This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip takes us into a core topic for virtual conversations – that of TRUST. Without Trust and Connection in a virtual conversation, it’s unlikely that people will engage. As I write in Effective Virtual Conversations, part of creating a more engaged conversation space is about building trust and connection.

Today’s post gets you to stop and consider these questions:

1. What is helping TRUST in your virtual relationships?
2. What is hindering TRUST in your virtual relationships?

Things may be further magnified in a virtual space given that we don’t see the “full picture”, only a small sliver of their world via the screen.

Some ways to boost trust in the virtual space might include:

• Taking time to share more about your work and how that relationship fits into it
• Making conversation touch points more frequent
• Including both formal and informal relationship building time
• Being intentional in creating agreements about how you will work together. This could include things like – how often will we communicate? What is the best way to communicate?
• Taking time to share more about yourselves (as appropriate)

Reducing Trust might include:

• Not following through
• Failing to provide appropriate information
• Not letting a partner know of something in a timely manner
• Not being clear in directions which leads to a faulty end result

 
What can build or erode trust with your partners?
 
Best wishes,
Jennifer

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.

​Today’s post focuses on tips for boosting collaboration in the virtual space:

1. Be proactive in terms of what relationships are important to build. Are you taking time for regular outreach with a purpose?
2. Be systematic in discussing key elements of collaboration – what is the end result you are aiming towards, what will success look like? Who is in charge of doing what? When will you meet to review how things are going and make adjustments?
3. Agree on regular feedback loops. Feedback can be a challenge when you don’t know each other too well. What are the touchpoints you are dedicating to feedback? Creating formalized quarterly or mid-point check-ins can be valuable to earmark. Take a look at some of the mid-point or evaluation questions I have pointed to in the past.
   
4. Be clear on what you are each bringing to the relationship. What are the things that are going to help your next collaboration thrive?

Best of luck!
Jennifer

Partnering in the virtual space is a key part of getting work done. We often don’t have the luxury of meeting people face-to-face and/or before our work together. Likewise, our contact points may be infrequent, or very short.
 
Think about current, or upcoming projects, and where you might need to partner in the virtual space.
 
As you step into new partnerships consider:
Why are you considering partnering in this project, rather than going it alone?
What’s important for you in terms of the outcome of this project?
What’s important for them?
What might they not know about your, or your work focus?
What’s important about your focus to communicate?
Where do your work/priorities overlap? Where are they not overlapping?
What assumptions might be made, or might need to be clarified?
What would happen if things aren’t successful?
What will happen if they are successful?
What else is important to note?
If this is a new partnership, what else can you leverage that you’ve learned from other projects or partners?
 
If you are interested in more posts on partnering, check out these posts I have written in the past:
 
Teams365 #1550 – FlashbackFriday – Collaboration – Partnering – Read it here – Link to https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1550-flashback-friday-collaboration-in-teams-partnerships-and-co-facilitation
 
Six Leadership Questions A Day – Collaboration – Teams365 #508. Read it here – link to https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-508-6-leadership-questions-a-day-collaboration-and-partnering
 
Teams365 #1152: Team Leader Audio – Five Ingredients for Successful Collaboration: https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1152-team-leader-audio-5-ingredients-for-successful-collaboration
 
Teams365 #904: Teamwork Fundamentals – Collaboration. Read it here - https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-904-teamwork-fundamentals-collaboration

​Best wishes,
Jennifer

Today's Flashback Friday post takes us back to a couple of different Teams365 posts - namely #1124 post on several questions to ask about collaboration - whether it's as a co-facilitator or within a team context

This winter I've had an increasing number of requests from teams, and for speaking services, around enhancing collaboration. Whether we are looking to work more effectively within our team, or outside of our teams, collaboration is a critical skillset.

As it relates to teams context, here's what I wrote in Teams365 #1124:
"In his book, Collaboration, Hansen cautions about collaborating in every instance. Consider the current opportunities for you to leverage collaboration and when it might be more appropriate for people to work on their own.

To make collaboration work most effectively consider:
What's the task at hand? What will success look like?
Are we all clear on the end result and what that looks like?
Are we all clear on roles and how they intersect?
Are we each in the right role, leveraging our talents and strengths?
How does my contribution feed into or impact others on the team?
What checkpoints do we have to come together and discuss progress?
What will we do if things go off-kilter?
What else do we need?"

One of the more specific areas of collaboration is in co-facilitation or partnering to lead virtual calls. This is an area I regularly work to support professionals in. Her'es what I wrote in Team365 #568 about Roles and Co-Facilitation, which requires a huge amount of seamless collaboration:
Even the most seasoned of us as virtual facilitators, myself included, need support to create masterful facilitated experiences in the virtual realm. This post explores several supporting roles which can make the difference between a good and a masterful facilitated experience.

When considering the roll-out of a virtual program you will want to keep in mind:
1 What are all the moving parts - lecture, interactivity, breakouts?
2. What technology issues might people experience?
3. And of course, what the platform is. A bridgeline alone is often not as complicated as say a webinar platform with screen sharing, polls and breakouts.

Depending on what you are using you may want to have a co-facilitator who can take the lead on certain facilitated sessions, or a producer who will look after the technology end such as getting people on board, and also moving people into breakout configurations.

Regardless of whether it is a co-facilitator or producer you will want to:
Consider which roles each one of you will play  throughout the session, and during different activities
Where are the major transition points where you may need to switch over control or presenter status - i.e. polls, breakouts?
What are the key points along the timeline you both need to be aware of - walk through the entire program and make sure you are both on the same page
What will you do if "technology" happens?
What are your requests of each other - for example, as a big picture person myself, I often ask my co-facilitator to help me keep an eye on the finer details such as numbers, details etc.
How will you have each other's back? Similar to what will you do if "technology" happens, this  is about considering how you will support each other.

For more questions to ask  yourself during co-facilitation, and how to prepare, please download this bonus digital chapter which accompanied my first book Effective Group Coaching on Co-facilitation. I hope that you enjoy it!"

What are the opportunities for enhanced collaboration in your team? What conversations are important to have BEFORE and DURING the work?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Today’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip #31 brings us to the topic of partnering. On page 384 of Effective Virtual Conversations I write:
“As virtual facilitators, we are partnering on a multitude of levels:
The first layer of partnering – collaboration and/or co-creation is with our clients
The next layer of partnering, which adds benefit, is with other professionals as a co-facilitator
The third layer is expanding the impact of collaboration through the development of the virtual leader, and creating a culture of virtual conversations.”

Masterful virtual events – webinars, conference calls and online learning rarely occur alone. They occur in partnership, and as my quote illustrates, most of us are working on multiple levels with partnering to make an exceptional conversation experience.  Who are you partnering with regularly?

Most of us are partnering with our clients every day. The more you can collaborate and co-create with your clients to shape the agenda, the approaches and style of the call, the more “on the mark” it is likely to be.

For larger events, and for moving to a platform of virtual calls, it’s likely that you are partnering regularly with a variety of people including other virtual facilitators, internal and external producers or people who can support you technically. Consider those you work with at this second level. What’s important to them? What do they need from you to create a successful call? What do you need from them? What requests do you want to make?

The third level of partnering is in service to building a whole culture of virtual work. Not every organization goes this route, but many do realize that with effective virtual conversations, we can change the way we communicate, making it faster, more efficient and more tailored. What is the culture you are building around virtual conversations? Are you building a network of virtual leaders? Consider what is going to make the conversations more effective and richer?

Consider at which levels of partnering you are currently working at? What are the levels at which you will be partnering in six months? One year? Three years?

Enjoy the start to your week,
Jennifer

Today's Effective Virtual Conversations tip #18 is about collaboration. As I write in Effective Virtual Conversations "Virtual Work is Grounded in Collaboration". We are constantly designing and redesigning our partnerships in the virtual space given that in each grouping, collaboration means, and looks a little different.

​Consider these two examples:

​1. A virtual team is tasked with exploring why turnover is so high in their program. There are team members across all five continents, and the Director is expecting a formal report by the end of the quarter. In addition to their membership in this special committee, the team members are also part of other matrix management structures. The "turnover" team is self-sufficient and needs to work through identifying what the six factors of high performing teams looks like for them (their common vision, roles, goals and how they are measured, team practices, etc)

​In the second example, two team members are working in the same geographic area, while other team members are based several time zones away. The two team members have started to come together physically to link into the team meetings as they find it's also a good way to compare notes about their projects and also share resources. This partnership has incorporated some of the best practices of collaboration as they do realize that their "sum is greater than their parts". 


​What are your best practices of collaboration?

​In the virtual space we want to make sure we are taking time to create intentional partnerships, we are identifying common ground, and we are naming our assumptions and looking to work across differences. For those that have a copy of my book - Effective Virtual Conversations - check out Chapter 12 - Partnering, Co-Facilitation and Creating a Culture of Effective Virtual Conversation.

​As I write in the book, some of the skills we leverage are trust, candor, connection, flexibility/adaptability, self-awareness, working across differences, relationship development, along with others.

What makes collaboration work for you?

​Have a great start to you week,
​Jennifer