Teams365 Blog - Potentials Realized

#TEAMS365 #2079 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 110: In Focus: Questions

9/9/2019

This week’s Monday Effective Virtual Conversations tip gets you to consider the virtual facilitation skill area of questions. A foundational area, the use of a powerful question can shift a virtual meeting from a one-way black hole of silence, to an engaged conversation.

A couple of things to keep in mind when integrating questions into your next virtual meeting:

Keep your questions short. When questions are too long, we don’t understand them. Aim for 5-7 words in a question.
Ask one question at a time. If you ask more than one question, the listener will first need to figure out what question they have to answer first. In a group context, this will likely lead to people getting off on different tangents, as people will hear different questions first.
Be clear on when you want to ask open-ended questions, which solicit an invite to expand, or when you want simply a yes/no answer.
Use different ways to get people’s response. Depending on the technology you are using, you may be able to share comments verbally, as well as by chat, and sometimes by annotation.
Avoid starting questions with WHY unless trust levels are very high! “Why” questions tend to put people on the defensive. “What” questions tend to be the most open-ended. “How” questions will invite people into thinking about process.For more on the art of questioning in the virtual space, along with a series of questions you might use, check out the Skills in Focus Chapter in my book, Effective Virtual Conversations.

What are some of your favorites? Share with us using the comments below.

And to leave you off with one of my favorite closing questions – What are you going to do to put this in practice in the next 24 hours?

Enjoy!
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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.

#TEAMS365 #2023 Effective Virtual Conversation Tip 102

7/15/2019

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversation Tip is something I say regularly to the coaches and facilitators I work with in train-the-trainer programs. Simply put it’s “Keep it simple. The complexity is with the group.”.

Keeping things simple in the virtual space might involve things such as:

Making sure our questions are crisp and clear
Only asking one question at a time
Asking the group to discuss only one question at a time
Making sure we allocate enough time
Focusing only on one theme or focus area each call
Simplifying instructions
Leaving space and time for questions that might emerge
Using a graphic instead of a lot of text
Using a metaphor to describe something more complex
Being sure to reinforce what we are saying with something written

What can “keeping things simple” look like in your virtual conversations?

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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #2000 Celebrating 2,000 Posts!!!

6/22/2019

Today we reach another milestone here at the Teams365 blog. It’s the 2000th post! What began as an experiment for me on January 1st to see what it would be like to write every day around leadership and teamwork issues, has now become an important part of my regular writing practice. Like so much in business, we don’t know where we are going to go until we do it.

There’s been a lot that’s occurred since I kicked off the Teams365 blog on January 1st 2014 including some of these achievements:

The evolution of the entire Teams365 series of learning programming for leaders, teams, and also virtual and remote workers. While these were a twinkle in my eye prior to the start of the blog, these are now well evolved sets of programs – some which are on-demand courses like the Teams365 Teamwork Foundations.
Multiple corporate engagements around group coaching training and coaching skills training for leaders, including one that was awarded the Prism Award for Excellence in Coaching (2016), and an Award of Excellence – Curriculum Design (2017).
The publication of three more books – Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), Coaching Business Builder (2018), and PlanDoTrack (2019).
Moving from less than 100 page views a week to last week’s 2,069 unique visitors, and 14,928 page views.

It’s been interesting establishing a practice of writing with a regular focus. Here are some of the series you will want to check out if you haven’t seen them already:

The Saturday Weekly Journaling Prompt series. For those that enjoy a reflective pause, you will want to check out the Saturday posts which started about a year ago, focused on a weekly prompt. Grab a pen and journal and get started! If you prefer to have it all under one cover, I’ve pulled together quarterly sets of the Weekly Journaling Prompts and have put them together in an ebook format you can print out and use. $7 at our Potentials Realized store. Check out volume #1 here.
Thursday’s Team Building Tips. Now it the mid-240 range, this Thursday series provides teams and team leaders with a question you can use the spark conversation and dialogue. Ideal for a team meeting, some of these have been made into a deck of 52 cards you can physically incorporate into your team meetings. What’s your favorite? Check out the series here, and share with us in the comments.
Mondays’ weekly Effective Virtual Conversations tip. For the past couple of years I have shared a weekly tip from my 2017 book Effective Virtual Conversations. That book focuses on ideas for making your virtual conversations (virtual meetings, virtual training, virtual mentoring more effective). Definitely a good place to check out as most of us have some sort of virtual touch point every week. Check

In the last 2000 posts there have been many other focus areas and series. While too many to name, some that you may be interested in are:

Leadership Myths
Teamwork in Uncertainty
Leadership a – z
The a-z of remote and virtual team activities

I look forward to continuing the journey with you! Continue to stay tuned.

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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #1996: Presentation Brush-up

6/18/2019

As you may recall, this month we’ve been exploring several mid-year topics – the Team Tune Up (link to that post), along with others encouraging you to do some mid-year stock taking.

One area which I think often gets pushed to the side is that around presentations. Whether we are being formally asked to lead a webinar, or present something “on the fly”, brushing up on our presentation skills can go a long way.

While there is a whole art and science behind presentations, I like to always bring it back to KEEP IT SIMPLE. I’m going to model that in today’s posts as well, sharing with you five key areas to keep in mind when you go to design or lead your next presentation:

Connect people early on with their WIIFM – What’s In It For Me? What’s important about this topic for people?
Use real-time examples. If you have time, is there an opportunity for people to share a real-time example of how they are focusing on this topic. The question might be: “Who can share an example you are currently working around, as it relates to this topic?”. This helps make it not only meaningful, but relevant and usually a lot more urgent than if you were talking about the topic in a more conceptual way.
Consider the start, middle and end. We tend to remember the start and end of things. Really think through how you want to start the presentation and how you want to wrap it up. What are
What are the top 3 bullet points? We operate in a fast-paced business context, where direct communication can be an advantage. What are the top 3 bullet points you want to share during the presentation, or have people retain?
Use graphics that capture attention. Media use in many presentations is an expectation and can bring to life many of the ideas you are covering. What are the graphics that are going to provide a focus and inspiration?

Finally, as a bonus tip, remember that most people prefer to bring their own voice into the presentation and talk about the issues that are relevant to them, rather than passively sitting back and being talked at. What can you do to bring their voices and experience into the room?

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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #1985 - #FLASHBACKFRIDAY: Preparing For the Feedback Conversation

6/7/2019

This week’s flashback Friday takes us to preparing for the feedback conversation. When feedback is unplanned or unscheduled things can go awry. Even taking a few minutes on a regular basis to review your team members performance, can be a useful habit to get into. Providing feedback on a regular basis is a best practice of leadership today.

Check out Teams365 1252 Preparing for the Feedback Conversation. This is useful for both the person giving and the person receiving the feedback.

Here’s what I wrote in Teams365 #1252:
Today's post takes us to the realm of feedback, an area I often find myself working with teams around. The performance conversation should not be a one-off conversation. In fact, it should be an on-going dialogue (two-way) between staff and their leader.

Taking time to prepare for the feedback conversation is an essential step in the process, and it is often one that is overlooked. It's important to take some time to think about the performance conversation, rather than just winging it.

Some things to do when you are starting to prepare for any feedback conversation is:

Make sure that you have solid items to talk about. What are the facts? What is hearsay? What have you seen yourself? If you realize that you don't have a lot to share, this is a flag to make some changes so that next time you do.

What are the key goals which are important to discuss? Another challenge in the feedback conversation is that the team leader may be focusing on different things than the employee. What are the key goals which are important to discuss? Are these aligned?

How have you set the employee up for success in scheduling this meeting? Performance conversations should be a two-way process. What have you done to set the employee up for success? Have you asked them to consider any questions prior to meeting? Have you invited them to do a self-assessment? When was the last time the two of you sat down to explore performance issues? Nothing raised in an annual review should be a surprize.

Dedicate time and space for the performance conversation and preparation. Even though many of us feel we need to run from task to task, feedback and performance conversations should not be left as a low item priority. Make sure you are dedicating time and space for not only holding the performance conversation, but also preparing for it.

What other tips do you have for preparing for the performance conversation?

Enjoy the conversations!
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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #1981 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 97: Listening in the Virtual SPace

6/3/2019

Welcome back to another Monday Effective Virtual Conversations tip. This week’s tip focuses into the skill of listening.

As both leaders and team members listening is a critical skill, particularly in the virtual space. It is important for all of us - leaders, entrepreneurs, individual contributors and team members.

Keys to listening in the virtual and remote space are to ensure that we are:

Focusing – Focusing 100% of our attention on the person who is speaking – not using other devices or focusing on other things.
Listening to the tone as well as the words. If you are streaming, what do you notice about the body language?
Listening for the pause points – What does their speed and rate of pitch say? How quickly or slowly are they speaking.

Finally, do you fall into one of the biggest pitfalls of listening today? We want to make sure that we are listening for what is really being said, rather than listening to respond. One of the greatest challenges for most professionals today is that they are so focused on figuring out what they plan to say, that they really are not listening to what is being said. What are you listening for?

I recently came across a great article by Ben Gross on the importance of listening. Here's a link to his article on listening.

It is often said that employees leave managers, not companies. What can you do to boost your listening skills? What did you notice about your last conversation?

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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #1974 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 95: Integrate Annotation

5/27/2019

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip gets you thinking about creating more interactivity in your next virtual program. This week’s EVC tip gets you thinking about using the tools of annotation.

Most virtual platforms will have the option of enabling annotation, where people can write on the screen.

Annotation might involve getting people to:

Circle things they are in agreement around
Check things off on a list
Write things on a blank white screen/PowerPoint
Create a logo which represents what people are bringing to the call

Annotation is a great supplement to using chat, and it will also provide more hands-on interaction. When requested to write something on the screen or circle something we are less likely to multi-task or be doing something completely different.

This week consider how you could incorporate more annotation and interaction into your virtual conversations.

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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #1964 - #FLASHBACKFRIDAY – Teamwork in Complexity

5/17/2019

This month’s posts are geared to Teamwork in Uncertainty. This is a close cousin to last May’s posts on Teamwork in Complexity. I thought it would be useful to take us back to that post on Teamwork Skills in Complexity – Experimentation from May 2018. Here’s what I wrote:

This month we are exploring the skills required in teamwork, including listening and curiosity. Today I wanted to take a dive into a third skill area, that being the area of experimentation.

Experimentation is key for business leaders and teams today. Many times, the context is changing so quickly that we don’t have time to complete an entire roll-out before having to make a final decision. That can lead to a mindset of experimentation, where it is encouraged to try things out, see what works and what doesn’t.

In supporting experimentation in our team we want to:

Encourage and reward trial and error
Create safety around not getting “things right”
Provide team members with time and resources to experiment, beyond their every day team responsibilities
Facilitate an evaluation of projects or “Experiments” that are completed or are even at the midpoint

Questions we may ask at project reviews include:

What’s working?
What’s not?
What are the things that need to be abandoned or tweaked?
What additional resources do we need?
What unknown obstacles have become visible?
What is the big learning we are taking?
What is the one thing/ or the many things we are going to do differently going forward?
Who else can we learn from (including our own past projects?

Read the original post here.

What else is important for you to note around experimentation?

If you haven’t read the blog posts I did earlier this week on Teamwork in Uncertainty around experimentation and cultivating more curiosity, be sure to check them out.

Wishing you all the best,
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.

#TEAMS365 #1962: Teamwork in Uncertainty: Empowering your Team with the Space to Experiment

5/15/2019

Another part of successful teamwork in uncertainty is giving people the space to experiment and try things out. This goes hand-in-hand with cultivating curiosity.

Experimentation is not just a strategy for small business and start ups, in fact, encouraging intrapreneurism has been a part of larger organizations for many decades now, including organizations like 3M.

Experimentation and trying things out can be a key business strategy when things are changing. Part of the success of this business strategy is that we also track.

When fostering an environment of experimentation, consider these questions:

Before you start an experiment, where are you? 📍
What do the metrics say? 📊
What do you want to measure?📏
How long and at what frequency will the experiment last?⏳
What is your hypothesis? I.e. What do you think will happen?📈

Recently I posted the daily business prompt as part of the #90Days Plan Do Track series over on Instagram at CoachingBizBuilder.

Ways we can encourage more experimentation:

Provide people with stretch zones
Work with real business challenges. Encourage a peer exploration of different options and perspectives around key business issues. It might be that you are looking for different ways to get services or products out to market or how to magnify sales.
Explore opportunities for cross-departmental sharing with a view to learning from other’s best practices and ways of working. This cross-pollination of ideas may lead to new ways of working in your department.

What else might you do to encourage more experimentation?

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.

#TEAMS365 #1961 – Teamwork in Uncertainty: Encouraging Curiosity – What The Research Says

5/14/2019

Last week I shared a post on cultivating curiosity. As a former team leader myself, working in highly volatile and changeable environments, cultivating curiosity was an important area to support my own team in. Given that many were responding to post-disaster contexts and needing to look at how to do their work in a highly changing environment, it was not business as usual. What many leaders don’t realize today is that “business as usual” may not longer be present in many industries.

As a leadership practitioner, author, coach and trainer, I’m regularly in conversation with leaders and teams around how important the skill of curiosity is. Yet, there are still many naysayers – from leaders and team members.

So, what does the research say?

I took a look at some of the more recent research in the area of curiosity and came across a great set of articles from Harvard Business Review - September 2018. In that edition, they cited the research and article written by Francesca Gino who has studied the area of curiosity. Read her article and study here.

Out of those surveyed, 70% of employees indicted that they faced barriers to employing more curiosity.

She cites in her article “The Business Case for Curiosity” five ways to encourage more curiosity:

Hire for it.
Model it yourself – inquisitiveness.
Emphasize learning goals. Many leaders today focus solely on performance goals. While not abandoning performance goals, what can you do cultivate and allow for more of a focus on learning goals?
“Let employees explore and broaden interests”. As someone who was schooled as multi-disciplinarian, I have seen throughout my career how a broad knowledge base becomes an asset, rather than a liability in times of change and complexity.
She also encourages days where people explore the questions: Why? What if? How might we do that?

Individually, each one of these suggestions could have a ripple effect on the way people work, without detracting from core functions.

What are the benefits to starting to integrate some of these approaches in your team meetings and ways of working?

Best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of multiple books including Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2018) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Now available – PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner - Order a copy today on Amazon
Join the conversation at the Conversation Sparker Zone - our online community where you can explore virtual and team issues, coaching, productivity and business development).
Check out the new 19 Tips for Productivity On-Demand Course. If this is your year to get things moving, check it out now. Join Jenn for bi-weekly live group calls until July. $129 US. Learn more and enroll here.