It’s Friday which means that it’s time for a Flashback Friday. Today I wanted to reach back to a 2017 post on Things New Remote Teams Need. Whether you are new to remote work, or are supporting others who are, this week’s post can also serve as a good checkpoint at the start of the year to see how we are all doing in each of the areas explored.

Check out the original 2017 post here.

Here’s what I wrote:
​
In today's business context many teams are moving to a mobile, distributed or remote work force. Whether it's because the talent pool is dispersed, or commute times are pressurizing employees, remote work can be as effective or more so, when virtual teams are set up for success. Today's post explores six things new virtual teams need in order to thrive. These elements include:

1. Clarity regarding reporting relationships. Who are they to report to on what issues? When is reporting required? If matrix reporting relationships exist, what do they report to whom? What issues need to be co-reported?
2. Clarity regarding expectations regarding working – hours, approaches, breaks, how to log and share work etc.
3. The technology and ability to connect with others in the team and across the organization. Working remote can be a lonely endeavor and just as social time is important for face-to -ace teams, so is face-to-face for virtual team.
4. Regular check ins and feedback. Regular check-ins and feedback may revolve around the questions:
   1. How’s it going?
   2. What’s working? What’s not?
   3. What support do you need?
   4. What are your current priorities?
   5. What resources do you need in order to get the results you need?
5. Platforms so they can see each other and connect with their team. This could include regular virtual potlucks where the team actually connects for a meal from each of their locations. It could also include face-to-face time – quarterly or on a regular basis.
6. Clarity regarding how to flag issues - what issues to raise and when. Who should they be flagging issues to? When is the team leader available and how?

What other elements do you see as essential for new virtual teams to hit the ground running?

What’s important for your team to focus on, or take action on right now?

Have a great weekend,
Jennifer

As we move into 2020, it’s easy to get swept up into the “doing” of work right away. Before the year gets further ahead, take a few minutes to be sure that you get these items scheduled in…

#1 – Team Meetings – Make them consistent and regular. It’s likely that you won’t be able to have everyone at the table (or the screen). Make sure that you create shared team agreements of what team members need to do if they are not present for meetings.

#2 – Meetings with Your Boss – Have you scheduled in time with your direct line manager? Keeping visible and being in regular communication is essential in today’s workplace. Corporate priorities can change quickly as can your boss’ priorities. How often are the two of you meeting? What format are you using? What’s important for them to know?

#3 – One-on-ones with The Team – While group and team meetings are great, team members still need some 1-1 time. Be sure to schedule in some time with your team on a regular basis. Are you aiming for monthly 1-1 conversations? Quarterly deeper dives? Daily touchpoints? As a team talk about expectations and make agreements about who is responsible for scheduling and follow up.

#4 – Team Development Time – As I shared in yesterday’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip, team development time is critical and is often overlooked for virtual teams. Teams don’t just excel by osmosis! They need time to get to know each other, clarify how they are operating and focus in on what’s important.

#5 – Strategic Thinking Time — Are you leaving yourself enough time for reflection and thinking? Be sure to leave in enough time for strategic thinking. This can include creating, or revisiting your VISION, MISSION and MANDATE. Taking time to think strategically is important so that you have a clear big picture with a longer-term horizon. With things changing rapidly, the strategic horizon of 1, 3 or 5 years down the road can be invaluable in helping us keep moving, and not getting too set back by the small changes which can feel frenetic.

#6 — Time to Get Things Done — With meetings, communication and email taking a lot of time, what time are you leaving for yourself to get things done? For some professionals, it means coming into the office early to tackle key tasks for 30-60 minutes before others arrive. For others, it means booking a conference room and closing the door. Notice when you are most productive and when it’s important to get things done.

# 7 – Learning Time – What are your learning and development goals this year? Embracing ongoing learning has never been more important. What are the skills, processes and approaches which are going to help you do your best work? Note that learning can take many forms: including in-person programming, virtual learning as well as on-demand learning. Finally, peer learning (see #9) is another set of approaches.

#8 – Feedback Time – What feedback touchpoints are you building in throughout the year? Feedback in many organizations has moved to an ongoing cycle, and it can be important to make sure that it is happening regularly. Block off time in your schedule to get it done.

#9 – Peer Learning Time/Mentoring Time — What is the peer learning you want to undertake this year? Is it possible to do some job shadowing or pair with a peer partner throughout the year to compare notes, share resources and learn from each other?

In addition to peer learning, what about identifying a mentor in your organization or industry who can share their experience in order to help you understand “what’s below the waterline”?

#10 – Time Within Your Industry or Outside Your Regular Scope of Work — Finally, industry connections are key. Keeping current in your area of work may be as important, or more important, in the medium- and longer-term. What connection into professional associations are going to support you this year?

As you think about this year, what is going to support you best?

Best wishes, 
​Jennifer

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversation Tip #125 takes us back into the vault of past EVC tips. This one brings us back to #25 which was “Feedback from your group is essential to facilitation growth and mastery”.

What feedback are you receiving BEFORE, DURING and AFTER, your virtual facilitation engagements? Feedback is critical at all stages.

Feedback before the session may take the form of connecting with learners before the program via voice and/or survey. Questions might include a focus on:

• What are you looking forward to learning?
• What should I know about your experience in the virtual learning space?
• How do you learn best?
• What’s important about this topic for you? Your work? Etc.

You may even ask people about how they will be following up with the learning.
Sometimes people feel that they may be speaking into a black hole. Taking time to get feedback during the session is also important. This might involve asking:

• For people to share an emoji
• To have people circle a number on the screen where they are in terms of their learning
• To share in chat what they are learning? What they are they going to do next?

Building in time at the end of the day to receive feedback around these questions can also be important. That might include some of these questions and/or questions along these lines:

• What worked well?
• What are you taking away?
• What should we do differently next time?

A third touchpoint where you may receive feedback about the session is:

• Right after the event with a traditional survey which may go out to measure impact.

A few weeks after the event you may also want to build in a final touchpoint which can not only serve as a point of evaluation but also as an opportunity for enhanced accountability. For many of the groups I work with, we will look to schedule a call about a month after the session to check in around what they are putting into practice and what questions they have.

Take a look at what we covered earlier in EVC Tip 25. Read the original EVC Tip #25 here.

What are the conversations you want to have?

Best, 
​Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing 
Phone (416)996-8326
 
As we step into the end of the year, get your 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.

It’s the first weekend of the holiday season for some. For others, in retail, it may be another day in lead up to a continued busy period. This week we’ve covered a variety of topics including:

• Monday’s Effective Virtual Conversation Tip – Embrace the Differences. View it here. Read it here.
  
• Tuesday’s focus on Digital Transformation. Read it here.
  
• Wednesday’s focus on Ten Areas We Covered This Year. Read it here.
  
• Thursday’s focus on Team Building Question – “How do you want feedback?”. Read it here.
  
• Friday’s focus on 10 Questions to Take Stock of The Year.
  
• Saturday’s Weekly Journaling Prompt around what you want to put in your time capsule
  

​Enjoy your review!
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing 
Phone (416)996-8326
 
As we step into the end of the year, get your 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.

Coaches - What's possible if you were take 60 days of focused action on your business? Join us starting January 1st for this experiment in 60 days of focused action at the 60 Day Coaching Business Builder Accelerator. Join us. Early bird rate to December 23, 2019

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you to consider the question “HOW do you want feedback?” As part of team days, I host for teams (virtually and in person) we usually wind up doing work around strengths or styles, helping team members understand the diverse needs and approaches on the team. From there, we usually start exploring what these differences mean in terms of communication, working style, approaches to conflict and also things that get under our skin, or triggers.

One of the areas where you may see significant differences is in the area of feedback – how we like to give it, and how we like to receive it. Feedback should be a two-way street.

This week’s Team Building Tip asks the question: “How do you want feedback?”
Options might include:

• Regular in batches or as things happen
• Focused on the big picture vs. Granular in detail
• Verbal only vs writing which you can review and then connect verbally to speak about

What are the ways you want to focus on feedback?

Feedback should also be a two-way street, and while asking the question to those we are supporting through feedback, you’ll want to consider asking “What type of feedback do you want as the receiver?”

Note that in many teams, feedback is not just between the leader and team members. There may be peer feedback cycles as well. The question how “How do you want feedback?” may be an interesting one to explore with the entire team.
​
Enjoy the conversations!
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Writing 
Phone (416)996-8326
 
As we step into the end of the year, get your 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.

As we step into the “last mile” of 2019 (i.e. the last six weeks, give or take a few, especially if your business shuts down for the holidays), one of the key activities you will want to make sure you build in time for is a set of year-end one-on-ones with staff. While many organizations have moved to an ongoing feedback and performance management culture, it can be important to ensure that final one-on-ones don’t get forgotten in the rush of year-end.

Some of the elements you may want to include in your final one-on-ones are:

• A look back at the key highlights for the individual this year.
• Reflections and sharing on key performance witnessed – things that they did very well, times when you saw their strengths in action.
• What were their major accomplishments? What skills and experiences were learned/acquired? How can this support them going forward?
• Discussion around areas for growth and improvement in the new year.
• Looking ahead to the new year, what are the key priorities based on organizational and department goals?
• What are their key learning goals? Where do they want to grow? What changes do they want to make?
• Support needs for the new year.
• Learning needs for the new year.  Identification of any areas they would like to acquire more skills within in their work.
• Goals they have for themselves and their career.

What other items might you include in your year-end one-on-ones? Every team and organization is different. While not all of these categories may reflect the type of performance conversations you typically have, it can be useful to invite your team to consider the bigger context of their work (i.e. how has this year helped them with future career aspirations).

While it’s top of mind, I hope that you will take a few minutes to make note of the questions you want to include in everyone’s discussion.

Enjoy!
​Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized 
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success focusing on the Virtual and Remote Space
Author of 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.
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. ​
Coming soon - the Remote Pathways™ Podcast

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you to think about the question “What would the devil’s advocate say?”.

The Devil's Advocate view on a team may be in complete opposition to everyone else. It may also be the unpopular voice in the room.

At the same time, the devil’s advocate voice can point to an area which needs to be addressed or changed. This perspective can be very important when change is ongoing.

Rather than vilifying the voice of the devil’s advocate, it could be useful to invite their perspective around issues of importance. This may tease out alternative viewpoints, unforeseen risks, assumptions the team is making, or unpopular views.

How can the voice of the "Devil's Advocate" be useful to you as a team right now?

Many teams feel that they may remote the voice to the dissenter if he or she leaves the team, but note that it's likely that that voice will re-emerge if changes are not made at the deeper level of the team's system (it's culture, roles, how they do things, norms etc).

What is important to note on your team right now about key issues and the Devil’s Advocate view?

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.
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. ​

This week takes us into the interesting landscape of performance reviews in the remote space. Just as feedback is important in the in-person realm, feedback in the remote space is also important. Perhaps even more so, given the isolation and possibility that things can get off the rails very quickly.

Just as in in-person work, it is important to provide feedback and checkpoints on a regular basis. Usually the pace around everything is faster in the remote space, so consider how you might build in monthly or bi-weekly checkpoints for team members to see how they are doing.

Questions to consider when shifting performance reviews and conversations to the remote space:

HOW do we evaluate? Considering your feedback process is critical for remote workers. We want to be sure that they are getting regular, consistent feedback. No comments, or radio silence, is not enough. Consideration around HOW we evaluate - through written feedback, verbal feedback, review of job products - is a great starting point.

What are the different sources of feedback? Given that people are liaising with lots of different members, WHO is well placed to provide feedback? HOW do we invite them to provide feedback?

Getting really clear on outputs - In the remote space what we see in work is usually the end product. Being super-specific around outputs and what success looks like is very important in any type of performance conversation. Measuring on the process is usually a little trickier as it often is not seen, so consider how you are speaking to success measures and outputs in your performance conversations.

Provide multiple checkpoints - Formal feedback cycles may be much quicker than in-person given that we usually don’t see each other and informally connect with updates. What are the checkpoints you are going to put into place to make sure that people are feeling supported, and that issues are being “caught” in time?

Micro-monitor, don’t micro-manage - Micro-monitoring is a key part of virtual team success. When we have staff who work remote, it’s key that we are monitoring their results and outputs, rather than trying to micro-manage what they do. Micro-management is usually impossible or improbable given distance. Together with members of your team, set up a schedule to track, report and discuss key metrics and milestones.

What is important to put into place for your performance reviews?

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 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. ​

​This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations post takes us to #105 in the series. The focus this week is on the skill set of Accountability. It’s much harder to track things in the virtual space, given that our time windows of synchronous moments when we are together can be limited. At the same time, our work may still be interdependent.

With this in mind, it is important to discuss what accountability can look like on your team, and how you want to support it.
​
Consider these ideas for supporting virtual or remote accountability:

• Make it visible – Keeping things visible allows us to keep things top of mind. If there are key goals are there dashboards or visible measurement items, you can create and share in your intranet or team portal?
• Create peer accountability partners – In the virtual space, relationships are essential, and we may not take time getting to know our peers. Creating peer accountability partners where everyone has one or two buddies, helps with information flow across a team, and also can boost the needle on accountability.
• Help people see the bigger picture and connections – Many times team members don’t realize how interconnected things are, and that their work may directly impact another team members. Help teams members see the bigger picture of tools and also how their work flows into another's.
• Build in time to check in – What doesn’t get tracked, doesn’t get done. What time are you building in for tracking and check in? This might be 5 minutes in a weekly team meeting, or via one-on-one calls.
• Model accountability – If leaders are not following through it’s hard to ask team members to follow through. Model accountability and walk your talk!

Best wishes,
Jennifer

​This week’s Flashback Friday takes us back to the 2017 series entitled “Leadership Practices”. Given that this time of year often involves planning, I wanted to take us back to our focus on feedback.

Here’s what I wrote in Teams365 #1296: 

Leadership Practice – Feedback

One of the areas many team leaders struggle with is providing feedback. Sometimes feedback has not been well modeled to us, or we may not operate in a feedback culture. Creating the context of regular feedback  - both positive and constructive – can be an important shift in changing the way people work and interact. When feedback is sparse we may inadvertently create a culture where team members move below the radar line, and people are afraid to take risks. When we create a culture where feedback is offered on a regular basis – both positively and constructively – we are often able to take more risks and try things out in an iterative fashion.

Several keys for providing feedback include:
​
Make feedback regular. In moving to a feedback culture we want to make sure that we are providing feedback to our team members in both positive and constructive ways. Poor performance, or performance that is not meeting the mark should not be a surprise at formal performance evaluation moments.

Leaders alone may not be the only ones providing feedback. Building the capacity within our team to provide peer feedback can support a shift to an overall feedback culture. In building the capacity within team members to provide feedback we want to make sure that we train people in providing feedback. It can be useful to start with comments like “ I see one of your strengths as…..” or “I appreciate it when you….”. Constructive feedback from the perspective of “one thing you might want to try is…..” or “one are you may want to focus on is….”.

Be sure that in providing feedback you are speaking to observable behaviors not personality issues. A major trap in feedback is that we attribute poor performance not to things we see, but to heresay or assumptions.  It is important to provide feedback on things we have seen ourselves.

Practice giving feedback in authentic ways. When feedback cultures are not established it can feel awkward to provide feedback and it may not be modeled in different voices. Providing team members with the opportunity to provide feedback using a framework mentioned in the last point, may start to build the muscle and confidence around feedback, along with a common framework with different voices.

As you think about feedback for the year, what do you notice?
​
Enjoy,
Jennifer