Teams365 Blog - POTENTIALS REALIZED

#teams365 #3073 Weekly Journaling Prompt – Where can you leverage your strengths more?

6/4/2022

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized |Reconnecting Workspaces | Group Coaching Essentials
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats
Follow us on Instagram @ReconnectingWorkspaces
Phone: (416)996-8326

Check out my TEDx talk

Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon.

#teams365 #3072 Flashback Friday – Working With Strengths – Part 1

6/3/2022

One of the most exciting parts of being on a team, and also one of the most challenging, is working with others who have a different style and different preferences. As someone who has led teams, or worked with teams, globally for the better part of the last three decades, I see this as one of the biggest challenges for teams.
Past posts here at the Teams365 blog
Key to becoming more effective in working with different styles in a team is:

#1 - Know Your Own Style and Strengths
We each have a unique style, and there are many great assessments on the market place today - MBTI, DisC, or the series of strengths based work through assessments such as VIA Character Strengths, or StrengthsFinder2.0.
What do you know about your style and strengths?
How does that help you? Hinder you in your work?

# 2 -Understand the limitations of your own style
With strengths come limitations, particularly if we are over utilizing or focusing on those. When others have to work with you as a details oriented person, what is that like? If you are constantly driving for results, how is that for others who have to work with you?

How does your strengths and styles help you? Help the team?
Where do your strengths and styles get in the way?

#3 - Understand what happens to your style when you are under pressure. Pressure in today's context is a daily occurrence for many. Whether it's working with limited resources or getting a project done in half the time it needs, pressure is constant. What typically happens when we are under pressure - time, resource pressure or stress - is that o ur styles can get magnified. Our strengths become a blindspot. So, our attention to detail becomes over magnified, or our penchant for strategy becomes over utilized without a focus on the practicality of what can, and needs to get one.

What happens to your style, when you are under pressure?

The focus on ourselves is one part of the equation. The other part is to explore what happens across the team and how strengths and styles overlap and connect. There may also be gaps.

Have you as a team created space to talk about strengths/styles?
Where are you aligned?
Where are you in contradiction or opposition to each other?
What gaps exist?

Finally, with these ideas in mind, we also need to think about how we "dial up" and "dial down" our strengths. When do they become over magnified? When are they not enough? When do we become entrenched with them?

I hope that this post sparks some conversation for you as a team around your unique styles and how that is supporting or hindering you this quarter. For those interested in learning more about how I could support you and your team in this discussion, please reach out and set up a phone call.

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized |Reconnecting Workspaces | Group Coaching Essentials
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats
Follow us on Instagram @ReconnectingWorkspaces
Phone: (416)996-8326

Check out my TEDx talk

Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon.

#teams365 #3066 Weekly Journaling Prompt: Strengths and Activation

5/28/2022

“Talent (a natural way of thinking, feeling, or behaving) × Investment (time spent practicing, developing your skills, and building your knowledge base) = Strength (the ability to consistently provide near-perfect performance)” – Tom Rath, StrengthsFinder
Over the last few weeks we’ve been exploring strengths. What’s important to note about these or you?
This week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt is getting you to think about your strengths. It’s all about the question – Where can I activate my strengths more?
The word activate is a power word. Think about the 1980s characters the Wonder Twins who always said “Wonder Twin Powers, Activate”.
Questions to consider:
What can you be doing to use your strengths more?
How they can be used?
When you think about the Talent x Investment = Strengths, what’s important?
Enjoy your reflections!

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized |Reconnecting Workspaces | Group Coaching Essentials
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats
Follow us on Instagram @ReconnectingWorkspaces
Phone: (416)996-8326

Check out my TEDx talk

Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon.

#teams365 #3063 Key Questions for Activating Strengths

5/25/2022

Questions form the backbone to a great conversation and today we’re exploring six areas for conversations around S. Take a look at this :
We are at S today in the 6 #Leadership Questions of the Day and S brings us to key leadership and team topics such as strengths, styles, struggle, What is SAID and NOT SAID, stablity and success.

What does success look like? is one of the most citical questions leaders and team members alike can be asking all the time. Without having a clear vision and alignment around what success looks like, we can find that our efforts become very diffuse. This week, try asking the question, "What does success look like?" more often and see what the impact is. A tweak on this is to also notice that the success factors will look different for different team members and stakeholders so how do you create that shared vision of success.

Strengths - I've written quite a bit on the importance of taking a strengths based approach in our work with teams. Not only does it have an impact on engagement but also motivation and satisfaction of our team members.
Questions to consider: What strengths does each team member bring? What's aligned? What's missing across the team.
Click here to read more about strengths from past posts here at the Teams365 blog.

Styles - Closely related to helping teams excel by knowing their unique and collective strengths is learning more about individual working styles. Whether you opt to use an assessment like MBTI or DiSC, styles infuse how we communicate, work and relate with each other. Providing teams with the opportunity to step back and consider their styles can be an important and long term investment in helping them work more effectively across differences.
What do you notice abotu different working style sand preferences. As you consider your team, what do they need?

Stability and Struggle - Throughout the lifecycle of a team we may move through nanoseconds of stability and also moments of struggle. What do you notice, and what have you learned in these moments?

What is SAID and NOT SAID - Teams often struggle with not naming the "Elephant" in the room. What's been said and NOT said within the team right now. What questions do you want to be asking, or taking the team to?

What’s important to note?

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized |Reconnecting Workspaces | Group Coaching Essentials
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats
Follow us on Instagram @ReconnectingWorkspaces
Phone: (416)996-8326

Check out my TEDx talk

Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon.

#teams365 #3058 Flashback Friday: Video – Working With Strengths with Your Team

5/20/2022

I thought it would be interesting today to take a look back at a short 5 minute video which was part of the A-Z of Team Development series from 2017. It actually hasn’t dated so enjoy today’s flashback and video –

We are at S in our A-Z journey of different team development activities. S brings us to strengths. There is a huge business case for creating environments where strengths are leveraged within teams. From my many years as a team developer I have found that having dialogue and doing work around helping team members understand their unique contributions and strengths can go a long way. It can help a team understand where their collective strengths are as well as gaps. It can also help a team understand where they may be overcompensating or overfocusing because of their natural abilities.

There are many great resources to look at Strengths including StrengthsFinder 2.0, as well as the VIA Strengths Survey which focuses more on Signature Strengths.

Listen in as I share a little more about strengths in this short 5 minute video:

What can you do to focus more on strengths?

Enjoy the conversation,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized |Reconnecting Workspaces | Group Coaching Essentials
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats
Follow us on Instagram @ReconnectingWorkspaces
Phone: (416)996-8326

Check out my TEDx talk

Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon.

#teams365 #3054 Strengths in Focus

5/16/2022

“Focusing on strengths is the surest way to greater job satisfaction,
team performance and organizational excellence.”
– Marcus Buckingham

For the last few weeks we have been focusing on coaching and mentoring, both modalities offering an opportunity for leading with a strengths-based approach.

The empirical research around strengths is quite compelling. In times of disruption, change and transition, strengths are an important element to lean into.
Gallup has undertaken decades of research on the topic of strengths and has found that individuals and teams that are able to lead more by strengths, are:
•       6x more engaged
•       3 x more likely to report having excellent quality of life
•       8.9% more profitable
Also, teams which focus on strengths have 12.5% greater productivity
(Gallup Strengths Center)

During transition, change and disruption, collaboration becomes an even more important element to activate. Whether we are part of a partnership, or a team, it is important for explore what each person brings, and how these uniquely fit together.

What are you doing to explore strengths?

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized |Reconnecting Workspaces | Group Coaching Essentials
Team and Leadership Development | Coaching | Retreats
Follow us on Instagram @ReconnectingWorkspaces
Phone: (416)996-8326

Check out my TEDx talk

Looking to bring your workplaces back together, whether you are remote, hybrid, or face-to-face? Pick up a copy of my new book, Reconnecting Workspaces, at Amazon.

TEAMS365 #2468 - Flashback Friday - #1976 - Teamwork in Uncertainty - Synergy

10/2/2020

Many teams globally are needing to continue to redefine how they operate, and one thing is clear; collaboration is essential. Part of collaboration is learning how to synergize. How to blend skills and fuse them together. How to break things down into different packets and weave them together.

This week, I wanted to reach back to a post I originally shared in 2019 – Teamwork in Uncertainty – Synergy. Let’s take a look at what I wrote then:

When situations are complex and uncertain, it may be difficult to bring all the skills required for success. Therefore, being able to focus in on leveraging the skills that are available to you as a group or team can help maximize your skill base as well as what is available to you.

As I wrote in yesterdays’ post, knowing our strengths is important on the individual and team levels.

In synergy, we are looking at how 1+1 equals more than 2.

If you have completed some strengths-based work, some additional questions to explore as a team are:

What the core strengths we bring as a collective?
What can we harness as a team?
Where might we be over-developed?
What is missing?
Where are the gaps?
When we think about current projects what strengths would benefit them?
Who is best suited to support which project?
What else is important to note?

In situations of uncertainty, it can be important to consider risk, and also contingencies. Given that contexts may be changing rapidly leading from strengths allows us to do things quicker and with less energy expended, freeing up focus and energy for other items.

What is important to note around synergy?

All the best,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

Join us September 17th for the one-day Stand Out Virtually! STtdio Day Masterclass - Learn more about creating exceptional virtual presentations, meetings and programs, and leave the day with your next one sketched out!

TEAMS365 #2434 – Weekly Journaling Prompt 114

8/29/2020

Welcome back to another Saturday Weekly Journaling Prompt. This week’s WJP is number 114 in the series. It asks the question:

What are you truly excited about right now?

When we are able to tap into the river of excitement that can course through our body, and soul, it’s likely that we are tapping into that magical place called FLOW. At moments of flow, time takes on new meaning. Things may feel magical. And it’s usually a signal that we are doing the things we are MEANT to.

What are you noticing about FLOW moments?

What are you noticing about what you are truly excited about?

What do you need to say YES to in order to cultivate more of that?

What do you need to say NO to in order to create more space for the flow?

As we wrap up today’s post, here’s a quote about FLOW from the author himself:
“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Reading this book as a young university student in the early 1990s has been transformational in the work I do and in the way I structure my time. What’s going to support you with flow?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAMS365 #2413 – Weekly Journaling Prompt 111

8/8/2020

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do”. -- Leonardo da Vinci

This week’s Weekly Journaling Prompt gets you to think about the question “It’s easy for me to….”. What is easy for you to do?

Or perhaps it is a different question. Consider these “It’s easy for me to…”..BE….THINK…Consider…DREAM…SPEAK….GROW

Enjoy your reflection this week – have a great Saturday!

With best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

TEAM365 #2382 – Remote Team Builders – Nine Areas Team Members Can Benefit From

7/8/2020

Remote teamwork is here to stay for a little longer in many organizations. While team development may not be the first thing on everyone’s mind, it’s likely that teams will require some attention in the upcoming months. Research continues to indicate that teams of all kinds need both a focus on results as well as relationships.

Several months ago, in early March, before the pandemic hit North America, I released a Remote Working Whitepaper. In it, I explored 7 Different types of Remote Enablers, things that help us do better work in the remote space. While many have become experts in remote work in recent months, this has been the landscape I’ve led teams, programs and businesses in for almost 30 years.

A few weeks ago, I launched a new on-demand program entitled “Remote Team Builders” which covers a couple of activities in eight different areas which remote teams can benefit from. The areas I cover in the nine-part program are:

Module 1 – Remote Team Enablers
What helps remote teams thrive? I dig more deeply into what I call the 7 Cs or the Remote Team Enablers.

Module 2 – Openers for Remote Team Building – Two Activities
We remember the start and end of things. Having a strong start to a virtual meeting is key, signalling that this is not just going to be “Any call”…

Module 3 – Creating Connection in Remote Teams
What can you do to quickly connect remote teams? Check out these two activities and think about others you might have at your disposal.

Module 4 – Working with Goals – 2 Frameworks
Goals are key to alignment in the remote space. Listen and watch the short video I share about creating SMART-E Goals.

Module 5 – Strengths and Remote Teams – 3 Activities
What are the strengths your team members bring to the table? How are you harnessing these? What blind spots might they be creating?
Don’t know what yours are and want to learn more? Contact me to discs a Remote Team Day and/or some 1-1- coaching for yourself. You can reach out by phone to 416-996-8326

Module 6 – Collaboration in the Remote Space – 2 Exercises
Collaboration is key in the remote workspace. What are some of the essential ingredients for collaboration? Check this out.

Module 7 – Styles – 2 Areas to Explore
What are the different preferences of those on the tam? What do you know about how others like to communicate, make decisions, and what they prioritize? Being clear on this is critical.

Module 8 – Closers in the Remote Space – 2 Exercises
What are the different was you want to create a solid ending to a call? What will support ACTION and RETENTION after the call? Check out these two closers in the remote space.

Module 9 – Now What? Putting This into Practice in Your Work!
What are the areas your teams might benefit from? If you’d like to explore these eight areas more in depth, check out the Remote Team Builders on-demand course. It’s normally $129 US and save $32 by using the code TEAMS365 until July 15th.

Enjoy the focus!

With best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized | Coaching Team Leaders
Coaching Skills Training | Leadership Development | Teamwork
Growing Team Leaders, One Conversation at a Time™ in the Remote Space
Contact us to discuss leadership, coaching or performance needs for your and your team
Phone: (416)996-8326

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