Teams365 Blog - POTENTIALS REALIZED

TEAMS365 #2379 – The Week in Review

7/5/2020

Welcome back to another Sunday post with the Week in Review. This week we shifted out of Q2 and into Q3. Did you take a few minutes to review what you accomplished in Q2 and what the focus of Q3 is going to be?

Here’s where we went this week:

Enjoy your 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 #2378 – Weekly Journaling Prompt 107

7/4/2020

This week’s Saturday Journaling Prompt is “the road less traveled”. Consider what is important for you right now. What are the pathways you are taking? How are they traveled? Are they less traveled?

Consider what are the ways your journey is going? What have been some of the highlights of the year? What have you been surprized by? What have you been WOWed by?

Consider the road less traveled.

Best wishes,
Jennifer

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

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

TEAMS365 #2377 – Flashback Friday: Teamwork in Complexity – Experimentation

7/3/2020

This week we take a look back at a post which is probably even more relevant today than it was when I wrote it back in 2017 – Teamwork in Complexity.

What are you noticing about how teamwork is changing in your work in 2020?

What role does experimentation play in helping you be successful?

Take a look at this post:

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 the conversations!
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 #2376 –Team Building Tip 252

7/2/2020

Welcome back to another weekly installment of the Team Building Question.

This week is #252 in the series. Today’s prompt is:

What needs to go under the microscope?

In the spirit of the mid-year review we’ve just done, what do you notice about what needs attention?

What needs to be looked at more closely?

What needs to be examined more?

As you zoom in, what do you notice?

What are the conversations you need to have going forward as a team? With your stakeholders?

Enjoy the conversation!
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 #2375 –Mid Year Stock Taking: Happy Canada Day and Kicking off a New Month and the 2nd Half of the Year

7/1/2020

Welcome back and first of all, Happy Canada Day to other fellow Canadians. I hope that you are enjoying a day of rest and relaxation and maybe some good BBQ and sunshine.

As we kick off a new month, what’s important for you to keep an eye on?

What are your top 3-5 goals?

What are the most important habits and routines to consistently undertake?

Like we’ve done in past months, what do you want to ensure you focus on?

Once you are done that, earmark some time to focus in on your mid-year review.

Here are a number of questions to take stock of the first half of the year, and look ahead to July, as well as the second part of the year:

What have your successes been?
Who have you been working with?
I have PIVOTED BY…
Where has your focus been?
What have you taken a stand for?
What have you become known for?
Which goals are becoming new habits, or something you can check off?
What do you notice about your metrics?
Which goals need to be adjusted or let go of?
The thing that helped me be most successful this year has been __________
The thing that has helped me be happiest this year has been __________
What has helped me be most healthy has been __________
What I have noticed about my work/productivity/results and/or relationships is __________
What’s your focus for the rest of the year?
Looking ahead to the next six months, my top 3 – 5 priorities are:
My theme for the rest of the year is…
Success at the end of the end of the year includes:
I also need to think about __________

Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do”. What are the habits and routines which shape your world?

Planning Support with Your Business
Looking for a mid-year Virtual Work Planning session for yourself or your business? Check out the half day, one day and multi-day VIP working day sessions. You can find out more here.

Enjoy!
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 #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 #2373 – Effective Virtual Conversations Tip 152

6/29/2020

It’s the start of another week and this week’s Effective Virtual Conversations Tip #152 is all about PAUSE. Where could you benefit from taking a bit more of a pause – figuratively and literally?

One of the challenges professionals have faced this year has been the lack of pause in their work. For many, shifting to the virtual and remote space involved a tsunami of flurry. For those of us who already worked in the remote space it also meant a flurry of people using the same technologies and often access points we do.

Many have complained about Zoom fatigue and how exhausting virtual calls can be. One reason may be that leaders of calls don’t always leave in a pause during their calls. Consider how you might incorporate one of these pauses in an upcoming call –

Giving people 2 minutes to capture and schedule their next steps after a call
Providing group members with the opportunity to pause and have a 5-10-minute conversation with others
Providing people with a quick opener or energizer at the start of the call, geared to get them thinking about what their own connection is to the issue. Note, this will likely lead to a better call quality overall!
Having a short co-working session with colleagues to boost focus and attention

What else might you be able to do to boost your time in having a pause?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

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

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

TEAMS365 #2372 – Weekly Review

6/28/2020

Welcome back to another Sunday week in review installment here at the Teams365 blog post. Today’s post gets you to stop and take a look back at this week’s blog posts which have included:

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 #2371 – Weekly Journaling Prompt 106

6/27/2020

Welcome back to the 106th Weekly Journaling Prompt. This week’s prompt is “I appreciate”. What do you appreciate and are grateful for? As I have written in the past, gratitude plays an important role I health and well being.

As I shared in Teams365 #331:

Flowing from gratitude are a number of health and psychological benefits which include higher levels of optimism, increased positivity, more pro-social relationships, happier relationships, and also lower levels of toxic thoughts. As you will read, one practice which has been shown to increase gratitude and the benefits is keeping a gratitude journal, which is as simple as writing down on a weekly basis five things you are grateful for that week.

You can read more about what science has found about the importance of gratitude and how to incorporate more of this at this link from the Center for Greater Good from the University of Berkeley.

What are the things you are grateful for? What would it be like to keep a list of what you are grateful for on a regular basis, even if it’s as simple as listing out the top 3 things you are grateful for?

Enjoy the rest of your 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 #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