This week’s Team Building Tip gets you thinking “outside of the box”. Challenges and opportunities exist all the time. What are the solutions which could be activated around your most pressing business challenge?

One of the frameworks I like to share with teams I work with is the Six Thinking Hats from DeBono. Read more about this topic here.

With the Six Thinking Hats we are encouraged to look at issues from a variety of perspectives –

• what’s possible,
• what new ideas can we generate,
• what are the benefits of the approaches,
• what caution do we need to heed,
• what are the facts and
• what might get in the way.

If you are not familiar with De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats model, take a look at his work and writing.

Wishing you all the best,
​Jennifer

As a writer, one of my favorite past times is heading to the library for some focused writing. I often try to fit it in on Tuesdays. When I am there, I usually check out the business book selection. Two titles, both named Pivot, recently caught my attention. Jenny Blake’s Pivot  explores the shifts and turns we can make in our career. The 2nd Pivot book is by Adam Markel. Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life.
 
Both are great reads for those looking at ongoing performance and change. Whether we work for others or ourselves, we can all benefit from the tools and tips in both books.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines pivot as:

• a fixed point supporting something that turns or balances;​​
• the central or most important person or thing in a situation.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pivot
 
As you consider your biggest opportunity or challenge right now, consider:

1. What is creating balance in the situation right now?
2. What is the fulcrum around what things are turning?
3. What is the important person/issue in this situation?
4. What is the most central item?
5. With this information in mind, what’ s possible? What are the options for next steps?

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized 
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of multiple books including Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2019) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder 
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development).
Pick up a copy of Volume 1 of the Weekly Journaling Prompts in an digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

Welcome back to another Sunday post here at the Teams365 blog.

Today there are two items I wanted to share with you:

#1 – The latest installment of the #90DaysPlanDoTrack Video Montage. These are a summary of some of the daily question prompts I have shared over at the CoachingBizBuilder Instagram feed. They will be of interest to business owners, leaders and other team members.
​
#2 – I also wanted to share another post from the vault here at the Teams365 blog. Given our focus this month on Teamwork in uncertainty, you’ll also want to think about how prioritization can be a skill cultivated with all team members. Whether the team is working remote or in person, when things are changing quickly being able to prioritize work and ask questions to others to prioritize is also a key skill.

Here’s a post I wrote last year on Prioritization and Teamwork in Complexity – Teams365 #1610
​
Prioritization is a skill set we draw upon regularly in times of complexity. Prioritization allows all team members to regularly scan and manage their workload.

Key to prioritization is:

• Having the tools to prioritize
• Feeling empowered to make decisions and take responsibility for managing workload
• Understanding what is most important – to the different players of the team, as well as the different time frames you are working on (short term, medium term)

In past Teams365 posts I’ve explored a range of prioritization skills including the Urgent/Important Matrix (we often attribute to Covey), as well as a Decision Matrix where we weight what’s important in making our decisions
 
For more on the topic of prioritization, check out these additional resources:

• This excellent article from MindTools.com - which has an incredible amount of other resources team members and leaders will also want to check out.
• LiquidPlanner.com's article on How to Prioritize Work When Everything Is #1 - Read it here.
• For those that are looking at prioritization through the lens of product design, you'll want to take  a look at this excellent article 20 Product Prioritization Techniques.

​Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Jennifer

From open office spaces to a focus on collaboration, there can also be a pendulum swing in organizations where sometimes things go too far.
​
As I mentioned over the weekend, there are a number of studies exploring this topic of distraction including Udemy In Depth’s 2018 Workplace Distraction Survey. You can read it here. 
 
The report asserts that distractions have an impact on productivity. Some of the distractions noted in that study are talkative co-workers, email and others.
Many of the distractions I hear of in the work of my clients are:

• Unscheduled meetings
• Co-workers dropping by to chat
• Email
• Social media which takes you “down the rabbit hole”
• Materials and information which are not readily accessible and have not been stored in the locations you thought they would be in

What are you doing to minimize the distractions? What do you find distracting?

What conversations are important to have?

​Here are some other articles of interest:

Check out this article from Financial Times – “Digital Distractions are Making Us Dumb and Twitchy” which also includes some great tips from Professor Cal Newport.

Suresh Subamdam’s article on Is Your Work's Communication Channel Turning Your Team Into a Bunch of 'Slack'-ers?

Take a look at Digital Responsibility’s website and ideas on Digital Distraction.

Wishing you all the best,
​Jennifer

As a coach and author I love to read books to pass on to my readers and clients. In the last few months as I have been starting to write my new book on virtual and remote team leadership and teamwork, I’ve been reading A LOT of the more recent business titles. Today's post includes seven that I found myself enjoying and recommending regularly to leaders, teams and fellow facilitators. While not all were published this year, they did have relevance to the current leadership, and teamwork, context. Here they are:
 
Extreme Teaming – Amy Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey -  A wonderful follow up to Edmondson’s 2012 Teaming, this book explores teaming in its extreme forms. Think teams which have to form and disband regularly (i.e. shift teams, ER teams, some project teams). This book takes a look at core foundations and the theory behind teaming. A great read even if you are not a theorist. As a practitioner I would hazard a guess that many of the teams I work with would benefit from more of a focus on the principles identified.

The Productivity Habit – Chris Bailey. I really enjoyed reading Bailey’s book. As someone who is regularly asked to speak with teams and emerging leaders around personal productivity, this book is an excellent resource covering pertinent research and providing very practical, and tactical, activities to undertake. I appreciated how Bailey included how much time it would take to cover each chapter, and it allowed me to cover more than I might have while traveling for work recently.

The Weekend Effect – Katrina Onstad. Another book about the importance of time, and renewal. I enjoyed how Onstad also provided research and stories about the importance of taking back our weekends.

Grit – Angela Duckworth - Another valuable read around leadership in today’s uncertain context.

Scrum – Jeff Sutherland - With Agile’s leveraging of teams, I found that this was an important read for me, providing more of the framework behind this increasingly adopted, and important topic.

Deep Work – Cal Newport – Living and operating in a digitally distracted world, Deep Work is a wonderful read, and an important reminder of the need for deep work.

Radical Candor – Kim Scott - A must read for all teams who want to be able to accelerate their results. This year I would trace much of the challenges experienced by teams that I worked with back to a struggle with being able to practice candor in their communication, pointing to and speaking to difficult issues in a way that was productive, and effective.
 
What books were you influenced by this year? What did you enjoy reading?
 
 
 With best wishes,
Jennifer

As I write on page 327 of Effective Virtual Conversations, "Leadership needs to change as the context changes. The new norm for many virtual leaders is continued volatility, ongoing change, and complexity in different locations" (pp 327, Effective Virtual Conversations).

​Although I wrote this earlier this year, the new norm for leaders of all kinds is becoming disruption. Whether you are a virtual leader or an in-person one, how is volatility, change and complexity impacting your work? What are you noticing about how you are changing your leadership style?

​I did a quick search on writing around leading in disruption and here's what I came up with:

​Succeeding in Disruptive Times from KPMG. Read it here.  They note the research they have done where 34% of CEOs have indicated that they have failed to "achieve the value in their transformations" due to factors including "inability to innovate", "missing the cultural connection", and inability to execute" (pp 2)

​Check out "Tech Disruption Forces CEOs to Rethink Leadership" - Read it here.

​Here's Washington Post's Top 10 Leadership Books to read during 2017 - Read it here.

​15 of the Best Leadership Books to Read in 2017  from Inspiring Leadership Now - Read it here. I was pleased to see many of the books I've read this year - including Kim Scott's Radical Candor.
​
What constitutes leadership for you right now? What are the major forces shaping your business? What is required of you?

Have a great start to the week,
Jennifer
​

Over the lats month we've been looking at the Foundation of Teamwork (you can catch up on posts you missed here).

Today I wanted to share with you a list of some of my favorite books in the topic of teamwork. These are ones I find myself recommending to new and experienced team leaders and team members alike. 
In no particular order you may find these useful in your work, and great summer (or winter!) reading:

Jim Collins - Good to Great
Robin Sharma - Leading Without Title
Daniel Goleman - Primal Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
Katzenbach and Smith - The Wisdom of Teams
Ferrazzi, Keith. Never Eat Lunch Alone
Susan Scott - Fierce Conversations
John Whitmore - Coaching for Performance
Kerry Patterson - Influencer
Steven Covey - Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Steven MR Covey - The Speed of Trust
Lencioni, Patrick – The Advantage, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Team Player

What are some of your favorite teamwork books? Feel free to share!

Have a great Saturday,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Set up a conversation about how we can support you and your team though enhanced coaching, mentoring or other support
Looking for more tips and ideas to support you in your work as a leader? Sign up for our monthly newsletter, full of tips, resources and hacks for leaders and team members looking to realize their potential. Sign up at http://bit.ly/teams365news
(416)996-8326

Yesterday's post explored the topic of accountability and included six leadership questions you will want to incorporate into your team discussions, if you are not doing so already.

​In today's post I wanted to return back to Our Essential Leadership Reads Series, and  provide you with five resources you might find useful around accountability. Note that accountability is not created in isolation, it's also related to Trust, Goal Setting and Relationship Management.

​Here are five books and other resources you may find useful in your work:

​Accountability: The Key to Driving a High Performance Culture - Greg Bustin - View it here on Amazon


​The Oz Principle - Getting results through Individual and Organizational Accountability - Connors, Smith and Hickman - View it here on Barnes and Noble

​Crucial Accountability - Patterson et al. View it here on Barnes and Noble

Fix IT - Getting Accountability Right - Connors and Smith. View it here on Barnes and Noble.

​No More Excuses - Sam Silverstein - View it Here

What other resources would you recommend to others?

Enjoy your weekend,
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Looking to spark more conversation with your team? Consider the Conversation Sparker(TM) Cards
Set up a conversation about how we can support you and your team best
(416)996-8326

It's Friday and time for another Essential Leadership Read. Five more resources which you may want to check out if you are leading or Training Remote Teams:
 
Training Journal = REACH - https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/feature/managing-remote-team

Full’s Article on 3 Tips for Managing a Remote Team = http://full.io/3-tips-for-training-a-remote-team/
 
Five Icebreakers for Distributed Team Meetings from the Lucid Meetings BLog - http://blog.lucidmeetings.com/blog/5-icebreakers-for-distributed-team-meetings
 
TeamBonding.com’s :  Five Team Bonding Tips for Remote Employees https://www.teambonding.com/5-team-bondingtips-for-remote-employees/
 
MindTools article on Remote Teams https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_40.htm

Enjoy your weekend,
Jennifer

This week's focus has been on coaching, with Monday's cartoon showing the new team leader Jo holding a one-on-one coaching conversation with Sujit one of her team members. You can read it here

On Tuesday I focused on the Four Foundations of Any Coaching Conversation and on Wednesday on 20 Coaching Questions you might want to use in your own conversations.

As someone who has trained thousands of coaches and leaders in coaching skills in the last decade plus, finding good books and resources on the topic are key. This is a mainstay of our work at Potentials Realized, and over the years I've not only written two books on coaching, but a number of our products like the Conversation Sparker cards, are geared to support people in having  better coaching conversations.

Here are five books on coaching I often recommend to those looking to add coaching skills to their mix:

Coactive Coaching - Kimsey House and Kimsey House

Coaching For Performance - John Whitmore

Executive Coaching with Backbone and Heart - Mary Beth O'Neill

Coaching For Leadership - Goldsmith/Lyons

A new one coming out in a few weeks which looks like it will be a great one is Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit. It will be released in early March.

What are some of your favorite resources around coaching? As always, please feel free to comment below.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats.
Author of From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2009)
Follow us on Twitter @Teams365
Phone: (416)996-8326