Building the teams we need now

Last week I shared a post about the competencies we need to develop for the work we’re experiencing now. I focused on the individual and the skills of Self-efficacy, Curiosity, Resilience, Time-management and Experimentation. You can read the post here.

This week, I wanted to focus on teams and the idea of collective competency. There are 5 skills in particular I think help teams to work most effectively in the current environment and where we should be investing effort in development.

The skills are:

• Virtual Collaboration – 'collective engagement without in-person interaction'     
• Clear communication – 'alignment of message intent and impact'
• Peer-to-peer feedback – 'observations shared to help you to be your best'
• Adaptability – 'how well you react to the inevitability of change'
• Problem-solving – 'finding solutions to challenges or knowledge gaps'

As before, I’ve taken each skill, reflected on why it matters and shared tools I’ve found to support development.

Please do share this with people you think may benefit.

Virtual Collaboration

We’ve all fast-tracked our knowledge of virtual collaboration tools like Teams and Zoom over the past few months, but there is perhaps a risk that we’ve just taken the way we used to work and overlaid it with a virtual meeting software rather than reflecting on the best way to collaborate virtually.

This was really brought home to me in this Medium article which talks about the 5 levels of remote work, with level 2 being ‘recreating the office online’. When we do this, we’re not redesigning work we’re resigning ourselves to work with the same inefficiencies that got in our way before!

To really make virtual work work for teams, we need to relook at how we collaborate together. In addition to the obvious Teams, Zoom, Slack, Workplace…there are some other tools that are well worth looking into if you haven’t discovered them yet:

• Mural & Miro – can help you with collective idea sharing (think virtual post its and flipcharts)
• Asana, Monday & Trello – helpful for collective work scheduling
• Perdoo – a useful tool for collective goal/OKR clarity (free for up to 10 people)

Clear Communication

Virtual working creates some new communication challenges for teams to tune into. One issue is the feedback we get from others, which helps us to understand that our message has been received the way we intended. This communication response can be implicit or explicit:

• Implicit feedback - includes non-verbal sounds, facial expressions, touches and body language. It might be a nod that someone has understood or a frown/raised eyebrow that indicates they have a question or need to know more.
• Explicit feedback – straightforward communication we get from others. This might sound like ‘I get it. What do we need to do next?’ or ‘I hear you, but I don’t agree. My perspective is……’

When we’re with people in person, we get a mix of both implicit and explicit feedback and it helps us to understand others and adapt our communication. In a virtual working environment we miss a lot of the implicit communication and it can lead to a lack of clarity about what is actually being said or whether a message has been received as we intended.

Thinking about what conversations would benefit from implicit and explicit communication feedback is a good place to start (e.g. more difficult conversations/announcements). For those meetings, encourage cameras to be on. If you have a presentation to talk through, stop screen sharing afterwards so you can ask people what they thought and look at their expressions. If you have a large group of people, using breakouts and actively listening to what people say and how people say it.

You’re seeking to better understand in order to be better understood.

Another thing that can affect communication effectiveness, is knowing what messages should be shared where. With email + Slack + Whats App + Teams + whatever else you're using, it can create confusion that takes away from clarity. Microsoft had a really useful approach when I worked there with an ‘inner/outer loop’ model for clarifying what tools to use when – this concept could be adapted for your context if it’s a challenge you see in your teams:

Peer-to-peer feedback

Physical distance can lead to disconnection in teams. When this happens, small issues can be magnified and create bigger problems. Where teams feel safe to give each other frequent feedback, they can course correct more quickly and prevent issues from escalating.

Ideas to increase the frequency of feedback

• Friday feedback: each team member shares 1 thing that worked well this week and 1 thing that would be even better if for next week 
• Use a tool like DISC (basic free assessment here) to help teams understand each other’s individual styles to provide a shared language for feedback e.g. “As someone with a high Influence style, I really appreciate that you bring an element of Compliance into our work to ensure that everything we need to get done, gets done”
• Start asking for more feedback e.g. ‘when have you seen me at my best in the last 3 months’ or ‘where do you see me adding the most value to the team at the moment?'
• Ask the team to share examples of when they have seen fixed and growth mindset moments in action and the impact was on them and their work

Ideas to increase the quality of the feedback

• Talk to the team about the principles of radical candour and ‘clear is kind’ feedback.

• Ensure the team share feedback that is given with the intent of helping someone improve (not criticism or judgement)
• Encourage feedback that focuses on the work, not the person
• Use a framework like COIN to help people structure thoughts (Context, Observations, Impact, Next Steps)

Adaptability

We’ve been through a lot of change in how we’re working and there is almost certainly more to come. Focusing on team adaptability enables the team to respond more quickly and stay on track.

Natalie Fratto’s TED Talk on adaptability is excellent and there are several practical actions a team can take from watching it.

1. Asking ‘What If?’ to generate to new ideas
2. Reflecting on Lessons Learned to ensure a work-in-progress mindset exists in the team
3. Actively ‘unlearning’ by spending time talking to people who approach problems and work in a different way to you (this time could be spent with people who work in a different organisation or industry or who have a different working style)

It’s also worth watching out for fixed mindset in the team, which might sound like ‘we can’t do it like that’ or ‘we never work well with xxxx’. These limiting statements are the antithesis to adaptability.

Problem Solving

If we don’t find effective ways to solve problems in teams, we slow down progress and can end up passing around monkeys (tasks we pass off onto other people).

The ladder of inference is a really useful tool for understanding how people think about problems and get to solutions. Exploring it with teams can help to unpick assumptions that might create certain conclusions and enable new options and ideas to be generated.

This article from Harvard helps explain how it can be used in practice.

You can also build the teams problem solving skillset in informal ways with exercises like the ‘desert island scenario’

• Step 1: The team is given a scenario where they’re stranded on a deserted island with seven objects – but they can only grab three (make the objects as obscure and challenging as possible so that people are forced to really use critical thinking and planning)
• Step 2: Split the team into small breakouts and allow them to collaborate on which items they want to pick. Set a timer for the discussion
• Step 3: The teams return and share their thinking
• Step 4: Use an online poll so that the teams can vote for the best logic/most creative solution

One thing I haven’t mentioned in the competencies is the importance of a team being connected and positive! For some ideas of ‘fun’ virtual team building exercises, this is a good article.

Hopefully lots of ideas and things for you to take forward! Feedback always appreciated on how to make this weekly newsletter useful for you.

Helen