​Last month here at the Teams365 blog I intentionally focused on posts to support you in wrapping up the year. We usually never have enough time at this time of the year, so for today’s FlashbackFriday I want to reconnect you to these five posts. Do make a point of checking at least one of them out!

5 things to get in your calendar for 2019, right now! 
Have you got all 5 of these items in your calendar for 2019? Click on over to the post to explore what I’ve written and linked to around team meetings, team development, feedback, mentoring and skill development.
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Planning for Year End Activities with your Team 

Year end productivity reminders – 4 things to keep in mind
In addition to the 19 Productivity Tips for 2019, you may also want to check out this post which includes 4 key things to keep in mind around productivity (Going back to the basics including  - understanding your Pareto Ratio)

18 Questions for 2018 Year-end one on ones
While I have flagged these questions for year-end one-on-ones, these are just as good for the start of the year conversations. What have you already scheduled for 2019 conversations and 1-1 time with your team?

Bringing projects to a close
Some of you may still be moving to get projects to a close. Check out this post for several tips for bringing projects to a close.

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.  
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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.
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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

This summer I’ve been taking a look back at some of the teamwork videos which have been shared here at the Teams365 blog in my weekly Sunday posts. There are a number of good ones you may not yet have viewed. I encourage to you watch these short 2 minute videos and to think about sharing these with your team and/or organization:

4 Ways to Build Trust in your Team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr1PQz_jgW0

Six Things New Virtual Teams Need: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnG6eb5euJg

5 Reasons Why Mentoring is Important: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onVbSWncKuU

Videos can capture team members attention in ways that documents and books don’t. I hope you will consider how you can leverage them to spark ideas and/or discussion.

​Enjoy!
Jennifer

​Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats.
Follow us on Twitter @Teams365
Phone: (416)996-8326

​It’s Sunday and I wanted to share with you links to some of our more than 30 videos I’ve created in the last year, bringing to life some of the more than 1600 blog posts here at the Teams365 blog. I hope that you’ll take a few minutes today to check out these blog posts:

Teams365 #1440 – 12 Mentoring Questions – Watch it here - https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1440-12-mentoring-questions-teams365-video
 
Teams365 #1512 – Ways to Build Trust in Virtual Teams. Watch it here - https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1512-ways-to-build-trust-in-virtual-teams
 
Teams365 #1608: 4 Tips for Fluid Speaking. Watch it here - https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1608-video-tips-for-fluid-speaking
 
Teams365 #1307: Four Keys to Feedback – Watch it here -
https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1307-video-4-keys-to-feedback 
 
Teams365 #1489- Four Ways to Plan and Set Goals. Watch it here - https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1489-teams365-video-another-way-to-plan-and-set-goals
 
What has been your favorite Teams365 blog in the last year?
 
What posts would you like to have brought to life through a weekly video?
 
Let us know your thoughts and comment below!
 
With thanks,
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 video focuses on mentoring. Later this week I will be talking with a group of HR professionals on collaboration and coaching skills which make mentoring work more effectively. Today's video brings to life Teams365 post #379 on what Makes Mentoring Work. Take a look at this week's Teams365 video.

Enjoy!

​Looking for resources to support you in your mentoring work? Check out the supports we offer through the Mentor RoadMap Programming.

This week's Teams365 video brings to life #Teams365 post on 12 Mentoring Questions. So many organizations are now encouraging mentoring - formally and informally. Key to making this work, is having a great conversation. Not every mentor or protege is comfortable in starting that conversation.

I hope today's post will inspire some new ideas and flow of conversation for you!

For more resources around mentoring, please check out my work through MentorRoadmap.com

For the last two Fridays I have included It's Friday and time for another #FlashbackFriday. Recently I have been receiving a lot of questions around setting up a mentoring program, and what typical mentor conversation sound like. As such, I thought it would be useful to take us back to #Teams365 #582: Mentoring: A Dozen Questions.

Whether you are creating a formal or informal program, mentoring can be a valuable, and lower cost, development approach for your team, your staff and/or your volunteers.

While every mentoring relationship is different questions usually get the conversation started. Here are a dozen questions you as a mentor and protege may want to use as a conversation starter during your conversations

1. Tell me about a time when you learned the most?
2. What do you see as the most important skills for (insert job title)?
3. What are the activities I can undertake to learn skills in x?
4. What has been your biggest learning throughout your career
5. What do you see as new trends for our work/organization on the horizon?
6. How do you navigate work-life issues?
7. What advice would you provide about projects? On-boarding? Getting up to speed? Making new connections? Keeping stakeholders engaged (definitely not be asked in one breath!)
8. In order to make the move from job A to job B what do you see as needed?
9. What do you do to keep abreast of professional development/trends?
10.   Tell me what you think is important with....
11. What's your most valuable lesson learned?
12.  Now that you know me, what's the one piece of advice you would offer me....

I hope that you will consider incorporating these questions in your upcoming mentoring conversations.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

This week's Teams365 video covers the topic of mentoring, an essential area for leaders at all levels. If you have not been mentored before, this short 1 minute video brings to life Teams365 post #187 - Five Reasons Why Mentoring is Important.  Enjoy!

Later today I'm speaking at our annual national HR conference here in Toronto on Five Core Essentials for Virtual Team Leadership Development. Part of what I will be talking about is the important role of mentors in developing virtual team leadership.

In his HBR article “Getting Virtual Teams Right”  in late 2014, Keith Ferrazzi mentions the case of an engineering firm which found that a significant factor in exceptional virtual team leadership was past experience. Given the complexities many team leaders face, those who have walked in our shoes before can provide valuable insights. While each one of our experiences as virtual team leaders will be different, the role of mentoring in virtual team leadership development is often under-leveraged.

Here are several items to consider if you are integrating a mentoring component within your virtual team leadership development initiatives:

1. Identify potential mentors who bring past experience and would like to share their learning/experience with others;
2. Consider how you want to pair people – is it on regional experience, programmatic experience, role similarity? You may also want to consider the value in matching people cross-functionally.
3. Provide a frame or broad structure. Formal mentoring programs usually have a start and end point. Will the support run over a 6 month period, 9 month period, other? Consider what will work best in your context?
4. What supports would be useful to provide mentors and their protégés/mentees (the people being mentored)? In the mentoring training and program development work I undertake we can provide training and also a toolkit of resources
5. What are common theme areas mentors and protégés may have as a back up? This could include discussion around work-life issues, virtual team support, virtual team development, addressing tricky issues, different platforms you use for connection etc. Make a list of the different focus areas which would be useful.

What is going to be important for you to note about mentoring and supporting your virtual team leaders? What best practices have you evolved in your organization?

Join me with the hashtag #letstalkvirtual a hashtag I am using for my forthcoming book on Effective Virtual Conversations. I'll be using this hashtag on posts related to more effective virtual conversations as well as virtual team development and virtual team leadership.

Have a great Wednesday,
Jennifer