Welcome back to another Sunday post here at the Teams365 blog.

Today there are two items I wanted to share with you:

#1 – The latest installment of the #90DaysPlanDoTrack Video Montage. These are a summary of some of the daily question prompts I have shared over at the CoachingBizBuilder Instagram feed. They will be of interest to business owners, leaders and other team members.
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#2 – I also wanted to share another post from the vault here at the Teams365 blog. Given our focus this month on Teamwork in uncertainty, you’ll also want to think about how prioritization can be a skill cultivated with all team members. Whether the team is working remote or in person, when things are changing quickly being able to prioritize work and ask questions to others to prioritize is also a key skill.

Here’s a post I wrote last year on Prioritization and Teamwork in Complexity – Teams365 #1610
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Prioritization is a skill set we draw upon regularly in times of complexity. Prioritization allows all team members to regularly scan and manage their workload.

Key to prioritization is:

• Having the tools to prioritize
• Feeling empowered to make decisions and take responsibility for managing workload
• Understanding what is most important – to the different players of the team, as well as the different time frames you are working on (short term, medium term)

In past Teams365 posts I’ve explored a range of prioritization skills including the Urgent/Important Matrix (we often attribute to Covey), as well as a Decision Matrix where we weight what’s important in making our decisions
 
For more on the topic of prioritization, check out these additional resources:

• This excellent article from MindTools.com - which has an incredible amount of other resources team members and leaders will also want to check out.
• LiquidPlanner.com's article on How to Prioritize Work When Everything Is #1 - Read it here.
• For those that are looking at prioritization through the lens of product design, you'll want to take  a look at this excellent article 20 Product Prioritization Techniques.

​Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Jennifer

This week’s Weekly Journaling prompt gets you to reflect on the question “What I want to say a big NO TO is….”

Whether it is getting a handle on time, or clutter, or something else, saying NO can just be as powerful as saying YES.

This week I hope that you will enjoy journaling around the question: “What I want to say a big NO TO is…”

Kind 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 an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

​This month’s posts are geared to Teamwork in Uncertainty. This is a close cousin to last May’s posts on Teamwork in Complexity. I thought it would be useful to take us back to that post on Teamwork Skills in Complexity – Experimentation from May 2018. Here’s what I wrote:

This month we are exploring the skills required in teamwork, including listening and curiosity. Today I wanted to take a dive into a third skill area, that being the area of experimentation.

Experimentation is key for business leaders and teams today. Many times, the context is changing so quickly that we don’t have time to complete an entire roll-out before having to make a final decision. That can lead to a mindset of experimentation, where it is encouraged to try things out, see what works and what doesn’t.

In supporting experimentation in our team we want to:

• Encourage and reward trial and error
• Create safety around not getting “things right”
• Provide team members with time and resources to experiment, beyond their every day team responsibilities
• Facilitate an evaluation of projects or “Experiments” that are completed or are even at the midpoint

 
Questions we may ask at project reviews include:

• What’s working?
• What’s not?
• What are the things that need to be abandoned or tweaked?
• What additional resources do we need?
• What unknown obstacles have become visible?
• What is the big learning we are taking?
• What is the one thing/ or the many things we are going to do differently going forward?
• Who else can we learn from (including our own past projects?

​Read the original post here.

What else is important for you to note around experimentation?

If you haven’t read the blog posts I did earlier this week on Teamwork in Uncertainty around experimentation and cultivating more curiosity, be sure to check them out.

Wishing you all the best,
​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 an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

This week’s Team Building question gets you to consider the question:

“What addition would benefit the team?”

What are the things you could add that would help the team be more successful, do things quicker, or innovate more?

Consider these items in terms of additions:

1. New Team Member
2. New Role
3. A New Process – As an example, you might consider changing things up with your meetings. As I’ve written in past posts, team members may be spending 40% of their time or more in meetings- definitely an area for exploration!  A new process could include hosting team meetings on a platform like WebEx or Zoom where the call could be recorded (and potentially transcribed) so that responsibilities and accountabilities are noted and followed up on.
4. Additional Resourcing – This might be physical or technical resourcing, a new piece of software or app.
5. New Learning – Given the rapid pace of learning change needed in today’s workplace, what is the new learning that someone could benefit from?

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What else might benefit the team?

Best,
Jennifer

Another part of successful teamwork in uncertainty is giving people the space to experiment and try things out. This goes hand-in-hand with cultivating curiosity.

Experimentation is not just a strategy for small business and start ups, in fact, encouraging intrapreneurism has been a part of larger organizations for many decades now, including organizations like 3M.

Experimentation and trying things out can be a key business strategy when things are changing. Part of the success of this business strategy is that we also track.

When fostering an environment of experimentation, consider these questions:

• Before you start an experiment, where are you? 📍
• What do the metrics say? 📊
• What do you want to measure?📏
• How long and at what frequency will the experiment last?⏳
• What is your hypothesis? I.e. What do you think will happen?📈 

Recently I posted the daily business prompt as part of the #90Days Plan Do Track series over on Instagram at CoachingBizBuilder. 

Ways we can encourage more experimentation:

• Provide people with stretch zones
• Work with real business challenges. Encourage a peer exploration of different options and perspectives around key business issues. It might be that you are looking for different ways to get services or products out to market or how to magnify sales.
• Explore opportunities for cross-departmental sharing with a view to learning from other’s best practices and ways of working. This cross-pollination of ideas may lead to new ways of working in your department.

What else might you do to encourage more experimentation? 

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 an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

Last week I shared a post on cultivating curiosity. As a former team leader myself, working in highly volatile and changeable environments, cultivating curiosity was an important area to support my own team in. Given that many were responding to post-disaster contexts and needing to look at how to do their work in a highly changing environment, it was not business as usual. What many leaders don’t realize today is that “business as usual” may not longer be present in many industries.

As a leadership practitioner, author, coach and trainer, I’m regularly in conversation with leaders and teams around how important the skill of curiosity is. Yet, there are still many naysayers – from leaders and team members.

So, what does the research say?
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I took a look at some of the more recent research in the area of curiosity and came across a great set of articles from Harvard Business Review - September 2018. In that edition, they cited the research and article written by Francesca Gino who has studied the area of curiosity. Read her article and study here.

Out of those surveyed, 70% of employees indicted that they faced barriers to employing more curiosity.

She cites in her article “The Business Case for Curiosity” five ways to encourage more curiosity:

1. Hire for it.
2. Model it yourself – inquisitiveness.
3. Emphasize learning goals. Many leaders today focus solely on performance goals. While not abandoning performance goals, what can you do cultivate and allow for more of a focus on learning goals?
4. “Let employees explore and broaden interests”. As someone who was schooled as multi-disciplinarian, I have seen throughout my career how a broad knowledge base becomes an asset, rather than a liability in times of change and complexity.
5. She also encourages days where people explore the questions: Why? What if?  How might we do that?

Individually, each one of these suggestions could have a ripple effect on the way people work, without detracting from core functions.

What are the benefits to starting to integrate some of these approaches in your team meetings and ways of working?

Best,
​Jennifer

As someone who has led a variety of virtual calls for the better part of the last 15 years, I often get questions around quick techniques we can use to “jazz things up” with hearing from different people on the call.

While some people will attend a virtual session thinking they can multi-task, if you really want to create a powerful learning context create agreements around engagement and how you are going to call on group members during your time together.

Last week I shared the tip of calling on people from A-Z. This week consider using an East to West (or West to East strategy). This provides a little more interest and mental power in keeping the call moving.

To support this process, during one of your call kick offs as an energizer you may want to get people to share their location (or where they are calling in from – city, state or country) by dotting themselves on a map.

These approaches are yet another quick way we can “Avoid the Death by Conference Call”, creating more engagement for our group members.

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 an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

​It’s Sunday which means that it is time for another Video Montage from PlanDoTrack. Take a look at this week’s video montage.

In bringing this work out into the world, one of my favorite program offerings at the moment is the four-hour PlanDoTrack Virtual Retreat.  Check it out here.

The program is geared for business owners and professionals who are looking to reconnect or create their vision OR take action on a creative project. We meet throughout the four-hour retreat every hour as a group, leaving you ample time in between our group touch-points to engage in structured activities to help you PLAN, take action (DO) and TRACK your results.

Here’s what two participants from the April session wrote about their experience:

"The PlanDoTrack session was everything I hoped for and more! These 4 hours were a super useful and productive pause to work on my business vision and goals for the year. It was a hands-on approach, very much helped by the worksheets in the Coaching Business Builder and also Jennifer's guidance.
I would certainly do at least one more session!”
- Rute Silva - Organizational Development Consultant/Executive Coach - PCC 

"Jennifer - thank you for creating a space to allow me to focus on the deep work that I am committed to getting out into the world.  On a normal day, the whirlwind of life would have prevented me from putting pen to paper and designing a problem that could have easily been put off until "someday". Today I prioritized the important over the urgent and I feel so accomplished to have created content that will make a difference. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you are committed to creating a program, a business plan, content, or whatever is meaningful to you and your clients, but you do not have the space or time to focus, this program is a game changer. Block the time. You will be thrilled with the outcome and the support along the way.” 
- Jacyln M. Bradley

The next one will be held on Thursday May 30th from 10 am – 2 pm Eastern/Toronto.

I hope that you will join us. The cost is $129 US and includes a virtual retreat workbook, structured exercises to work on during the afternoon and access to me during the 4 hours for some individual coaching.

You need to bring a copy of the PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner, OR the Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner, an idea of what you want to focus on, and four-hours of dedicated space.

Reserve your spot at the next PlanDoTrack Virtual Retreat – Thursday May 30th here.

Look forward to connecting!
​Jennifer

Happy Saturday! It’s time for another Weekly Journaling Prompt here at the Teams365 blog. Have you downloaded your copy of the first 6 weeks booklet?

For a short while, readers here at the blog will have access to this resource for free. Use code THANKSTEAMS365 when prompted. 

Today’s weekly journaling prompt gets you to consider the question:

What I want to more fully embrace is…?

I hope that you will take a few minutes today or this weekend to journal on this question. After you have journaled, review what you have written and note:

• What do you notice about this?
• What’s holding you back from embracing it more?
• What changes do you want to make?
• What else is important to note about this question?

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 an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

With our focus this month on teamwork in uncertainty, my guess is that many of you are thinking about the questions “Practically, what are some things that I can do to support my team through uncertainty?” OR “What can we do to address these topics?”
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This week’s FlashbackFriday post takes us back to Teams365 #1657 when I hosted a series around the A- Z of Team Development Activities. As leaders (and team members) it is important to have a variety of ideas and tools available to facilitate the conversations needed for teams to excel.
You can read the original post here.
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Here’s what I wrote:
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“This month’s focus is on team development. The summer months may be one of the only times when people have an opportunity to focus in on what’s needed for their team. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing a quick A through Z of possibilities for team development activities, whether you are supporting a virtual team, intact team or project team. Over the last five years I’ve written about a lot of these different areas and I’ll include links to the original posts for you to check out:

A – Assumptions, Acknowledgements, Action and Accountability
 
Take a step back to one of the first A through Z series I did back in 2014 on Leadership. Read the Leadership A – Z around A for Action and Accountability here.
 
B – Barriers, Beliefs, Behaviors, Boundaries, Brevity,  Bottom lining, Beauty, Better, and Best

Check out Teams365 #427 where I explore 6 Leadership Questions for B here. 
 
Check out Teams365 #309 for additional focus areas around B – Check it out here.
 
C – Culture, Communication, Conversation, Change, Collaboration

Check out these six leadership questions around C here.
 
Virtual and Remote Leadership – C is for Communication. Read it here.
 
Check out the Leadership Myth – Change is Easy here.
 
 
D – Delegation, Decisions, Direct, Difficult Conversations
 
Check out Teams365 #315 on D is for Delegation. Read it here.
 
Check out Teams365 #431  - Six Leadership Questions a day - read it here.
 
And finally: Virtual and Remote Team Leadership - read it here.
 
As you consider the A-D of your team right now, what are focus areas the team could work around? Highlight 4-5 key areas you’d like to have conversation or a focus around in the coming weeks.”
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Consider what type of conversations you want to have.
 
With 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 an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.