It is hard to believe we are at the end of August and it's time to wind down another month. Where is 2017 going?

I hope that you will take 15 minutes today to reflect on your accomplishments this month (and perhaps this summer), along with taking time to think about your goals for September and the fall.

Here are some questions to support you as you reflect:

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 ones need to be let go of?
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 _______

As I think about the summer overall -
My biggest learning has been....
My ability to flourish has been supported by....
I'm proud of....
My biggest accomplishment has been....
The one habit which has really helped me has been...

Looking ahead to September....
My priorities are:
My goals are
I want to......
I want to cultivate relationships in...
The one thing to keep an eye on is...

Enjoy your reflections!

Jennifer

One of our final leadership practice posts is on fostering collaboration. The ability to work across differences and help others to do so is an essential skill set for today’s business context.

As a leader, fostering collaboration may involve you focusing in on these five areas:
Boosting Trust - Collaboration flourishes when trust levels are high. If trust levels are low, it may be important to start in building trust as part of your team development process.
Knowing each other – knowing each others’ strengths and abilities is a foundation of building a high performing team. We know that teams which excel usually are complimentary in nature and are able to leverage their strengths.
Understanding styles - we each have different styles in terms of communication, decision making, navigating conflict. The ability to navigate conflict in a proactive way is important for teams to learn how to work across differences, and leverage the diverse perspectives which may exist for the team.
Relationship Development – Our ability to build relationships across the team and outside of the team is important for teams of all types today. What are the core relationships you want to foster?
Roles – Understanding roles, who is doing what, who is responsible for what, and how the pieces fit together is important for collaboration

What are areas which will support your team in boosting collaboration?

Take a look at past posts I have written about collaboration here.

Fostering strong team connections where team members can take turns to lead and offer their expertise to others on the team is essential in today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment. Helping team members improve their coaching skills with each other is an important part of creating a more collaborative environment.

Several of the core skills we want to cultivate in moving to a peer coaching environment are:
Questioning – the ability to ask open ended questions which will hep the other person widen their knowledge, explore options, gain clarity or create assumptions. In boosting our questioning skills it is also important to consider Are you leaving enough time for the person to reflect and then respond?

Designing the conversation – helping peers be in dialogue around what they want to purpose and outcome of the conversation to be is important This could include asking questions such as:
What do you want as an outcome for this conversation?
What would be most helpful to you? To brainstorm? Be asked questions? Consider solutions? Other?

Listening – Being able to listen deeply is important. The ability to listen on multiple levels is key to peer coaching. Listening around
One of the biggest stretch areas for peers is learning not to give advice but lead from questioning and listening

A starting point for peers to experiment with their sills is dedicating 20 – 30 minutes a mot to peer coaching conversations. Pair team members and have them bring a current business challenge or opportunity which they want to explore. Give them one to two minutes to outline what that is to their partner and then provide 7  minutes to coach and then one minute to identify specific next action steps. Rotate to the next person.

Peer coaching can be done virtually with virtual teams as well, using breakouts or separate calls between the session. Consider how you could integrate peer coaching into your upcoming conversations and team development

Welcome back to Effective Virtual Conversations tip #10. Today’s EVC tip is about how masterful virtual facilitators are highly effective in reading the environment of virtual calls.

All calls have their own rhythm and it can be very useful to make sure that you are regularly taking the pulse of a call. In doing this, facilitators will want to notice:
How people are speaking
The energy and tone of the call
Any visual cues if you are streaming

A general rule of thumb for in-person programming is to take the pulse of the group every 8-10 minutes, considering pace changes. A pace change might involve asking a question to the group, getting people to write things down, getting people to move to a breakout or getting people to do something real-time. You may also want to use this metric a touch-point in your own groups.

A related part of mastery is in creating an enabling environment for the call. There are several things you can do to create an enabling environment in the virtual domain including:

• Welcome people as they join the call
  
• Get people to indicate on a map where they are calling in from
• Make sure there is a personalized welcome email before the call
• Noticing energy flows and navigating pace changes accordingly
• Connecting people early on in the call to their WIIFM – What’s In It For Me?
  

What other things can you do to create an engaging and enabling environment for your virtual calls?

Have a great start to your week,
Jennifer
 

This week's Teams365 video covers the topic of mentoring, an essential area for leaders at all levels. If you have not been mentored before, this short 1 minute video brings to life Teams365 post #187 - Five Reasons Why Mentoring is Important.  Enjoy!

Today's weekend quote comes from Benjamin Franklin who wrote "Drive thy business or it will drive thee.". 

​Earlier this week I was speaking in Washington to a large group of professional coaches at this year's International Coach Federation conference. In my presentation about Virtual Team and Group Coaching, I touched on the importance of planning and preparation. Going hand in hand with this is intentionality. Taking time to think about what you want to create and what you want to commit to. As business owners, and leaders, it can be important to be intentional and focused on how we want to move forward with our work. It is far to easy for the work to take over and create it's own wheel!

Take a few minutes this weekend to consider:
​1. How are you driving your business/work or is it driving you?
​2. What is it that you want to create in your work/business?
​3. What boundaries are needed to allow you to work at your best?
​4. What are you creating?
​5. What else is important to consider around intentionality?

Have a great weekend,
Jennifer

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Yesterday I spoke here in Washington DC on Team and Group Coaching Virtually. As leaders, many times we are called upon to coach our team members, but are they ready to be coached? Here's a post from 2015 which you might find interesting - Four Coaching Flags, or four things to be aware of when coaching your team.  Consider what are flags coming up for you and your team right now.

Here's what I wrote in Teams365 #784:
A key success factor to supporting any learning or talent development initiative is to make sure that the approaches we are using are the  right fit. Whether we are coaching, training, mentoring, it is important to take stock regularly on what's working and what's not.

Sometimes there are flags which signal that things are not going as they should. In the coaching approach you may see:

• Lack of follow through on the part of the person being coached
• Circling of the client
• Person not showing up for their coaching sessions
• Jumping from one topic to another
• Client not seeing value of coaching

Questions to ask:
Is this person coachable? Do they really want to engage in the coaching process? Without their active participation it is not possible to coach a person. While people can sit passively through a workshop, in coaching they need to be an active participant?

Is it time to revisit the coaching goals they have set for themselves? Are these goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timebound)? Are the goals stretch goals?

When the client "circles" it may be for several reasons. This often signals a place where the person is fearful or feeling dis-empowered It may signal an "inner critic" or "gremlin". For more information on this topic i'd highly recommend Rick Carson's book Taming the Gremlin.

Finally when a client is saying they are not seeing value in the coaching process it may be time to have them take stock of their accomplishments and learning since the start of the coaching process. Sometimes we are so in he phase of learning that we have not stopped to reflect and note what is different and what changes have happened.

There are several more flags you may see around coaching, however, thse are four very common ones experienced by coaches as leaders, as well as internal and external coaches. What other coaching flags have you experienced?

Have a great weekend,
Jennifer

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We are celebrating a milestone in the Teams365 Team Building Tip Series and a new look to the series. I'd love your feedback regarding how this compares to our first 149 TBT. Please comment below
​Today's Team Building Tip is a reminder to "Meet People where they are at". This is a central theme for my new book, Effective Virtual Conversations. Whether we are supporting a team face-to-face or virtually, meeting people where they are at involves:
​Knowing your people - what they prefer and what their strengths are
​Understanding what are current priorities for team members
​Knowing what people's preferences at in terms of communication, decision making, conflict
​Supporting team members through their stretch zone - whatever that looks like

​What does "meeting people where they are at mean for your team right now?"

Have a great Thursday,
​Jennifer

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Over the summer I have been spotlighting a couple of different leadership practices each week on Tuesday and Wednesday posts. From delegating to presentation skills, 1-1s to mentoring. Today's leadership practice brings us into the area of project management. Even if we do't have formal responsibility or training in this area, chances are we are leading and supporting projects of all sizes on a regular basis.

​In my former world of work as a Program Manager a large part of my work revolved around project, and program management. From large scale regional educational projects, to infrastructure, much of my leadership experience and time was spent managing projects. In the last 13  years since starting Potentials Realized, projects have once again shown up on my dashboard.

​Several  things to keep in mind when working with any project:

​What's the state of your triple constraint. In the world of PM we hopefully bring "projects in" in terms of budget, scope and quality, like we hope. Together these make a triangle and if one changes, the notion is that the others will to. Consider this: budget needs to be reduced by 20% due to a reallocation of funds to a new emerging priority within the business.  What can you do? Maybe you need to reduce scope - or what's covered in this "phase" of the project, or maybe you need to change the quality - i.e. instead of using certain hard-copy materials you need to go to a digital version.

​Know your people - One of the central tenets of my work is around teamwork. Projects are usually only as successful as the team effort. Knowing your team's skills and strengths and being able to leverage these are key in any project context.  In most projects it is not only important for the team leader to know the team, but also have the team members know each other - their strengths and abilities.

​Focus on Building a Team - Whether your project is six months or two weeks, teamwork can also take on enhanced importance in projects. Given that team member A may be relying more on Team member B than on you, helping team members get to know each other, clarifying roles and how roles are connected is an important start-up activity. 
​Skills in communication, influence, relationship building, listening, EI are all skills of significance for ALL Team members to have in the world of projects. What can you do to help your team further develop these skills, or lead themselves with best practice.

​Ongoing evaluation and feedback is key - In the sometimes shorter cycles of the project management world, ongoing evaluation and feedback is key. Whether it's formal weekly status meetings, or more informal daily check-ins, remaining connected to the iterative and fast paced context is critical for successful projects.

​A whole professional body of resources is available through the Project Management Institute

​What is going to help you bring in your next project to a successful close?

​Have a great Wednesday,
Jennifer

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As a former leader myself, one of the most important activities I would undertake on a regular (ie. almost daily) basis were walkabouts. Whether I was in my office, or our visiting with member of my virtual team (which were scattered across multiple countries), taking time each day to do a walkabout was critical.

We talk about the importance of visibility and relationships so much in today's leadership world, yet how visible and focused on building genuine relationships have you been recently.

Walkabouts look different according to your location, but involve you getting out and spending time checking in with your team. It may be as quick as a ten minute walking of the floor to stop in and say hi, do a quick touch base to see how projects are going, or take time to find out how one of your team member's coaching work is going.

Walkabouts are about connecting with others, and being available - for questions, problem solving(as needed) and coaching. It's not about micro-management or "checking up on people" which is one perception if trust levels are low.

Are walkabouts being modeled in your organization? How could this benefit your team and relationships?

Have a great Tuesday,
Jennifer