Teams365 Blog - Potentials Realized

TEAMS365 #2159 – Thursday November 29: Team Building Tip 263: Remote Work Enabler: Expectations

11/28/2019

It’s Thursday and while some are celebrating Thanksgiving, many of us have a regular day of work. This week’s Team Building Tip is a “Remote Work Enabler”. Throughout the upcoming weeks I’ll be including a number of special items to keep in mind to help your remote team THRIVE, not just SURVIVE!

The first remote work enabler I wanted to point to was that of expectation. In a remote team, we may be part of multiple matrix relationships, which makes it even more important for us to be clear on our expectations about HOW THINGS ARE DONE.

Teams can benefit from taking time to create a WAYS OF WORKING, or Team Agreements about how they will operate together.

What are the team expectations around?:

Showing up for meetings
Focus at meetings
Being prepared
Being punctual
Quality of work
Surfacing issues
Addressing difficult conversations
How you interact with each other
Share information
Connect with others outside of the organization
Participate in ongoing learning

Each one of these could spark a conversation around multiple factors.

When expectations are not clear we run the risk of doing things differently, having varied output, and most importantly, creating assumptions that might not be founded. These can have the most detrimental impact in the long run.
As a team, what do expectations do you want to make clear?

Best wishes,
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 #2088 – Remote Working Myth – I do it all alone!

9/18/2019

This week’s remote working myth explores the myth of “I do it all alone”. The work of a remote worker can feel isolating and like we are in a vacuum. In fact, collaboration needs to be at a higher level for remote workers. We often need to be more proactive in reaching out to meet our colleagues and seek out knowledge about where things are overlap in our work. This knowledge is critical for scaling our work as remote workers.

Here’s a quick exercise to try:

Think about the current projects you are working on. What tasks do you need to collaborate on with others? Where could collaboration benefit the project?

Make a list of all the people you would like to get to know better, in service to the projects you have on the go. Earmark time every week to meet with one or two people.

Another more team-oriented way to figure out how you don’t need to do it alone is to dedicate 5-10 minutes of a team meeting into finding the common links between projects. This can be supplemented by what you are including in Slack or in other areas.

Who do you want to reach out to today?

All the 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.
For those looking for tips, tools and ideas about remote work and support for your remote teams, be sure to check out these tags and resources.

#TEAMS365 #2054 – Team Building Tip 249: What are you putting your attention around?

8/15/2019

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you to think about what you are putting your attention around. What we measure gets done. What we focus on, may improve.

Creating intentional focus is critical for success in a disrupted business context. It’s often the consistent action that gets things going.

In contrast to the question you, as a team, will want to consider – what are you NOT putting attention around? What does need some attention?

As we step into the early part of September, it’s likely that things are going to ramp up again. Having a discussion this week with your team who is in the office around what you are and are not focusing on, and changes you want to make, can help set you up for success this fall.

Enjoy your conversations!
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 #2053 – Teamwork Foundations - Meetings and Other Team Practices

8/14/2019

As I have written in other Teams366 blog posts, shared team practices are critical for high performance. Shared team practices are the ways teams communicate with each other and share information and build trust and connection.

Shared team practices could include:

Weekly team meetings
A monthly pot-luck meal (virtual or in person)
Getting together monthly to share information about programming and focus areas
Informal and/formal peer learning events

One of the main vehicles teams use for communication is meetings. As many find, meetings may not be held most efficiently or effectively. Next week I’ll share more on meeting pitfalls.

In today’s post, I wanted to remind you of the 8 Essential Meeting Questions I share in Effective Virtual Conversations. These are questions you will want to get in the practice of asking before each conversation you have:

What’s the purpose?
What takeaways do we want?
Who needs to be on the calls?
What preparation is needed for us to be most effective in the meeting?
What pace do we want in order to keep it engaging?
What will help keep the focus?
What is absolutely essential (versus what will be a nice to cover) where people can go for more information?
What follow-up might be required?

(Source: Britton, Effective Virtual Conversations, page 304)

As you consider your meetings and/or team practices, what is important to note? To adjust as you step into September?

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.

#TEAMS365 #2052 – Teamwork Foundations – Alignment

8/13/2019

This week’s Teamwork Foundation post gets you, as a team, to consider how you are as a team with respect to alignment. Teamwork today is dependent on alignment.

Alignment around purpose.

Alignment around values.

Alignment around goals.

When a team is not aligned, it’s likely we’ll see these types of behaviors:

Duplication
Gaps
Performance issues and lack of clarity around goals
Weaker team culture – no one is sure what they are working on or what’s important

In order to boost alignment, we want to:

Help team members see the bigger picture
Help teams prioritize so they can focus on what’s important
Build connection across the team
Understand who does what
Clarity and strengthen team culture

What is important to note around alignment within your team right now?

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 #2040– Welcome to August and a Return to Teamwork Fundamentals

8/1/2019

Welcome to August and a focus on the Foundations of Virtual Teamwork and Leadership. This month we’re going back to the basics, given that we are only a month away from what often is termed the “second new year” - September.

September often signals “all hands-on deck”, when our teams and leaders need to be ready to run. With this in mind, this month we are returning to the foundations of work today. We’ll be exploring topics around these Teamwork Foundations:

Planning
Minimizing Distractions
Four Neuroscience Ideas that can help your team accelerate
Meeting Management 101
Powerful Presentations
Planning for Team Events
Boosting your mentoring and coaching conversations
10 Questions to ask when selecting your mentor
Creating Accountability Partners

I hope that you will enjoy the posts!

A reminder to take a look back at yesterday’s post on the monthly round up and planning for the month of August, if you haven’t seen it yet. Check it out here.

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 #2000 Celebrating 2,000 Posts!!!

6/22/2019

Today we reach another milestone here at the Teams365 blog. It’s the 2000th post! What began as an experiment for me on January 1st to see what it would be like to write every day around leadership and teamwork issues, has now become an important part of my regular writing practice. Like so much in business, we don’t know where we are going to go until we do it.

There’s been a lot that’s occurred since I kicked off the Teams365 blog on January 1st 2014 including some of these achievements:

The evolution of the entire Teams365 series of learning programming for leaders, teams, and also virtual and remote workers. While these were a twinkle in my eye prior to the start of the blog, these are now well evolved sets of programs – some which are on-demand courses like the Teams365 Teamwork Foundations.
Multiple corporate engagements around group coaching training and coaching skills training for leaders, including one that was awarded the Prism Award for Excellence in Coaching (2016), and an Award of Excellence – Curriculum Design (2017).
The publication of three more books – Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), Coaching Business Builder (2018), and PlanDoTrack (2019).
Moving from less than 100 page views a week to last week’s 2,069 unique visitors, and 14,928 page views.

It’s been interesting establishing a practice of writing with a regular focus. Here are some of the series you will want to check out if you haven’t seen them already:

The Saturday Weekly Journaling Prompt series. For those that enjoy a reflective pause, you will want to check out the Saturday posts which started about a year ago, focused on a weekly prompt. Grab a pen and journal and get started! If you prefer to have it all under one cover, I’ve pulled together quarterly sets of the Weekly Journaling Prompts and have put them together in an ebook format you can print out and use. $7 at our Potentials Realized store. Check out volume #1 here.
Thursday’s Team Building Tips. Now it the mid-240 range, this Thursday series provides teams and team leaders with a question you can use the spark conversation and dialogue. Ideal for a team meeting, some of these have been made into a deck of 52 cards you can physically incorporate into your team meetings. What’s your favorite? Check out the series here, and share with us in the comments.
Mondays’ weekly Effective Virtual Conversations tip. For the past couple of years I have shared a weekly tip from my 2017 book Effective Virtual Conversations. That book focuses on ideas for making your virtual conversations (virtual meetings, virtual training, virtual mentoring more effective). Definitely a good place to check out as most of us have some sort of virtual touch point every week. Check

In the last 2000 posts there have been many other focus areas and series. While too many to name, some that you may be interested in are:

Leadership Myths
Teamwork in Uncertainty
Leadership a – z
The a-z of remote and virtual team activities

I look forward to continuing the journey with you! Continue to stay tuned.

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.

#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.

#TEAMS365 #1975 – Teamwork in Uncertainty – Strengths and Go-To’s

5/28/2019

In our last Teamwork in Uncertainty post of the month we’re going to explore a favorite topic here at the Teams365 blog – Strengths. As I have shared in many other posts, strengths have a variety of benefits, from strengthening productivity to creating more engagement in the workplace.

In times of uncertainty the only thing we may be able to rely on are our strengths – our own and others. When we are tasked with new activities and tasks it can be useful to explore who on the team might have brought a similar experience. What are the strengths that can support you as a team?

As I share in PlanDoTrack, there are several key questions you will want to explore on the individual level. Check out the sections on strengths in Sections 1 and 4 of PlanDoTrack.

Some of the more common frameworks include:

Utilizing Gallup’s StrengthsFinder 2.0 - Purchase a copy of the book for each team member and have them bring their reports to an upcoming team meeting.
Incorporating the VIA Character Survey – This comes from the Positive Psychology realm and provides another doorway into exploring strengths. The nice thing about this assessment is that it is free.

As with any assessment, it’s important to reinforce a few things:

This may provide a snapshot in time and can be dependent on a variety of factors.
Take what is valuable from the information. Assessments are intended to provide insights, not a box.
Exploring strengths and styles helps us understand ourselves better. Under times of stress and pressure, some of these styles and strengths become magnified. When magnified, some of our strengths become a liability. For example., if one of my strengths is getting results, this is good. However, in times of pressure I may become dogmatic in getting results, pushing harder than needed and burning myself, and others, out. Success in today’s workplace requires a focus on both RESULTS and RELATIONSHIPS.
Look at both the individual view of things and the collective view. The power of bringing most assessments (not all, but many) into the team context is to provide a snapshot across the team, helping them see the collective. It also provides an opportunity for everyone to have a collective framework for exploration and dialogue.

Questions to consider:

What are the discussions you want to have around strengths?
What’s important about exploring this topic individually and collectively?
What do you notice about the collective strengths of the team?
Where are there gaps? What might you do about this?
What will be valuable for you as a team to explore around strengths?

Are you looking to do more work with your team around strengths? Contact me to discuss our team day sessions for teams around strengths.

Enjoy your conversations,
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.