Teams365 Blog - POTENTIALS REALIZED

TEAMS365 #2374 – Back to the Basics: Teamwork Skill: Listening

6/30/2020

We’re heading Back to the Basics as today is Tuesday. This week’s teamwork skill in focus is listening. How are your listening skills on your team? Are you doing a good job of listening to each other?

Listening in both the in-person realm and the virtual space can feel like a bit of a lost art form sometimes. Here are a few things to consider as you think about listening:

What are you doing to signal that you are listening?
What are you listening for? Are you listening to really hear what the other person is saying or are you listening to figure out how to phrase your reply?
What are you noticing about the energy of the conversation? Are you listening for how fast they are talking? The words they are using? What’s really important to them?
What is not being said in the context of this conversation?
What are the elements which are not being talked about?
What do you notice about the tone and energy of the conversation?

As a team, it may be interesting to share what you each notice about listening. My guess is that everyone will be listening in different ways.

What’s important to note as a team around this?

And so, this wraps up our June posts. This month I brought in the new Tuesday series around going Back to the Basics. This joins the Thursday Team Building Questions and Friday’s Flashback Friday series. This month continued a focus on teamwork, a core focus of my business. I hope you got tips for both your remote and in-person teams, especially for those that are returning back to face-to-face work.

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

Check out our Digital Resources to support you in your work and conversations

TEAMS365 #2370 – FlashbackFriday – Teamwork Skills In Complexity – Experimentation

6/26/2020

Many of you know that I cohost the Remote Pathways podcast. It was inspired by a writing project I started last year about the Digital Dozen™, twelve different types of remote workers. This writing has been shaped by my own adventures in the remote space over the last three decades.

One of the most important areas I ‘ve seen for teams that thrive in complex and uncertain times is adopting an experimental mindset. This is a topic I wrote about a few years ago in Teams365 #1597 which I thought would be good to return to in today’s Flashback Friday. In fact, at the Remote Pathways Community, we’ve had Experimentation as our Quarterly Theme for 2020. What have you done this quarter to incorporate more experimentation?

Here’s what I wrote in Teams365 #1597:

This month we are exploring the skills required in teamwork, including listening and curiosity. Today I wanted to take a dive into a third skill area, that being the area of experimentation.

Experimentation is key for business leaders and teams today. Many times, the context is changing so quickly that we don’t have time to complete an entire roll-out before having to make a final decision. That can lead to a mindset of experimentation, where it is encouraged to try things out, see what works and what doesn’t.

In supporting experimentation in our team we want to:

Encourage and reward trial and error
Create safety around not getting “things right”
Provide team members with time and resources to experiment, beyond their everyday team responsibilities
Facilitate an evaluation of projects or “experiments” that are completed or are even at the midpoint

Questions we may ask at project reviews include:

What’s working?
What’s not?
What are the things that need to be abandoned or tweaked?
What additional resources do we need?
What unknown obstacles have become visible?
What is the big learning we are taking?
What is the one thing/ or the many things we are going to do differently going forward?
Who else can we learn from (including our own past projects?

What are you going to do to create more of a focus around experimentation?

Have a great weekend!
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

Check out our Digital Resources to support you in your work and conversations

TEAMS365 #2367 –Back to the Basics with Teamwork: Roles

6/23/2020

It’s Tuesday which means that we are heading “Back to the Basics” with teamwork. One of the areas which gets really magnified in the virtual and remote space is that of roles. With matrix relationships being the norm for many teams who operate remotely, it’s not uncommon to have two, three or four different line managers. Someone who might be your “main” boss, someone who supports you on one project, and another who supports you technically.

At the same time, it’s likely that in addition to having different bosses, you also likely inhabit different roles. On some teams you might be a project lead, on others an activator and on others a person who gets things done.

With membership on so many teams, it can be important to clarify ROLES as well as be really intentional with building out the culture of your organization. Tomorrow we will look at the different components of building out a vibrant remote team culture where people feel connected with their team and help to shape the culture of it.

Spending time focusing on the roles which exist in a team is important. It’s important on several different levels:

First, what are the roles needed in order to get things done?
Second, who is ideally suited for each role. Consider who might be good at setting a vision, versus executing things and getting things done. Who is better at the granular detail versus the strategic view of things? Consider who is best placed for which role. Consider who gets put in a role by default – they do it just because they can, not because they want to. While this will work in the short-term, what happens in the long term?
Third, how do the different roles connect and fit together? Where is there overlap? Where are their gaps?
Fourth, what are the different roles and responsibilities? Who needs to do what, when? What happens if this doesn’t happen? Helping team members understand the bigger picture is essential for performance.
Fifth, what are the feedback loops from one part of the team to another? Take a look at Monday’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip on Team Feedback. What can you be doing to amplify your team feedback?

Roles are an often-overlooked part of team experience. What’s important to note?

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

Check out our Digital Resources to support you in your work and conversations

TEAMS365 #2365 – Kicking off For Summer and Sunday in Review

6/21/2020

Welcome back to another Sunday in Review.

We’ve just passed the Summer Equinox, and I had indicated that many would want to take some time this weekend to note your goals and focus areas for the next 3 months of summer (or winter – if you are in the Southern Hemisphere).

Here are some questions to get you thinking about this season:

What are 3-5 key priorities for the next 90 days?
What do you want to do consistently for the next 90 days?
Is there one habit or routine you want to focus on?
What relationships do you want to cultivate?
What projects are in focus this season?
What do you want to be saying YES to? What do you want to be saying NO to?
If you track metrics, note your metrics today (sales, outreach, social, achievements) and compare them to 90 days ago, as well as think about where you want them to be in another 90 days.
What else is important to note?

This week we’ve taken a look at a lot of topics which are important and might warrant some more reflection or “percolation time”. Our posts this week were:

Enjoy the focus!
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

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2360 –Back to Remote Team Basics – Core Teamwork Skills: Communication

6/16/2020

Each week I’m going to be sharing a new remote team basics post. Given that at a lot of teams will not be returning to a full in-person team experience, it can be important to return to the basics of remote teamwork. Today we explore teamwork skills.

In the paradigm shift of remote leadership, all team leaders need to develop capacity with leadership skills such as relationship building, communication, influence, decision making and prioritization. When our work needs to be managed by ourselves and we can’t physically get together, these core skills are really important.

As I wrote back in February in the Remote Working Whitepaper, in addition to these teamwork skills, we also want to make sure we foster the 7 Remote Enablers™, what I also term the 7 Cs to Remote Work™ - Communication, Clarity, Connection, Culture, Consistency, Community and Collaboration.

What are you doing to build these and foster these throughout your teamwork, processes and practices?

Today let’s explore one of the foundational teamwork skills: COMMUNICATION.
Communication in the remote space does illustrate two fundamental principles in remote work those being “things get magnified in the remote space” and “things can be more complex”.

In terms of things being more complex, communication in the remote space happens along many different channels – slack, IM, text, phone, Voxxer, dashboards, email, social channels. It can be dizzying, and exhausting, if boundaries aren’t incorporated. What are the expectations regarding how many channels communication can occur on? How quickly do you need to respond? When are you “on” and when are you off?

Each of us is also likely to have a preference in terms of what we like as our primary and secondary channels, also creating more complexity.

To what level of detail do people on the team require information? High Level? Granular? Big picture? Regardless of level, be sure to connect people into the WHY and what’s important.

To the point of things getting magnified, what do you notice about what does get communicated? What does not? And what becomes noise, when it’s being overly communicated?

Consistency is key around communication, so consider how you are being consistent with core messaging?

As you consider communication this week, what’s important to notice?

Enjoy the conversation,
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

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2356 – FlashbackFriday: Teams365 #1597: Teamwork Skills in Complexity: Experimentation

6/12/2020

My former world of work involved leading mega-projects in terms of post disaster management support. From coordinating teams of professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds (GIS specialists, architects, civil engineers, health care professionals) to rebuild different components of society (from roads, to land records, educational systems to health care). My work during the 1990s and early 2000s was outside of the norm, I believe, from what many leaders experienced. Flashforward to 2020, where everyone – leaders and team members alike – can benefit from thinking about teamwork and leadership skills to support them in navigating and thriving in complex environments.

Today’s post takes us back to one of several posts from May 2018 where I explored different teamwork skills required for complexity in a series of Teams365 blog posts. From exploring experimentations, to curiosity, problem solving, focus (and think about yesterday’s blog post about the RAS), to listening and synergy.

As part of today’s Flashback Friday post, let’s take a look at one of the skills that I think is probably most important to cultivate and sometimes requires a significant shift in terms of focus and mindset. It’s the skill of experimentation.
How often do you experiment?

Are you encouraged to experiment? Are youencouraged to try things out, even if they don’t work?

Here’s what I wrote, and as you read, consider how experimentation might support your work efforts.

This month we are exploring the skills required in teamwork, including listening and curiosity. Today I wanted to take a dive into a third skill area, that being the area of experimentation.

Experimentation is key for business leaders and teams today. Many times, the context is changing so quickly that we don’t have time to complete an entire roll-out before having to make a final decision. That can lead to a mindset of experimentation, where it is encouraged to try things out, see what works and what doesn’t.

In supporting experimentation in our team we want to:

Encourage and reward trial and error
Create safety around not getting “things right”
Provide team members with time and resources to experiment, beyond their everyday team responsibilities
Facilitate an evaluation of projects or “experiments” that are completed or are even at the midpoint

Questions we may ask at project reviews include:

What’s working?
What’s not?
What are the things that need to be abandoned or tweaked?
What additional resources do we need?
What unknown obstacles have become visible?
What is the big learning we are taking?
What is the one thing/ or the many things we are going to do differently going forward?
Who else can we learn from (including our own past projects)?

Enjoy your reflections!
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

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2320 – Team Building Tip 243

5/7/2020

Focus has been a major theme for many professionals in recent weeks. This week’s Team Building tip gets you to consider the question “What’s possible if you had more focus?”.

As a team, have some discussion around where your focus is – this month, this week, each day of the week. Is everyone aligned? Is everyone on the same page?

If team members are members of multiple teams, it’s important to have this conversation regularly.

Questions to consider:

What’s important for us to focus on right now – today? This week? This month?
What are we not focusing on, and need to?
What do we need to STOP focusing on?
Where do we need to enhance our focus?
What distractions are getting in the way of focus?
What’s possible if we/I had more focus?

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 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

PDF copies of PlanDoTrack now available! Get yours here.

TEAMS365 #2174 – Flashback Friday – Navigating Disruption

12/13/2019

2019 has been a year of disruption on many fronts. Professionals of all kinds are no longer being buffeted by their leaders from the winds of change. Learning how to navigate disruption has become an imperative for all professionals.

I thought it would be fitting to reach back to a post from this past June on Navigating Disruption to help you think about the focus you want to take in continuing to cultivate these skills and mindsets in your work – here we go with a revisit of Teams365 #2003.

Here’s what I wrote in that blog post from June 2019 – Key Trends: Navigating Disruption

Disruption is part of the landscape of many industries and workplaces today. Whether things are changing dramatically due to technology or geopolitical impacts, change is pervasive for many.

While we can’t change the pace of change, we can adjust our approaches to it.

What do we do to continue to be effective and positive in times of change?

Three practical things we can do are:

Cultivate curiosity – While many leaders would assert “easier said than done”, cultivating curiosity is important for today’s business landscape. Cultivating curiosity can be an important skill to develop in team members AND embed in the culture of an organization.

For more on cultivating curiosity, check out this earlier Teams365 blog post I wrote on Cultivating Curiosity Teams365 #1955 and what the research says Teams365 1961 – Encouraging Curiosity.

Be clear on the big picture goals – Adopting a 30,000 foot view on work, life and context can also be a valuable strategy for buffeting against the shocks of change. While the meta-view (big picture view) is not one that everyone adopts easily, seeing the big picture helps with the micro-shocks we can feel on a regular basis when things change. This is why it’s really important to continue communicating and meeting during times of change. Helping share the big picture so people don’t find themselves in the “Weeds”, cut off from what’s happening in the bigger picture is critical.

Become comfortable with knowing when things are “good enough” to let go, and that learning may always be needed. The embracement of “growth mindset” on the part of organizations in support of their staff is encouraging. When we come from what Carol Dweck has coined “growth mindset” it gives permission for experimentation, learning, and not quite being ready “yet”.

Disruption may mean that reverse mentoring (junior to more senior professionals) is just as important as traditional mentoring (senior to more junior professionals). It also provides us with an opportunity to pause and see how we are adjusting to change. Are we as “good at change” as we thought we were?

A reminder that last month I focused on Teamwork in Uncertainty:

Teams365 #1955- Teamwork in Uncertainty: Cultivating Curiosity. View it here.

Teams365 #1954 – Managing Uncertainty – Building Trust and Connection on Your Team Virtually. All workplaces can benefit from this topic – it is one of the #1 questions we receive here at Potentials Realized. Check out the post here.

Teams365 #1962: Teamwork in Uncertainty: Empowering your Team with the Space to Experiment. Read it here.

Teams365 #1968: Teamwork in Uncertainty: Pivot . Read it here.

Teams365 #1969: Teamwork in Uncertainty: Comfort with the Unknown: Read it here.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

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

As we step into the end of the year, 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.

#TEAMS365 #1978 – May Month End Review: Teamwork in Uncertainty

5/31/2019

This month we explored the topic of Teamwork in Uncertainty. From looking at the statistics of readers, it seems like it was a very resonant topic for those who visited the Teams365 blog this month. If you haven’t taken a look at this month’s posts, please be sure to check out:

1968 – Tuesday May 21: Teamwork in Uncertainty – Pivot
1969 – Wednesday May 22: Teamwork in Uncertainty - Comfort with the Unknown
1974 –– Tuesday May 28: Teamwork in Uncertainty – Strengths and Go-Tos
1975 – Wednesday May 29: Teamwork in Uncertainty – Synergies

As we step into the end of May, I thought it would be useful to reach back to one of the posts from last May on Prioritization.

One of the most disruptive things about disruption is the impact on our focus. Prioritization becomes a key skill set to cultivate.

Here’s what I wrote last May about leading in complexity -

“Prioritization is a skill set we draw upon regularly in times of complexity. Prioritization allows all team members to regularly scan and manage their workload.

Key to prioritization is:

Having the tools to prioritize
Feeling empowered to make decisions and take responsibility for managing workload
Understanding what is most important – to the different players of the team, as well as the different time frames you are working on (short term, medium term)

In past Teams365 posts I’ve explored a range of prioritization skills including the Urgent/Important Matrix (we often attribute to Covey), as well as a Decision Matrix where we weigh what’s important in making our decisions.

For more on the topic of prioritization, check out these additional resources:
This excellent article from MindTools.com - which has an incredible amount of other resources team members and leaders will also want to check out.

LiquidPlanner.com's article on How to Prioritize Work When Everything Is #1 - Read it here."

For those that are looking at prioritization through the lens of product design, you'll want to take a look at this excellent article 20 Product Prioritization Techniques.

In my books PlanDoTrack and the Coaching Business Builder I share four prioritization tools I use regularly with my clients and teams including the Urgent/Important Matrix and Strategic Issues Mapping.

The issue of prioritization takes on increased importance when we are working as part of a matrix or remote team. In these instances, our priorities may be varied and not as visible to ourselves and others. What is important for you to note around prioritization?

Best
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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.

#TEAMS365 #1976 – Teamwork in Uncertainty – Synergy

5/29/2019

In keeping aligned with this month’s focus on Teamwork in Uncertainty, today’s blog post gets you thinking about how you can leverage synergy across your team.

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’s is important to note around synergy?

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 a digital format. Print it out and take it with you for some inspiration and writing on the go! Available at the Potentials Realized Store.