​The most recent episode of the Remote Pathways podcast focuses on Conflict in the Remote Space. This is probably one of the most challenging topics for teams today as often it’s easier to pretend that conflict is not happening – avert our gaze, push it under the rug, or even hope that it will just go away – than address it.

In Episode 12 we are joined by Conflict Specialist Gayle Oudeh who is also the author of Conflict is for the Birds. She brings a wonderful metaphor to us in her writing of the different types of approaches to conflict.

Gayle also joined us for the May 7th Remote Pathways Community Call which I am embedding below.
 
If you weren't able to make the call live, catch up on the recording!
It's now available on YouTube.

Gayle is the author of Conflict is for the Birds: Understanding Your Conflict Management Styles.
 
As you’ll see in our call Gayle’s writing explores the varying ways we may approach conflict through the metaphor of birds. Listen into the call as she shares more about the different types of birds. What types are you?
 
Conflict is an inevitable part of change, innovation and disruption – three things which are characterizing business right now.
 
Our approaches to conflict are shaped by our socialization, experience and also knowledge of ourselves.
 
How do you approach conflict?

• What do you notice about how others on the team approach conflict?
• What’s important to take note of as a team right now?
• What are the conversations you want to have?

 
Be sure to check out episode 12 of the Remote Pathways podcast as Gayle shares even more about conflict in the remote space.  You can find it at your favorite podcast player or here.
 
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 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. ​

One of the current challenges and stretch points for many teams right now is how do we collaborate better? With not all workplaces returning to normal and remaining in a virtual workspace, collaboration has become an increasingly important skill set.
 
Who do you need to collaborate with?
 
Some of the core components which are needed to make collaboration successful are:​

• Trust
• Connection
• Communication
• Candor
• Finding common ground and leverage points

Let’s look at each one off these in turn.
 
For several years now I have delivered a 90 minute keynote on Collaboration: The Sum Is Greater Than Its Parts to many organizations, associations and groups in person and virtually. I often poll the audience and ask them “What are the skills you need in order make your collaborations really work?" #1 on the list is often TRUST, quickly followed by the rest. In the past six months I had noticed that CANDOR was starting to make it’s way up the list pretty close to trust.
 
Candor is an important topic to explore and if you have read the writing of Kim Scott in Radical Candor, you would know that it involves being both KIND and FIRM or as she says Caring Personally, and Challenging Directly.

What are you doing as a team to have the important conversations of the moment? Are these moments of candor happening, or are they being “swept under the rug”? Tomorrow’s post is going to link into this with a focus on conflict.
 
Connection and finding common ground is critical for success in the virtual and remote space. While our differences may appear to be vast, we need to make a concerted effort in discovering and leveraging our common elements. This takes time and needs to be intentional. Regular touchpoints are important as well – characterized by quality and frequency not length of time.
 
Going hand in hand with connection is communication. What are you doing to use the different communication channels available? What do you know about different team member’s preferences? What are you doing to communicate changes, adjustments, successes and challenges regularly?
 
Collaboration is an art form as well as a structured process. In most of my books it shows up as a significant theme.
 
If you have a copy of PlanDoTrack check out pages 54-56 as well as sections on strengths.
 
If you have a copy of Effective Virtual Conversations check out Chapter 12 – Partnering and Collaboration.
 
If you have a copy of From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching check out Chapter 11.
 
You’ll note in EVC a focus on structured questions to consider as you move through the different stages of the partnering phase.
 
Enjoy the conversations and hope you’ll check back tomorrow with the focus on conflict in the remote space.

All the 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 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. ​

This week’s Friday Flashback takes a look back at a recent post focusing on building out your remote team toolbox. This has become an even more important topic than ever!

Here’s what I wrote:

Area A: Activities/Resources to help the team to get to know each other
What’s outside your window? – As I wrote in Effective Virtual Conversations, we often only see people in their screen but aren’t able to see what’s beyond the screen. Have people share what’s outside their window or call in from a different location so you can learn more about their context.

Earmark 3-5 minutes to a fun opener/icebreaker in your next team meeting so people can get to know each other better.

Area B: Tools to help with focus
Minimizing the impact of digital distraction is a key issue for teams today. See what I had to say about reducing digital distractions a short while ago here at the Teams365 blog. 

Several different tools which help team members focus in the virtual space include the:

• Urgent/Important Matrix
• Strategic Issues Mapping 
• SWOT: The trusty strategic planning tool 

Area C: Helping teams connect
Helping teams connect with who is who and who is working on what is of critical importance to a remote team. IT’s an area we often don’t think about on the surface, sometimes given the diversity of roles and locations. IT can be very useful in the medium and long term to facilitate regular conversations with the team around who is doing what, and to also earmark time for the team to regularly connect and get to know each other. Discussion in this area might include:

• Undertaking inventory of projects people are working on so that lessons learned can be shared.
• Identifying key strengths and experience bases which exist in the team – there may even be a “go to” team resource person around different areas – i.e. technology questions, resource around different themes/focus areas you work on etc.
• Short team openers and closers such as BINGO. (with team members asked to find someone who – insert different categories like – has visited 3 different continents, speaks multiple languages, is a twin etc.)

For more on this topic check out the 20 Focus Areas for Virtual and Remote Team Development ebook which is available at the Potentials Realized site and provides you with facilitated instructions of 20 different activities you can facilitate with your team. Pick up a copy here.

If you have a copy of the Effective Virtual Conversations book, check out chapter 7 on Tools and Resources.

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 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. ​

At this point of remote work, many have gotten into their groove (or not). One area which is always a challenge, and is absolutely essential for long term business success, is building relationships in the remote space. While old-school networking often felt uncomfortable, how are you approaching virtual networking and relationship development?

Here are 10 remote conversation starters you might want to try out:

1. Tell me a little about the work you do.
2. What are the major projects on your desk right now?
3. Tell me a little about your career progression and how you got to your current role?
4. What have you found to be a useful tip around building relationships virtually?
5. What’s been your biggest learning as a professional?
6. What are some strategies you use to (manage conflict, “manage up”, focus on you)?
7. What helps you be productive in the remote space?
8. What resources do you tap into regularly (websites, people etc)
9. What’s one tip or suggestion you have for others in our line of work/space?
10. What’s the piece of advice you have for others?

 
These are all possibilities. They may have resonance or not.

Key to remote working success is making a concreted effort to build relationships (horizontal, vertical, within your industry, outside your organization and industry) on a regular basis.

I hope that you find these remote conversation starters useful.

​What other ones do you like to ask?

Enjoy the 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. ​

Welcome back to another week which of course brings us the Monday Effective Virtual Conversations Tip. Tip #143 is “Don’t Assume”.  When we can’t see each other face to face, our window to everyone’s world becomes the small boxes we live within. Given that we can’t see people’s context, it can become very easy to not see their context.

Today’s post is “Don’t Assume”. What are the assumptions you are making?

It might be…

• Your priority is my priority…
• You have more time than me…
• You don’t have the distractions I have…
  • Listen into a short daily reading I did (link to day 23 or 24 I think Lindsay), which covered the Assumptions around Virtual Conversations and Learning we can hold.  Two of the ones I hear all the time:
  1. Everyone understands what I am saying – Be sure to pause regularly and use polls or chat to check for understanding.
  2. People will follow up – With back to back calls becoming the norm, it’s not uncommon for people to forget their stream of thought from hours earlier. Be sure to leave time for people to NOTE and SCHEDULE their follow up.
• Everyone is going to have the same needs – Learning styles, preferences and focus is usually going to be radically different from person to person. Be sure to vary your approaches and techniques for engagement – from voice, to chat, to things that are hands on. This will ensure that you are meeting the different learning styles in the group.

​What are the assumptions you are making? What changes do you want to make?

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 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. ​

Whether we are part of a team, collaborating with others or even building a community, there is an art form to bringing people together in the remote space. Today’s topic both curates some of my favorite past posts I’ve done on remote team builders, as well as focuses on some of the areas groups may be hungry for…

#1 - A little bit of grounding: This is where a quick meditation might come in handy.

#2 - A bit of context: Share one thing that’s on your desk right now!

#3 - A little bit of laughter: I recently heard Les Brown share in a presentation that a minute of laughter boosts your immune system for 24 hours. What can you to do create a bit of humor?

#4 - A little stress relief! Check out these 20 stress reduction activities from Sophaya.

#5 - Thinking about things in a different perspective: Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats tool is always a great go-to to explore issues from multiple perspectives.

#6 - Leveraging strengths: Check out this earlier blog post on Leveraging Strengths for remote teams.

#7 - Creating connection: One of my favorite exercises to do at the start of the call (even before stay-at-home became a reality for many of us) was a quick exercise of What’s Outside Your Window?  Check it out in action in the April 15th Community Call I co-hosted for the Remote Pathways podcast.

Here’s a great list on the A – Z of building a remote team from Trello’s blog – you can find it here. 

You may also want to go back to the A-Z series I did back in 2017 as well.

Download a copy 20 Different Remote Team activities you can take your team through at the Potentials Realized store for $27.50 US - (immediate download).
 
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 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. ​

One of the legacies of March and April 2020 may be learning how to effectively collaborate in the remote space. This is important whether we are collaborating with our peers, our leader, another team or even stakeholders. Today’s blog post explores four tenets of collaborating in the remote space:

# 1 - Create a clear end result and vision of success for this project. What are you wanting to create together? Why are you doing this? (Note: lack of clarity on this can create a lot of divergence as you go.) How will you know that you will have been successful with this?

#2 - Be proactive and don’t assume. In the remote space, at the best of times, we see each person’s world in a small box. This may not be representative of everything that is on the go.

#3 - Plan it. Take time as a partnership to ask yourselves, what’ important about this? What are you wanting to achieve?

What are your strengths? What are the gaps between the strengths of your partnership?

Find common ground as well as differences. What are the areas we foresee might be challenges? What can we do to mitigate against those?

#4 - Be proactive with communication and ensure you do this on a regular basis. Shift your mindset to one of “of course” to “What should I communicate?” Given that it’s likely we are under-communicating rather than over-communicating.

What’s going to help your collaboration work better?

For more on this topic check out other posts I have done on collaboration.

Wishing you the 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 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. ​

This week’s Effective Virtual Conversations tip is a reminder to keep people in the loop. In the remote space it’s very easy to forget to share information, particularly if our meetings are not occurring regularly.

One of the things we have been seeing recently with so many people having to work from home, is a vacuum of information. I may not be updating my colleagues as much as I used to. I may note be able to keep people as much in loop.

What are the PROCESSES you have in place to keep people in the loop? What are the PRACTICES you have to keep people updated? How often do you update others?

What information do you ALWAYS make sure you pass on?

What else is important to note about your work right now?

What do you need updates from others?

Remember that meetings may not be the most effective way to keep people updated. If you are using meetings as your primary vehicle, be sure to think about how you can have people extract and share that info quickly. It may be useful to evolve a written template that everyone completes.

What is important to communicate this week? What do you need to keep others in the loop about?

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 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. ​

As I recently shared in an article about remote teams, questions form an important backdrop for professionals today. Questions are the things that open up the conversation. They are the things that provoke new insights, or prompt connections.

This Friday I wanted to take us back to an earlier Team Building Tip from July 2019. Here’s what I wrote:

This week’s Team Building Tip gets you thinking about the questions “What questions do you need to ask?”. This is a valuable way to expand our thinking and get out of the rut of how we might be looking at things.

As you go about thinking of your most important questions, ask yourself the 5 W's + H.

1. Who?
2. What?
3. Where?
4. When?
5. Why?
6. How?

To expand your thinking this week, consider asking yourself questions along the lines of…

• Who is important?
• What is the one thing that might work best for you?
• What are the elements that could distract/detract?
• When do you want to focus more?
• Where do you need to look?
• What do you need to embrace?
• Where do you need to let go?

In addition to these questions, you may also want to consider the questions of:

• What do we see as common ground?
• What’s important to connect or what’s connected?
• What’s missing?
• What’s another way of exploring this?
• What assumptions are we making?
• What is the outcome we are looking for?
• What else?

 
I hope that you enjoy your conversations and have a few minutes to focus in on what’s important for you as a team.
​
With 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 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. ​

Performance conversations are challenging for many at the best of times. What about now that you are likely having to have these conversations virtually? What are the things you want to do to keep the performance conversations going virtually?

Performance issues become even more complex when you are not able to see people in their own element. In fact, our feedback is likely to be framed by what we can see on the screen (which might be one-tenth or one-hundredth of the time in a week) as well as what we see with output.

With that in mind, here are several things to keep in mind around performance support and feedback in the remote space:

• Watch assumptions – be super explicit around what you mean with this.
• Clarify what the end results need to look like.
• Have more frequent check-ins or walk-throughs. It’s important that is not seen as hovering, but it creating a more frequent monitoring process.
• Be sure to return back to measures of success, and things like the IS/IS NOT framework.

As it relates to feedback:

• Make sure that feedback is specific, and demonstrable – again, check assumptions.
• You may want to lead with “Walk me through “ to identify where processes or practices get derailed.
• Be open to feedback in new ways.
• Remember that feedback is a two-way street. It’s often best to get it to give it. Feedback is reciprocal.
• Be sure that you are also having people share what areas they are going to value feedback in first.

What else is important to note about feedback and performance conversations for your team right now?

Enjoy your virtual 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. ​