Teams365 Blog - POTENTIALS REALIZED

TEAMS365 #2457 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 168: Follow Up

9/21/2020

It’s Monday and time for another Effective Virtual Conversations tip. This week’s tip is about follow-up. While virtual learning is often seen as a one-off event, reinforcing the learning with follow-up can support integration of knowledge to become learning.

Follow-up in the virtual space can take many forms including:

Focus
Framing
Exponential growth

Are you taking the time to follow up? How has this impacted your learning?

All the best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

Join us September 17th for the one-day Stand Out Virtually! STtdio Day Masterclass - Learn more about creating exceptional virtual presentations, meetings and programs, and leave the day with your next one sketched out!

TEAMS365 #2456 – Sunday in Review

9/20/2020

This week’s blog posts have explored:

Have a great weekend!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAMS365 #2450 - Effective Virtual Conversations 167: Stories

9/14/2020

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip is STORIES. Stories create an important part of any virtual conversation. It’s often through our stories that we bring examples and learning to life.

As a writer myself, I come from a long line of storytellers. My grandmother’s obituary referred to her as an oral historian, and earlier this year my cousins and I were taken back in time when we heard her voice sharing history as part of a library event. She lived a full life and passed away in 1998, at the age of 98. We always remarked how cool it would be to be a century baby.

While I’ve published 5 non-fiction business books, it’s only been in recent years that I’ve dabbled in non-fiction writing. In fact, the Digital Dozen™ of the Remote Pathways series is part of a whole new series of adventures I explore in the virtual, remote and digital space. Stay tuned for more updates on these bodies of work….I hope to have one or more new books under this banner out in 2021. For now, you can listen into the Remote Pathways podcast here.

As I thought about what would be useful to share in terms of stories as it relates to the virtual realm, I thought it would be useful to go back to the basics. What are the core elements of stories?

Your dictionary.com indicates that stories are comprised of these essential elements:

Plot
Character
Setting
Theme
Point of View
Tone

Check out their article here.

While you might not be writing an entire book, it can be useful to think about these elements in terms of:

Plot – What are the main points and milestones you want to cover and reinforce?
Character – Who are the players? Are there some concepts you can bring to life with real-time stories?
Setting – What is the environment? What is the context? What’s important to note or focus on?
Theme – What is the overarching theme of the presentation or conversation? There may be several happening at any time and pointing to these can help to “tie things together”.
Point of View – What are the different perspectives at play?
Tone – What is the tone? This is often communicated through the colors we use, the font and images. Recently in the Stand Out Virtually Challenge I hosted, a lot of coaches, leaders and presenters were intrigued by learning more about the use of color and thought about how more intentional they could be with images.

What is important for you to note in your upcoming presentations? You might consider working through each of these questions as you pull together your next virtual conversation. It’s even more important given that each one of our locations, and related context, is different.

Let us know what you are focusing on and what you are doing to connect in with these essential elements - plot, character, setting, theme, point of view, and tone.

This is a topic we’ll be exploring later this week at the Stand Out Virtually one day Masterclass. Join us to deepen your skills and widen your toolbox around virtual conversations. Grab one of the remaining spots – we’ll be kicking off at 9:30 am ET on Thursday September 17th, wrapping up at 3:30 pm ET. My goal is for you to leave with a presentation or a module drafted out.

Enjoy the conversation!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

Join us September 17th for the one-day Stand Out Virtually! STtdio Day Masterclass - Learn more about creating exceptional virtual presentations, meetings and programs, and leave the day with your next one sketched out!

TEAMS365 #2449 – Week in Review

9/13/2020

This week we’ve focused on the Week in Review:

Enjoy the rest of the weekend!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

Join us September 17th for the one-day Stand Out Virtually! STtdio Day Masterclass - Learn more about creating exceptional virtual presentations, meetings and programs, and leave the day with your next one sketched out!

TEAMS365 #2443 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 166: Mix It Up

9/7/2020

Engagement is key for virtual conversations. Unfortunately, a lot of poor presentation skills have translated over to the remote space. Even if you are not a great presenter, you can create a memorable call, by mixing it up. What does that mean? It means:

Varying the pace every 7-10 minutes with a pace change or adjustment
Using a variety of approaches – presentation, dialogue in a bigger group, discussion in smaller groups
Using a variety of media – video, text, photos
Remembering that we don’t learn when we are “talked at” by a presenter. We learn when we can put things into practice, and also discuss the topic with others

Many of the platforms which are available (Teams, Zoom etc) have a variety of tools available which aren’t always used. Consider what you can do to activate:

BREAKOUTS
ANNOTATION
POLLS

We’ll be exploring this and a variety of other topics at my upcoming one-day Stand Out Virtually Masterclass on September 17th. Learn more about the day and reserve your spot to join us!

Enjoy the conversation!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

Join us September 17th virtually for the one-day Stand Out Virtually! Studio Day Masterclass - Learn more about creating exceptional virtual presentations, meetings and programs, and leave the day with your next one sketched out! ENVISION. DESIGN. CONNECT.

TEAMS365 #2436 - Effective Virtual Conversations #165: Facilis!

8/31/2020

Welcome back to another Effective Virtual Conversations tip. This week’s EVC tip is a reminder of the roots of facilitation. The word is actually derived from the Latin word - Facilis which means to make easy.

The role of the facilitator, particularly the virtual facilitator is to make things easy. That means making a focus on PROCESS easy. What’s the purpose? What can people expect? What are you doing?

Making connection EASY. As I shared earlier this month in the STAND OUT Virtually Challenge – that means connecting with the CONTEXT, with OTHERS, with YOU. What are you doing to make this easy?

Making outcomes EASY. Part of the mastery of a facilitator is having a variety of tools available to get to the outcomes required. This is where it’s important to have a wide toolkit. I’ve enjoyed helping many professionals build out their virtual toolkits this year in the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program.

Finally, it’s also about making ENGAGEMENT EASY. What are you doing to keep things moving? It’s important to be able to focus in on engagement - which is linked to connection as well as process.

What does FACILIS mean for you in your work?

Enjoy your conversations,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAMS365 #2435 – Week in Review

8/30/2020

Welcome back to our Sunday weekly wrap up. This week we’ve explored a variety of topics including:

It’s also almost the end of the month. What time have you built in to take stock of how the month went? I hope that you’ll join us in a few days for the month end review and monthly planning post. Stay tuned!

Be sure to note your metrics as you move into the new month.

Enjoy
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAMS365 #2429 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 164

8/24/2020

It’s Monday which means that it’s another Effective Virtual Conversations Tip day. This week the invitation is for you to build your toolkit. If you joined me last week for the Stand Out Virtually 5 day Challenge, it’s likely that you spent time building your toolkit.

We covered visuals (and you got to built up some of your visual library). We also talked about backgrounds, along with engagement toolkits.

A quick note that I’ll be hosting the next one-day Virtual Facilitation Essentials program tomorrow, Tuesday August 25th from 9-4:30pm ET. The day is geared to get you building out your toolkit.

What do you notice about your toolkit for exceptional virtual conversations?

Whether you are an individual leading calls or an organization, it’s important that we build out our tools and practices. Consider building tools in these areas:

Planning
Opening a Program
Decision Making
Problem Solving
Consensus Generation

I’ve been spending even more time this year than usual working with organizations to build out their repertoire of virtual tools and practices. If you, or your organization, could benefit from some support and focus in this area, give me a call.

Be sure to take a look at the 163 Effective Virtual Conversations Tips I’ve written here at the blog.

With best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAMS365 #2422 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 163

8/17/2020

Happy Monday! Did you know that this week I am hosting a 5-day challenge online - geared to provide you with 5 days of focus on helping you Stand Out Virtually! I hope you will consider joining us – each call will be available for a 24-hour period if you can’t make the live call time which is 9 am ET/Toronto/New York time. We’re meeting from today until Friday August 21st.

Today’s tip connects in with some of the themes I’m addressing this week which are engagement, interactivity and visuals.

Today’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip gets you to think about how you might use word clouds as a way to capture and present information.

Two resources I have used in the past to present data to teams and organizations I work with are – WordClouds.com and WordArt.com.

For a cool interactive polling feature, check out MentiMeter.com. You can create real time word clouds using polling.

What other resources do you like to use?

Be sure to check out these resources and also share with us additional ones you use!
With best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAMS365 #2415 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 162: Silence

8/10/2020

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip gets you thinking about SILENCE. How much silence are you leaving in your virtual calls?

In my work and writing I call this a “micro-pause” and the inclusion of even 30 – 90 seconds of intentional silence can make a big difference in the remote space when you are leading virtual calls.

It’s likely that most calls you lead are heavy on the side of content and flow, and less about pause and silence.

With a professional’s day full of back-to-back conversations, it’s really important that we do leave micro-pauses of 30 -90 seconds or more during calls to help people REFLECT, PROCESS and COMMIT TO NEXT STEPS.

Consider these opportunities for incorporating a micro-pause:

Before opening up a question for discussion, have people write out their response for 30 seconds.
Structure a call with a component which has a series of timed prompts, with silence in between. I often host calls where we have anywhere from 5 – 20 minutes of reflective prompts, particularly at the end of projects and/or months/quarters. These have easily become people’s favorites and have been noted to be invaluable as they are something people aren’t doing on their own.
Mid-way through the call pausing for a minute to have people note for themselves what is the “one thing they can apply to their work”. After the minute pause (not during) have them share it with others
60 - 90 seconds towards the end of the call, for people to note their top 1-3 takeaways and schedule them in

It can be useful to have whoever is facilitating the call to set a timer so they too can relax and drop into the reflection themselves.

What other ways might you create a pause?

Enjoy the reflection!
Jennifer

PS - Take a minute and be sure to join us over at the Virtual and Remote Visionaries Hub as well on Facebook. You can join us here.

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326