Teams365 Blog - POTENTIALS REALIZED

TEAMS365 #2313 –Team Building Tip 242

4/30/2020

The last month has been full of disruption for most of us around the world. It may be at moments like this that we need to activate our metaphorical “jet fuel” to move us to the next place.

It’s been commonplace for organizations, teams and businesses to be stuck, shut and simply out of gas this month. Coronavirus has impacted everyone.

Next steps for many after this passes may look very different than what you expected and had envisioned earlier this year. Is it time to revisit your vision and think about what you want to create? What if you had some "jet fuel" to move you into the next stratosphere? What if…?

If you are interested in making a shift, today’s question of “What could jettison you forward?” might be of interest to explore and consider.

Enjoy your conversation,
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2312 – Remote Team, Group and Community Builders

4/29/2020

Whether we are part of a team, collaborating with others or even building a community, there is an art form to bringing people together in the remote space. Today’s topic both curates some of my favorite past posts I’ve done on remote team builders, as well as focuses on some of the areas groups may be hungry for…

#1 - A little bit of grounding: This is where a quick meditation might come in handy.

#2 - A bit of context: Share one thing that’s on your desk right now!

#3 - A little bit of laughter: I recently heard Les Brown share in a presentation that a minute of laughter boosts your immune system for 24 hours. What can you to do create a bit of humor?

#4 - A little stress relief! Check out these 20 stress reduction activities from Sophaya.

#5 - Thinking about things in a different perspective: Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats tool is always a great go-to to explore issues from multiple perspectives.

#6 - Leveraging strengths: Check out this earlier blog post on Leveraging Strengths for remote teams.

#7 - Creating connection: One of my favorite exercises to do at the start of the call (even before stay-at-home became a reality for many of us) was a quick exercise of What’s Outside Your Window? Check it out in action in the April 15th Community Call I co-hosted for the Remote Pathways podcast.

Here’s a great list on the A – Z of building a remote team from Trello’s blog – you can find it here.

You may also want to go back to the A-Z series I did back in 2017 as well.

Download a copy 20 Different Remote Team activities you can take your team through at the Potentials Realized store for $27.50 US - (immediate download).

Enjoy!
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2311 – Collaborating in the Remote Space

4/28/2020

One of the legacies of March and April 2020 may be learning how to effectively collaborate in the remote space. This is important whether we are collaborating with our peers, our leader, another team or even stakeholders. Today’s blog post explores four tenets of collaborating in the remote space:

# 1 - Create a clear end result and vision of success for this project. What are you wanting to create together? Why are you doing this? (Note: lack of clarity on this can create a lot of divergence as you go.) How will you know that you will have been successful with this?

#2 - Be proactive and don’t assume. In the remote space, at the best of times, we see each person’s world in a small box. This may not be representative of everything that is on the go.

#3 - Plan it. Take time as a partnership to ask yourselves, what’ important about this? What are you wanting to achieve?

What are your strengths? What are the gaps between the strengths of your partnership?

Find common ground as well as differences. What are the areas we foresee might be challenges? What can we do to mitigate against those?

#4 - Be proactive with communication and ensure you do this on a regular basis. Shift your mindset to one of “of course” to “What should I communicate?” Given that it’s likely we are under-communicating rather than over-communicating.

What’s going to help your collaboration work better?

For more on this topic check out other posts I have done on collaboration.

Wishing you the best,
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2310 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 142: Keeping People in the Loop

4/27/2020

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip is a reminder to keep people in the loop. In the remote space it’s very easy to forget to share information, particularly if our meetings are not occurring regularly.

One of the things we have been seeing recently with so many people having to work from home, is a vacuum of information. I may not be updating my colleagues as much as I used to. I may note be able to keep people as much in loop.

What are the PROCESSES you have in place to keep people in the loop? What are the PRACTICES you have to keep people updated? How often do you update others?

What information do you ALWAYS make sure you pass on?

What else is important to note about your work right now?

What do you need updates from others?

Remember that meetings may not be the most effective way to keep people updated. If you are using meetings as your primary vehicle, be sure to think about how you can have people extract and share that info quickly. It may be useful to evolve a written template that everyone completes.

What is important to communicate this week? What do you need to keep others in the loop about?

Best,
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2309 Weekly Review

4/26/2020

Welcome back to our weekly reflection. This week I tackled a couple of areas key to the current moment.

Monday’s Focus on the Effective Virtual Conversations Tip around using the IS/IS NOT tool to clarify
Tuesday’s Remote Enablers – the 7 Cs from my Remote Working Whitepaper. Be sure to pick up a copy of the whitepaper here
How to Keep Conversations Going Virtually on Wednesday
Thursday’s Team Building Question around What Haven’t You Mastered Yet?
Friday’s Flashback Friday – Questions to Open up the Conversation
And Saturday’s dipping into five of my favorite posts -what are yours?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2308 Weekly Journaling Prompt 96

4/25/2020

We’re into week 96 of the Weekly Journaling Prompts here at the Teams365 blog. I’m curious, what have you learned about yourself as you’ve been moving through these?

If you have been following for a while, now may be the time to reflect back on all that you have written. What’s important for you to note?

Some of my favorite prompts have been:

Enjoy the reflection!
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2307 Flashback Friday

4/24/2020

As I recently shared in an article about remote teams, questions form an important backdrop for professionals today. Questions are the things that open up the conversation. They are the things that provoke new insights, or prompt connections.

This Friday I wanted to take us back to an earlier Team Building Tip from July 2019. Here’s what I wrote:

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you thinking about the questions “What questions do you need to ask?”. This is a valuable way to expand our thinking and get out of the rut of how we might be looking at things.

As you go about thinking of your most important questions, ask yourself the 5 W's + H.

Who?
What?
Where?
When?
Why?
How?

To expand your thinking this week, consider asking yourself questions along the lines of…

Who is important?
What is the one thing that might work best for you?
What are the elements that could distract/detract?
When do you want to focus more?
Where do you need to look?
What do you need to embrace?
Where do you need to let go?

In addition to these questions, you may also want to consider the questions of:

What do we see as common ground?
What’s important to connect or what’s connected?
What’s missing?
What’s another way of exploring this?
What assumptions are we making?
What is the outcome we are looking for?
What else?

I hope that you enjoy your conversations and have a few minutes to focus in on what’s important for you as a team.

With best wishes,
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2306 Team Building Tip 241

4/23/2020

If anything, the recent context has underscored the need for ongoing learning and adaptation in all areas of our life. The writing and research of Dr. Carol Dweck is so important at this time around Mindset and the approaches to open and closed mindset. In an open mindset we know that there are likely to be multiple areas for ongoing learning and business development.

As a team it can be useful to regularly ask “What haven’t we mastered yet?”, considering the questions of what areas might need to be focused on, adjusted or amended.

As Heraclitus wrote back in Ancient Greece: “Everything flows and nothing abides, everything gives way and nothing stays fixed."

Mastery is almost impossible in a context which is not static. Even a Master knows that they will need to keep learning.

What’s important to explore individually or collectively this week?

All the best,
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2305 How to Keep The Performance Conversations Going Virtually

4/22/2020

Performance conversations are challenging for many at the best of times. What about now that you are likely having to have these conversations virtually? What are the things you want to do to keep the performance conversations going virtually?

Performance issues become even more complex when you are not able to see people in their own element. In fact, our feedback is likely to be framed by what we can see on the screen (which might be one-tenth or one-hundredth of the time in a week) as well as what we see with output.

With that in mind, here are several things to keep in mind around performance support and feedback in the remote space:

Watch assumptions – be super explicit around what you mean with this.
Clarify what the end results need to look like.
Have more frequent check-ins or walk-throughs. It’s important that is not seen as hovering, but it creating a more frequent monitoring process.
Be sure to return back to measures of success, and things like the IS/IS NOT framework.

As it relates to feedback:

Make sure that feedback is specific, and demonstrable – again, check assumptions.
You may want to lead with “Walk me through “ to identify where processes or practices get derailed.
Be open to feedback in new ways.
Remember that feedback is a two-way street. It’s often best to get it to give it. Feedback is reciprocal.
Be sure that you are also having people share what areas they are going to value feedback in first.

What else is important to note about feedback and performance conversations for your team right now?

Enjoy your virtual conversations!
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2304 Remote Enablers in Focus

4/21/2020

In the Remote Working Whitepaper, I released earlier this year, I summarized seven of the areas I consistently see as things that help, or enable, exceptional performance in the remote space. As a former remote leader myself for many years, I knew that these things were always areas to check in around first, to see if perhaps, one or more needed attention, clarity or modification.

Whether your team is now working remote all the time, or for just this period of time, it can be useful to focus in on these 7 areas which I like to term Remote Enablers – The 7 Cs. Here’s an excerpt from the Whitepaper which you can pick up a copy HERE.

What’s different in the remote space?

Copyright 2020 – Jennifer Britton, Potentials Realized. All Rights Reserved

Remote teams operate across distance, time and culture. This usually requires enhanced skills in communication, boundaries, clarifying assumptions and being able to navigate the diverse preferences, cultures and ways of working of a global team. What is not clear or visible can become a challenge or pitfall for a remote team.

What ingredients enable exceptional remote work? I like to call these the 7 Cs which anchor exceptional remote work – Communication, Clarity, Connection, Culture, Consistency, Community, and Collaboration.

Communication is likely to take place along different channels, and at different times of day. The communication realm of the remote space may include phone, text, instant messaging, email, video streaming calls, and messaging across multiple apps like Slack and Trello.

The challenge with communication is that is often has no context - we don’t see “what’s beyond the screen”. Many times, we don’t have the visual cues that tend to make up the majority of regular communication messages.

On top of this, communication can vary across both geographic culture (some cultures are more direct than others), and industry culture.

Finally, we have our own individual preferences to communication. As a Gen Xer, I may prefer to have communication bundled and emailed to me, rather than up in the Cloud. Taking time to understand each team member’s focus and preferences is critical to remote work. Conflict may emerge for a variety of factors including different styles, lack of clarity, misunderstanding or interpreting instructions differently.

Connection with others helps remote work and includes connection to others inside and outside the team and understanding their work. Remote team members are likely to be part of matrix relationships, where they report to, and are part of, multiple teams. Matrix relationships offer another layer of complexity and opportunity in this work. Connection also means understanding how our work fits into the bigger picture, as well as fits into the bigger context of others work. Given the isolated nature of remote work, proactively focusing on connection is important. Take a look at the Remote Working Myths for more on this.

What can you do to create more connection across the team? Beyond the team?

Clarity is one of the most important enablers. This involves clarity of focus, clarity of priorities, clarity of expectations, clarity of roles and clarity of responsibilities. In the remote space, we need to make things EXPLICIT, and be regularly exploring our ASSUMPTIONS.

What clarity is needed for team members to do their best work?

Team culture becomes even more pronounced or diluted in the remote space, so a focus on this can be really important, especially when people are part of multiple teams. Culture is “how we do things here”.

Culture encompasses both visible (behaviors, language, artifact) and invisible manifestations (norms, values, basic assumptions or beliefs).” – Rosinski, 2003, p 20.

In shaping a culture there are the things we can see and help to define us (our taglines or the way we start meetings) and there are things that we don’t see. Team culture can remain very diffuse and not clear in the remote space. Taking efforts to clarify and intentionally shape what team culture is, and how we do things, becomes paramount for remote team performance.

Consistency is also key when we are dispersed or operating in different locations. It’s consistency of messaging, practices, and the way we do things. For example, every Monday we meet at 7:30 am ET, regardless of how many people can attend live.

Community – Remote Workers are hungry for connection and community. What are you doing to build a sense of connection and identity across your team or organization? Community can range from boosting communication across internal social platforms to interactive virtual lunch and learns.

Collaboration – Collaboration is an essential skill set when we work remote. As you’ll see in the remote work myth of “no person is an island”, we still need to place an emphasis on relationships. Who do you need to collaborate with in order to get things done? What can you do to collaborate better? Where are those collaboration windows and requirements?

Connection – Beyond community, how are we connected? What are the process pieces which help us do our best work? What type of communication exists? What helps bring people together on a regular basis both formally, and informally? Across a team and between teams?

End of Excerpt – Remote Working Whitepaper: When You Need to Get Up to Remote Working Speed Quickly. Copyright 2020, Jennifer Britton, Potentials Realized

Pick up a copy of the Remote Working Whitepaper for yourself here.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

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

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program

Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.

Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.