Teams365 Blog - Potentials Realized

#TEAMS365 #1802 – Team Building Tip 213

12/6/2018

As we wrap up the year, it’s likely that you may be moving into some of your last team meetings before the holidays.

This week’s Team Building Tip asks you to consider the question “Our greatest impact this year has been….”

Think about the impact you had. You might consider:

Projects
Impact on customers
Impact on internal stakeholders
Impact on team culture

As you discuss what impact you have had also consider writing it down and having it visible in a place you all can view – ie. Your Intranet, ScreenSaver, or on your project management software.

Best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton – Potentials Realized
Leadership - Teamwork - Business Success, with specialized supports for virtual and remote teams, and coaches
Follow along with the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series over at Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
Coming December 14, 2018 – PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner
Join us for a year-end virtual planning retreat!

#TEAMS365 #1794 -Bringing projects to a close

11/28/2018

At this time of year, the clock is ticking and it may now be GO Time to get projects across the finish line. Where there was once time and leeway, now things need to get done and completed. What is it going to take to get the project completed before the end of the year?

To bring the project across the finish line consider:

What is it going to take to bring this project to a successful close?
What resources are needed? Do we need to pull new resources?
Are there any lessons learned from other projects that we can incorporate?
Are there any specialized, or talented, human resources we can bring in at this time to move the project quicker? Are there experts or seasoned team members who can complete tasks more quickly than others?
What elements can be completed consecutively? We often think that tasks are sequential (i.e. this has to be done before that), when in fact, we might be able to complete some tasks consecutively.
What does complete look like? Think about quality and scope. Are we still within the original scope of the project, or has there been scope creep?
Do we want to reconfirm project requirements, checking for any assumptions which may not be correct?
What can we do to minimize distractions and focus on what is really important? Are there some tasks which need to be devolved from those on the project team so they can focus 100 % on the task at hand?
What does project close out look like?
How can we capture the learning so we don’t repeat these cycles next time?
What’s going to help your projects move to completion phase quickly?

Enjoy the conversation,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Effective Virtual Conversations | Coaching Team Leaders
Join Jennifer for a year-end virtual planning retreat in the PlanDoTrack Series!
Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
YouTube – Teams365 Leadership Channel
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#TEAMS365 #1793: 18 Questions for 2018 Year End One-on-Ones

11/27/2018

It’s that time where we start rolling into year end conversations, holding one on ones (coaching conversations) individually and with the team.
As we move into the end of the year, it is invaluable to schedule some one on one time with each team member. Today’s post includes a selection of 18 questions you might include in those conversations (pick and choose as appropriate). Great year end conversations help to create a pause to reflect achievements, synthesize learning and look ahead to the future.
You may want to incorporate these questions into your conversation:

What are the key achievements you have been most proud of this year?
What projects worked well?
Which projects didn’t go so well?
What was your learning there?
What connections/relationships have been most valuable this year?
Which relationships need attention next year?
What’s been your biggest learning this year? What experiences provided that?
What has worked well with the team this year? What hasn’t?
What feedback do you have for me as the leader? (What’s worked and what hasn’t)
What’s one suggestion for how we could do things differently as a team next year?

Looking ahead to next year:

What are you excited about?
What habits do you want to cultivate or lean into?
What do you want to do to keep growing your skills?
By December 31, 2019 what do you hope you will have achieved? OR by January 1, 2020, what do you hope you will have achieved? (Notice the impact of the difference one day makes! Yes, we are wrapping up a decade next year)
What are your top 3 priorities next year?
What feedback and support are you looking for?
What would be useful in terms of our 1-1 time?
What else is going to help you do your best work?

What else do you like to ask at this time of the year? Please let us know by sharing in the comments below.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Effective Virtual Conversations | Coaching Team Leaders
Join Jennifer for a year-end virtual planning retreat in the PlanDoTrack Series!
Instagram @CoachingBizBuilder
YouTube – Teams365 Leadership Channel
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#Teams365 #1787: 8 Questions to Reflect on Your Productivity

11/21/2018

As we continue along our journey of year end wind-down activities, it is time to take a check on productivity. What's working? What's not?

Productivity is not just about getting things done. It's also about getting things done consistently in a way that is renewing.

At this time of year, as part of your year end planning it can be useful to explore at an individual or collective team level the following questions:
1. What's helping me/us get results? (Get specific around this - what key activities or practices are helping?)
2. What's not helping me/us to get results?
3. Where is the bulk of your time being spent? If you are not yet tracking some of your key metrics and schedule, now is a great time to do so. It can be as simple as noting it in your calendar, or picking up a resource like my upcoming Plan.Do.Track workbook and planner.
4. What are noticing about key periods that are unproductive?
5. Where might you be spending too much time in meetings? What influence can you have on tightening up meeting results and focus OR exploring who needs to be at meetings?
6. What are you doing to renew?
7. From a scheduling perspective, are you building in enough blocks to get tasks completed right away before you have to switch your focus?
8. What other changes would you like to make to your schedule, to do more of what's working, and to do less of what's not?

I hope that these questions are useful as you go to focus on making the small changes in your schedule and work, which we know makes the big changes over time.

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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#TEAMS365 #1755 - From the Vault – Three past Sunday audios to check out

10/21/2018

Audio is making a big comeback in a lot of ways, given the popularity and presence of Google Home Minis, Alexa’s and other audio assistants in our kitchens, homes and cars.

Since the Team365 blog began back in 2014, I’ve dedicated Sunday as a day where I’ve been sharing either audios (what you’d find up to about 2016) or videos (most of the new Sunday posts from 2016 onwards).

Given that there’s some great content that’s still relevant (yes, even though the context is changing so much, things do remain the same!) which I thought would be useful to spotlight a couple of times a month in a From the Vault Series where I’ll reach back into our repository and share past posts.

Here are three audios from 2015 that I think you’ll like, aligned with this month’s topic of teamwork:

Ten Questions To Be Asking As A Team Leader (Teams365 #376 – 22 minutes)

Three Problem Solving Tools (Teams365 #488 – 9.5 minutes)

Hosting Effective Virtual Meetings (Teams365 #390 – 10.5 minutes)

What new audios would you like to see? I’ll be starting to schedule some of our November and December posts in the next few weeks so do let me know what content you’d like to see here at the Teams365 blog for the end of 2018 and start of 2019.

Looking forward to our 3:30 pm call!

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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#TEAMS365 #1747 – Weekend Journaling Prompt 19

10/13/2018

This week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt is a fun one. This week consider using “If I were to describe myself as a superpower, it would be….”

Everyone is unique, and being aware of what you are “GREAT” at, and what gives you a competitive edge is critical. With a quickly evolving business context, being able to articulate what values, skills and strengths you bring to the table, helps you, and helps others that you team with.
Here are a few prompting questions to help you think about your superpowers:

What are you great at?
What are your strengths?
As you look back to your accomplishments this year, what skills have you honed or developed?
How do others you work with describe your top 3-5 skills and strengths?
What is the “kryptonite” to your superpower (in other words, what has the potential to decimate it?)?

This is one of those weekly journaling prompts that may inspire you to draw or look for some inspiration visually or graphically.
Let us know by using the comments below what you see as your superpower.

Enjoy your weekend,
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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#TEAMS365 #1746 – Teamwork Questions - #FlashbackFriday

10/12/2018

Every Friday I take a look back at some of the varied posts related to our current monthly focus. This month, we are exploring teamwork skills.

As a starting point this week, I’m reaching back to 2015 for this post which included 6 questions to consider with your team: Read it here.

1. When are we at our best as a team?

2. What strengths can we leverage in our work and projects?

3. How do we have each others' backs?

4. How will we hold each other accountable for our results?

5. If we were to tweak/change one thing about how we work as a team that would be.....

6. I'm excited about _______ in the next few months.

Promoting regular, and quick discussion, across the team around questions such as these help with creating a common understanding and vision, as well as creating more alignment across teams. Alignment doesn’t mean that everyone is doing the same thing. Rather, it means that team members are able to understand how their work connects with others, and how they can lead from a common ground.

Books, and audio books, are always a great resource to learn more on the topic of teamwork, so I wanted to pull together several of the reading lists I’ve provided over the years.

Here are five books I shared around teamwork in December 2015 in Teams365 #715:

You might be interested in checking out:

Team Genius - Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone

Primal Teams - Jackie Baretta

The Silo Effect - Gillian Tett

Collaboration Begins with You - Be a Silo Buster - Ken Blanchard, Jane Ripley and Eunice Parisi-Carew. Check it out here.

Collaborative Intelligence - Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur. Check it out here.

As well as these a few days later in Teams365 #718:

Strengths Based Leadership = Tom Rath and Barry Conchie

Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams - Kimball Fisher and Maureen Fisher

Talk Like TED - Carmine Gallo

Visual Teams - David Sibbert

A couple of other books from 2017 and 2018 I have been enjoying myself and recommending to teams and others:

Amy Edmondson and Jean-Francois Harvey - Extreme Teams

Shane Snow - Dream Teams

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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#TEAMS365 #1744: Teamwork Skill 3 – Communication

10/10/2018

Communication is at the heart of a thriving team. Teams which excel are great at relationships and results.
In today’s team context, particularly when people are working remote and/or virtually, communication occurs through a wide variety of channels:

Email
Text
Instant Message
Phone
Streaming
Face to Face

When we are communicating across a team, it can be useful to consider:

1.What are my natural communication preferences? Am I a direct communicator? Quick? Slow? Detailed? Big picture?
2. What are the communication preferences of the person I am speaking with? Direct/Indirect? Quick? Slow? Detailed? Big picture?
3. What is the best channel for communication? Is it email, phone, face-to-face?
4. What are the key points I want to communicate? Focused communication is critical. What are the top 3-4 ideas you want to get across?
5. What follow up will be needed?

In communicating in a virtual team environment, we want to also focus on LISTENING and asking POWERFUL QUESTIONS. Be sure to focus on these skills as well. Check out past posts about Communication, Listening and Questioning.

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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#TEAMS365 #1732 - 20 Mentoring Questions

9/28/2018

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

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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326

#Teams365 #1727: 12 More Questions for Stepping Into Fall (Video)

9/23/2018

Many of you would have noticed Friday's video returning to the 2017 Fall Video where I share a number of questions geared to get you thinking about what you want to create in this season.

Earlier this week, I updated the list and shared it on another blog I write at. These questions are slightly different so I thought that it would be good to post them here in a new 2018 Fall Questions video.

As we step into fall 2018 this weekend, I hope that you will grab a pen and your journal and take stock for a few minutes.

If you have enjoyed this, and are on Instagram, do follow my 90 Days Plan.Do.Track series at my @CoachingBizBuilder Instagram feed. For the 90 days of fall I will be posing a new question related to business every day. You can follow here at @CoachingBizBuilder Instagram.

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 several books including the 2018 Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner & Effective Virtual Conversations (2017)
Email: info@potentialsrealized.com
(416)996-8326