5 Team Practices For Staying Focused During Constant Change

As the uncertainties and complexities of our world continue to increase, team agility has emerged as an essential component for organizational success. Team agility is the ability for teams to take effective action toward their most important goals amid complex and rapidly changing conditions. Now more than ever, organizations need teams to make the necessary adjustments to evolve to address new opportunities and challenges.?

For a team to achieve outstanding results and build relationships, there must be a solid foundation of common purpose, clear and aligned roles, and effective processes for getting work done. Instilling a foundation for team effectiveness is the price of entry for team performance. But team agility is the key differentiator that allows a team to exceed expectations while others struggle or fail.

5 Team Practices For Staying Focused During Change

1) Ability To Quickly Reset Priorities

A common purpose, values, and goals give the team its identity and direction. Clear alignment of team goals to the most strategic company goals enables the team to assess what current activities have a meaningful impact and what parts of their current workload are not as important.

Teams must develop the capacity to continually assess and reset, when necessary, their priorities to meet new challenges and remain on track for success. The following questions can help teams reflect and adapt to a shifting environment.

• What has changed? / What is still the same?
• What have we learned?
• How do we need to update our goals, priorities, or processes?
• How do we need to work differently?
• What new knowledge and skills do we need to develop?

2) Empowered To Say "No"

Teams must feel empowered to say “no” to projects, tasks, and requests that steal energy and focus away from accomplishing their most important priorities. For a team to have a laser-like focus on its most important goals, its leadership must agree that the team is focusing on the right priorities.?Without leadership support, team members will never feel safe to say ‘no’ when the ongoing urgent work and emergencies get in the way of accomplishing the most strategically important activities.

Teams must be responsive to urgent requests, just not at the expense of moving forward their most important goals.?Team members must feel empowered to use their noes to protect their yesses.?

3) Emphasize Team Problem-Solving

The best teams are great at solving problems. Resolving the issues that get in the way of accomplishing team goals should be the central component of the team's recurring meetings. Too often, a team will spend the majority of their time together providing general updates, many of which are not pertinent for everyone to know or could be shared electronically.?

A meeting agenda that focuses on problem-solving enables the team to develop their team muscle for successfully addressing ongoing issues and opportunities. Below are best practices for establishing an effective and equitable problem-solving process.

• An inclusive, simple, and replicable process for the team to work together to resolve issues and solve problems
• Communicate that the team is about to work through an issue and that all perspectives and input is valued
• Provide think time for team members to document their thoughts before asking people to share
• Ensure agreements for next steps and accountability are documented and revisited during subsequent meetings

4) Actively Learn From Experience

The highest performing teams are skilled at learning from experience and dedicate time for team learning. This team learning process goes by many different names including, After-Action Review, Post Mortem, Retrospective, Blameless Autopsy, or Team Debrief. The purpose of this exercise is to gather the team together to review and learn from work recently completed by answering the questions about what went well and what went wrong and then committing to any improvements identified.

An ongoing process of practice and reflection helps teams quickly assess previous experience, make meaning of the experience, and decide what the experience means for future action.

5) Invest In Relationships

Focusing solely on tasks can work for short periods of time, but over a long haul these behaviors deteriorate a team’s social bonds. This is magnified by the fact that today more of our work and meetings have to completed virtually. This isolation is problematic, as a strong social support system is the most important factor in creating resilient and productive teams.

Teams must invest in building their social networks, especially during times of challenge, change, and high demands. Below are some ideas for how teams can establish strong relationships.

• Celebrate wins?
• Share gratitude and appreciation
• Make time for fun and laughter

Teams that are most advanced with agility and continuous learning outperform their peers. These 5 practices help team members to maintain a laser-like focus on accomplishing their most important results within a constantly changing environment and ongoing uncertainty.

*Previously shared by Tony Gambill on Forbes Leadership

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Tony Gambill is the President and Founder of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping executives and managers bring their best leadership self to their most challenging situations. Tony is the author of the book,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life .