This Friday I am reaching back to a 2018 post – Teams365 #1743 which includes different ways to be building out connection as a virtual team. For some teams today, the stakes are high in terms of keeping things going.

Here are some ideas to keep your team moving:

#TEAMS365 #1743 Creating Connection and Building Community - Virtually

In today’s business context, the ability to build strong relationships with our team, and our other stakeholders is critical.

A starting point to create connection and build community is to find common connection points. Whether finding common ground by discussing the shared results you have OR starting with finding a personal connection, building community is critical for information sharing, knowledge expansion and innovation. Most professionals don’t operate in silos, yet, when they are working remote or virtually, it’s common to feel “alone”, or operating in a vacuum. The ability to connect with others and build strong virtual relationships and networks is a core skill area for virtual professionals.

How do we go about creating connection and building community virtually?

Six areas to consider:

1. Find points of common connection – what is the common ground and purpose you have in your relationship?

2. What is critical for success for your work together? Discuss what is important from each perspective in terms of success. Note what is similar and different.

3. Understand how people prefer to communicate – Big picture? Details? Frequent updates or summary journals? Direct? Indirect?

4. On a macro-level, who is important for you to build relationships with? How do you do this? Is it by joining LinkedIn Groups? Connecting on other social networks? As you look to these larger communities, what are the core themes/areas people are exploring? What are the trends? What are the virtual meeting places?

5. Be clear on what you are after and what you are asking to connect around. Like any networking and community building it can be important to be clear and focused on WHY you are doing it. What is your end goal? Intention?
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6. Create parameters around HOW you are going to do it is also important – Before it becomes an all-consuming activity, are you going to spend 10-15 minutes a day connecting on social media? Are you going to dedicate one-hour a month to reaching out and participating in a virtual community event? What’s going to avoid scope creep around time spent?

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 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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

Given that a number of professionals are needing to move to the remote space I thought that it would be appropriate to return back to past post on planning for a virtual co-working session. Remote work can feel isolating, so what if you met up for a block of remote work together?

Here’s what I shared last year in a post around Planning a Virtual Co-working session:

From leaders who manage teams which work remote most of the month, to project teams which span the globe, from remotepreneurs leading virtual businesses, remote work is on the rise.

We’ll be following many of these trends and taking a deeper dive into the adventures of the Digital Dozen™, twelve different types of remote professionals. I hope that you’ll join us and will follow along at the new website here.

With so many professionals jumping into the remote workspace, I am hoping that the years of writing on remote work, and virtual teams here at the Teams365 blog will be of service.

With that in mind, I wanted to highlight an earlier blog post  - Teams365 #1729: Plan a Virtual Co-working Session

​As we move into fall, it can be very useful for teams to continue to put attention around getting things done WHILE connecting. A favorite activity I continue to facilitate is GET IT DONE afternoons, which really become Virtual Co-Working Sessions. They are a derivative of the virtual retreats I have been offering for teams, business owners and leaders since 2007. 
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Virtual co-working sessions may range from one-hour sprints, to four-hour blocks, to full day sessions.

Three considerations to making a virtual co-working session work include the following:
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1. A platform where you can all meet, see each other and converse for periods of time.

• Streaming is often best; however, others may appreciate the ability to take their work on the road and call in at time.

2. Focus – collectively and individually. Consider these questions:

• What’s bringing you together today?
• What’s the focus – is it to do something collectively or individually?
• What outcomes do you want?
• How do you want to break it down – meeting every hour for check-ins? Meeting more frequently?

3. Scheduled Checkpoints 

• A way to share and keep the momentum going throughout the day. I have found that virtual group and team sessions have been the seeds for some amazing new ideas and cross-pollination. Be sure to build in blocks where people are not only checking in around what they are doing, but also consider the value of building in some time for sharing of learning or insights.

Looking for inspiration on what you might do in a virtual co-working session? Consider these ideas – they are all real programs I have facilitated over the years:

• One-hour virtual sprints for planning on the team or individual level
• 30-minute brainstorming/innovation sessions geared to create new product and or service ideas
• Four-hour GET IT DONE sessions where groups of solopreneurs connect virtually to take focused action once a month on things on their list. Check-ins are once an hour.
• Four to eight-hour Virtual Retreats, where each hour has a dedicated focus and theme to explore and/take action on. For example, an hour dedicated to creating a business plan, an hour to marketing approaches, an hour for project work).

Looking for a facilitator to host your next virtual co-working session? Contact me to learn more about this service I offer. 

What could a co-working event look like for you?

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 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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!
​

Welcome back to another Sunday. This week we’re taking a look at the past week‘s posts around remote work and other topics. Check out:

• Saturday’s post about 6 words to describe you…– and how you may be 1 in a 33.4 Million (at least according to Gallup). Read it here.
• Friday’s Flashback Friday post on Remote Team Toolbox – Connection and Focus
• Thursday’s post on Team Building Tip – A Reminder of The Six Factors for High Performing Teams
• Wednesday’s post on Keeping Motivated in the Remote Space
• Tuesday’s post on Virtual Collaboration – Collaboration in the Remote Space
• Monday’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip: Rotate – Who is Getting Short Changed

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 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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!
​

In my book, Effective Virtual Conversations, I share seven skills needed to make collaboration work well. These are particularly important in the remote and virtual space where collaborations need to be more intentional and are often characterized by touch points which are much more infrequent.
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The seven areas we want to be building skills and capacity around are:

• Trust
• Candor
• Connection
• Flexibility/Adaptability
• Self-Awareness
• Working Across Differences
• Relationship Development

(Page 385 – Effective Virtual Conversations, Britton, 2017)

What do all of these skills look like in your virtual work?

If you were to give each one of them a rating, what would they look like?

Having introduced these categories to hundreds in speaking engagements over the last few years, I often will poll the audiences I speak with about which ones are most important. By far, the one which most frequently gets raised is TRUST.

What does building trust look like in your virtual relationships?

It may include:

• Being present – and not looking like you are multi-tasking
• Being reliable – following through with promises made to send something out
• Participating in chat and/or annotation and/or verbally
• Showing up on camera (even if that’s uncomfortable)
• Asking questions out of curiosity

Consider recent calls you were on. What does building trust look like in your context?

For more on other topics check out:

• Differences When Working Remote
• Listen into Five Ways to Strengthen Team Relationships here

Remember that things are magnified in the remote space.
If you are collaborating remotely, consider how some of the 7 Enablers of Great Remote Work fit in, including:

•     Communication
•     Clarity 
•     Consistency

What’s going to support better conversations and results in the remote space?

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 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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

This year we get an extra day. Every four years a leap year occurs. February 29th was actually the birthday of one of my grandmothers. She was born in 1904. As a little girl, I thought it would be so neat to be born on leap year. What do you want to dedicate the extra time to today?

Given it’s a special day, I thought it would be interesting to look back at some of my favorite series over the last four years since we last had a leap year day.

If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at these past posts, do take a look at the following:

• 20 Activities for Virtual and Remote Teams, such as #11 on Conflict Management – read it here.
• Remote Work Myths – Read one of the more recent ones here – Remote Does Not Equal Disconnected
• Weekly Journaling Prompts each Saturday – View the 80 plus in the series here.
• Monday’s Effective Virtual Conversations tips - check them out here.

These tips map to my 2017 book – Effective Virtual Conversations. If you are needing to shift your workspace to the remote or virtual domain, this might be a great book to pick up. It covers some of the foundations of holding more effective virtual meetings, learning and team sessions.
 
Given that’s it’s the last day of February I thought it would be interesting to highlight some of our focus areas this month. What was to focus more on Collaboration and Relationships at the top of the month, became much more focused on one of our specialty areas – remote working – given the significant impact health events have had this month.

You’ll want to check out some of the posts including:
Teams365 2227 – Ingredients for Making Remote Relationships Work
Teams365 Tip 274 - Calibrate
Teams365 2241 –Differences when working remote: part 1
Teams365 2242 – More Differences when working remote
Teams365 2235 – Remote Work Myth – Remote Does Not Equal Disconnected
Teams365 2243: February 20 – Remote Work Enabler #2 – Boundaries
Teams365 2240 - Effective Virtual Conversations Tip – Matrix Tip – What’s the priority?

​Enjoy your exploration and have a great Leap Year Day!
Jennifer

It’s Friday which means that it’s time for a Flashback Friday. Here’s a look back at a post from February 2018 – 4 Essentials Ingredients for Collaboration.

With relationships and collaboration being an essential skill set for leaders and team members of all types, I thought it fitting to make our Valentine’s Day post this year all about collaboration. Whether you are collaborating across your own team, or with others, collaboration allows us to tap into resources we do not have available, harnessing the talents of our network. Collaboration may be discrete for a fixed project, or longer for ongoing initiatives.

In today’s post I wanted to cover four essential ingredients for collaboration:
​1. Be clear on why you are collaborating
2. Consciously design your partnership: What do you bring to the table? What is important for you both?
3. Regularly check in and adjust
4. Consider what end result you are looking for
 
Let us look at each one of these in turn:

1. Be clear on why you are collaborating
​Collaborating for collaboration's sake does not equal success! Why is this collaboration occurring? What is possible due to the fusion of your skills and abilities? What outcomes are you looking for?

​Partnerships and collaboration are not always a straight road. It's important to be clear on:

• why you are collaborating
• ​what you hope to gain from the partnership
• ​what you want to gain
• and what your expectations are

​Spend some time as a partnership exploring this and coming back to it throughout your work together.

2. Consciously design your partnership.
​Take time to intentionally, or consciously, design your partnership. Building in time for focusing on the relationship can be as important as creating or doing the work together. In a recent newsletter article  I shared several of the partnership planning questions I have written about over the years.

​In my writing I talk about at least four stages where you will want to focus conversation - pre-program/partnership, at the start, during the work and at the end of major projects. Refer to chapters 12 of Effective Virtual Conversations or Chapter 11 of From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching.

3. Regularly check in and adjust.
Regular check ins will look different for each project. Ask yourselves regular questions such as:

• What’s working well?
• What progress have we made with this project?
• What are we learning and need to make sure we do? We stop doing?
• What changes are important going forward?

​4. Consider what end result you have in mind.
As Steven Covey wrote years ago "Start with the end in mind". Our end result shapes our action. As you engage in every conversation think about the end result you are aiming for. How does this influence your partnership? What roles you play? What attention you have? 

​These four factors - clarity, conscious design, check in, and end in mind - support partnering and collaboration to be a flexible, fluid process. What is important for you to consider in your own work?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

This week we covered a variety of posts related to working remote. If you missed, them, be sure to check out:

• Yesterday’s Weekly Journaling Prompt around Support
• Friday’s Five Ingredients for Successful Collaboration
• Thursday’s Remote Work Enabler around Boundaries
• Wednesday’s post around What’s different with work in the remote space? – Part 2
• Tuesday’s post around What’s different with work in the remote space? – Part 1
• Monday’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip around Prioritizing in the Matrix Environment (when you are part of a couple of teams)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
​Jennifer

With this month’s focus on partnering and working more collaboratively, a key ingredient of remote work, I thought it might be interesting to reach back to one of the Team Leader Breakfast Café Recordings I did a few years ago in 2017. While this isn’t the entire call, here are the five areas I highlighted as Five Key Ingredients for Successful Collaboration. You can listen into the original audio over at Teams365 #1152. Here’s what I shared in that audio:

What we know about great collaboration and great partnering is that a number of essential elements are in place. Typically partnering works best when we have a set of complimentary skills.

When partners are too similar, or teams are too similar we can create a lot of blind spots. We may have great bench strength in certain areas like the ability to execute results or to build relationships. And we may be missing certain skills that are essential, like strategic thinking.

That's great to drive for results, but if we're not clear on why we're driving for those results or if they're the best ones, then we may find ourselves in some challenges.

Another key principle in making collaboration work is making sure that we're leveraging people's strengths. As I have written many times here at the Teams365 blog, the research done by the Gallup organization points to that when teams that have the opportunity to use their strengths on a regular basis they are more productive and members generally have higher quality of life.
If you haven't had a chance to do any strength-based work with your teams, please reach out and contact me to discuss a Team Strengths Day. I use a number of strengths-based assessments in my work as a coach, as a trainer that can be brought into one-on-one conversations or work with your entire team.

The more we know ourselves, know what we're good at, and also know where we might find struggle, helps us be more effective. We can communicate that to others.

Teamwork is just like an orchestra. It’s not about being the best at everything, or even trying to. Teamwork is about making sure that we have the right people on the right instrument in the right seat, leveraging their strengths as best as possible.

As research has shown, it's much easier for us to do well in our strengths and to try to mitigate against our weaknesses.

Back to collaboration –two other factors really make it work well.

The third one is PLAN. Partnerships, great teams, great collaboration don’t just materialize. It happens with some planning.  In my several of my books including Effective Virtual Conversations, I share more about the Arc of co-facilitation and some of the questions you can ask when you plan.

And number four, I wanted to mention which intentionality. So, as you go about your teamwork and or developing new partnerships, maybe you've been tasked with leading a new project. Maybe you've been tasked with pulling a group of experts together. Think about questions like how do we blend our skills or what do we each bring to the table?

Also, you want to make sure that you're feeling connected because we know that connection creates safety. Psychologically, if we think we are too different, it's very hard for teams in groups to move forward. So, a question around that might be getting people not to think about what they bring that’s unique, but also what is it that they bring that is similar.

In making teamwork and collaboration work take some time to get to know each other. Ask yourself questions around strengths and what's important, what will success look like for each of you as well as what will success look like for you collectively?

The fifth area I wanted to mention in terms of just getting or making collaboration, partnering really work is to make sure that you have deep levels of trust.

Trust is really the foundation of so many things. If we don't have trust, it's very hard to move into the deeper dialogue to feel that you are being supported, to know that someone has your back. Then in building trust, we want to undertake consistent actions that represent our intentions. We want to make sure that it's in proper alignment with where we're going, and we also want to make sure that we have things like transparency in place as well as feedback loops.

So just to quickly run through these five areas, again, things to think about as you're entering your partnerships, future projects, future collaborations.

1. Number one, how do we bring complimentary skills to the table?
2. Number two, what are our strengths and how do we leverage those?
3. Number three, have we built in enough time for planning related to that?
4. Number four, how intentional are we being?
5. And finally, what are our levels of trust?

I hope that you'll check out some of our Teams365 blog posts related to this topic. Some of the most popular posts of months have included the six  barriers to collaboration . Also check out making mentoring work virtually. Whether you are partnering with others face to face or in the virtual realm, in the same company or across the globe, these principles hold true.
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Interested in learning more or want individual or team coaching support around this? Looking to have a virtual team day facilitated to do some work around strengths? Please reach out to me by email at info@potentialsrealized.com and let’s set up a conversation.
 
Enjoy your weekend!
Jennifer

Yesterday’s Teams365 post explored four key differences when working remote – Autonomy, Skills, Connections with others and the Matrix.

In today’s post, I wanted to share four additional differences when working remote – focus, motivation, and inner drive, to relationship building and visibility.

In general, many things get magnified in the remote space – from clarity, or lack of clarity, around communication, processes, roles, goals; to what we actually see on the screen. This means that we may need to be more intentional in sharing information, checking assumptions and confirming that our messages were understood in the way they were communicated.

Motivation - When working remotely, a lot of us need to rely on our own inner motivation and self-direction to get things done. For those who like to work autonomously, it’s great! Being clear on what we need to excel as a team member, leader or business owner is key.

As I wrote yesterday, “No person is an island” and we do want to make sure we are clear on our strengths, and style preferences. It’s also key to note that when we over leverage our strengths, that they can become a blind spot. In the remote space this may mean that they get over magnified. So, if I have a love of learning I may keep learning, rather than getting work done. What are the strengths you are able to leverage? What’s important about your work? What drives you? What do you need to be aware of in case it gets over magnified?

For more on Motivation and Remote Work, check out some of the episodes of the Remote Pathways Podcast. 

You’ll also want to check out Week 6 of the 52 Weeks of Remote Work.

What is important for you about motivation in the remote space?

Context - One of the major challenges in the remote space is that we see each other usually only through the small window of the screen. As I write in Effective Virtual Conversations, a great activity to undertake is “what’s outside your screen”? What can we do to share more about the context of our work? That might include:

• Sharing a little more about your desk
• Sharing what’s outside your window
• Talking about what is a priority in your work
• Sharing more about the way work is done, or preferences are in your location (especially if you are a virtual team)

What context pieces are important to share?

Visibility and proactivity - Visibility and proactivity is key in the remote space. Some remote workers feel that their careers get stuck because they aren’t visible like those in an office space. I would invite a perspective that visibility is less about where you are, but how you approach work. What are you doing to be visible, to bring people together, to connect with peers and other stakeholders, to be proactive in connecting on a regular basis with your boss and team?

Regular co-working sessions may provide an opportunity for learning more and connecting with your peers, as well as hearing what you are working on. These sessions may run for an hour, half day or more. 

What is important for you to explore around visibility? What do you need to be more proactive about?

Focus - For many remote workers, productivity can actually increase when moving to work in the remote space. A study by Stanford Business School, headed by Professor Nicholas Bloom found a 13% increase in productivity by those who WFH (Work From Home). You will find a copy of the original publication here at Prof. Bloom’s site.
 
For another interesting article on the same topic check out Scott Mautz’s Inc article.

Even though there are differences with remote work, it’s still important to focus in on the basics of high performance. Be sure to check out the posts I have written on the Six Factors of High Performing Teams. How are we being clear about the ROLES, GOALS, PRACTICES of our work, in addition to connecting in with our vision and mandate, and being clear bout what success will look like?

Tomorrow, we’ll explore another remote working ingredient for success – managing boundaries!

See you then,
Jennifer

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

For most of us in today’s world we work through a variety of relationships. Even if we work remote, it’s likely that we are part of a number of collaborations. Usually we think about what we can get from others. In today’s weekly journaling prompt, it flips it around to get you to think about the question “I have supported…..”.

Questions you might want to think about today are:
Who have you supported?
How have you supported?
What has your support meant?
What was possible because of your support?

Each Saturday I provide a different Weekly Journaling Prompt, getting you to think about, and write about, a different question.

What’s important for you to note today about support?

Enjoy your reflections!
Jennifer