Blog Archives

TEAMS365 #2344 – Week in Review

5/31/2020

Welcome back to another Sunday in Review! Here’s where we went this week:

What’s been your favorite read this week?

Have a great Sunday!
Jennifer

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

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TEAMS365 #2343 –Weekly Journaling Prompt 101

5/30/2020

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This week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt gets you to consider the question – “What do you want to celebrate?”.

As you think about the first five months of the year consider:

What were your major accomplishments?
What did you achieve?
What are the things you are proud of?
What is important to acknowledge?

I hope that you enjoy this week’s journaling prompt!

With best wishes,
Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2342 #FLASHBACKFRIDAY: Motivation and Momentum

5/29/2020

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This week’s Flashback Friday takes us back to the a much older post, primarily focusing on two topics I find that I have talked a lot about in recent months as people have shifted over to the remote space- motivation and momentum.

Take a look at this week’s flashback Friday post to Teams365 #337: https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-337-leadership-a-z-m-is-for-motivation

Today's Teams365 Leadership a-z is at M. Management, momentum and movement have all been key topics in coaching conversations I’ve had this week.

Here's what I wrote about micro-managing and motivation last November - who other key M areas:

Today we are a the letter M in #leadership a through z. Two words in particular jumped to mind for me -
Motivation and Micro-monitoring

Motivation: What motivates you as a leader? What motivates your staff? A great book on this topic is Dan Pink's book Drive. In the book he explores what motivates us and proposes that we are motivated by three things - autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Questions to consider:
Looking at ourselves, where do we get motivation from? Is it an internal driver like purpose, or an external driver like money or recognition? Consider your team members - what are their motivators? What can you do to align their motivators with tasks that need to get done?
How do goals support motivation for your team members?

Resources around motivation:
Motivation 123 website - a website dedicated to motivation. You can visit it here
Jim Riley presents various theorists around motivation including Maslow (remember his Hierarchy of Needs) and others. You can read Jim's overview here.
An animated video by RSA based on a presentation Dan Pink gave. View it here.

Micro-management versus micro-monitoring: A common statement in any leadership development training process is that you don't want to micro-manage.

As a former co-facilitator of mine, Doug McLaren, always stated "as a leader you want to micro-monitor, not micro-manage". Micro-monitoring is about being aware of what your team members are working on, and making sure that you are there to provide support, resources and troubleshooting as needed. Micro-management, in contrast, is about taking over and not letting your employees work autonomously. As indicated earlier in this post, what is a major driver of motivation? Autonomy. Consider the implication

Questions to consider:
What does micro-management mean to you? What does it look like?
What does micro-monitoring mean to you? What does it look like?
On a scale of 0-10 (with 0 being none, and 10 being high) where are you as a micro-manager? A micro-monitor?
What support does each one of your staff really need at the moment to be successful with a particular task or project?

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TEAMS365 #2341 – Team Building Tip 246

5/28/2020

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This week’s Weekly Team Building Tip is “Where would it be useful to sprint?”. While many things in the workplace today are a marathon, there’s value in moving things into a sprint mindset. When we embrace a sprint mindset that might include:

Condensing project time-frames to shorter windows
Focusing in on more rapid iteration and learning

In my own programming I host a quarterly program design sprint. In the span of 30 – 45 minutes it’s a series of rapid reflection and writing questions, designed to support people to GET IDEAS on PAPER without a lot of self-censure.

Having run these for about four years now, it’s always amazing to see what emerges in these short windows. A recent group member was inspired by what they were able to get out of their head and onto paper just last week. I’ve dedicated a notebook to these jottings so that I can go back in the future to find and build onto them.

Sprints don’t just appeal to short projects, but also longer projects. Take a look at the book Sprint, by Jake Knappfor more on this. He goes through the rapid prototyping that can occur over the course of five days.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2340 – Remote Productivity Tip - Reducing Distractions in the Remote Space

5/27/2020

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With the tsunami of professionals who have had to shift over to remote work this year, many are getting into the groove of remote work. Whether remote is your new normal or still something temporary, even with the best of intentions, distractions can get in the way.

As someone who has worked in the remote space for several decades while leading virtual teams and a virtual business, I’ve been writing on remote productivity on a regular basis at the Teams365 blog since 2014, and thought that it might be useful to dip into some of my older posts.

Here are four areas I shared back in 2016, in Teams365 blog post #797 about four ways to minimize distractions when working remote. They are:

1. Clear a dedicated space for your work. Whether our workspace is a small table which folds back into the wall when we are done, or we have dedicated office space, clearing the clutter can be an important step in creating space to focus and be productive.

Consider where you work - what needs to be cleared? Spend 15 minutes this week clearing yourself more space.

2. Make sure you have what you need in order to do your work. Small issues can become big issues when working remote. An old laptop which crashes regularly, taking with it your hard work, becomes a liability. Slow internet speeds can also take a toll. While these issues might be minor pain when working remote once a month, if you need to work remote several days a week, the cost adds up. Consider what you might be tolerating in terms of equipment/resources that just aren't cutting it.

What's the cost of replacing them? What's the cost if you don't?

3. Consider when you are at your peak for different types of work. Some of us like the early morning to get our thoughts down on paper, while others like to tackle calls first thing in the morning. Consider your style and preferences in terms of when you would like to get different tasks accomplished, and SCHEDULE IT IN. We know that as Peter Drucker said, “What doesn’t get scheduled, doesn’t get done”.

4. Distractions can occur when we don't allow ourselves time for a break, or we don't allow ourselves to get into the flow of one activity at a time. While there are many approaches to time management (check out all of the Teams365 time management tips here), one favorite I’ve shared with many professionals over the years is the Pomodoro approach. The Pomodoro Technique recommends you set a timer for a set amount of time (i.e. 25 minutes) and work until the alarm goes off). Other time management gurus recommend a 10-minute break every 50 minutes.

What is going to keep you focused and at your prime in terms of productivity?

As you think about your current working situation, what distractions are getting in the way? What’s going to help you be most productive? What’s going to help you do your best work, when working from home?

This was originally shared as Teams365 #797 https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-797-four-ways-to-minimize-distractions-with-remote-work

Best wishes,
Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2339 - Ways to Keep Your Virtual Meeting on the Flow

5/26/2020

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Keeping the conversation going with virtual meetings in the remote space can take some concerted effort and is critical in terms of getting right. For many teams, it’s going to be a while longer before they are back face-to-face.

Next time you are going to lead a virtual meeting or facilitate a virtual webinar, consider these tips:

Keep it varied. Keep the pace moving and adjust pace every 7- 10 minutes. This might involve polling people in a larger audience or focusing more on
Use the tools available. There are usually many tools we can activate in the virtual space to engage others. From annotation, to breakouts, polling, to chat, what do you want to ensure you do to bring in everyone’s voices?
Wrap it up before the top of the hour. Maybe even 5 – 10 minutes early. With back-to-back virtual meetings becoming the norm, what would it be like to adopt a 50- or 55-minute meeting length so people actually have time to move from one meeting to the next?
Leave 30-60 seconds for people to note what they are going to do and schedule it in. How many times have you left one meeting, clear on what you had committed to doing, and then by the end of the next hour had forgotten what it was?

Always run through your pre-meeting checklist before you get going…. check out my past post around 8 Meeting Questions you always want to ask. You can read it here at the PlanDoTrack Blog.

What’s going to help make your next meet be most efficient?

With best wishes,
Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2338 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 146

5/25/2020

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Over the last few months, we’ve had a tsunami of professionals joining us in the virtual and remote space. One thing that most have become aware of is that virtual conversations are not uniform across the virtual and remote space. In fact, in my 2017 book, Effective Virtual Conversations, I share 9 different types of virtual conversations which vary across both level of formality and peer versus individual learning approaches.

In EVC, I differentiate between these nine different types of virtual conversations across the ecosystem:

Mentoring
Coaching
Peer Learning
Team Development
Goal Setting
Video Based Learning
Education – Webinars, Webcasts, Formal Learning, MOOCs
Meetings
E-Learning

What are the different types of virtual conversations you are engaging in? Are they synchronous – real time – or asynchronous – when the conversations take place at different times?

Chapter 4 of Effective Virtual Conversations dives more deeply into the different types of virtual conversations which exist.

Regardless of the type of conversation we are having, many of the same skills and practices underpin all of these. Last week I delivered a national webinar series for the Institute for Performance Learning and covered the 8 skill sets that underpin virtual conversations including:

Creating the Context
Communication
Process
Tools
Group Development
Ourselves as Facilitators
Technical
Design

(Copyright – 2017, Jennifer Britton, page 71)

What are the skills which are important for you to develop further to enhance your conversations?

For more on these skills, check out the Daily Reading Series I hosted during April and May of this year covering off chapters 1-3 of the book. You can listen in here at the Effective Virtual Conversations Blog.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2337 – Week in Review

5/24/2020

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Welcome back to another Sunday post and the week in review. This week we’ve taken a look at these six areas:

2331 – Monday: Effective Virtual Conversations Tip
2332 – Tuesday: Collaboration In The Remote Space
2333 – Wednesday: Conflict in the Remote Space
2334 – Thursday: Team Building Tip
2335 – FlashbackFriday: Four Past Collaboration Posts
2336 – Saturday Weekly Journaling Prompt: PAUSE

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2336 – Weekly Journaling Prompt #100

5/23/2020

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We made it to milestone Weekly Journaling Prompt #100. It’s simply PAUSE.

I hope that you enjoy this week’s prompt and that it provides you some time to SAVOUR!

If you want, you may want to take a look back at all the entries you’ve written in sets of 10 perhaps. Note what the themes are and how they arc together.

Enjoy your time to PAUSE and relax!

Jennifer

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TEAMS365 #2335 – Flashback Friday – Collaboration

5/22/2020

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Earlier this week I did a post on the importance of collaboration. That got me to thinking, what other posts I have shared around collaboration. It took me back to some posts I had written back in 2017 when I had focused on Collaboration for the month of February. Here are some of the posts you may want to check out.

That month some of the most popular posts were:

Teams365 #1152: Five Ingredients for Successful Collaboration - Listen into this audio post here.
Teams365 #1149: Leveraging Peer Conversations for Better Collaboration - Click here to read the post
Teams365 #1135: Six Barriers to Collaboration. Click here to read the post.
Teams365 #1137: Flashback Friday - Skills for Collaboration. Click here to visit this post.

What post is your favourite?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

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Teams365 Blog

TEAMS365 #2344 – Week in Review

TEAMS365 #2343 –Weekly Journaling Prompt 101

TEAMS365 #2342 #FLASHBACKFRIDAY: Motivation and Momentum

TEAMS365 #2341 – Team Building Tip 246

TEAMS365 #2340 – Remote Productivity Tip - Reducing Distractions in the Remote Space

TEAMS365 #2339 - Ways to Keep Your Virtual Meeting on the Flow

TEAMS365 #2338 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 146

TEAMS365 #2337 – Week in Review

TEAMS365 #2336 – Weekly Journaling Prompt #100

TEAMS365 #2335 – Flashback Friday – Collaboration

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