Teams365 Blog - POTENTIALS REALIZED

TEAMS365 #2287 – Journaling Prompt 93

4/4/2020

Recent weeks have found a majority of the population in one place – their homes. For most it’s been a renaissance of found time to get things done that we haven’t done around the house for a while – get things fixed/in order, catching up on book reading, spending time connecting with friends we have not talked to in a while.

I’ve been using what extra time I have to continue learning. No surprize as “LEARNER” is one of my strengths. It was my ongoing learning as a young leader in South America that anchored me in earlier days when the context I operated within was turbulent. Today, I have found solace again in the simple art of learning. Of reading. Of hearing someone else speak.

From podcasts to on-demand courses, learning can take many forms. I can see by the metrics that our Remote Pathways podcast downloads have gone up. I can see that web visits are up. I can see that more people are completing on-demand courses over at the Learning Lab and Design Studio as well as over at the Teams365 portal.

This week’s prompt is “I want to learn about….”. What do you want to learn about? What is important to explore right now?

I hope you will enjoy this week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt!

Have a great Saturday,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

Get your Q2 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, or join me for the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming virtual programs on our calendar

TEAMS365 #2279 – Flashback Friday: Teams365 #1743

3/27/2020

This Friday I am reaching back to a 2018 post – Teams365 #1743 which includes different ways to be building out connection as a virtual team. For some teams today, the stakes are high in terms of keeping things going.

Here are some ideas to keep your team moving:

#TEAMS365 #1743 Creating Connection and Building Community - Virtually

In today’s business context, the ability to build strong relationships with our team, and our other stakeholders is critical.

A starting point to create connection and build community is to find common connection points. Whether finding common ground by discussing the shared results you have OR starting with finding a personal connection, building community is critical for information sharing, knowledge expansion and innovation. Most professionals don’t operate in silos, yet, when they are working remote or virtually, it’s common to feel “alone”, or operating in a vacuum. The ability to connect with others and build strong virtual relationships and networks is a core skill area for virtual professionals.

How do we go about creating connection and building community virtually?

Six areas to consider:

1. Find points of common connection – what is the common ground and purpose you have in your relationship?

2. What is critical for success for your work together? Discuss what is important from each perspective in terms of success. Note what is similar and different.

3. Understand how people prefer to communicate – Big picture? Details? Frequent updates or summary journals? Direct? Indirect?

4. On a macro-level, who is important for you to build relationships with? How do you do this? Is it by joining LinkedIn Groups? Connecting on other social networks? As you look to these larger communities, what are the core themes/areas people are exploring? What are the trends? What are the virtual meeting places?

5. Be clear on what you are after and what you are asking to connect around. Like any networking and community building it can be important to be clear and focused on WHY you are doing it. What is your end goal? Intention?

6. Create parameters around HOW you are going to do it is also important – Before it becomes an all-consuming activity, are you going to spend 10-15 minutes a day connecting on social media? Are you going to dedicate one-hour a month to reaching out and participating in a virtual community event? What’s going to avoid scope creep around time spent?

Best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2277 – Projects to Keep Us Moving in the Remote Space

3/25/2020

Today’s blog post is all about projects to keep us moving in the remote space. What are the projects you want to work on in your space? What’s going to help you keep focused and motivated? What are those projects which you have always wanted to work on?

Beyond the immediate need, what else is important for you to be focusing on?

Depending on your work, you might consider:

Catching up with colleagues and taking time to reach out for a virtual conversation/1-1
Updating records and projects
Clearing out items which no longer serve a purpose
Revisiting your vision – what’s important right now? What is important to keep an eye on in the big picture?
Spending time focusing on what is important and connected to your vision
Reviewing the focus of work and impacts you have had
Catching up on paperwork/administrative tasks
Getting your finances in order
Taking time to ensure that you are focusing on family projects and routines
Carving out time to get through the pile of books/podcasts/blogs you have said you always wanted to focus on
Starting a memoir

What are the projects which are going to fill you up? What are the projects that are going to help you focus in on what’s important for you right now?

Enjoy your projects!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2276 – Teams in the Remote Space

3/24/2020

In this month’s Effective Virtual Conversations newsletter, I shared an excerpt from an e-book I created a year or two ago on virtual and remote teams. I wanted to share this excerpt with you here as well, knowing that many professionals today have needed to shift their conversations to the remote space.

In the remote world of work, many things get magnified as our touchpoints before less frequent. We are framed by the screen.

What do you notice about your team and their focus?

When making the transition over to the remote space, it’s important to go back to the basics around team work and our team culture – Who are we? How do we do things? What’s important to us?

Providing the team with time to connect and share what they are working on is also an important part of the team process.

Don’t forget to go back to the foundations of effective teamwork, commonly known as the Six Factors. Here’s how I’ve described them before in Teams365 1920:

“One of the frameworks I continue to share with teams is what I call the Six Factors of High Performing Teams. These are six things that teams need in order to excel. The ingredients come from the research of professionals including: Katzenbach and Smith (The Wisdom of Teams), Hackman and Wageman (A Theory of Team Coaching) and others.

As you step into the new month, as a team you’ll take the pulse of where you are on a scale of 1- 10 in each of these six areas:

1. Shared purpose or mission (Your WHY)
What is your purpose? Your mission? Why do you exist? Does everyone hold the same understanding? What does this mean practically for your work? What priorities does your purpose or mission naturally create?

2. Shared behavioral norms
How do you do things? What is acceptable and unacceptable on the team? What behaviors and habits exist? Which ones are supportive of exceptional performance? Which ones aren't?

3. Shared commitment
What are team members committed to? What will you get done, no matter what? Is there anything that needs to be dropped off the list?

4. Shared performance goals
What are key goals for the team this year? What are key individual goals? How do your goals align? Overlap? What does success look like for each member? For the entire team? Does everyone have an understanding of the key goals of others on the team and how they feed into them?

5. Shared team practices
Teams that work together effectively share common practices such as a Monday morning huddle, a Thursday night out or some other regular event. What practices support your relationships?

6. Clear Roles
How do our roles overlap, align and connect? What changes, if any, are needed this year around your roles giving your priorities?”
A quick activity to undertake together is to have some discussion around how you are doing in each of these areas this week, especially if you are now operating in the remote space."

Check out the many posts I’ve written on remote teamwork including Teams365 #2130 – Remote Team Toolbox.

Best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2275 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip #137 – Communication

3/23/2020

Clear, and effective, communication is at the heart of any great virtual work. Whether we are communicating with our colleagues, our boss or stakeholders/customers, we want to be sure that we are clearly communicating what’s important.

In the remote and virtual space, communication takes many forms – from instant messages, to texts, to email. In these instances, we lose a lot of the tone that helps us pick up on cues about communication. Phone is also another important channel not to forget, as it does provide for the layer of TONE to be heard.

The best channel to incorporate for your work may be streaming – whether you come together on a Zoom call or a Skype call. This can provide the rich, visual cues that help us get a total picture of the person we are speaking with.

Effective virtual communication also involves another layer of effectiveness and that includes checking in that our message has been received as it was intended. What are you noticing about how your messages are being understood? Today’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip is about COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE to reflect that important messages will need to be reinforced in different ways. If there is something important which needs to be shared, how do we ensure that we speak it, reinforce it with a written message, and maybe reach out for a one-on-one conversation?

Another channel available to us is also using images to anchor in the ideas we want to communicate. What are the icons and images which will support the conversation? What can you do to support the reinforcement of the messages you want to share?

As you think about your conversations this week, what’s important to reinforce?

Enjoy your conversations!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2274 – Weekly Review

3/22/2020

Welcome back to Sunday’s post, taking a look back at this week’s Teams365 posts.

What’s going to provide you with focus and/or a break this weekend?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2272 – Flashback Friday: Plan A Virtual Co-Working Session #1729

3/20/2020

Given that a number of professionals are needing to move to the remote space I thought that it would be appropriate to return back to past post on planning for a virtual co-working session. Remote work can feel isolating, so what if you met up for a block of remote work together?

Here’s what I shared last year in a post around Planning a Virtual Co-working session:

From leaders who manage teams which work remote most of the month, to project teams which span the globe, from remotepreneurs leading virtual businesses, remote work is on the rise.

We’ll be following many of these trends and taking a deeper dive into the adventures of the Digital Dozen™, twelve different types of remote professionals. I hope that you’ll join us and will follow along at the new website here.

With so many professionals jumping into the remote workspace, I am hoping that the years of writing on remote work, and virtual teams here at the Teams365 blog will be of service.

With that in mind, I wanted to highlight an earlier blog post - Teams365 #1729: Plan a Virtual Co-working Session

As we move into fall, it can be very useful for teams to continue to put attention around getting things done WHILE connecting. A favorite activity I continue to facilitate is GET IT DONE afternoons, which really become Virtual Co-Working Sessions. They are a derivative of the virtual retreats I have been offering for teams, business owners and leaders since 2007.

Virtual co-working sessions may range from one-hour sprints, to four-hour blocks, to full day sessions.

Three considerations to making a virtual co-working session work include the following:

1. A platform where you can all meet, see each other and converse for periods of time.

Streaming is often best; however, others may appreciate the ability to take their work on the road and call in at time.

2. Focus – collectively and individually. Consider these questions:

What’s bringing you together today?
What’s the focus – is it to do something collectively or individually?
What outcomes do you want?
How do you want to break it down – meeting every hour for check-ins? Meeting more frequently?

3. Scheduled Checkpoints

A way to share and keep the momentum going throughout the day. I have found that virtual group and team sessions have been the seeds for some amazing new ideas and cross-pollination. Be sure to build in blocks where people are not only checking in around what they are doing, but also consider the value of building in some time for sharing of learning or insights.

Looking for inspiration on what you might do in a virtual co-working session? Consider these ideas – they are all real programs I have facilitated over the years:

One-hour virtual sprints for planning on the team or individual level
30-minute brainstorming/innovation sessions geared to create new product and or service ideas
Four-hour GET IT DONE sessions where groups of solopreneurs connect virtually to take focused action once a month on things on their list. Check-ins are once an hour.
Four to eight-hour Virtual Retreats, where each hour has a dedicated focus and theme to explore and/take action on. For example, an hour dedicated to creating a business plan, an hour to marketing approaches, an hour for project work).

Looking for a facilitator to host your next virtual co-working session? Contact me to learn more about this service I offer.

What could a co-working event look like for you?

Enjoy!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2270 – Strengths and Remote Work

3/18/2020

Earlier this month at the Remote Pathways podcast which I host, we released Episode 8 which focuses on Strengths and Remote Work. We were joined by Coach Jennifer Grote as a special guest. You can listen into it here.

Strengths often play a key role in helping professional excel, particularly in the remote space when we are operating in isolation.

When’s the last time you explored your strengths?

Research around strengths has found that individuals and teams that are able to lead more by strengths, are:

6x more engaged
3x more likely to report having excellent quality of life
8.9% greater profitability
Teams which focus on strengths have 12.5% greater productivity

(Gallup Strengths Center)

Today’s invitation is for you to explore how strengths shape your work.

Questions to consider:

What are your strengths?
What do you do to magnify them?
What happens when they are not magnified?

Enjoy exploring your strengths!
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2269 – Remote Work White Paper Now Available to Help You Get Up To Speed Quickly

3/17/2020

As many of you know, remote work has been the context of my professional life for the last thirty years, even before the Internet. Throughout the last three decades I’ve seen, and supported, thousands of professionals and teams in making the shift to remote work. With this in mind, I created a new whitepaper called the Remote Working Whitepaper – When You Need To Get Up To Speed Quickly.

Little did I know a few weeks ago when I finished writing this, and actually scheduled the post, that we'd be in a moment like this, where people all over the world are having to work remote.

It’s a very practical guide to support you and other team members in getting moving effectively in the remote space. The Guide covers these sections:

Context and Benefits of Remote Work
Pitfalls to Remote Work
Remote, Virtual or Mobile?
Who’s working in the remote space? The Digital Dozen
What’s different in the remote space?
7 Remote Work Enablers
What’s needed for success in the remote space?
Making the Shift To Working Remote
Making Remote Work, Work for You
What Organizations Can Do to Support the Shift To Remote Work
Five Digital Tools for Remote Workers
Core Skills for Any Remote Worker
In the Spotlight: Communication In the Remote Space
Remote Work Myths

Teams and individual remote workers like solopreneurs will find the white paper of interest.

Pick up a copy here.

Many past organizational clients have been reaching out to me in the last few days looking for support around their shift to remote work.
Different supports we offer for remote work includes:

Virtual Team Sessions
Virtual Planning sessions
Virtual Strategic Planning Sessions for organizations
Virtual facilitation skills training - gain skills in leading virtual conversations
Leading virtual sessions for their organizations and teams to help with the transition to working remote.

If I, or my company, can be of service to you at this time, please reach out and contact me - phone # is below or please reach out by email. Don't feel like you need to go it alone.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!

TEAMS365 #2268 – Effective Virtual Conversations 136 – Boundaries: When is Off, Really Off?

3/16/2020

One of the remote working myths is that “We are always on”. When we are part of a global team you might think that you need to be on all the time in order to reply. While this can be a short-term strategy, over time it will lead to burnout and other productivity lowering events.

Today’s question gets you as a team thinking about, and in dialogue around the question for the remote working space “When is off, really off?”.

As I have asked in other Teams365 posts, are there core hours of work when people are expected to be on?

What happens when people need to turn off?

What is expected in terms of response time?

If someone is off, how do they signal this?

What communication channels do you have to ensure that people know when people are off, and when they are on?

What do team members understand about workflow and prioritization so they can plan more effectively or workflow and time?

Issues which seem small in the face-to-face context can get magnified easily in the remote space. What’s important to note?

Best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders | Remote Pathways Podcast
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Everything DiSC
Phone (416)996-8326

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.
Contact us to discuss how we can support you and your teams and organization with remote work.
Check out upcoming programs on our calendar!