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

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. ​

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:

1. Mentoring
2. Coaching
3. Peer Learning
4. Team Development
5. Goal Setting
6. ​Video Based Learning
7. Education – Webinars, Webcasts, Formal Learning, MOOCs
8. Meetings
9. 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:

1. Creating the Context
2. Communication
3. Process
4. Tools
5. Group Development
6. Ourselves as Facilitators
7. Technical
8. 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

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. ​

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

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. ​

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you to think about the question – What questions do you need to ask? Thinking about the current opportunities and/or challenges right now, what will help you explore this in a different light? You may want to generate some new questions by asking new questions which will help you as a team:
 

1. Expand your thinking?
2. Create some new options?
3. Develop new possibilities?
4. Challenge the assumptions you are making?
5. Uncover something new?
6. Help you consider what you have not thought of yet?
7. Look at it from a different perspective?
8. Explore a deeper level of the challenge?
9. Look at it from the opposite angle?
10. Reverse engineer it?

 
What other type of questions might you explore?

Enjoy the 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. ​

One of the current challenges and stretch points for many teams right now is how do we collaborate better? With not all workplaces returning to normal and remaining in a virtual workspace, collaboration has become an increasingly important skill set.
 
Who do you need to collaborate with?
 
Some of the core components which are needed to make collaboration successful are:​

• Trust
• Connection
• Communication
• Candor
• Finding common ground and leverage points

Let’s look at each one off these in turn.
 
For several years now I have delivered a 90 minute keynote on Collaboration: The Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts to many organizations, associations and groups in person and virtually. I often poll the audience and ask them “What are the skills you need in order make your collaborations really work?" #1 on the list is often TRUST, quickly followed by the rest. In the past six months I had noticed that CANDOR was starting to make it’s way up the list pretty close to trust.
 
Candor is an important topic to explore and if you have read the writing of Kim Scott in Radical Candor, you would know that it involves being both KIND and FIRM or as she says Caring Personally, and Challenging Directly.

What are you doing as a team to have the important conversations of the moment? Are these moments of candor happening, or are they being “swept under the rug”? Tomorrow’s post is going to link into this with a focus on conflict.
 
Connection and finding common ground is critical for success in the virtual and remote space. While our differences may appear to be vast, we need to make a concerted effort in discovering and leveraging our common elements. This takes time and needs to be intentional. Regular touchpoints are important as well – characterized by quality and frequency not length of time.
 
Going hand in hand with connection is communication. What are you doing to use the different communication channels available? What do you know about different team member’s preferences? What are you doing to communicate changes, adjustments, successes and challenges regularly?
 
Collaboration is an art form as well as a structured process. In most of my books it shows up as a significant theme.
 
If you have a copy of PlanDoTrack check out pages 54-56 as well as sections on strengths.
 
If you have a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations check out Chapter 12 – Partnering and Collaboration.
 
If you have a copy of From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching check out Chapter 11.
 
You’ll note in EVC a focus on structured questions to consider as you move through the different stages of the partnering phase.
 
Enjoy the conversations and hope you’ll check back tomorrow with the focus on conflict in the remote space.

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. ​

Welcome back to another Team Building Tip. This week we are at Tip #244. A few months ago, in early March, I released a new Remote Working Whitepaper. In it I share what I term the 7 Remote Enablers: 7 Things that help remote work flow. One of them is Clarity. Another is Communication. As a team, it’s often the things metaphorically “below the waterline” which aren’t visible or explicit.

Things that might require some clarification are:

• The assumptions we’re making about the projects we are jointly working on – “I’m working on this…No you are.”
• What are our roles and responsibilities?
• Who needs to do what, when?
• What am I reporting out to others?
• What do we do if we have a disagreement?
• If I have a problem, I should work through it versus if I have a problem, I should raise it for discussion.
• Resourcing.
• Authority – Who is able to do what?

It’s often the unspoken, or unclear, that creates confusion or even conflict.

As a team get into the practice of checking your assumptions and also seeing what needs to be made explicit.

Enjoy the 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. ​

Poor meeting etiquette may have gotten magnified in the remote space in the last few months of Stay in Place and Quarantine. I recently attended a conference for remote workers and one large tech firm had surveyed several thousand employees, asking “What is the biggest challenge right now”?

The response – Meetings!

As I have shared for years – things get “amplified” or “magnified” in the remote space. This includes the good, the bad, and the disengaged.

Whether your meetings are back to face-to-face (with distance) or are virtual, what are the practices we want to focus on?

Here are six things you’ll want to keep in mind around meeting etiquette:

1. Start and end on time – It’s likely that people are moving from meeting to meeting over the course of the day – so start on time and be very clear with agreements around.
2. Have a clear agenda and success measures of what you want to leave the meeting with.
3. Be on time. Note that some “virtual meeting rooms” will lock after a certain amount of time.
4. Be present and be prepared. Take a few minutes the night before to review what meetings you have upcoming and ensure that you have done all the pre-work needed before you get on the line.
5. Pause regularly to note key agreements, main points and action steps. Leave time (60 seconds, 90 seconds) for people to write things down and schedule it in.
6. Wrap up the meeting on time, or even a few minutes early so people can get to their next meeting.

And as a bonus – Track accountabilities and make it memorable!!

Enjoy your next meeting!
​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. ​

Welcome back to another week which of course brings us the Monday Effective Virtual Conversations Tip. Tip #143 is “Don’t Assume”.  When we can’t see each other face to face, our window to everyone’s world becomes the small boxes we live within. Given that we can’t see people’s context, it can become very easy to not see their context.

Today’s post is “Don’t Assume”. What are the assumptions you are making?

It might be…

• Your priority is my priority…
• You have more time than me…
• You don’t have the distractions I have…
  • Listen into a short daily reading I did (link to day 23 or 24 I think Lindsay), which covered the Assumptions around Virtual Conversations and Learning we can hold.  Two of the ones I hear all the time:
  1. Everyone understands what I am saying – Be sure to pause regularly and use polls or chat to check for understanding.
  2. People will follow up – With back to back calls becoming the norm, it’s not uncommon for people to forget their stream of thought from hours earlier. Be sure to leave time for people to NOTE and SCHEDULE their follow up.
• Everyone is going to have the same needs – Learning styles, preferences and focus is usually going to be radically different from person to person. Be sure to vary your approaches and techniques for engagement – from voice, to chat, to things that are hands on. This will ensure that you are meeting the different learning styles in the group.

​What are the assumptions you are making? What changes do you want to make?

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. ​

Hey, have you stopped by lately at the Remote Pathways podcast?

Check out this week’s blog posts including:

• Saturday’s Weekly Journaling Prompt on Systems Check
• Friday’s May Kickoff – Monthly Reflection and Planning Prompts
• Thursday’s Team Building Question – What could jettison you forward?
• Wednesday’s focus on Remote Team, Group and Community Builders – check out these articles!
• Tuesday’s focus on Collaborating in the Remote Space
• Monday’s focus with the Effective Virtual Conversations Tip around Keeping People in the Loop

I hope that you have a great rest of the weekend.

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. ​

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. ​