Focus Question: What strengths have your teams been leaning into this year?

Description
What are the strengths you can leverage?
 
Teams which get results are often complimentary in skills. What are the skills each team member brings to the table?
 
In times of disruption and/or change, it’s even more important for us to be focusing on our strengths. Strengths and what we are good are often the things that we tend to rely on, or lean into, first.

• As a team what do you notice about your strengths?
• The overlap between different members of the team?
• The gaps between different members of the team?

 
Over an extended period of time, especially when under pressure or stress, we may tend to over leverage our strengths.
Consider dialogue around this question:

• Where, and how, the team is overleveraging their strengths?
• What impact is it having?

​Check out this great March 2020 podcast from Gallup .

Activity 

This week spark a dialogue around strengths. If you have done some strengths-based work (see the earlier focus in Week 8 of the Remote Pathways 52 weeks guide), spend time exploring it…

Possible avenues to explore are StrengthsFinder 2.0 OR VIA Strengths.

What do you notice about your strengths? What’s working? What blindspots have you created? What’s not working?
 
For more on this topic check out: Section 1 and 2 of Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack.

Enjoy!
Jennifer

Focus Question: What are the conversations which need to be had?

Description
From leading meetings, to giving presentations that break the mold of Zoom Fatigue, to undertaking strategic planning, in the remote space facilitation skills are critical.

Virtual Facilitation is a highly interactive approach to helping groups or teams in the online or digital space have the conversations they need to have. Facilitation is all about Dialogue, a two-way conversation.  How much space and time are you leaving for interaction in your virtual calls?

​Building out your toolkit in the area of virtual facilitation might include boosting your skills in:

• Asking questions – Meetings should be a conversation, not just being talked at.
• Using different tools and apps – From the Post-its of Mural, to the polling function of MentiMeter, masterful virtual facilitation is about bringing everyone’s voice into the room. What are the additional tools you want to incorporate?
• Using images to signal what you are trying to describe
• Storytelling – Virtual presentations and conversations take people on a journey. What’s the journey you want to take people on?
• Facilitation skills – Virtual facilitation is about facilitation. It’s about helping people make decisions, prioritize, come to consensus. This is what we focus on at the Virtual Facilitation Essentials program. It’s about helping a group get to the results they want in a way which might invoke discovery, exploration as well as debate, focus, and even abandoning ideas.

What are the things that are going to help your next virtual conversation stand out?

Activity
 
Consider what type of conversations you are engaging in. Are you creating space for pause, reflection, action and dialogues? What are the skills you need – is it more about developing a mastery of facilitation tools OR focusing more on your approach to leaving space for dialogue.
 
For more on this topic check out Jennifer’s book, Effective Virtual Conversations which explores principles and practices of virtual and online conversations across the ecosystem of virtual learning – from asynchronous approaches, webinars, coaching to team building.

All the best,
Jennifer

Focus Question: What’s important to note about your work right now?

Description
Now, more than ever, teams need opportunities to connect, learn and grow together.
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In earmarking Team Time, you will want to make sure that you are creating a sacred time for the team to connect for getting clarity on the RESULTS they want and the RELATIONSHIPS which are important.

What are you looking to create in your team time?

Teams need a number of ingredients which we explored earlier this year in the Six Factors of High Performing Teams. A reminder that these six factors are:

• Shared mission and vision
• Shared goals
• Shared performance measures
• Clear roles
• Shared team practices
• And shared commitment

Teams excel when they have time formally and informally to get to know each other. While you might have lots of formal meetings, what informal opportunities do you provide to help team members to get to know each other?
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Have you considered virtual co-working as a way for people to get to know each other?
It’s important for teams to engage in ongoing learning. What are the types of learning experiences you have earmarked, both formally and informally? 

Activity
Review where you are as a team.
Consider what team development activities you have planned.

For more on this topic check out: Episode 15 (Team Effectiveness) and Episode 20 (Virtual Co-working) of the Remote Pathways podcast and the associated download. You’ll find it here.
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Also check out Chapters 10 and 11 of Effective Virtual Conversations, Jennifer Britton’s 2017 book, Effective Virtual Conversations, which focuses on Virtual Team Development and Virtual team Learning

Focus Question: What does experimentation mean for you? Look like in your work?

Description
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:

Practically, incorporating more experimentation may look like:
• Putting shorter time windows on projects, with quicker checkpoints to see what is working, and what is not
• Moving projects out of design phase and into beta more quickly so that pilots can be rolled out and/or early adopters can take the program for a test drive
• Looking at testing a couple of different strategies at the same time, with the notion that they may not be as fully developed as they have been in the past. Early results may inform what gets further developed and/or followed
(Originally published as https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1597-teamwork-skills-in-complex-times-experimentation and https://www.potentialsrealized.com/teams-365-blog/teams365-1583-in-focus-experimentation)

Activity
What are the experiments you want to undertake right now around your work? Where could more experimentation benefit you (and the team) with innovation or focus?
 
For more on this topic check out: Section 4 of PlanDoTrack for more on Experimentation.
Experimentation has also been one of the quarterly themes we’ve anchored into this year at the Remote Pathways podcast. Be sure to check out the Community Calls at the Remote Pathways Podcast.  You can find them at this YouTube Playlist - (Remote Pathways Podcast Community Call playlist)

All the best,
​Jennifer

Focus Question: Where are you focusing on?

Description
Focus is a multi-layered word in the remote space. Focus is not only about what we are choosing to look at, what also thinking about what helps us keep our focus.
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#1 – Where are you focusing?
Just as Goleman writes focus is important on three levels – inner focus, other focus and outer focus. Where are you putting your attention? All three areas are key for work in the remote space, and it can be easy to get pulled into certain areas, for example, an inner focus.
 
#2 – Building out your focus muscle
What are you doing to focus your attention? This may be about tuning out your distractions as well as those things that are not core.
Read through Week 43 on Keeping Things Simple and Week 42 on Minimizing Distractions.

Activity
# 1- Consider where are you focusing – inner focus, outer focus or other focus? Where are you not focusing? What’s the danger or trap of not focusing there?
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#2 – What is going to help you build your muscle for focus? What will help minimize distractions?

For more on this topic check out: The Teams365 Blog at Potentials Realized.com.

Best,
Jennifer