This week’s Team Building Tip brings us to #209 of the series. Aligned with our shift to a focus on year-end, this week’s question to surface with the team is the question:
What needs to get completed by year end?
As you think about year end, here are 14 common year-end activities you will want to budget time and space for:

1. Reporting
2. Financials
3. Projects
4. Planning for new projects
5. Meeting with stakeholders (internal and external)
6. Communication planning for next year
7. Team development
8. Performance Reviews
9. Coaching Conversations
10. Learning for 2018
11. Learning for 2019 (individual and team level)
12. Peer Meetings
13. Meeting with our bosses
14. Meeting with other key internal partners

What else would you add to the list?
​
Enjoy!
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.  
​
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.
​
Best wishes,
Jennifer

Mentoring is one of the most important areas we can engage in, at all stages of our career. This week I wanted to take us back to a 2016 post entitled – 20 Mentoring Questions. You can read the original posts here.
 
Here’s what I wrote:
Whether we are mentoring virtually or in person, having a number of questions in your back pocket as conversation starters can be a great resource for mentors and proteges alike. Today's post includes 20 different questions you may want to use to get your next conversation going or deepen where you are going already:

​1. Tell me about a time when you learned the most?
​2. What was a challenging leadership situation you encountered? How did you approach it? What did you learn?
​3. What advice do you have for me around the goals that I am working on?
​4. What goals are important for you right now?
​5. What do you do to maintain focus?
​6. What do you do to find balance as a leader?
​7. Who would you recommend I connect with?
8. Who provided you with the best advice as a leader?
​9. What would you say is a "must do" for leaders?
​10.  What advice do you have for someone starting out on their career?
​11. What resources help foster success in today's business context?
​12.  What resources would you recommend for someone in my position?
​13. What was the most challenging move for you in your career? What was the easiest?
​14. What's the biggest learning of your career?
​15. What legacy do you want to leave?
​16. What do you see the biggest challenges for our profession in the next 5-10 years? The biggest opportunities?
​17. What is a business issue I should be looking at more closely right now?
​18. What trends are important to take note of at the moment?
19. How do you stay current or ahead of the curve?
​20. Knowing what you know of me now, what advice or recommendations do you have?

With best wishes,
​Jennifer

When I started the journey with blog post #1 of the Teams365 blog back on January 1st 2014, I didn’t really know where it would take me. Two more books later, and more than 1700 blog posts, I think about the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of conversations with teams and leaders these posts have also infused.

Just recently, perhaps due to blog size, or other, the search function on the site has changed. It means that you can’t go back and search posts earlier than this year. While you can still find them through tags and dates, it may mean that it’s harder to find older content. That makes these Friday posts even more important where I reach back, and share, an older blog post.
 
Today I am reaching back to one from September 2014, entitled “What’s the WIIFM” . It was Teams365 blog post 265 and here’s what I wrote:

#Teams365 #265: What's the WIIFM?
9/22/2014
0 Comments
 
The WIIFM, or the What's In It For Me, is an essential leadership concept to keep in  mind.

WIIFM has connections with employee engagement, developing and delivering stellar presentations, recognition and motivation.

Let's first look at motivation. Psychology posits that we get motivated through our internal drive, or externally. As leaders, helping our team members connect around What's in it for me when faced with a new project or task, helps increase the internal motivation. It also may provide us with some cues as to what we can do to provide external support for those individuals, given what they find motivating.

In developing presentations or public speaking, helping your audience connect with their WIIFM (What's in it for me) creates a richer learning experience. We should always be trying to design presentations (content, approaches, flow) from their perspective as well.

Employee engagement and recognition continue to be hot button topics. WIIFM is central to engagement and puts our team members in the heart of being part of the driving force of what creates an engaged workforce. Create a habit of asking people to consider their WIIFM and contribution with new initiatives, and as change processes happen.

Finally, in recognition (something we don't often get enough of), lead from individuals WIIFM. 

Where else could you get people you work with to consider the WIIFM?


Enjoy your weekend!
Jennifer

One of my favorite coaching questions is “In the next 24 hours, what will you do?”. This coaching question has inspired this weeks Weekly Journaling Prompt, “In the next 24 hours….”.
As you consider the  landscape of your work this fall, what would benefit from being actioned NOW, RIGHT AWAY, in the next 24 HOURS?
From a learning and retention standpoint we know that new pieces of learning which are not actioned right away gets lost. Here’s a quick, visual, article on 15 Science Backed Ways to Improve Learning Retention by Reuben Yonatan. Read it here.
Many other items have a “shelf life”. What’s important to take action on right now?
 
Enjoy your weekend,
Jennifer

This month’s focus is on team development, an area I spent a lot of my time working with teams around. As you can imagine, I’ve already written a lot about these topics through some of the many series here at the Teams365 blog. Rather than reinvent the wheel I thought it would be useful to return back to some of the many posts I have already written.
 
I is for initiative, influence and impact. Check out the post I did on these topics here.
 
J is for Just-in-time. Check out this posts on Just-in-time here: 
 
I also shared in the Team Development A – Z the notion of Jeopardy. You can read the post here.
 
K is for Kick off. Check out this post on K is for kick off here.
 
K is also what you are Known for – what is your reputation? Check out this post.

L is for loyalty, leadership, leverage, learning, listening, lean.
Check out this post on L is for leverage here.
 
Check out these 6 Leadership Questions a day around L here.
 
Some of the activities you might consider including with team members are:
Listening – Check out some of the various posts on listening here.
 
A final area which is so important to teams today in times of change is the area of Learning to Learn. I haven’t written as much about this area but what do you notice about your ability to learn as a team? What has helped you do this?
 
Enjoy your Wednesday and I’ll be back with our remaining letters next week.
 
Best
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Effective Virtual Conversations |  Coaching Team Leaders  
We provide team and leadership development support through coaching, consulting and training services
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) 
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

​The 190th Team Building Question gets you to ask the question – What are the key lessons learned from this last quarter that we need to take note of?”.
As we move into some of the hotter weeks of the year (in the northern hemisphere) or colder weeks of the year (for the southern hemisphere), it can be useful to spend time pausing to take stock of where you have been as a team and what is working.

Do check out my June 21st blog post which included a more extensive list of quarterly questions and prompts to explore as a team (link to June 21stblog post).
 
Enjoy the conversation!
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Effective Virtual Conversations |  Coaching Team Leaders  
We provide team and leadership development support through coaching, consulting and training services
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) 
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversation tip #52 gets you to think about developing short videos for whatever type of virtual conversations you are creating. Whether it is a webinar or a team meeting, short videos can serve to jazz things up. Consider:

​Who is the audience? What would they like to see or experience? What’s the most important topic for them right now?
Length – shorter videos are usually better – 2 minutes or less
Will the video include photos? Music? Text?
Always be aware of copyright and intellectual property issues
 
I recently spoke with a group of professional coaches and indicated that using videos as one of the pace changes every five to ten minutes can keep calls moving along.  They can also help with focus, and spark some new energy (particularly if it’s an after lunch session).
 
Videos can also be seen as more novel or memorable, and may be an important vehicle for making things stick.
There’s a compelling case for video creation:
 
Two different video creation tools I have used in my work are:
Lumen5 and Adobe Spark
 
Both are easy to use and quickly repurpose content you might have. If you have been following along with the Teams365 blog for a while you may have seen some of the short 2-3 minute Sunday videos I have created, bringing to life many of the blog posts I have written here. While it’s not quite just a cut and paste of the content and the video is done, it is quite a quick process.
 
This week, take stock of the content you have that could be converted into a video. Perhaps it’s a:

• Blog post
• An article you have written which can be broken down into shorter posts
• A series of tips you have created around a topic
• A response to some of the common questions you receive in your work

 
Make a list of five to ten videos you could create. If you are drawing a blank, set a timer for 3 minutes and make a list of everything that comes to mind!
 
Enjoy!
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Effective Virtual Conversations |  Coaching Team Leaders  
We provide team and leadership development support through coaching, consulting and training services
Author of Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) 
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

​How are you incorporating video to you work? Dialogue? Learning? Virtual Conversations?
 
A few weeks ago I attended a school field trip with my son’s Grade 7 class. We were visiting a historical site and it was the end of the day. To wrap things up the guide asked if we wanted to watch a video or recap the ideas verbally. It was a resounding 100% “Video!”. On the hour long bus ride back to the school you could hear the continued conversation about the video and its’ contents.
 
Video is still at a stage where it’s the memorable and novel approach to recapping or sharing information. How are you using video in your work?
 
Over the last two years I have been experimenting through more use of video, not only here at the blog, but also in presentations and my webinars.   You’ll notice that for most Sunday posts over the last year I’ve included a short 2 minute video, bringing to life a blog post. If you’ve taken the time to read the original then view the video, which do you prefer? Take a look at some of the Sunday videos here. 
 
Most of these short 1.5-2.5 minute videos were made via Lumen5. It’s a platform I find intuitively easy to use, and is great if you have content you want to convert to video.
 
I’ve also experimented with other video platforms – Facebook Live as well as Adobe Spark. In Adobe Spark you can take still photos and add words, plus do a voice over. It’s another great option. Facebook Live, of course, is a different option, and can be a valuable vehicle to connect with your audience in real-time.
 
How might you be able to use more video in your work? What addition would it provide?
 
Enjoy the start to your month!
 
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​

This week’s weekly journal gets you to think about what your biggest learning has been. Whether you consider the time over the last month, the last quarter, or since the start of the year, take a few minutes this weekend to reflect on the question “What’s been your biggest learning?”

As the mid-year point it’s an opportunity to take a look back at the planning and writing you did at the start of the year or back in December, and note how far you’ve gone.

What do you notice? What have you learned?

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​