​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

Last month I took at look at core teamwork skills, a critical area for success in any team. At this stage of the year, your budget allocation may still be available. With that in mind, I wanted to take us back to what I wrote only five weeks ago about key themes and ideas for your own team development. Here’s what I wrote in Teams365 1736.
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“This month we are going to focus on teamwork skills. Whether you work as an intact team, a project team or a remote team, teamwork skills are cross-cutting and help professionals at all stages of their careers do better work.
The context of teamwork has changed. In the past, teams were together for longer windows, with much more stability. Today most teams experience ongoing change and team composition. Researcher Amy Edmonston terms this “Teaming” and writes, “actively building and developing teams even as a project is in process, while realizing that a team's composition may change at any given moment.” (Teaming, Edmonston 2013)
She flags four behaviors as essential in the teaming context:

• Speaking Up
• Collaboration
• Experimentation
• Reflection

What are you doing to foster these areas?
The teamwork skills we are going to explore this month are:

• Trust
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Working Across Differences
• Relationship Management
• Conflict Management
• Emotional Intelligence
• Change Management
• Influence

For each of the areas we’ll explore what the skill is about, why it’s important. What some of the differences are in the different types of teams today. I’ll also point you back to some of the many posts I’ve already written on these topics.”
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If you weren’t with us last month, I hope you’ll  take some time this weekend to look at some of the blog posts I shared. You may also want to build in time to think about WHAT SKILLS your team could benefit from more resources, conversation and training around.
 
Enjoy your weekend,
Jennifer

This week’s Team Building Tip brings us to #209 of the series. Aligned with our shift to a focus on year-end, this week’s question to surface with the team is the question:
What needs to get completed by year end?
As you think about year end, here are 14 common year-end activities you will want to budget time and space for:

1. Reporting
2. Financials
3. Projects
4. Planning for new projects
5. Meeting with stakeholders (internal and external)
6. Communication planning for next year
7. Team development
8. Performance Reviews
9. Coaching Conversations
10. Learning for 2018
11. Learning for 2019 (individual and team level)
12. Peer Meetings
13. Meeting with our bosses
14. Meeting with other key internal partners

What else would you add to the list?
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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

What team practices are supporting relationships?
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From the realm of high performance we know that teams which excel have strong relationships. Part of this is making sure we have strong team practices – that could include Monday morning meetings, a mini-team event each month, a Thursday night social or a quarterly team development activity.

Consider your team right now and think about what is needed on the part of the team. What will help the team connect, have fun and get to know each other? Having fun as a team is important as it can help people relax and bring themselves more naturally into their work. If they are not able to bring their natural self to the workplace, disconnect may happen between how they work at home and how they work at work.

Here are seven different ways teams may be connecting with each other:

1. Daily huddles or quick status meetings (10-15 minutes) to keep projects on task.
2. Monday morning meetings – a meeting at the start of the week can support focus and alignment for the team, assisting with priorities and information sharing. Monday meetings may also flag issues that need to be addressed but haven’t been noted before.
3. Monthly project assessments – some teams may do a short monthly team meeting, highlighting key projects which need attention and/or doing a review. Some of the more common project questions are included under the next category of team debrief.
4. Team debriefs post major project (or mid-term). These may get the team to identify lessons learned, what’s working, what’s not and suggestions for the future.
5. A weekly or monthly social event around town. PingPong and darts are favorite options. Escape rooms and/or axe throwing are for teams who are more edgy (note: these options may not be applicable or appropriate for every team and their culture!).
6. Quarterly Booster Shots – Dedicating half a day or a full day to team development and/or learning. It could be undertaking an assessment together such as the Everything DiSC, or StrengthsFinder.
7. Key to making these valuable team practices, teams will want to consider the purpose and efficiency of each approach. Just because you do it, doesn’t mean it’s going well.
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What is the team finding valuable? What needs a change?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

It is Monday and time for Effective Virtual Conversations Tip #65. We are on part two of the three part core essentials for virtual team success, which comes from page 343 of my book, Effective Virtual Conversations.

With virtual teams becoming more the norm, becoming more proficient at the support of a diverse team is critical. Team leaders, and also team members will want to think about the following as it relates to support for each team member.

What is the preference of each team member in these different areas:

• Email, text, phone call, in person communication
• Short and to the point, or long and conversational?
• Big picture thinker or small-details valued?

Also consider:

• What support needs do they have already from the local environment?
• What unique to their context?
• What time of day is going to work best? (especially if you are managing a global team)
• What supports do they need from you? Others?

As you review the posts this month around teamwork, consider how you can be building supports ACROSS the team, from peer to peer. These peer connections are invaluable, formally and informally with virtual and remote working situations.

With best wishes,
Jennifer

In the first FlashbackFriday of the month I wanted to take you to back to the month of April 2017 when I last did a series on teamwork skills. I hope that you will check out the posts from that month as you go through this month’s series.
I wanted to link us back to Teams365 #1211 where I spotlighted 10 different team development activities. Several of these are useful in building capacity in the different teamwork areas we’ll be exploring this month – trust, emotional intelligence, collaboration, relationship building etc.
 
Here’s what I wrote in that post:
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Whether it's an offsite team retreat, or a strategic planning session, or a one day team building session, teams benefit from  focused time together, time spent in getting to know each other and also focusing in on goals and results.

​The following list includes ten areas you may want to explore together as a team during your upcoming team development sessions:

​1. What's your vision? As we've seen in other posts, having a shared vision is critical in creating alignment and supporting team members to work more autonomously. As Seneca wrote, "If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable."
​What's your vision as a team?

​2. What do you have going for you? Doing work around strengths can be a powerful way to help team members get to know each other, and understand what they uniquely bring to the team. Whether you explore StrengthsFinder 2.0 or undertake an Everything DiSC profile, learning more about ourselves helps us understand our natural inclinations as well as where we tend to go when under stress or pressure (which can be a daily reality for some teams today!).

​3. Fun initiative tasks - It's important to have fun and websites like Wilderdom.com provide you with dozens (if not hundreds of fun ideas of things to do).

​4. Tower Building - There are many iterations of tower building. in essence it's about providing micro-teams or smaller groups with asset of materials to build the tallest tower they can in the time provided. It's a great activity to bring out new learning around roles, planning and communication!

​5. Moving from point a to b - My roots in the late 1980s in experiential education come out when I get to incorporate the "old school" initiative tasks of getting people to "Cross the divide" and move from point a to b with the resources provided. This can be a great activity to reinforce innovation and practice.

​6. Scavenger Hunts - Although these take some time to plan, scavenger hunts in a "bounded" area can be extremely fun and great for those that like to compete!

​7. Work with Visual Cards - sparking conversations is a huge part of the work I do with teams, and photographs and other visual cards are a different way to invite exploration around topics like perspectives, innovation and strategy. Check out our Conversation Sparker Cards for more info.

​8. Team Bingo - It's always good to return to the basics and even if you have worked together for a while, it's likely that you don't know everything about each other. the organizer can ask each team member to submit one or two interesting factoids about themselves and these statements can be put in a bingo format (5 x 5 layout). The first person to capture all the right signatures wins! A fun way to learn a little more about your team.

​9. Team Storyboard - using scrapbooking materials, photos and other materials, have the team create a storyboard of your greatest adventures!

​10.  Team Model - using aluminum foil, have the team create a model which represents who you are. It's always interesting to see just what can be created out of tinfoil.

​What do you think you might try at your next meeting? I hope that it has sparked some new ideas and possibilities for you.
Here's a link to that original post.
 
What do you want to make sure you schedule and incorporate for your team this fall?

Best,
​Jennifer

As we step into October, the first teamwork skill which is essential for today’s context is “Trust”. Trust is like oxygen. Without it, you are not able to do anything.
 
Over the past few years here at the Teams365 blog I have shared a number of posts around trust including one cartoon developed for us by Steven Ravensfeller on the Duality of Trust. Let’s take a look at it again - you'll see it in today's post. What do you notice about the skills and behaviors which show up on either side of the body? What is the flipside of trust/distrust?

​In his book, The Speed of Trust, Steven Covey writes that trust is like a bank account. You can put in resources, and quickly deplete them.
Trust is like a web across a team. When one link is broken or weakened it can have the effect of weakening the entire system.

What are the things you are doing as a team to build trust? Are you following through? Providing feedback? Creating Expectations? Building regular communication channels? Adjusting things for each person’s style?
At the same time we can be cultivating an environment of low trust. What is the state of feedback? Transparency? Follow through? Expectations?
What items could benefit from having more attention around right now?

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

It’s the start of a new month, and  time for a new focus here at the Teams365 blog. This month we are going to focus on teamwork skills. Whether you work as an intact team, a project team or a remote team, teamwork skills are cross-cutting and help professionals at all stages of their careers do better work.
The context of teamwork has changed. In the past, teams were together for longer windows, with much more stability. Today most teams experience ongoing change and team composition. Researcher Amy Edmonston terms this “Teaming” and writes, “actively building and developing teams even as a project is in process, while realizing that a team's composition may change at any given moment.” (Teaming, Edmonston 2013)
She flags four behaviors as essential in the teaming context:

• Speaking Up
• Collaboration
• Experimentation
• Reflection

What are you doing to foster these areas?
The teamwork skills we are going to explore this month are:

• Trust
• Collaboration
• Communication
• Working Across Differences
• Relationship Management
• Conflict Management
• Emotional Intelligence
• Change Management
• Influence

For each of the areas we’ll explore what the skill is about, why it’s important. What some of the differences are in the different types of teams today. I’ll also point you back to some of the many posts I’ve already written on these topics.
Looking forward to starting this journey with you this month.

Best,
Jennifer