dialoguing for a better team

A new week is starting, and with it, a new article! Today I want to talk about dialogs, and how we can improve them to create a deeper connection with the people in our team, tackle problems the tell us and use all of this to improve the system. For that, I use the Improvement Dialogues!

Improvement Dialogues is a way to talk about four areas that can affect our individual or team performance. We want to know if people are motivated and engaged at work by looking at: Personal, Relational, Organizational and Environmental Topics. Each of them has a clear goal to address, following the guidelines in the Management 3.0 practice, we should use the deck with the cards, we should draw a card and discuss based on the question. I used it a bit differently.

I started using Improvement Dialogues (with the official practice opened to use as a guide https://management30.com/practice/improvement-dialogues/) because I started in a management position having no prior experience guiding a one on one meeting, so I thought it could be a nice guide for me to do it effectively with my new team. Looking in retrospect, it was a good choice.

I used these questions during my one-on-one meetings with my teammates, every one-on-one I go through the four areas asking if the person is happy, if there’s anything that’s not good for them, making them unhappy, the transparency, anything happening in their personal lives we can help them with. As I listen to them, I also explain somethings that happened during the month, some changes, we talk about new ideas for the company, new tests, things they want to do. In the end, I give them feedback (always trying to use the Feedback Wrap) and ask them to give me some feedback as well.

I learned a lot about my teammates, how they see the enterprise and how what happens motivates or discourages them based on what’s happening. Interesting to see that sometimes a person can feel good about what’s happening at your team, or with you as a leader, with the team, but something at a company level can discourage them and affect teamwork, if something personal happens, the impact is even deeper. As time goes on, you’ll learn more about your team and those one-on-one gets more interesting. I think I’ll try it out with the deck card, it might be interesting and create new paths of conversation. This time I can’t give visuals, because I won’t post my one-on-one notes.

#management30 #continuosimprovement