name for the topic you are looking at. Perhaps it’s 2018 Goals – see my handwritten example above, expanding on Program Ideas (see the other handwritten one for the upcoming Teams365 Leadership Lab) or maybe project planning for a new workshop (see my other computerized example).

First, write the topic you are goal setting or exploring. Extending out from the main hub are arms – almost like rays of the sun. Each arm houses ideas relating to a separate topic. These arms can also have offshoots as well.
There are a number of wonderful applications you can access and purchase through different app stores for different devices, including ones that I have used over the years – MindJet, and MindMeister.

There are a number of reasons I return to mindmapping, project after project:

1. It’s a quick way to get ideas on paper
   
2. It’s an easy way to start setting connections and themes
3. It keeps initial ideas in one place
4. It gets ideas out of your head
5. It can be added onto at any time
   

 
If you use MindMaps let us know how and why. Do you use any particular apps that you would recommend? As always, feel free to comment below.
 
Enjoy your Tuesday,
Jennifer