Don’t Read This If Your Team Is Stressed

April 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Well, here you are reading this so your team (or perhaps more accurately you) are stressed. And I just know what you’re going to say … you have too much work and too little time. So if I suggest anything at all to you at this point, you might just rip my face off (you laugh but I just had that happen and not that long ago). But I will risk it anyway and suggest that at your next team meeting, you ask for 5 minutes and have everyone do the following:

  1. Write down all of the things that you can celebrate right now about your lives, your work and your team. And yes, do feel free to tweet, text or email each other if you simply can’t pull yourself away from your technology.
  2. Make a list of the things you are stressed about that you can control and ask yourselves for each one – 6 minutes from now will this be important, 6 hours from now, 6 days from now, 6 weeks from now, 6 years from now. I’d like to humbly suggest that you put all of the 6 minute, hour, and day things into perspective.
  3. Then, make a list of things you are stressed about that you can’t control and banish them from your heads. As someone once said (and I’m sorry I cannot remember who said it or where I read it), don’t let them live rent free in your head. It’s like giving someone you don’t trust the passwords to all of your accounts and that’s just plain crazy.
  4. TAKE A MINUTE, AN HOUR, OR BETTER YET A DAY OFF!!!! If your team is stressed, you have opened just one too many programs and your computer will crash (I know this because my husband watches me do this all the time and, yes, even that brand new super dooper computer will crash at some point if you just keep installing software on it.)
  5. Next, get reacquainted with the original passion and intent of the team. What is your team being called to do? How does that fit into the overall goals of your organization? How and where does your team need to prioritize its work?  How can you reignite how you all work together?
  6. Now that you’ve rebooted, take a deep breath and prepare yourself for the final bit of advice …

LOOK AFTER YOURSELVES!!!! Instead of winding yourselves up like the Ever Ready Battery Bunny, try to keep our teamwork tip of the week top of mind, or better yet the wallpaper on your iPhone.

Look After Yourselves

Jack of Hearts – Look After Yourselves

Our work lives can be challenging, and demanding. Make sure you take time for yourself on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Ensure that you are in touch with what really matters in life and strive to separate challenges and failures at work from your own personal sense of worth and efficacy. Take time for exercise, rest, leisure activities, family, friends, daily time-outs, and vacations.

How is your team doing?  How do you encourage each other to look after themselves?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Find out more.

Filed Under: Leadership, teams, Work Life Balance Tagged With: , ,

Do you have the right skills?

April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A fascinating report by the BC Premier’s Technology Council outlines the new skills needed for our knowledge-based society. Among them, creativity, communications, teamwork, personal organization and self-regulation stand out as key skills that can have a profound impact on performance at individual, team and organizational levels.

We’ve been delivering workshops on creativity and innovation for many years now. It’s sometimes the most fun we have at work. We’re finding people are naturally attracted to creativity and innovation but our educational institutions and formal workplaces have somehow subdued a natural talent that is often just waiting to burst out. Check out Ken Robinson’s 2006 ted.com talk if you want to know more.

“Communications is the ability to relate concepts and ideas to others either in person, on the page or through technology” … so says the report. Unfortunately, I fear the PTC has fallen in to the trap of considering communication a one-way street. In our work we’ve found an ability to listen is often the most obvious communication skill that many need to develop. Communication needs to be about sharing ideas and building common understanding, not simply pitching your own thoughts effectively.

We’re so glad to see teamwork on the list. Most of us now work in sufficiently complicated jobs that no one person can achieve anything of real value without the mutual support of others. Once again I worry that our educational institutions are partially to blame for encouraging individual achievement over good team skills.

Adding EQ to the IQ is something we discuss a lot at Calliope. All of our clients are smart, but IQ alone does not guarantee success. Research has shown clearly that Emotional Intelligence (or EQ) has a profound impact on an individual’s capacity to be successful both at work and personally. The most popular framework for understanding EQ, developed by Dan Goleman, divides EQ into self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. We see clear overlap between the domains of self-awareness/self-management and the critical skills of personal organization and self-regulation.

You can get the full report from:

http://www.gov.bc.ca/premier/attachments/PTC_vision for_education.pdf

We’d love to know what you think?

Dave Whittington, Calliope Learning, 2011

Filed Under: Creativity, Leadership, teams Tagged With: , , , ,

Wisdom of Crowds

April 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Teamwork Explorer Tip is the Queen of Clubs (decision making) – Wisdom of Crowds. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Wisdom of Crowds

Queen of Clubs – Wisdom of Crowds

One of the reasons we work in teams is to have input on an issue from various different perspectives. In Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, suggests that optimum solutions are found when all these diverse opinions are incorporated into the decision.

How do you ensure that you hear all voices on the team, even the unpopular ones? Obviously this is very much dependent on the nature of the team, and there’s no one right answer. However, my work with teams suggests that some of the best ways to elicit diverse opinions would include setting clear ground rules that encourage the non-judgmental sharing of ideas. You also have to ask the right questions. Sometimes team members can have valuable input, but fail to share it because they don’t think it’s been asked for, or that it will add value. “Does anyone have anything else to share (no matter how crazy it may sound) regarding this issue?” or something similar is a great question to ask before moving to decision making.

Of course, the next big challenge, once all the diverse opinions are shared, is to incorporate them into a decision. The Jelly Beans in the Jar example is very straightforward.  Fill a glass jar with jelly beans and ask people to guess how many there are.  Then calculate the mean of the answers. I’ve tested this with several groups and the mean is almost always the best answer in the room.

It gets more complex of course when the problem at hand is something more realistic that the team really needs to move forward on. An approach I find useful when opinions are so diverse (perhaps even contradictory) that they can’t be incorporated into a single solution, is scrap the idea that there is one best solution. Once teams start looking for multiple, good, potential solutions, rather than the one best solution, they can move forward with testing prototypes rather getting stuck in what is often called “analysis paralysis”.

Finally a word of caution. Not all decisions lend themselves to a Wisdom of Crowds approach. The decision about which decision making approach is the most appropriate, is of course, the most important decision!

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Find out more!

Posted by Dave

Filed Under: Leadership, teams, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Team Trust Buster #2

April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There’s nothing that breaks trust faster and contributes to organizational miscommunication, angst and lost productivity than triangulation, our Teamwork Explorer Tip this week. Not the map related kind or the research related kind but the all too common and human kind where you talk to your husband about how much your friend has hurt you or vice versa. Or the organizational kind where you tell everyone you know how much of an idiot your boss is but never have the courage to actually tell him to his face. Or the even more destructive kind that gets going on a group level contributing to silos in organizations.  Bad mouthing another department or unit in your organization to another unit or department might be human, a fun past time and a way to release your frustration, but it’s also really bad business.

On teams, triangulation is poisonous. You know it’s happening when there is more talk about the meeting AFTER the meeting in hushed voices in offices. There are two guilty parties in triangulation … the one telling and the one listening.  If you really want to improve trust and productivity on your team, you need to implement a no triangulation zone which means that a) you don’t talk about anyone else behind their back and b) if someone else is doing it, you challenge them to stop.

It might sound overly simple … but it’s amazingly difficult to live consistently. Having taught this concept for close to 15 years, you’d think I would have mastered it, but I am still working on it myself. What I have discovered about triangulation is that the more centered I am, the less likely I am to engage in triangulation because I am strong enough to see my own role in situations and not blame others.  When I get stressed or off balance and don’t create time to focus on the things I am doing well or the successes I have had, the more likely I am to blow off steam and avoid difficult conversations.

Queen of Diamonds (communication) – Triangulation. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Triangulation

A common response to conflict on teams is to speak to others about the situation. This sets up an indirect communication pattern (often called triangulation), encourages people to not see their own roles in the problem, and leads to unresolved conflict in the team. The essence of any productive team building and effective organizational learning is de-triangulation.

Is your team guilty of triangulation? How can you encourage people to talk directly to each other?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Visit our store!

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Why I Love Gail Vaz-Oxlade

April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Ok here’s my guilty little secret. I love Gail Vaz-Oxlade and all her various TV programs, books, blogs and tweets.  If you don’t know who she is, she is the Queen of Realty TV about debt and since I’ve gotten my Shaw PVR, I tape all of her programs and watch them obsessively.  While her ideas around debt and saving money are no nonsense and informative, that’s not why I watch her over and over.  I watch her and love her because she is the kind of creative no nonsense coach that I aspire to, and her insights about helping couples get back on track applies equally well to teams.

Gail is gifted in her ability to hold up a mirror and force people to face up to reality … her weekly challenges that get people out of denial, into perspective shifting and into action are creative and funny. Consider the one where she makes a couple carry around a backpack of 50 pounds for a week so they physically “get” how their debt is weighing them down.  Or has another couple remove all of the items in the house that don’t add value (because they wasted so much money on “stuff” that literally cluttered up their house) and while doing that limits the wife to only 30 sentences because she talks too much at her husband.

The show often starts with the couple being interviewed about their problems and challenges around money. What is most fascinating is often the couple knows what they are doing wrong, but just can’t quite get past the denial of it to make some changes. It takes Gail to help them see what their behavior is REALLY costing them.

This is so true of teams as well. I often interview individual members of a team before I actually do a team session with them. They all have a pretty good sense of what’s happening and even what they might need to do to make it better.  But they don’t know how to disrupt the routine of the team to put challenges/issues on the table.

So that’s my team tip of the week.  Use regular check-ins to take the temperature of the team and create alignment with your vision and goals. Once a month at a team meeting, do a round table on questions like “How are we living our vision/values?” “What are we doing well?” “What conversation do we need to have?” “What are we avoiding?”

It’s a whole lot easier to facilitate low risk type conversations and catch things early than wait until you hear Gail say something like “And if you keep this up, in 5 years you will be $650,000 in debt!”

3 of Hearts – Devote Time to Alignment (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Devote Time to Alignment

While devoting time to creating understanding among team members about your vision is important, regularly checking in with and creating alignment is even more important. Regularly check in with the vision through asking the following:

  1. What do you think we should start/stop doing on this team (project)?
  2. What are the three best and three worst examples of us living our vision?
  3. On a scale of 1-10 how are people doing, how is our stress level, how do we feel about the progress on the project, etc.?
  4. What is one thing we need to do to better align our actions with our vision?

What other tips do you have for keeping a team on track and raising issues?

Filed Under: Leadership, teams Tagged With: , , ,

How to Keep Teams Motivated

March 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Teamwork Explorer Tip is the Queen of Hearts (heart) – Celebrate Success. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Celebrate Success

We do a lot of work with the high tech sector. We love working with them as they are curious, engaged, motivated and voracious learners who keep us on our toes. When we do teambuilding workshops with them and ask them to identify their 5 card winning hand from our Teamwork Cards, they almost always choose the Queen of Hearts, Celebrate Success.  We think this is common across high performing teams who are working on complex projects where it’s not always possible to see that you’ve made progress. In our experience, everyone needs to experience some sort of success and celebrate it somehow in order to remain focused and motivated.

Queen Hearts – Celebrate Success

High performing teams can sometimes get into the habit of constantly striving for faster or better outcomes, thereby creating a subtle message that says ‘we are not good enough’.

Make sure you add celebrations into your project plans, both at the very end of a project but also along the way to celebrate small wins. Nothing motivates people more than acknowledgement of work well done. Find creative ways to celebrate that are meaningful for your team.

Do you celebrate your small wins, successes, and/or milestones? What has been the most memorable celebration you’ve had?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Then download the free Teamwork Explorer iPhone app now! More interested in the actual paper based set of cards?  Visit our store!

Filed Under: Leadership, teams Tagged With: ,

Blind Decision Making

March 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Teamwork Explorer Tip is the King of Clubs (decision making) – Gathering all Information. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Gathering All Information

Today’s blog is very related to last week’s on the Baby in the Back Seat.  Because we often jump to conclusions, our decision making may not be all that accurate or helpful.  I was coaching someone last week who was being asked by her CEO to attend morning huddles.  She was newly promoted to the executive leadership team and was finding the changing requirements of the position challenging.  She was sceptical about the value of the huddles and thought they would really disrupt her day … she had made a number of assumptions about them and was really leaning towards just not attending. I asked her if she knew why her CEO wanted her to attend and why he thought they were important. The lightbulb went off … she had no idea and had not thought to ask.  By the end our session, she had decided to try a few and have another conversation with her CEO about the importance of them. She also realized that if she were going to go to these morning huddles she would need to remain open to them.  She came up with the following questions to guide her “What can I learn from the morning huddle?” “What can I contribute to the morning huddle?”

While this example is about an individual, teams are guilty of the same sorts of knee jerk reactions in response to requests. Ensure that your team has the right information to make informed decisions.

King of Clubs – Gathering All Information

Gathering as much pertinent information as possible prior to making a decision may involve bringing in expertise from outside the team. Teams have to beware of spending too long gathering information prior to making time-critical decisions.

How does your team handle the information gathering phase of your decision making?  Do you make decisions too quickly or procrastinate too much?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Then download the free Teamwork Explorer iPhone app now! More interested in the actual paper based set of cards?  Visit our store!


Filed Under: Leadership, teams Tagged With: ,

Baby in Back Seat

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Teamwork Explorer Tip is the King of Diamonds (communication) – Ladder of Inference. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Ladder of Inference

What does a baby in the back seat have to do with teams and our communication tip this week?  Well, read on …

Despite the fact that I value learning and know that patience is a large part of learning, I am not a patient person.  A story I read in Anna Maravelas book helps me slow down and communicate better with those around me.  It’s the story of a man who stopped behind a woman at a red light. The light turned green and the woman ahead didn’t start moving, so he (being like me) got impatient and started blowing his horn.  Not only that, but she actually turned around and was fiddling with something in the back seat and THEN she actually got out of the car and was trying to get something out of the back seat. Well, the driver lost it at that point, blowing the horn, yelling through the window, just in general carrying on.  Well, we’ve all been there haven’t we? Stressed out, thinking that we are running short of time, etc, etc. Turns out that the woman was trying to stop her baby from choking. That’s why she got out of the car … to save her baby and thus baby in back seat or BIBS as Anna calls it in her book.

And this is the essence of Peter Senge’s ideas (based on the original work of Chris Argyris) in the Fifth Discipline around the Ladder of Inference. We take in information and select certain bits of it to pay attention to, attach meaning to and base our actions on.  Because so many drivers don’t pay attention to what they are doing, this man ran up his ladder to actions (blowing the horn, etc).

How often do we do this on teams?  I see it all the time and I do it all the time.  Remaining open and curious about what is REALLY happening for people takes time, energy and commitment, but if you really want to improve the communication on your team, you need to do it.  I try to remember BIBS when I find myself getting angry or stressed … we have a few other tips below in our teamwork card, King of Diamonds.

King of Diamonds – Ladder of Inference (Peter Senge)

To make sense of the world, people have short-cuts or ladders of inference for their beliefs and actions. Analyzing what has led to a particular belief and/or asking others what has led to their beliefs often improves communication.

  1. What are some of your ladders of inference?
  2. How have these worked for or against open communication and building positive relationships?
  3. How might you use the ladder of inference model to check your assumptions about team members and/or help your team members check their own assumptions?

What other tips do you have for suspending judgments and watching your assumptions? I would love to hear them!

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Then download the free Teamwork Explorer iPhone app now! More interested in the actual paper based set of cards?  Visit our store!


Filed Under: Leadership, teams, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

5 Tips for Team Goals

March 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Teamwork Explorer Tip is the King of Spades, Be Clear about the Goal. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Be Clear about the Goal

The idea of goal setting is not new, but what is challenging on teams (and generally in organizations) is getting everyone aligned and working towards the same goal.  In Built to Last Collins and Porras described the importance of having visonary and emotionally compelling goals, or big hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs). As they suggest a BHAG is “clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a clear catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines.” In our experience, here are a few tips for identifying your team’s BHAGs:

  1. An obvious tip … but ensure your team goal is aligned to the overall goals of the organization. If that connection isn’t clear you are on shaky ground.
  2. Identify the common values of your team members.  Goals need to be aligned with common values or you definitely won’t get people buying in. For example, if team members value social causes and your team’s big goal is to increase sales revenue you likely won’t get everyone on board. When you identify and discuss values, ensure you also talk about the beliefs and behaviors behind your value. For example, I value freedom because I believe that freedom contributes to my creativity and keeps me energized. That’s why I have chosen to remain an independent consultant for many years as the freedom to choose projects and organizations keeps me interested, engaged and continually learning. I have turned down many jobs in order to live my value of freedom.
  3. Find goals that tap into the passion of your team members. Start goal setting with a brainstorming starter like “What if we could …” Ensure that you suspend the “we can’t do that because …” critical analysis until you’ve had a good shot at the brainstorming!
  4. Ask yourselves how you will know if you are making progress toward goals and then build in celebrations when you reach them.
  5. At the end of meetings, ask yourselves how the meeting helped to move you closer to your goals. If it didn’t, you need to change your meetings and/or revisit your goals.

King of Spades – Be Clear about the Goal

Amazing results are achieved when team members pull together toward a common goal. Revisit the goal often to make sure everyone understands what the team is trying to accomplish. It’s best to bring hidden agendas out on the table rather than keeping them hidden.

Are you clear about the goal on your team? What tips do you have for helping team members stay focused?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Then download the free Teamwork Explorer iPhone app now! More interested in the actual paper based set of cards?  Visit our store!


Filed Under: Leadership, teams, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Team Trust Builder #1

March 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Today’s Teamwork Explorer Tip is the King of Hearts, Fess Up!. (Need to know more about our approach to teamwork?) See our Teamwork Explorer blog post.)

Fess Up!

This week’s blog post follows very closely from the last two … as humans we make mistakes. The biggest trust builder on teams in our experience is to sincerely fess up! While we think that fessing up should be practiced by every team member as a matter of good practice, much has been written recently about the importance of public apologies from leaders … for a great blog post check out Barbara Kellerman’s When Should a Leader Apologize?

King of Hearts – Fess up!

Everyone makes mistakes. The biggest trust buster on teams is people making mistakes and not fessing up, but looking for something or someone else to blame. Help each other be accountable and create a team environment that encourages people to learn from mistakes. Fess up in a timely manner to head off any built up resentments over time.

What’s your team environment like? Do people fess up? Has fessing up been a trust builder for your team?

Curious about the rest of the tips and want to know all about them now? Then download the free Teamwork Explorer iPhone app now! More interested in the actual paper based set of cards?  Visit our store!

Teamwork Explorer

Filed Under: Leadership, teams Tagged With: , ,
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