#10 – Support Action and Clarity with 3 Bullet Points

Communicating in business is usually about creating clarity so that people can take action. If our message is lost in transmission, we may have lost an opportunity to support change, missed a sale, or weakened a relationship.
Brevity is key to effective presentations and business communication. It helps us stand out and helps our message be memorable.

The latency and recency effects assert that we remember the start and the end of things. What are the key messages that you want people to remember? Keeping the latency and recency effect in mind, it is best to include the main points at the start and reinforce these again at the end.

Starting and wrapping up your presentation with 3 bullet points can be an effective way to boost retention of your message.
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Rather than going into a long description, boil it down to 3 bullet points.

Activity:
Think about your upcoming presentations or marketing messages. What are the key points you want to communicate? What do you want to get across?
Think about the presentation. Write out the three bullet points you want people to remember. 
Now think about the audience. What is important to them? What action do you want them to take? 
Now rewrite your three bullet points. 
As you think about the overarching arc of the presentation, what can you do to reinforce these three bullet points at the start of the presentation, and at the end?
Insert it now!

The 3 bullet point tip is also useful beyond communication, in light of overall productivity. Simpler is better. It helps us focus. As it applies to time management, a the start of the day identify what are the 3 core items that MUST GET Done. If all else fails, what are those 3 things?
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Conversation Sparkers:

• What is the message you want to communicate?
• What do you want people to remember, and take action on?
• What are the three bullet points?

 
Thank you!
Jenn

​My 2017 book, Effective Virtual Conversations, takes a deeper dive into creating more engaging virtual conversations. With many meetings shifting into the virtual space, being able to host effective virtual meetings and conference calls is critical. The added complexities of not always seeing each other, or being able to follow up directly, means that meetings are not always effective.  Check out this past Wednesday’s prompt on 8 Essential Meeting Questions (Productivity Tip 9 of 19 for 2019), as well as stay tuned to the upcoming post on Monday’s Effective Virtual Conversation Tip.
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I’m reaching back today in this FlashbackFriday post to Teams365 #1015 where I shared these additional tips for creating more engaging conversations:

“Key to creating engaging and interactive virtual events is in pace and interactivity. To avoid the death by conference call mode, consider how you are able to adjust pacing for maximum interactivity.
Different ways to change pace include –

• Asking a question
• Getting people to annotate using pens, markers
• Asking people to comment in the chat box
• Creating breakout groups. Just like in person events, many services allow you to use breakout groups. Whether you pair people automatically or manually these can provide for a deeper level of conversation. Consider what opportunities you can leverage with breakouts and also how much time is needed for people to have a good discussion. It can take people several minutes to set themselves up as they arrive in their virtual domain.
• Creating a pause where you get people to take notes or complete an activity in silence real time
• Introducing a different media – i.e. showing a video you have created, or introducing a cartoon

What approaches do you want to use to introduce different pace changes?”
 
Enjoy your weekend!
Jennifer

​We are back to the Effective Virtual Conversations Tips today, returning back with a quote I say regularly as it relates to virtual work – “Keep it simple, not simplistic”.
When working with groups, or virtually, this is an important mantra to live by. The complexity we face is usually in the group members we work with, or the inevitable glitches that technology can create.

Keeping things simple helps us to:

• Focus on what’s important, and what the key message is (think 3 bullet points, rather than 30 pages!)
• Focus on process and flow
• Provide clear instructions
• Connect people early on to their WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) so that they are able to listen for, and connect with, things that are important for them

Keeping things simple does not mean that we oversimplify things. Rather, it means that we leave space for the message to get heard.
Think about what is going to keep it simple for our learners and what they will value.
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Best wishes,
Jennifer

We are at Effective Virtual Conversations Tip #75 which is entitled “Size Matters”. In the virtual space, size has a significant impact on engagement, interactivity and how much the conversation is conversation.
I like to say that in the virtual space numbers become exponential. Adding one person is not just adding one person on, it’s adding on a whole set of layers – different styles, different perspectives, different priorities and different contexts. This can make larger groups especially challenging in the virtual space.
Here’s what I wrote in Effective Virtual Conversations,
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“Size Matters!
Less is more. Small is beautiful. Whichever cliché appeals to you, the fact is that group size in the virtual realm does not always have to be large. Again, think back to the level of engagement and interaction you want to foster. In developing trust and connection, smaller is definitely better—so if you are a coach reading this book, aim to create your virtual groups on the smaller side. As I mentioned previously, optimum group size from my experience has been around 4-8 members for virtual groups. While we can support more than that on a call, the more voices we have in the room, the more exponential the differences. We’re not just adding one person—we’re adding a whole new web of relationships.

This has been reinforced by research done by Richard Hackman—mentioned by Keith Ferrazzi in his article “Getting Virtual Teams Right.” Hackman found that it only takes 10 conversations for every person on a team of five to touch base with everyone else, but when the number of team members increases to 13, the number of conversations necessary jumps to 78![i]”
(Excerpt: Effective Virtual Conversations, 2017, Jennifer Britton, All Rights Reserved)

What do you know about size in the groups and teams you work in? What is the optimum size for the teams you work with?

What happens when you add in one more team member, or lose a team member?

Best wishes,
Jennifer


[i] http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a136398.pdf

As we move into the 73rd Effective Virtual Conversations tip, we’re looking at another success factor for high performing teams. This week brings us to number two of six in the ingredients which make up high performance – Shared Performance Goals.
In a virtual team it is really important to be clear on what the performance goals are, so everyone knows what they are aiming for, how things fit together, and what success looks like.
The danger in a virtual team when these things are not clear are:

• Lack of alignment
• Lack of understanding of how one goal fits with another
• Competing Priorities
• Differences in terms of quality of output, if end results are not clear
• Spending time clarifying goals, and what success measures are, are critical when team members do not see each other, and may be reporting to multiple matrix teams at any given time.

Goals are the heart of any team, and it is important to spend time with the team in discussion around this. You may want to dedicate an upcoming team meeting to this and have discussion around:

• What are your key goals?
• How do goals fit together?
• What does success look like around each one?
• What are the standards for work on this team?
• What are the minimums in terms of response time?
• What needs to be communicated, when?
• What are the best channels/appropriate ways to keep everyone updated with respect to their goals?

Enjoy your conversations!
Jennifer

​This week’s Team Building Tip gets you as a team in dialogue around the question – "What’s another way of looking at that?”
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As teams and professionals it’s easy to get into our own rut of planning and action. Expanding our vantage point and incorporating different perspectives allows us a new vantage point. We may see things that are different, or were not visible before.

As I wrote last week around Focus, doing work in today’s context of ongoing change, requires us to challenge assumptions, and explore different perspectives. As a team how often are you taking time to ask yourself about the assumptions and embedded ways of working. Are they still current and relevant? Could they use an update?
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Enjoy your conversation this week!
Jennifer

Last month I took at look at core teamwork skills, a critical area for success in any team. At this stage of the year, your budget allocation may still be available. With that in mind, I wanted to take us back to what I wrote only five weeks ago about key themes and ideas for your own team development. Here’s what I wrote in Teams365 1736.
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“This month we are going to focus on teamwork skills. Whether you work as an intact team, a project team or a remote team, teamwork skills are cross-cutting and help professionals at all stages of their careers do better work.
The context of teamwork has changed. In the past, teams were together for longer windows, with much more stability. Today most teams experience ongoing change and team composition. Researcher Amy Edmonston terms this “Teaming” and writes, “actively building and developing teams even as a project is in process, while realizing that a team's composition may change at any given moment.” (Teaming, Edmonston 2013)
She flags four behaviors as essential in the teaming context:

• Speaking Up
• Collaboration
• Experimentation
• Reflection

What are you doing to foster these areas?
The teamwork skills we are going to explore this month are:

• Trust
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Working Across Differences
• Relationship Management
• Conflict Management
• Emotional Intelligence
• Change Management
• Influence

For each of the areas we’ll explore what the skill is about, why it’s important. What some of the differences are in the different types of teams today. I’ll also point you back to some of the many posts I’ve already written on these topics.”
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If you weren’t with us last month, I hope you’ll  take some time this weekend to look at some of the blog posts I shared. You may also want to build in time to think about WHAT SKILLS your team could benefit from more resources, conversation and training around.
 
Enjoy your weekend,
Jennifer

As we step into November the wave of year-end activities, celebrations and push may be rearing it’s head. Today’s post is a reminder of five key things to get in your team calendar for 2019 right now. As we’ve explored here at the Teams365 blog over the last 5 years, certain skills are critical for success – teamwork skills, coaching, difficult conversations, team development and reflection time.
Five different things you may want to get into your calendars right now for the next year are:
 
Team meetings – Whether the entire team, or some of the team, attends, spending time on a regular basis to plan, and update, is key for alignment, communication and noticing what’s working and what’s not. Even if the team is remote, team meetings do need to happen on a regular basis.
For further ideas on team meetings, check out the post on 8 Questions to be asking before any team meeting.
 
Team development – Regular team development meetings are critical – not just for
 
Feedback conversations – Once a year performance reviews are being replaced in many organizations with ongoing feedback conversations. With this shift, it’s common for organizations to be experiencing:

1. A sense on the part of the leader that coaching and feedback conversations are happening more frequently than they really are. Block in time to your schedule for these key 1-1s, being clear on whether you are coaching or providing feedback.

2. Feedback and coaching are often getting blended together under the same umbrella. These are actually two separate activities and the danger of them being lumped together is that the staff member may not know what type of conversation they are part of.  Regardless off whether performance is good or not, it’s key to indicate when a performance conversation is a performance conversation. If changes are needed, this should be clear and non-negotiable.

On the other hand, coaching is voluntary initiative. The person being coached is the one “at choice” in terms of what they want to do. Coaching is about encouraging change. If a leader wants to prescribe change for the employee, coaching is not the right modality. That’s telling!

​Like other activities, it is important to get key 1-1 time and conversations into your calendar. What have you noticed about what’s worked in terms of time, availability and openness to these types of activities? Block out some time right now.

3. Mentoring – Mentoring is beneficial to us at all stages of our development. Having a variety of formal and informal mentoring relationships is key to ongoing career progression. Whether we are mentoring or being mentored, it’s common for both parties to benefit from a balanced mentoring relationship. Have you scheduled mentoring into your calendar for 2019?

4. Team development – Beyond team meetings, we all benefit from formal and informal team development opportunities. Some research, including the 2016 Culture Wizard Survey, found that only 22% of virtual and remote teams benefited from team development. What are the activities you have scheduled for 2019?  

5. Skill Development and ongoing learning – Whether we are a leader, or a team member, ongoing learning and skill development opportunities are key to keeping us equipped for the ongoing landscape of work. As I explored in Effective Virtual Conversations, the Virtual Learning Ecosystem today is vast. From attending MOOCS (Massive Online Open Courses) at Universities for Credit, to micro-learning modules, from webinars, to virtual team development, skills development and ongoing learning can take many forms.  
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As a team have you discussed what skill development and ongoing learning each team member wants to undertake in the next year?
What doesn’t get scheduled, doesn’t get done. Be sure to block dedicated time in your calendar for these five activities during 2019.
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Best wishes,
Jennifer

Today’s Sunday video takes us back to one that I posted this time last year, entitled “Six Ingredients for Teams in Today’s VUCA World”.
Recently I attended a conference here in Toronto for business leaders and educators. While I’ve been talking about VUCA for many years, I was surprized that this is not a term everyone is aware of. If you haven’t heard of VUCA, it was originally a term that was coined by the military to describe the context.
Think about these four words for a minute and how they are showing up in your work right now:
Volatility
Uncertainty
Complexity
Ambiguity
These factors require that we really embrace new ways of leadership, teamwork and conversation. While we still need planning, we also need to track what’s working and what’s not. Past successes may not guarantee the same results a second time. Working in ambiguity calls for new skills for leaders and teams such as being able to see the patterns across a range of data. Working in complexity means that we want to also consider simplification and synthesis.
What are the things you want to be focusing on as a leader? What skills do you want to be building in your team during 2019?
Here’s a link to the video I did last year in Teams365 #1188.
 
What’s important for you to note about VUCA right now?
What’s important for your team to note about VUCA?
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Enjoy the conversation,
Jennifer