How to make the most of your team in 2020

“Some of the easy wins just started happening, spontaneously. I didn’t have to ‘do’ anything.”

It’s that time of year. Plans for 2020 will soon need to be submitted.

They will very likely be “ambitious, but achievable.”

A brief negotiation; and budget/objectives for your team are set – possibly with slightly higher targets; and perhaps with a bit less resource than you’d suggested.

Now you have to deliver – and because of the budgeting process, resource looks tight. You need to make the most of it.

You may plan a 2020 kick-off to explain the plan to the team. They’ll listen to it; the more confident will ask questions, make suggestions. Most will sit quietly; keeping their thoughts to themselves; clapping on cue at the end.

And in that moment you will have missed a massive opportunity to make the most of everyone in your team.

Because while you’ve been talking your people will have been not just listening but experiencing a whole range of thoughts and emotions . They may experience confusion or uncertainty, their brains scanning for threat in everything you say; or cynicism, seeing all kinds of barriers (which they may think you haven’t clocked) from their experience at the coalface; or they may be brimming with ideas and feel frustration or resignation that they’ve not been asked. All kinds of interpersonal mush might be getting in the way, meaning they may hear what you say, but will not have fully engaged with it.

You will have left a huge amount of hidden potential in the room.

So, for 2020 why not try a different approach?

This year fully engage your team. Get them in a room in a psychologically safe environment; help them to really explore and understand the strategy, what it means for them and what success looks like; encourage them to express honestly what may get in the way of success; ask them to come up with ideas for breaking down those barriers; and get them commit to their contribution.

If this sounds like a good idea but you are wondering how to do this in a reliably positive way, then you might be interested in my Making the Most of All of Us workshop using LEGO? Serious Play?.

LSP rapidly creates a psychologically safe space that allows for authentic, focused, creative and collaborative dialogue in which everyone is fully involved throughout.

Making the Most of All of Us is designed to build effective collaboration among your team; and has been delivered successfully in both commercial and public sector organisations. Participants will learn about and experience ways to improve collaboration; they’ll learn more about each other; and, most importantly, they’ll explore the plans for 2020 together and develop actionable ideas for ensuring that the full potential of the team is realised in the weeks and months following the workshop.

And as a result of coming up with the ideas as a team, they’ll feel a sense of shared ownership and responsibility. Hence the quote at the top of the article which was from a Direct Distribution Director of a large retail financial services company. At the same workshop, a junior staff member who had come up with a great idea said the biggest learning from was: “I didn’t know I could be creative.”

So, if you think resources are going to be tight in 2020, don’t think solely in terms of the number of people; think about how you can start the year by releasing the hidden potential of the people you have.

Find out more at www.bulbb.co.uk or message me here. And check out my other articles on how playful methods supercharge your teams’ most important interactions:

• Making collaboration effective again
• Building instant psychological safety
• Making the most of each other: a more hands-on approach to knowledge management
• The mini-transformations that change the team dynamics in a moment
• Removing the disconnect between senior and junior team members
• The neuroscience of play, work and breaking down silos
• The importance of shared meaning 
• Making the most of the diversity of your team?