To better prioritize, use a system (Priority Series 4/5)

You have done the work of capturing and organizing all your tasks.  Now it is time to figure out what should come first and next, so you attain optimal results for you, your team, and your organization.

Here are some popular systems for prioritization: 

1. Eisenhower Matrix.  Former US President Dwight Eisenhower developed this tool. It is a simple four-quadrant box that helps you separate important and urgent tasks.  Most of us fall into the trap of thinking urgent is important, but there is a big difference.  This propensity likely has roots in our evolutionary history; our ancestors concentrated more on short-term concerns than long-term strategy.  This is because tending to an immediate stimulus like a charging saber-toothed tiger could mean the difference between life and death.

In basic terms, urgent tasks are things that feel like they require your immediate attention.  They can put us in reactive mode, marked by a defensive, negative, hurried, and narrowly-focused mindset.  Think about an email that has to go out in the next 30 minutes, we could feel a little rushed and stressed and maybe will not put the kind of work into it that we would like.  Additionally, it could be an email that we have to do, which is not necessarily central to our goals.

There are two common reasons why urgent tasks occur.

·      First, it can be related to your poor planning. For example, you just finished a meeting and have five deliverables, but you forget to write them down.  About an hour before the next meeting, you remember those tasks and become frenzied to complete them.  This is the type of urgency that can be fixed with more solid planning. 

·      Second, it can relate to other people’s poor planning that puts you in a situation where you have to now react to their demands.  Perhaps your teammates drop in and request information within the next hour.  Just because something is urgent for them does not mean it is significant to you.  Of course, emergencies arise, and it is always good to band together in times of crisis and support the team, but if this is more the case of poor planning and less of a pop-up situation, it should be addressed to course correct for the future.  Having a system to deal with these two common causes of urgent tasks will be helpful. 

Important tasks are ones that support your long-term purpose, mission, values, and goals.  They are tasks that inspire you.  While some important items can be urgent, Eisenhower believed, “What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”  Most people spend a lot of their time managing situations and crises by reacting to other people’s priorities stemming from poor planning.   

Once you have created your matrix and listed all your items in the respective quadrant, you can then behave accordingly. 

·      Important and urgent (Q1): Do these tasks as soon as possible.

·      Important, but not urgent (Q2): Decide when you will do these and schedule it.

·      Urgent, but not important (Q3): Delegate these tasks to someone else.

·      Neither urgent nor important (Q4): Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible and never look back.

The goal is to have only a few items in Q3 because this quadrant is about putting out fires and dealing with tight timelines.  It does not serve anybody to have a sense of panic around completing an item.  The more time you dedicate to effective planning, the more you will notice that in about a month or so, you will have fewer items in Q3 and can focus more of your effort where it matters (Q1). 

2. Ivy Lee Method or the Tomorrow List.  This strategy is a way to rank your urgent and important work by its true priority.  The Ivy Lee method dates back to 1918, when Ivy Lee, a productivity consultant, was hired by Charles M. Schwab, the President of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, to improve his company's efficiency.  As the story goes, Lee offered his method to Schwab for free, and after three months, Schwab was so pleased with the results he wrote Lee a check for $25,000, worth $400,000 today.  

Here’s how it works:

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important tasks you need to accomplish tomorrow.  Do not write more than six.

2. Prioritize those six items in order of their importance.

3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task.  Only when you are finished, you may move to the next one. 

4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion.  At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.  Repeat this process every working day 

When you spend time in the evening creating this “Tomorrow List,” it has several benefits:

·      Studies indicate that writing down our goals and tasks helps us relax and declutter our minds.  The more we free our minds, the less we worry about when we try to fall asleep.

·      While sleeping, we can subconsciously be thinking about the goals and problems awaiting us, and our mind can go to work solving problems and forging new insights that can be carried forward for the following day and prime us to take action.

·      When we are focused on our plans for the next morning, we save time thinking about what’s first on the docket.

·      Limiting ourselves to six daily tasks (or less depending on preference) creates a constraint that forces us to prioritize appropriately and then stay focused by single-tasking our way through the list.

3. ABCDE Method.  This technique developed by Brian Tracy helps further divide the most important from a list of already important items. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Go through your list and give every task a letter from A to E.  Letter A being the highest priority because if you do not complete it, it can have serious consequences.

2. For every task with an A, give it a number that dictates the order you will do it in – A1, A2, A3.  B are tasks that you should do, but have somewhat important consequences.  Ideally, you should not move on to a B task until you have completed all the A tasks.  C tasks are ones that may have mild consequences.

3. Repeat until all tasks have letters and numbers.

The power of this prioritization technique lives in its simplicity and precision.  It allows you to get clarity on what is truly important to you because you have to decide what goes in the B3 category v. the C1.

4. Eat that Frog or “Hardest Item First” Method.  Once you have prioritized your most important work using whichever preferred method, it’s time to choose how to attack the day. 

Many productivity experts including Brian Tracy suggests doing the most important or most laborious task right away because it will set the tone for the rest of the day.  Mark Twain famously wrote, “If you have to eat a live frog, it does not pay to sit and look at it for a very long time!”  After you eat the frog, you will have the satisfaction that you have already done the worst and hardest thing for the day, and everything else will seem easier.  That emotional payoff can spark inspiration and confidence to tackle other tasks.  For those who consider themselves early birds, it makes sense to do your most challenging item first because you have a tank of fresh energy in which to dedicate.   

5. Warren Buffet’s 2-list strategy.  This is a way to make sure that you are working on the most important goals.  It does not matter how productive you are, if you are going after non-essential goals that are not leading you to your vision, you are not making progress. 

As the story goes, Warren Buffet used this process with his personal pilot to help him prioritize his career goals.  The first step was to write down 25 life goals, big and small, relating to career, education, family, and anything else worth spending time on.  Step two was to circle the top five goals on that list.  Any goals not circled, should be ignored, rather than interspersing them in your schedule for when you have time.  This is so that you are always working towards those big life goals and not spending your time doing non-trivial items.  Be sure to frequently check-in with yourself to make sure your priorities align with your long-term goals.

6. Fran Hauser’s 4 Square Model.  Author and Executive Fran Hauser divides her life priorities into four key quadrants: Career, Friends/Family, Me, and World.  Each box has the top priorities that cannot be moved because they deliver the greatest joy and align with her lifestyle.  80% of her time is dedicated to those top items, anything else that does not fit into that box, she is prepared to say no.  Sometimes it may mean shifting her schedule around so she can ensure that most of her time is spent on these four quadrants.  You can also build in some flexibility and take the average of two weeks instead of sticking to a weekly schedule since some weeks are more demanding than others.

Here are some examples of what it can look like:

·      Career: Reading books, learning a new skill, working with a coach on growth and development

·      Family/friends: Twice per week, family rituals of spending time together, such as working on a project or doing something wildly enjoyable together

·      Me: Personal development goals – could be exercise, more sleep, eating well, meditation, etc.

·      World: Doing charitable or volunteering work

7. Pomodoro Technique.  Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s as a time management technique that helps you with your priorities.   It uses a timer to break down work into intervals traditionally 25 minutes in length, separated by short breaks.  Each interval is known as a Pomodoro, named after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer Cirillo used as a university student.  This method has been widely used and similar to concepts such as timeboxing.

Here is how it works:

·      Decide on the task to be done.

·      Set the timer (traditionally 25 mins.) and work on the task.

·      End the work when the timer rings and put a checkmark on a piece of paper.

·      If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break for 3-5 minutes.

·      Once you have completed four Pomodoros, take a longer break (15-30 mins.), reset your checkmark count to zero, and begin with step one. 

This technique can help you concentrate your energy on a big task you have prioritized that you want to devote at least a couple of hours to make a dent.

There are various systems that will help you prioritize work that will move the needle in your life to a place of fulfillment and meaning.  Experiment with the right system for you and get started!

Quote of the day: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” -William James

Q: How do you prioritize? Which system do you use that may not be listed above?

The next blog in this series 5/5 will focus on top tips for prioritization.

As an Executive and Leadership Coach, I partner with others to get clarity on your priorities, contact me to learn more.

What’s your system for prioritization?

Why you need a daily practice of planning and prioritization (Priority Series 3/5)

The last blog covered the importance of mapping out our high-level plan, including our purpose, vision, and values.  Now we can jump into creating a daily practice of planning and prioritizing.

Author and Organizational Consultant David Allen, a master of prioritization and planning, offers his Getting Things Done (GTD) system for organization.  His 5-step process - capture, clarify, organize, reflect, and engage with your stuff - helps us get more precise with our work.

1. Capture.  We need different lists for different purposes.  First, make a master list, where you capture everything you need to do in one spot that is out of your mind.  This thought-download exercise will provide a sense of relief.  Allen asserts, “Your mind is for having ideas, not for holding them.”  If we put things in an external drive, we can free up mental space and be fully engaged with our current tasks and be more present with the people in our lives.  You can create categories of things that are important to you for more significant organization.  You can also have a “someday maybe” list of items that could be interesting to explore eventually.  For example, consider taking the marketing course, look into taking the family to this event.  You can then further divide your work into monthly, weekly, and daily lists.  Don’t worry about the number of items, just get as much down on the paper as possible. 

2. Clarify.  Get clear on all the things you have to do.  Break down your big items into parts.  Instead of having the task of “write a blog,” you can split it into its components parts such as: 1. Create an outline 2. Research 3. Write the first draft  4. Proofread 5. Post.  It seems like a small simple action, but it makes a big difference if it means that you are more likely to start when you know all you have to do is jot down an outline instead of doing all those prerequisite steps for publication.

3. Organize.  You can arrange your actionable items by category, priority, and due date.  As productivity consultant Brian Tracy explains, your monthly list pulls from your master list. Your weekly list pulls from your monthly list.  And so on.  This way, you know your daily priorities align with your bigger goals. 

When completing your different lists, remember the Pareto Principle, that 20% of your efforts tend to produce 80% of your results.  Look for those tasks that bring you great gains.

4. Reflect.  Reflect on your to-do list.  Allen recommends doing this weekly and performing general clean up.  It is a time to see how your week went, what needs to be adjusted, and what needs to happen for the week ahead. This airplane view will allow you to see if your priorities are aligning with your purpose, vision, and goals and if they are not, you can choose to delegate, cancel, or reschedule some of your non-essential tasks.

5. Engage.  Take action – choose your next task from your list and get it done.  If you find that you are stalling, break up the task, maybe the next step is to have a couple of conversations with others to get ideas on how to proceed. Once you take the next step, you can receive additional information that you can act upon for the following step, and so on.

While you are planning, it is essential to be flexible.  What you want today can be different from what you want in the future, so you need to occasionally check in with yourself to make sure your values and goals are crystal clear and current.  Reshuffling priorities and making changes are all part of the process.

The very act of thinking and planning unlocks your mental powers and triggers your creativity.  Choose a process that will allow you to take action on the work that matters most to you.

Quote of the day:  “Cleaning and organizing is a practice, not a project” -Meagan Francis

Q: Which method do you use for organizing your information?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

[The next blog in this series 4/5 will focus on systems of prioritization]

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to get clarity on their priorities, contact me to learn more.

Establish a daily practice to enhance your prioritization skills

The Importance of Long-Term Planning Before you Prioritize (Priority Series 2/5)

You have just decided that you are going to start regularly prioritizing so you can go big on the things that matter to you. To facilitate your efforts, you first want to devise an effective planning system that will offer greater strategic clarity.

Here are some useful steps to take to create a foundation of planning that will set you up for more effective prioritization: 

Get clear on WHAT you want and WHY you want it! This process includes purpose, values, vision, goals, and objectives.

1. Purpose.  This can be a much more involved exercise, but essentially, why are you on this planet, what are you here to do?  Is your purpose to help others, if so, what actions are you taking to serve that purpose which allows you to feel fully alive?  It will be easier for you to create daily and weekly tasks when you know what you need to do within the bigger picture and when you are going after purpose-driven items, you will love the reasons for choosing what to spend time on.

2. Values.  These are essential pillars that energize you and buttress your purpose.  Maybe your values include learning and service, so having a purpose aimed at helping others seems natural. When you are living your values, you will feel productive in how you spend your moments.

3. Vision.  Three or five years from now, where do you want to be?  If you fulfilled your purpose, what would that look like, what would your lifestyle be?  Paint a detailed picture.; you need to know where you want to go so you can take prioritization steps to support that vision.

4. Set goals and objectives.  Once you have your vision, you want to collect all the things you need to do to accomplish that 3-year plan and capture it on one master list.  Then you can break it down into yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals and objectives.  Prioritization happens on different levels. You have the tasks that need to be done today, goals completed in a week, and accomplishments for the month.  Sometimes the lists do not always align, and sometimes it can be easy to default to what seems urgent today instead of what is vital for the long term.  Always choose to take the steps that are moving you closer to your important life priorities – your purpose and vision.

This high-level planning will make daily decisions much easier.  Brian Tracy’s 10-90 rule for personal effectiveness says that when you spend 10% of the time planning,  you save up to 90% of your time in execution.

You may also want to consider this popular ABZ planning method in designing your long-term objectives.  Created by Authors and Co-founders Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, it is an excellent strategy for designing your career while being flexible and having a backup plan for when things go wrong.  Plan A is about your current focus, which can be modified to adapt to small changes.  In case of a dramatic or unexpected change, Plan B launches, allowing you to pivot to refocus your goals and take the next steps to get there.  Plan Z is the fallback position; if all goes wrong, it is something you can comfortably rely on while you get back on your feet and not have to worry about the basics.

When you are clear about what you want and your priorities, you should be able to act decisively when a conflict comes up.  To help with this decision-making, you can set up potential conflict scenarios.  For example, you say that you want to prioritize career advancement.  So if you have an amazing work opportunity come up, but it is on the same day as your friend’s birthday party, which activity will you choose to attend?  When you put a few of these conflicts against each other and know exactly how you will act based on your vision, values, and purpose, you will be less stressed and act with conviction when the time comes.

To begin to prioritize, you want to get clear on your big-picture items – purpose, values, vision, goals, and objectives.  Then you can jump into the daily actions of working from a list and prioritize your most important work.

Quote of the day: “Tell me, what is it you wish to do with your one wild and precious life?” -Mary Oliver

Q: When was the last time you dedicated time to think and write about your purpose?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you 

[The next blog in this series 3/5 will focus on daily practices of prioritization] 

As a Leadership Coach, I partner with others to craft their personal leadership vision, contact me to learn more.

Big-picture planning will make your priorities clearer

The Dangers of Not Prioritizing (Priority Series 1/5)

It can be common to feel like you have a never-ending river of responsibilities. You put in what feels like a productive work session, but cannot quite seem to make a dent in your pile.  Learning to prioritize your most important work will allow you to make meaningful progress in your life.

Choosing not to prioritize comes with some dangers.  Here are a few:

1. When we do not prioritize, everything becomes important.  Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, shares a story of how on the day after his daughter was born, he was urged to attend a work meeting by a colleague.  Feeling pressured and not knowing his priorities, he left his wife in the hospital and showed up to work.  When he got there, clients looked at him perplexed and could not understand why he was not with his family.  When you are not clear on your priorities and say yes to everybody to please them, you end up doing more damage in the process – in his case - harm to his family, his integrity, and client relationships.  Agreeing to requests seems like you are being helpful, but you are not; it is much more important to know your priorities and act in accordance with them to serve yourself and others even better.

2. If we do not prioritize, we can get overwhelmed with too many choices.  An abundance of options can be problematic.  In The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz argues that having more choices can lead to unhappiness because it can be harder to cut through the noise and make a decision.  But when you know your priorities, you can look past the superfluous because that diamond is shining so brightly in front of you that you do not even see any of the other enticing stones.

3. When we do not have a clear sense of our priorities, we can engage in multi-tasking by trying to do it all.  Our brain can only focus on one thing at a time, so when we aim to go after two or more high priority items, we pay the price in time and effectiveness.  What happens is not multi-tasking (you cannot solve a math problem and share original poetry at the same time,) instead, what occurs is task switching, spending time on one task, and then moving to another.  A bounce between activities wastes our time because we have to reorient our brains to the new job.  We lose up to 40% of task effectiveness and sometimes more depending on the assignment’s difficulty.  Prioritizing helps us focus on one thing at a time for a longer duration, and that uninterrupted workflow can lead to higher productivity.

4. With no prioritization, we live in reaction mode.  If we do not know what we want to do, we may say yes to things that others want us to do.  Jim Rohn said, “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan.  And guess what they have planned for you?  Not much.”  Getting clarity on your most essential work will allow you to feel good about the job you are doing that supports your mission and vision.  

5. A lack of prioritizing can lead to burnout.  We all know those people who consistently stay late at the office or work on the weekends to catch up.  Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, but when it is the norm, it may be due to a challenge in prioritizing.  This activity is not something to wear as a badge when it comes at the expense of quality family or wellbeing time.  Conversely, there are those people who consistently leave at 6:00 pm to go to the gym because they have prioritized exercise, and knowing they have set boundaries garners great respect.

We may have 100 visions a day, but we cannot accomplish them all simultaneously.  Less is more.  Prioritization is a cornerstone of productivity and once you build this habit, it will help with time management and work-life balance.   

Quote of the day: “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Q: What is one skill that you can be excellent in that would have the most significant positive impact on your career?  How willing are you to prioritize that skill development?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this series 2/5 will focus on the importance of long-term planning to facilitate prioritization]

As a Leadership and Executive Coach, I partner with others to help discover and clarify priorities, contact me to learn more.

What’s your cost to not prioritizing?

Top 6 Ways to Brainstorm (Brainstorming 2/2)

In the last article, I wrote about how adding guidelines can improve the process of brainstorming, however, there are many different types of brainstorming. Let’s explore six popular ways to spark creativity on your team.

1. Brain Writing. Start by giving people time to think and work alone by writing down all of their ideas.  Then come together as a group and each person shares one idea at a time. When you separate the individual idea generation stage from the group discussion phrase, it allows for many more initial possibilities. You can then narrow down your selections by detecting the overlapping themes and building on these smaller and more concentrated concepts in greater detail.

2. 6-3-5 method. In this approach developed by Bernd Rohrbach in the 60s, six people sit around a table and pass their three ideas to the person on the right who builds on them.  This passing is done five times (or more) until everybody has had time to add to each idea.  They then get together and evaluate and search for commonalities.  This method is successful because it slows down the creative process since it gives everybody in the room adequate time to generate and strengthen before moving on to the evaluation phase.  It also prevents those who want to rush into solution mode because they are uncomfortable with uncertainty.

3. Round Robin Brainstorming. After each person has prepared something to share, the facilitator will go around the table requesting one idea from each person.  The job of the facilitator is to ensure an orderly process so everybody has a chance to talk and nobody evaluates the ideas until all have the opportunity to share.  This approach can be useful when team members have a tendency to stay quiet.  It also provides additional control for those who want to start analyzing the first few ideas before seeing the whole menu presented, they will have to wait until everybody has offered something.

4. Nominal Group Technique. Is a structured method for group brainstorming that can illicit creative answers to specific problems. Team members begin by writing down their ideas, then selecting which ones they feel are best. Once they are ready, everyone presents their favorite idea persuasively and then discussed and evaluated thoroughly. The group can take a simple vote for the ideas that they want to prioritize to further develop.

5. Sentence Stems. These include a series of prompts to get the discussion started.  For example, “we can cut our costs 10% by…?”  “We can become #1 in our space by…?”  Researchers at Google, Facebook, and IDEO have come up with a powerful three-word sentence starter – “How Might We…?” Each word is deliberately chosen, the HOW encourages detailed description, the MIGHT allows for freedom and creativity and the WE invites anybody to participate.  According to Duane Bray, the Head of Talent at IDEO, “How Might We” questions are so effective because they “allow clients to mentally reset and reframe a problem as an opportunity.”

6. Sketch Storming. This is the combination of drawing and writing to visually present your ideas.   Some concepts can be too abstract and difficult to describe in words so using diagrams and drawings can be helpful.  The depictions may even illicit multiple interpretations and fun, creative offshoots.

Whichever method you choose, the key is creating an environment of psychological safety so people can be encouraged to take risks in their thinking and silliness. You can choose to start with a fun warmup game.  Management Professor Leigh Thompson conducted a study on this subject and found that groups who shared funny or embarrassing stories about themselves came up with 26% more ideas and were 15% more creative than the groups who did not.

The best creative groups are not just the sum of their parts, but the totality of their experiences. When you can effectively implement methods that elicit people’s best, ideas blossom. 

Quote of the Day: “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainty” -Erich Fromm

Q: What’s your favorite brainstorming technique? Comment and share below, we would be overjoyed to hear from you!

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to facilitate processes for brainstorming & creativity. Contact me to learn more.

Which brainstorming methods yield the greatest results?

Brainstorming: From Broken to Better (1/2)

Does brainstorming ever feel like a waste of time? You believe it is necessary to get your team's input on a topic, but the session usually turns into a few people bickering, and the other participants remaining silent.   What’s going wrong?

When Advertising Executive Alex Osbourn developed this specific technique in the 1950s, the concept seemed obvious and simple - toss out as many ideas as possible without regard for being right or fear of criticism.  As it turns out, there are inherent problems with the design.  Psychology Professor Art Markman draws on research which shows that people who follow his method come up with fewer good ideas, compared to if individuals were to generate suggestions alone. 

Here are some challenges with basic brainstorming:

1. When people work together, their ideas tend to converge early on.  When one person throws out an idea, an anchoring bias occurs, where others tend to affix their ideas to the first ones.  Their minds are influenced as they start to think in similar ways about the problem.  In contrast, when they have time to work alone first, they diverge in their thinking because everybody takes a slightly different path when working through the problem while not being shaped by other ideas.  To reach the most creative solutions, it is much better to start with a large number of proposals and winnow down as opposed to having the first few thoughts dominate the process, thereby starting with a smaller sample in which to work.

2. Only some voices are heard.  According to Rebecca Greenfield of Fast Company, only a few people do 60%-75% of the talking, which can prevent other fresh ideas from surfacing. Even worse, if one of those people happens to be the boss, others could rally to support that view as a way to curry favor. Some may even censor themselves because they may feel like their ideas are not as worthy as those of the boss.

3. This method favors extraverts over introverts.  It is a natural tendency for many extraverts to blurt out ideas, even if they might not be fully formed because as they are sharing, they are processing and arriving at what they really want to say. It is their style. Contrastly, most introverts usually like to take time thinking more deeply about an issue and may go through several internal edits before they feel comfortable sharing.  The domination of a few loud contributors can cause others to remain silent because of fear of looking stupid by contributing an idea that has not gone through their personal vetting process or because they do not feel comfortable sharing freely in this way since they yearn for that uninterrupted thinking time.

In my experience in working with teams, not many people take the time to set up guidelines before they engage in a brainstorming session, they want to jump in and figure it out on the go.  With just a little bit of structure, the process can yield much higher efficiency. 

Here are some helpful steps to make the most out of your sessions:

1. Organize the logistics.  According to Author Brian Tracy, the ideal size of groups is 4-7, and the optimal length should be about 30 minutes.  Chose a facilitator to ensure that each person can have the same amount of contributions and to step in when guidelines are not being followed. Be sure to create those norms that work best for your team. Elect a recorder to capture all the ideas for revision and reflection.

2. Go for quantity.  The goal is to generate the greatest number of ideas in the time allowed.  There’s a direct relationship between the number of ideas and quality. In the book Originals, Adam Grant argues that creative people are no more creative than anybody else, but what separates their effectiveness is the number of ideas they put together and while many of them may fail, they just need that one from the bunch. Do not aim for 3-5, go for 15-20, or whatever may seem like a stretch for your team. Sometimes the last idea offered in the final minute is the breakthrough one.

3. Be positive and build. It is essential to avoid criticizing or judging. When you treat every idea as a good one, even seemingly absurd ones, it creates a safe space for people to give freely.  Always be thinking about how you can encourage and build on other’s ideas because it could take you to interesting and surprising places. This is the approach of improvisation, which is called, “YES, AND.” The idea is that when your partner introduces a crazy idea or scenario, instead of rejecting it, you go with it and make it even crazier. Essentially accepting what they say as truth and building on the reality that they set however asinine you think it may be.

4. Go for the ridiculous ideas. It is not uncommon for one bizarre idea to be combined with another crazy one to create a revolutionary third idea.  Lighten up, this process should be fun, silly, and at times, have you stitched over in laughter. After all, if we can’t laugh when in an imaginary and creative space, when can we?

When we put careful thought into brainstorming, we can create an environment that extracts the best quality from the team, while also fostering a feeling of fun, connection, and being a part of a powerful creative process which can deliver untold meaning and purpose.

Quote of the Day: Creativity is contagious - pass it on” -Albert Einstein

Q: What other guidelines would you add to maximize effectiveness in the brainstorming process? Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

The next blog will explore the different types of brainstorming for maximum team performance.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to facilitate processes for brainstorming & creativity. Contact me to learn more.

How do you spark creativity on your team?

Optimize Your Nighttime Routine for Sounder Sleep (Sleep Series 4/4)

In the previous articles in the sleep series, we covered the harmful impact of sleep deprivation, tips for a more successful snooze, and the importance of daytime decisions to improve your quality of sleep.  To conclude our blog series, let’s jump into strategies for creating an optimal nighttime routine, or a series of automatic steps to take, to help you fall asleep more easily.

Here are some suggestions to include in your nighttime routine that could help you relax and prime you for sleep.  Whatever you decide that comprises your routine, it can be helpful to set an alarm to kick it off about 45 minutes before bed.

1. Start strong. You can begin the routine by listening to music or a podcast while doing your bathroom business.  Beginning with an enjoyable activity will allow you to look forward to the process instead of instinctually trying to delay it. Maybe you have a dedicated audiobook that you get to enjoy each night and look forward to picking up the story where you left off.

2. Stretch. Doing a series of relaxing, low-impact exercises like yoga or gentle stretching in the evening can help promote sleep. The key is to draw your awareness to your muscles and feel them getting tired.

3. Breath. These exercises are another way to relax your body. When we are relaxed, our breathing slows.  Researchers have found that the relationship is bidirectional, when we deliberately slow our breath, our body relaxes and can more easily fall asleep in a calmer state.

4. Read in bed.  Some studies show that reading for as little as six minutes lowers our heart rate, eases muscle tension, and reduces stress by as much as 60%. The more relaxed our mind and body are, the more we can ease into restorative sleep.

5. Journal. Take time to write a few sentences about the events that you experienced that day. When you dedicate moments to actively reflect on your day and put your experience into words, it gives you a sense of control and makes it easier to quiet your thoughts. Not keeping a journal is like spending the whole day painting a portrait and not bothering to step back and examine what you have made and where you want to go for next time. If you are not reflecting on your day, you are not learning or improving how you live.

6. Foster Positive Thoughts. While lying in bed and ready to fall asleep, focus on the positive.  Research from the University of California took a cohort of people who were having a hard time falling asleep and divided them into three groups and timed how long it took to fall asleep.  Group 1 was not given any instructions and took about an hour. Group 2 was told to try and forget their worries; they fell asleep in about 40 minutes. Group 3 was asked to think pleasant thoughts, they fell asleep in 20 minutes. Focused thinking on something positive like an upcoming vacation, a good movie, an adventure with a friend can help with lights out.   The more specific your thoughts, the better, e.g., thinking about the colors you see and the surrounding objects will engross you in the experience and relax you.

Setting yourself up for excellent sleep does not just happen when your head hits the pillow, but in the series of choices you make leading up to bedtime. When you can start and end your routine on a positive note by doing one of your favorite activities and writing in your gratitude journal, you are priming your mind for a quality snooze.

Quote of the day: “If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there and worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the loss of sleep.” ― Dale Carnegie

Q: What’s your favorite nighttime routine to prime you for the best sleep of your life? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

What’s your nighttime routine?

For Quality Sleep, Make Better Daytime Decisions (sleep series 3/4)

Getting good quality sleep does not just happen when your head hits the pillow, but from the moment you wake up.  Our behavior throughout the day and the choices we make, especially in the last few hours of our day can significantly impact our ability to get great rest.

Here are some practical things to do during the day to improve your sleep:

1. Control Stimulants.  As a general rule, it is best to cut off caffeine by 2 pm. Try to give yourself at least eight caffeine-free hours before bedtime. Nightly alcohol also disrupts your sleep quality.  Some people may believe a couple of glasses of wine can help them fall asleep quickly, which may be true, but the problem is that sleep hinders the REM stage, which is the most restorative.  That’s why even when getting many hours of sleep after a night of drinking, we wake up exhausted because alcohol has gotten in the way. The rule is if we are going to have a drink, make it at least three hours before bed; for two drinks, at least four hours before sleep.

2. Get Sunlight Exposure. The more daylight you soak up, the happier and the more alert you will be, which will allow you to sleep better at night since some of that energy has been expended earlier.  Even if you may not be able to get outside, sitting near a window can also help.  Studies show that on average, employees whose offices have windows get 46 min more sleep every night.

3. Exercise. Even as little as 10 minutes of exercise per day can dramatically improve the quality and consistency of your sleep. For one thing, it is because movement tires the body, which increases the chances that you’ll be sleepy when it is time for rest. Sleep specialist Matthew Walker recommends visiting the gym after work rather than before because it is a great way to reduce stress after a day at the office.  The movement helps burn off any tension, which enables you to wind down more easily and relax when you get to bed. Taking more walks can help boost your energy so the next time you need to make a phone call or have a meeting, why not combine it with walking?

4. Eat Well. The food we consume throughout the day has a surprisingly strong impact on our sleep. In particular, eating saturated fats and sugar is associated with a harder time falling asleep. Fat requires the body to work overtime, which makes it more difficult for us to feel comfortable. Regularly eating a cheeseburger and french fries – especially for dinner – causes your sleep quality to suffer, and frequent sugar intake raises energy arousal. Accordingly to an Australian study, spicy food may also disrupt your sleep.  In addition to the higher fat levels, it can increase your internal body temperature, which needs to lower for you to have restful sleep. If you eat these foods too close to bedtime, your body expends energy in digestion rather than helping your brain fall asleep. Many studies would advise not eating at least 3 hours before bed.

The choices you make during the day can have a major impact on the quality of sleep you have. When you are eating healthy, exercising, getting appropriate sunlight, and avoiding stimulates like caffeine or alcohol late in the day, you are creating the conditions for the best sleep of your life.

Quote of the day: “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night.” ― Charles Fisher

Q: What are some productive daytime activities that help you sleep better at night?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear!

The next blog in this sleep series 4/4 will focus on optimizing your nighttime routine.

Are you inspired by the way you lead yourself? As a Leadership Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

Make healthy eating choices for better sleep

Tips for Being a Super Sleeper (Sleep Series 2/4)

When was the last time you thought about the quality of your sleep? Given that it is one of the most important factors that can greatly impact our health, happiness, productivity, and relationships, it seems like it would be pivotal to invest our time to be super sleepers.

The National Sleep Foundation and the Center for Disease Control recommend 7-9 hours. Because every person is different, how much sleep you need depends on your genetics and how you are spending your waking hours. Some people may believe they fall into the category of needing only a few hours of sleep, but their underslept brain may be tricking them.  Arianna Huffington, Author of the Sleep Revolution notes, “Unless you have a genetic mutation and can function on three to four hours of sleep which is 1.5% of the population, the rest of us need 8-9 hours to have fully restorative sleep.”

If you are not sure how many hours you need to feel refreshed, you can run an experiment over a holiday or long weekend to find out.  Allow yourself to wake up whenever you want without setting an alarm. Needless to say, if you are backed up on sleep, the first night of doing this will not tell you much because you will be making up for lost sleep. But after one to two nights, you will start noticing how many hours you are getting when you wake up naturally. 

Why Are We Sleep Deprived?  Here Are Some Common Culprits:

1. Incompatible work schedules. Your work schedule may not be conducive to your natural tendencies. You may be a night owl who can do your best work in the evenings but those creative insights sparked at midnight will take a toll on your job when you have to report to the office at 9:00 am or even earlier.

2. Technology disruptions. Researchers have known for years that the blue-ish light that smartphone screens emit can make it harder to fall asleep.  A new study from Deloitte found that one-third of adults check their phones if they wake up in the middle of the night, as do nearly half of those under the age of 35. This smartphone addiction is impacting our ability to fall asleep and to remain so.

3. Coffee consumption. Caffeine is a stimulant that raises alertness and blocks our bodies from getting tired. What most people may not realize is that coffee has a half-life of 5-6 hours, meaning that if you drink a cup of coffee at 6 pm, 50% of that caffeine will still be in your system at 11 pm. So while your body may be tired later in the day, your mind is still racing, preventing you from winding down.

Now that we laid out key sleep disruptors, let’s turn our attention to tips for getting the best sleep of your life:

1. Minimize technology. Curtail technology use about an hour before bed; if you must consume, read a book.  To avoid distractions, use the iPhone bedtime app or an equivalent.   By setting an alarm for when you want to fall asleep, the “do not disturb” function switches on, and your phone will not continuously lure you with dings and vibrations.

2. Set the right temperature.  Being a little chilly will help you fall asleep more easily.  The ideal temperature is around 68 degrees but adjust according to personal preference. 

3. Control the light.  Light tells our brain it is time to wake up so keeping them dimmed leading up to bedtime can help. When you are ready to sleep, make your room as dark as possible.  You can even cover up any blinking lights from your laptop, cable box, or tv with stickers called lightdims.

4. Be Consistent with your sleep routine. A mistake that a lot of us make is that we stay up late on Friday and Saturday, and sleep later the following mornings. That leads to a phenomenon that psychologists call “social jet lag” because it’s what happens when our social life throws off our bodily rhythms. Sleeping in on the weekends after a late night with friends or binge-watching Netflix is what causes Sunday night insomnia. Going to bed and waking up roughly the same time will prime your body for nighty rest.

5. Create a sleep runway. If you are aiming to sleep at 10:00 pm, you should create a sleep runway of at least 10-20 minutes, depending on how long it takes you to fall asleep after you close your eyes.  Most people falsely assume that if they are in bed at 10 and up at 6, they have met their quota, but being in bed is not the same as being asleep.

Sleep deprivation is a pervasive problem and if left unaddressed, it can have devastating consequences. Creating the ideal conditions can help you get the best sleep of your life and have you perform at your best in all your important arenas.

Quote of the day: “Tired minds don’t plan well.  Sleep first, plan later.”  -Walter Reisch

Q: When you are having trouble sleeping, what is usually the main reason?  What trick do you use to help you fall asleep? Comment and share below; we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this sleep series 3/4 will focus on making better daytime decisions for sounder sleep.

Are you inspired by the way you lead yourself? As a Leadership Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

How do your habits contribute to your lack of sleep?

To Be a Peak Performer, Start with More Sleep (Sleep Series 1/4)

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is a mantra uttered by some of my clients who are trying to max out their waking moments.  But in fact, the best way to live productively is to do just the opposite -  invest in good quality sleep every day.  It is one of the most important factors to being a peak performer and successful leader. If some of us are finding that during this global quarantine, we have some spare time on our hands that would normally be spent on commuting or attending social events, I would say, now is a great time to prioritize sleep.

The Problems with Sleep Deprivation:

According to a Gallup poll, about 100 years ago, people slept on average 9 hours per night. Now, the average is closer to 6.8 hours with 40% banking less than 6.  Sleep is not just a luxury, it is a necessity, and the lack of it can cause an onslaught of problems.  According to Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, “Sleeping less than 6-7 hours have long-term health consequences, including a weakened immune system, hypertension, gastrointestinal disorder, diabetes, colon cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.  World leaders Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher both talked about sleeping 4 hours developed the latter condition.  Denmark has even begun paying compensation to women nurses who developed breast cancer after working night shifts because the government realized the deleterious effects lack of sleep could have.

And it is not just physical health in jeopardy, but our mental health is impacted every bit as profoundly. According to Psychologist Ron Friedman, sleep deprivation changes the way we see the world. Upsetting things are much more distressing when we are tired.  We have reduced energy levels and increased anxiety which impacts our mood and our behavior – we are much more likely to blow things out of proportion and lose our temper with colleagues and loved ones.  UC Berkeley researchers have found that sleep-deprived people feel lonelier and less inclined to engage with others, avoiding close contact in much the same way as people with social anxiety. Jeff Bezos noted yet another ramification, “When I get six hours, my decision-making is 5% - 20% less solid.” 

The Bountiful Benefits of Sleep:

1. Fosters good health.  When you sleep, your brain flushes out toxins that build up over the course of the day and when you do not do that, you run the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other degenerative conditions.  During sleep, your body produces hormones and proteins that build your immune system. Friedman noted, “those who sleep only six hours a night are 50% more likely to get sick.”  Additionally, the nightly release of growth hormone makes your bones stronger and increases your muscle mass. 

2. Positively impacts memory and learning.  Sleep’s primary purpose is memory consolidation.  New memories are formed when a person engages with information to be learned (i.e., memorizing a list of words or mastering a piano concerto). However, according to Matthew Walker, these memories are initially quite vulnerable. To stick, they must be solidified, improved, and shifted from short- term into more efficient and long-term storage regions within the brain, which happens during the NREM sleep stage. This process of "memory consolidation" occurs when connections between brain cells and among brain regions are strengthened; time spent asleep plays a role in preserving memory. Consequently, while awake, memory tasks can be performed more quickly and accurately and with less stress and anxiety.  When you are sleep deprived, it is harder to focus attention optimally and learn efficiently to store those insights. 

3. Enhances problem solving and creativity. Research shows that the average person has about 60,000 thoughts every day. When we sleep, our minds are busy consolidating, organizing, and reviewing experiences, as well as generating insights.  Our brain tests out connections between vast stores of information and is biased towards seeking out the most distant, non-obvious associations in ways our waking brain would never attempt. Our sleeping brain allows us to take freshly minted memories, collide them with an entire back catalog to spark creative insights and forge novel links between unrelated pieces of information. This REM stage, also responsible for dreams allows us to take a step back, make sense of this collection, and glean overarching insights.  It fosters impressive problem-solving skills -- you essentially wake with new solutions to previously intractable problems.  Larry Page said the idea of Google came to him in a dream. Indeed, the brain you take to bed is not the same as when you wake up. 

4. Improves happiness and performance. Quality sleep is linked to greater energy and happiness. Walker adds, “Just one night of good sleep makes you feel more outgoing and socially confident, and furthermore, will attract others to you.” This will make you feel more connected and filled with positive feelings.

Sleep is also tied to performance, such as better alertness, enhanced cognitive functioning, better judgment, stronger productivity, and fewer mistakes.  Researchers at Stanford University took 11 members of the school basketball team and were made to sleep 8.5 hours every night, while the rest of the team slept 6.5 hours.  At the end of 5.5 weeks, the performance of those who kept their normal routine of 6.5 hours did not change.  In contrast, the group that was now sleeping 8.5 hours became different players.  Their free throw percentage shot up by 9%, their 3-point shooting jumped 9.2%, and they were even running faster, shaving half a second off their sprint time. In every sport tested, performance went up. In tennis, players hit fewer faults, ran faster, and got to more balls.

Many people may believe that they can outwit sleep, that they can survive on less than 6 hours, but that is only because they might be making this call while being sleep deprived so their judgment may be blurred. Getting high-quality sleep consistently will positively impact every area of your life.

Quote of the day: “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” -Gandhi

Q: What is the biggest cost sleep is having on you?  How can you prioritize sleep? Comment and share below, we would love to hear!

The next blog in this sleep series 2/4 will focus on top tips for being a super sleeper.

Are you inspired by the way you lead yourself? As a Leadership Coach, I partner with people to grow their leadership ability so they can live their best life and develop others more effectively. Contact me to learn more.

Enjoy the numerous benefits of sleep

Top 10 Tips For Building Community Within Your Team (Team Series 10/10)

People yearn for a sense of belonging.  Some want to go to their job and feel just as connected to each other as they are to the work.  Otherwise, it can be tragic to think that you are alone in a crowd because you do not entirely relate to others or even have a chance to get to know them.  Companies would bode well to provide more enriching communal experiences for their employees to bring them closer together.

Here Are Some Ways To Build Community In Teams:

1. Pre-Meeting “How Are You” Check-ins.  The goal is to have people get to know each other and learn about their lives outside of work as interesting people with families and not just experts with a particular role.  Five minutes spent chatting may seem like only a little bit of time, but when you add those dedicated moments before each meeting, it will build up over the long run and lead to positive results.  It is about sacrificing short-term efficiency for long-term productivity.  Professor Uri Hasson's research at Princeton University shows that when people share personal stories with one another, even if they do not have anything to do with the topic of the meeting, neural coupling takes place.  This is the synchronization between the brains of the listener and storyteller. This strengthened cognitive connection between each other makes it more likely they will build rapport and work well together.

2. Trip Report Practice.  This is a simple communication practice that Eric Schmidt used at Google and was taught to him by his Executive Coach Bill Campbell.  He got people to share stories that would lead to better decision-making.  He would kick-off meetings by asking what they did on the weekend.  If somebody had traveled, he would ask for a trip report.  The responses would allow team members to know each other on a personal level, which went a long way in improving relationships.  Having these common connection points got everybody involved in the meeting in a fun way from the start.  Learning about what matters to people helps to build a stronger relationship.  It also turned out that sharing information early on led to additional contributions later in the meeting. 

3. Thank You Ritual.  Former Yahoo Executive Marissa Mayer began her staff meetings with THANK YOUs.  It was called family prayer – you had to thank another team for something that happened last week, big or small. The only stipulations were that you could not thank yourself or repeat another person’s thank you.  It is an excellent way to recap the week, show gratitude, and build team camaraderie. 

4. Book clubs.  Those who learn together grow together.  Building camaraderie and teamwork by analyzing a book every 4-6 weeks to learn new concepts that can be applied to the workplace and our lives.  Collaborative learning is excellent for cultivating community, having fun, and building lasting bonds beyond the scope of work.  It is also really nice to have a common language in which to refer.

5. “Ask Anything” Approach.  This is an idea herald by Zappos Tony Hsieh.  He believes in a flat organizational approach, which is that the best ideas can come from any part of the organization.  Therefore, all his employees got to collaborate on the company’s core values, and not just the executive leadership team.  He launched a monthly employee newsletter, “Ask Anything,” which encourages employees to send an email and ask any question they want to get answered.  This approach can also be taken at the team levels as a way to share knowledge openly and build understanding.

6. Brief Weekly Check-ins. Teams getting in the habit of gathering once a week to clear the air on anything administrative – scheduling, events, or issue alerts can have its advantages.  For this segment, you can intentionally have no agenda or issues to be solved, just information exchange for as little as five minutes.  It can be a part of its own meeting, or it can be a component within a larger scheduled meeting.  A lot of time can be saved by not chasing down issues through emails and texts that can be solved in a meeting in 30 seconds.  This process to circulate information freely will help people feel like they are not existing in a silo and always know what is going on. 

7. Musical Connections.  When you listen to music with others, it creates bonding.  According to Srini Pillay, Harvard Medical School Professor, “physical synchrony to music makes people like each other more, remember each other better, and also trust each other more.  In fact, even as early as 14 months of age, children who are bounced in synchrony with an adult are more altruistic - they pick up objects that adults have dropped and give them back.”  Having team gatherings and events where people have musical experiences together can create more unity.

8. Talent Book.  It is nice to know the people you work with, and one way to do that is to have fun profiles of people that include a brief bio of their interests and talents.  It is an easy way of getting people connected through similar interests and starting conversations around interesting topics.  The book can include anything you want; it can even be expanded to include people who have had a profound impact on you or people that you admire. Zappos has a culture book they give out to people, which contains company highlights, individual achievements, funny moments, and weird times.

9. Collaborative Spaces.  Architects like to talk about spaces for serendipitous encounters, which can lead to enhanced collaborations.  Steve Jobs’ desire was that the only bathroom at Pixar be in the center so workers from different parts can mingle.  You can create spaces in your office where people are directed to those areas for spontaneous conversation and creativity.

10. Time for Physical Proximity.  Although we currently have to socially distance, things will go back to normal. Face-to-face collaborations help improve performance.  Independent studies conducted by Ben Waber et al., President and CEO of Sociometric Solutions found physical closeness boosts virtual communication.  He reported, “In one case, engineers who shared space were 20% more likely to communicate digitally and emailed four times more frequently when collaborating on a project.  The result was that their projects were finished 32% faster than those from staff working in different places.”

Practicing any of these activities or ones that your company created can engender magical moments in your team that brings them closer together and contributes to greater happiness, productivity, and a feeling of belonging.

Quote of the day: “You can only really succeed and accomplish things through the collective, common purpose.” -Lee Bollinger, Columbia University President

Q: What’s your favorite practice that your team has or that you would like to see?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

As a Leadership and Executive Coach, I partner with teams to build more community, contact me to learn more.

How do you build a sense of community within your team?

Does Your Team Have A Ritual? (Team Series 9/10)

Sitting around the table with your family for your favorite holiday and then playing board games together afterward can be a sacred social ritual that contains special moments that have lasting significance.

Rituals are surprisingly ubiquitous across cultures and time and have played a role, for better or for worse, in the lives of individuals and societies.  Our ancient ancestors used the bond of ritual to create ties of kinship necessary for survival in a world rife with dangers.  The ritual of storytelling around a fire was used to pass down wisdom and beliefs across generations. 

In modern times, for some people, this word can conjure up a negative connotation because it may remind us of the practices that we had to do when we were young to appease our families.  Perhaps we did not want to do them or even know the reasons for why we were partaking — I always wondered about going to confession when I was not in the mood to share my secrets.  However, simple social rituals like a bedtime routine, keeping a gratitude journal, or a Thursday evening walk to the ice cream shop with your partner can help us consistently engage in our core values by fostering healthy and positive habits for our mind. 

The benefits of social rituals that we choose:

1. It allows for presence.  In our hyper-paced world, we can easily become anxious by ruminating on the past or being worried about the future, but when we spend more time in the present, we gain a greater sense of control and wellbeing. Doing the same activity every day and choosing to be mindful and fully present means that we will both receive the most from, and give the most to the experience.  Top sports players are well known for their pre-match rituals.  Serena Williams always bounces the ball five times on her first serve and twice on her second.  She wears the same pair of socks for the duration of a tournament.  She has even blamed losing on not following her ritual.

2. It provides structure and comfort.  It gives a sense of stability and continuity amidst the ever-changing, hectic, and often chaotic world.  Knowing that there is a practice that we consistently turn to provides familiarity and control over a changing world.

3. It offers a sense of renewal.  Metaphorically, rituals are oases, a time to rest, replenish, and restore ourselves on our long and winding path through life.  The time-out from our cyclic existence can provide mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing, especially while we are connecting with others.

4. Increases self-control.  Harvard Business Professor Francesco Gina and colleagues wrote about the use of rituals to help with self-control. Their study compared two groups of people who had the goal of losing weight. The first group was told to be mindful of what they ate for five days.  The second group had to engage in a three-step pre-meal ritual.  Step 1: cut their food.  Step 2: arrange their food symmetrically on the plate.  Step 3. tap their food three times with the utensil before eating.  The second group who followed the ritual ate less on average.   Going through these steps made them more mindful of the process and had a more significant impact on their goal of eating in moderation.

The benefits of rituals in teams and organizations:

Secular rituals or repeated enactments of a particular set of behaviors, scripts, and interactions can be a great tool to shape company cultures.

1. It is a way to stay connected.  Setting aside quality time to better relate with others and build a strong sense of community is everything.  Rituals can provide purpose, values, and meaning, while also bringing us together.  It can be a way to reinforce our identity.  Many workplaces have rituals for this exact objective.  At Walmart, workers begin the day with a company cheer.  At Yelp, salespeople bang a gong when they close a sale.  When I was at Penn State for college, I encountered a ritual that I initially found quirky but then wholly embraced because it made me feel more connected with my classmates. Walking through campus or the town, you would hear crowds spontaneously erupt with chants “We Are?!” and then they would wait for the only response from all to join in “Penn State!” As my group of friends would proudly respond in unison, it made us feel more connected to each other and this special experience. Ritual is what allows us to gather the energy needed to achieve great things, often beyond what we could imagine ourselves capable of. 

2. Rituals can be motivating.  Athletes who come together and do a cheer before the start of a game feel linked and energized.  Rituals can motivate a team to excel together.  A few years ago, Michael Norton, a Harvard Business School Professor, led a study in which 221 people were grouped into small teams and assigned to run around campus taking group selfies in front of specific locations, earning points for how many photos they completed in 45 minutes.  Before they began, one group was instructed to form a circle and perform a series of rhythmic claps and foot stomps, followed by a chant of “Let’s go” — a ritual they repeated three times.  The other groups spent this time reading an article in silence.  When the scavenger hunt finished, the groups that had executed the pre-hunt ritual had outscored the no-ritual groups — and they also reported liking teammates more.

Engaging in a social ritual for your team can create special bonding moments that can boost performance and create lasting memories.

Quote of the day: “The human soul can always use a new tradition.  Sometimes we require them.” -Author Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline   

Q: What are your favorite individual or team rituals that help you feel more connected?  Comment and share below, we would love to hear from you!

*The next and final blog in this team series 10/10 will provide common ways to build community in your teams.

As a Leadership Development & Team Coach, I work with teams to create rituals for peak performance and community building. Contact me to learn more.

What are your team rituals?

Teams Who Break Bread Together, Bond (Team Series 8/10)

How often does your team eat together?  This simple yet powerful act can have a myriad of positive benefits.  

Research by Professor Kevin Kniffin of Cornell University found how extraordinary meaningful eating together can be.  One study looked at firefighters who engaged in Commensality – preparing and eating food together – and it showed that those who ate together did their jobs better.  In some cases, there is a lot of cooperative behavior that underline meal practice - collecting money, planning, talking, cleaning, and eating - all enhance group performance on the job.  In fact, cooperative behavior was twice as high for those who ate together versus those who did not.  Even those who did not contribute money for the meals still went in on the experience as they brought their food to eat with the others.  Eating together is essential for making the team more effective because it makes a group feel like a kind of family and creates bonds beyond the job. 

You can see this also happening in the sports arena.  Spurs legendary basketball Coach Gregg Popovich, who has the most wins in NBA history, knows all about building a strong team culture.  The Spurs eat together as often as they play basketball with a high number of team, group, and coach dinners.  As a food connoisseur, Popovich plans the restaurants and meals carefully, and at the end of the season, each player gets a leather-bound book containing the menus and wine labels from every dinner.  It’s a bonding experience that each player remembers long after the event.  

Companies would do well investing in how employees eat at work.  Google offers free high quality abundantly varied meals, which increases the odds that teammates will eat with each other and build further connections. While it is unrealistic to think that every company can provide meals, some simple things can be done to encourage your team or organizational members to break bread together more frequently.

Here are some practices you can use to encourage more team mingling:

1. Lunch roulette.  This is a great way to foster in-company networking.  It is currently being employed at Boehringer Ingelheim.  It works in four simple steps.  Participants select a date when they are free for lunch and choose one of the company cafeterias in which to travel.  They then click a “Match Me” button, and a lunch date and calendar reminder are emailed to their mailboxes.  After that, all they need to do is show up with an open mind and a willingness to connect.  Within seven weeks of the program, more than 350 people were matched, including a more unusual pairing of the CEO with a young member of one of the brand marketing teams.  It is a practical way of creating links where none had existed and exposing colleagues to different ideas and perspectives. Unexpected pairings and conversations for creative collaborations are always a welcomed surprise. And if you do not prefer to use an app to do these matchings, you can make the sign-ups electronically available as a google doc where people can add their names. If you are unable to meet in person, you can arrange a zoom lunch and create connections even while physically distanced.

2. Lunch and learn.  Similar to lunch roulette, but combines a more formal learning and socializing approach. You write down three things you would be interested in sharing and three things you would like to learn.  Partners are made based on mutual interest.  It is a great informal way of building cross-functional engagement and connecting with people who work in different departments that you do not get that much personal time to interact. This helps to create greater bonds and connect with people outside your immediate team.  Other than one-on-ones, you can also choose to have a small group gathering to amplify the learning experience.

When you dedicate time to get to know others and eat food together, you are creating special moments.  You may find yourself talking about meaningful personal topics that keep you connected to others in unbreakable ways. Additionally, that positive energy transfers into the work world as there is a significant correlation between eating together and positive performance.

Quote of the day: “First we eat, then we do everything else.” -Writer M.F.K Fisher

Q: What food practices do you have to spend better quality time with others? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

*The next blog in this team series 9/10 will explore the importance of rituals for teams.

As a Leadership Development & Team Coach, I offer teambuilding seminars & coaching Contact me to learn more.

The power of community through meal sharing

Collective Intelligence is the Goal (Team Series 7/10)

Your team is filled with highly talented individuals, yet you are not getting desired results.  How do you get your all-stars to contribute to something larger than themselves to produce excellence?

In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT wondered what made teams consistently better?  The answer – harnessing the power of collective intelligence or the coming together of people to share their knowledge and insights.  Michael Silverman, MD of Silverman Research, defines collective intelligence as “something that emerges from a group that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.” 

They concluded that two factors go into fostering collective intelligence.

1. Have equal distribution of conversation.  When you have all people speak for roughly the same amount of time during a meeting, you have the presence of what researchers call “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”  Whether people are speaking a little bit on each of the meeting tasks or more on one or two of them, as long as the balance sheet shows roughly the same amount of air time, collective intelligence can be reached.  Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author offered, “As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well.  If only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.”

Executive Producer Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, one of the longest-running and most successful shows on tv abides by two rules related to participation: give everyone a voice, and force people to listen to each other. Michaels will often keep a sheet of paper during a meeting, and make a note each time someone speaks.  He will not end the session until others talk an approximately equal number of times.  He sees his job as protecting people’s distinct voices and getting them to work together productively.

2. Foster high social sensitivity within the group.  This is a fancy way of saying that people are skilled at reading the room.  Teammates can intuit how other members felt based on non-verbal cues – body language, tone of voice, facial expressions.  Members took into account what was said and unsaid and were sensitive to all those thoughts and emotions. So, how do these behaviors of being more attuned to others emerge?  In a New York Times article where Author Charles Duhigg writes about effective teams, he answers the question by saying, “The right norms – those small habits, unwritten rules, and mutually agreed-upon ways of treating one another - could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.”  One recommendation by the Kellogg Insight would be to have more women on the team because they tend to be more socially perceptive.

When you set up the systems for all people to share openly and to really listen to each other, marvelous things can happen.  It has been shown that the quantity of ideas is where a lot of innovation stems, so nudging all your participants to get involved can advance your team’s creative purposes.

Quote: “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”- Peter F. Drucker

Q: How do you ensure that each member is contributing equally?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear.

*The next blog in this team series 8/10 will cover the importance of eating together for teambuilding.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to facilitate the creation of norms and agreements for the best performance. Contact me to learn more.

Harness the power of the group for the most excellent results

5 Ways To Spark Full Team Participation (Team Series 6/10)

How do you encourage active participation from your team? 

Perhaps, you have an important decision to make and you want to get a lot of quality input in pursuit of the strongest solution.  So… you prepare the room, invite the key participants, and get ready to receive an abundant amount of ideas from every team member.  What you actually get instead is a group of mainly silent observers with a few dominant voices.  Indeed, it can be a challenge to get the very best from the group if there is not 100% participation.

Here are techniques you can use to encourage full participation:  

1. Call on quiet people.  Let people know in advance of the meeting that you value their opinion and want to include their voices so you would like to find ways to include them.  When you call on them it is because you are merely eager to hear their thoughts to reach the best decision possible.  This can have the intended effect of creating a safe space where they do not feel singled out and are more interested to share. To work with the style of introverts, you can give them some additional time to write their ideas first.

2. Use a default guideline, such as “silence denotes agreement.”  Author Bob Frisch talks about a common problem in meetings, which is when a potential new plan is discussed and when asked if anybody objects or has concerns, nobody says anything.  So the leader mistakenly assumes that everybody is on board.  A few days go by and some people begin to offer doubts, even though they had those same reservations at the time of the meeting.  To address this challenge, he recommends setting a key ground rule – silence means agreement.  This would prompt more people to open up; otherwise, it is safe to say that if they do not share, it is because they agree.  It is important to note that in a psychologically safe environment, people usually feel comfortable and empowered to contribute.  If this necessary condition is not present, there are other things that can be done to include people’s voices, but it is a temporary fix because psychological safety is an essential ingredient for long-term team success. 

3. Take anonymous polls.  People can write down their questions or concerns and deposit them in a box to be read aloud. They can also use polling websites that would allow them to submit their responses anonymously and have their answers projected for all to see in real-time.  A benefit is that potential problems can be aired for those people who may not want to speak up and possibly be seen as a naysayer.  This technique should be used sparingly because you want to try and have as much open discussion as possible, which is what you get in psychologically safe teams. 

4. Have small group discussions.  People are more likely to participate when they are just talking to one or two others.  After the time is allotted for them to flesh out their thoughts, each group can have a representative to report on the ideas or challenges.  This is also a great way to get introverts involved because it creates a more comfortable space to share.

5. Use empathy to elicit more voices.  Bob Frisch mentioned how people are more likely to speak up on others' behalf than their own.  A question, such as “what objections or concerns might your direct reports or other teams have,” can prompt additional participation.  This distance will allow them to share other people’s possible perspectives that may not have been offered if it was coming directly from them.

Each person on your team plays a vital part.  By not getting them involved, you are neglecting essential resources.  While there is no set way to encourage participation because it is a matter of doing what fits with your team and culture, building phycological safety and having communication norms will go a long way for creating excellence in teams.

Quote of the day: “Not all who are silent do not want to talk.” -Author Debasish Mridha

Q: What’s the best method you use to prompt somebody’s participation? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

*The next blog in this team series 7/10 will jump into the goal of achieving collective intelligence.

Full team participation can lead to your greatest discoveries

Your Team Needs Universal Agreements (Team Series 5/10)

Effective teams are intricately linked by a common purpose based on shared values and norms.  They believe that they can succeed or fail together.  The healthy teams have rules of engagement – explicit and implicit guidelines of how to work together and the kinds of conflicts they will or will not allow. Some agreements can be broad such as listen like you are wrong, assume positive intent, and be solution-focused. Other agreements can relate to specific activities like team meetings.

Here are some norms that can foster an excellent working relationship among teams in their meetings:

1. Encourage full participation.  Sometimes when you go to a meeting, there is somebody who sits off to the side and never says anything.  However, it is essential for everybody to be heard for buy-in to occur and for the greatest amount of ideas to be put on the table. What systems do you put into place to foster maximum contributions? For some ideas, you can check out my article, “5 ways to spark full team participation.”

2. Adopt the Devil’s Advocate Role.  Some people invoke this term to have license to say something unpopular or distasteful, but a real devil’s advocate provides an excellent service.  It gives people permission to challenge, disagree, and argue productively.  It is an excellent practice to test your idea and make sure it is really solid.  If your teammate is trying to tear it apart, poke holes, and undermine it, and you cannot adequately defend the idea, perhaps it is not ready yet for the mainstream. For this tactic to be effective, you need to have trust and psychological safety. You are more likely to give and receive challenges when there is an understanding that the goal of the tough inquires is to make your ideas even better, thereby benefiting the team.

3. Establish a “disagree and commit” culture.  This idea comes from Tech Co-founder Scott McNealy's larger point - “Agree and commit, disagree and commit, or get out of the way.”  Andy Grove, and most recently Jeff Bezos included this idea in his 2016 letter to shareholders.  Bezos expected and demanded that teammates voice their disagreement.  He also believed that no matter their point of view, once a decision has been made, everyone commits to its success.  He writes, “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.”  If you have two people battling to win the approval of their idea and one loses, that person could be so tied to their plan that they may not want to see the other person’s idea succeed.  But real teammates know how to spar to make each other better and then offer their sincere support and robust commitment because there is a bigger picture and a larger vision at play.  If you notice somebody not jumping on board, they may be elevating the individual over the group agenda. 

4. Speak last as a leader.  This advice was given to former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer by legendary Executive Coach Bill Taylor.  He said that when you go first and blurt out your ideas, you rob other people with the ability to share their perspectives.  While you may know the answer, it is vital to contribute last because you give the team the chance to partake in the process, synergize, and get there together, which is just as important as coming up with the right idea.

5. Elect the right people to lead the discussion.  If the conversation is about marketing, it should be led by the marketing department.  Most times, corporate politics can get in the way of the finest ideas prevailing, but the best managers put the person closest to the problem in charge of solving it because they have first-hand experience and unique insights. Innovation is not about only allowing important people with big titles to create, but driving forward excellent ideas regardless of where they originate.

6. Use the Six Thinking Hats Method.  Edward De Bono designed a system for group discussion and individual decision making by the use of six colored hats, which represent a type of thinking. 

• The WHITE hat is logical and fact-based where you analyze data and past trends.

• The YELLOW hat symbolizes optimism where you explore the positives and probe for value and benefit.

• The GREEN hat is creative and provocative where you offer possibilities and out-of-the-box alternatives to standard ideas.

• The BLACK hat is judgment, the devil’s advocate role, or why something may not work.  This hat is cautious and conservative and can be the most powerful but problematic if overused.

• The RED hat signifies feelings, hunches, and intuition. When using this hat, you can express emotions and share fears, likes, loves, and dislikes.

• The BLUE hat is used to manage the thinking process, it could be a meeting chair that directs the conversation and calls on certain hats when there is a lull or when contrast is required.

You can try on certain hats for a specific agenda item to yield a great variety of perspectives to form a more comprehensive picture. 

7. Use the Double Pro/Con Method.  This is great for when you are trying to foster fruitful discussion and see multiple perspectives.  If you have a group of 10, you would divide them into two groups of five.  

·      Each group of five will spend some time depositing ideas into the collective pool and then choosing the best idea they want to present to the whole group of 10.  

·      They will then divide themselves - 2 people representing pro and three people representing con and will discuss for 10 minutes so multiple points are displayed.  

·      Then they will switch roles where the three people are now for the proposal, and the two people are against it. This would be enlightening for the second group of 5 people to watch because they can see the contrasting ideas and tease out the nuggets of wisdom.  

·      You can then invite the second group to go through the method so the first group can have the benefit of witnessing multiple sides to a proposal.

Great teams do not just organically happen. When you are intentional about adding some structure and universal agreements, creativity and excellence can surely abound.

Quote of the day: “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly.”  -Mark Sanborn

Q: What are some norms that you use which help your team perform at their best? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

*The next blog in this team series 6/10 will delve into 5 ways to spark full team participation.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to set up universal agreements for peak performance . Contact me to learn more.

Which agreements allow your team to thrive?

Bring On The Healthy Team Conflict (Team Series 4/10)

The ways your team interacts with each other can tell you a lot about the wellbeing of the whole.  One of the healthiest signs of a great team is to have smooth communication, and the way to do that is to have agreements or interaction norms that allow you to define who you want to be together. 

When teams first form, there can be surface-level harmony until they have gone through different seasons and have encountered significant disagreements. At that crucial point, they can reach a favorable resolution in both process and outcomes and cross the threshold to having an authentic team relationship for excellent performance to occur, or they can reach an impasse and remain in the stormy stage where team bonding and results are harder to come by.

To better navigate the rocky stage that every team goes through, expect, and even invite, healthy conflict. 

There is nothing wrong with conflict, tension, and disagreement.  Some people can be so nervous about it that they choose not to engage in a messy back and forth process for the sake of perennial harmony.  This mentality has its limitations because building on other’s ideas only gives you incremental thinking.  Worse yet, Writer Walter Lippmann maintains, “where we all think alike, nobody thinks very much.”  In contrast, when we disagree with each other, we can see a variety of perspectives and shine a light on our blind spots or incomplete ways of thinking.  We need disagreement to improve the quality of ideas and expose the risk inherent in the plan.  Plus, honest and respectful conversations usually yields the best results.  The opposite - passive-aggressiveness, silence, or even insincere contributions can be destructive to a culture.

Author Liane Davey outlined three specific techniques to help embrace productive conflict: 

1. Clarify Roles.  By highlighting how different people’s jobs drive different agendas, it can lead to excellent outcomes. Liane provides an example relating to the sales and production teams being in the same room; the production team might want more standardization and efficiency, while the sales group might argue for the opposite – more flexibility and customization to meet individual client needs.  There is an inherent tension between prioritizing the product for consistent quality versus favoring the customer for optimal satisfaction but likely a hit to the budget.  This is an important step for alerting people that they are expected to argue and disagree because they have different instructions for what they are representing.  This helps to depersonalize things, and you can see how your coworker is not living their life with the sole aim to frustrate you; in fact, they are just doing their job.  Being on the same team means you all want the same big-picture result.  Normalizing the tension will free people to spar in a more empathetic way as they strive towards finding the best answer constructively. 

2. Use personality assessments.  This can highlight differences in what people are paying attention to.  Maybe you have one person’s style who is high on the conscientiousness trait with a keen eye for detail, and another that is high on the openness chart and prone to the macro view.  Knowing your team’s orientation can create balanced groups and lead to productive disagreements.  

3. Set ground rules around dissension.  Ask your team to define the behavior that contributes to productive conflict?  What kind of engagements can improve decision-making and trust, and what kind can detract from it? 

Some behaviors can include: 

·       Be kind:  Disagree with the idea respectfully, not the person. Ad hominem attacks and wild bursts of anger should not be a thing. 

·       Be open-minded:  Do not reject an opposing point immediately, but follow a one-minute rule (accept an idea for one minute before you try and find anything wrong with it).  Think about the possibility – what if I was wrong? How willing am I to change my mind?

·       Be brief:  This allows many ideas to be voiced.  It is also hard to tease out ideas if one person is dominating the whole time.

·       Stay on topic:  This enables each subject to be flushed out before moving to the next issue. Avoid the trap of allowing people to take the conversation in a variety of directions because then it will be really challenging to make progress on each matter.

This sample set of ground rules can create contained chaos and lead to productive conflict. 

While some teams choose to shy away from conflict, the best teams know how to invite healthy conflict because it makes the overall group much more effective.  When you clarify roles, use data to create diverse groups, and set ground rules for disagreements, you cultivate the conditions for the best results to emerge. 

Quote of the day: “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen” -Winston Churchill.

Q: How do you get your team to engage in merry conflict? Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

*The next blog in this team series 5/10 will talk about the importance of universal agreements.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to resolve conflict in productive ways for peak performance. Contact me to learn more.

How do you encourage healthy team conflict?

It’s All About A Team-First Mentality (Team Series 3/10)

In today’s driven society, it is not uncommon for companies to have teams filled with talented, ambitious, opinionated people with large egos who want to advance in their careers.

The temptation for people to stand out from the crowd for recognition, promotion, bonuses, and office size looms ever large.  Internal competition creeps in and those company perks become ways to keep score.  The word team, unfortunately, exists in name, but not in practice because it becomes a collection of rivals who want to pursue individual achievement over group success.  If unchecked, these intergroup conflicts can have adverse rippling effects. 

So, how do you encourage your members to act as a team?  In short, form a community.  Phil Jackson said, “Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We.”  Do not just think about your team as a compilation of members who are working towards completing a job.  Instead, see them as much more -  a community that supports each other to be better than they think they can be as they march towards a common goal that they also personally care about.  Teams that act as communities do not have to be best friends and spend all their time together, but they have to know how to integrate their interests and put aside differences. 

The benefits of a community cannot be ignored.  Those who feel like they are part of a supportive network at work are more engaged, more productive, and are less likely to experience burnout.  The simple fact is that teams of people who subordinate individual agendas will always outperform teams that do not. 

Here are some ways you can build community:

1. Understand your role as contributing to the greater good.  Numerous examples can be found in sports.  Shane Battier is known as a no-stats All-Star in basketball, he never scored a lot of points or got a lot of rebounds, but he made his teammates more effective and the opposing team less so.  His team was more likely to win with him in the game and was part of two NBA championships. He knew exactly what his role was, which was not to be the best small forward in the league by merely chasing stats but to do whatever he had to do to be the best for his team, even if it was in a set-up role that did not allow him to accumulate impressive stats.   

Similarly, in 2015, co-captain Abby Wambach, considered to be one of the most successful soccer players -  2x gold medalist and all-time top goal scorer of 184 - spent most of the World Cup on the bench.  She was called upon as a substitute only in the late stages of some games.  She shared how she did not let that discourage her, she always found ways to lead from the sidelines and champion her teammates because that is what was called for.  To win a game, it requires a coordinated effort on and off the field and she always found ways to uniquely contribute wherever she was standing.

2. Share credit.  This is a vital part of being on a team.  Author A.J. Jacobs shared a story about Jonas Salk taking sole credit for coming up with a polio vaccine and when given a chance, did not acknowledge any of his collaborators and predecessors who helped along the way.  Psychologists call this failure to recognize and thank collaboratives the responsibility or self-serving bias.  It is a pitfall that we should all avoid since it causes a lot of pain and resentment among other people.  So, how do you fight against the natural tendency of each member to exaggerate his/her contribution relative to the influence of other teammates?  Choose to elevate and reward cooperation, as well as individual achievement. Encouraging teammates to help each other thrive should garner just as much, if not more recognition. When you consistently catch people doing great things like mentoring others or pitching in on teammates’ projects, that should be valued and rewarded. This gesture clearly communicates the emphasis your culture places on teamwork.

Author and Startup Investor Fran Hauser offers some easy strategies to share credit for team success and to provide appreciation.  When you have a team win, you can do the following, depending on what you think the recipient would most enjoy:

·      Send an email to that person’s boss and CC your coworker.

·      Call out a coworker’s “good job” at a meeting - have the person stand up while everybody else claps.

·      Take a colleague out to lunch to celebrate teaming up on a job well done.

·      Treat a colleague to a small gift card at their favorite store for helping you.

·      Send the person a morning text letting them know you got them a Starbucks coffee if you know they get a latte every morning.

·      Write a handwritten note mentioning their specific contributions that made the team successful.

If a supervisor accidentally credits you with a good idea, you can interject to set the record straight by letting your boss know it was your coworker who came up with that idea.  If somebody has told you an idea in private and you are passing it along in front of a crowd, be sure to mention the source and your information. When you spread the credit, you pass along the love, trust, and pride in the team

3. Contribute as a problem-solver.  Being a part of a community involves having a collective mindset.  Going to a meeting and pitching in on solving a problem, even if it does not relate to you directly because you are invested in the group’s outcome.  It is also about taking ownership of the group’s success.  When you complain, think about it as if you are griping against yourself so instead of spreading negativity, what are 1-2 possible solutions you can offer that goes along with your constructive critique?

While you may not get the chance to choose your colleagues, you can always take steps to improve the dynamic. Simple gestures about asking about people’s days, sending an email letting them know you appreciate their work, and genuinely listening to others can make all the difference in feeling like a community.

“Ego is the ultimate killer on a team,” said Management Guru Patrick Lencioni.  One way to subdue the dominance of the ego is to encourage people to feel like they belong to a community where they enjoy numerous collective benefits when operating together more than they can ever experience individually.

Quote of the day: “Great things in business are never done by one person; they are done by a team of people.” — Steve Jobs

Question of the day:  How do you like experiencing a sense of belonging?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you!

The next blog in this team series 4/10 will explore the importance of healthy conflict.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to build community for peak performance. Contact me to learn more.

What can you build with a team-first mentality?

The Must-Have Ingredients For Team-Building (Team Series 2/10)

In the search to build excellent teams, what are the most important factors to consider?

The last blog focused on the number one component in building great teams – psychological safety.  This article will explore the other important elements involved in a winning team dynamic outlined in Project Aristotle, including dependability, structure and clarity, meaningful work, and impact.

Here are a few ingredients that contribute to excellent teams:

1. Dependability.  It is about making and keeping commitments, which allow individuals to count on each other to get high-quality work done on time.  People crave reliability.  It is a great feeling when somebody claims ownership of a task, and the rest of the team members can dismiss it from their mind because they have confidence that it will happen. 

So…what makes people unreliable?  At times, it can stem from a communication issue – some people can say yes to something just because it is hard to say no.  Or, maybe they initially commit with the confidence that they can safely handle the task, but then run into a dead-end and are too afraid to ask for help.  Regardless of the reason, when you have psychological safety, people feel comfortable saying no to a task they cannot do or are secure in asking for help when they need to.   

One way to build dependability is to show excellent communication: 

·      Perhaps you say yes to a commitment and your world has abruptly changed, talk to your team members immediately so they can be part of the solution.  When you have ownership of a task and cannot complete it, it means recruiting allies to get the job done.  Teams pitch in for each other when emergencies arise.  Do not turn your back on a project because something has come up, find an alternative route to get the job done, even if it involves remedy through others. 

·      Be timely with your meeting follow-ups.  After a gathering, it should not take you days to send instructions, suggestions, or other pertinent information that team members need to do their jobs.  If you know you are going to be unavailable for the next four days, do not ghost your team, let them know of your absence and put a plan in place.  Perhaps somebody else can be assigned to send the meeting notes. 

·      Respond to messages in a timely manner.  If somebody emails you requesting something, do not just choose to ignore them, instead send a message saying you are unavailable and let them know when you would be free.  Perhaps the best you can offer is to jump on a 2-minute call or provide the name of somebody who can help out.  I am not saying that you should be attached to your email, but have a workable plan for the times when you are and are not available.  Imagine for a moment you needed something from somebody, knowing you having several options will make you feel like you are a part of a good team instead of feeling like you have nowhere to turn.

2. Structure and clarity.  People should know their job requirements, how to fill them, and what happens if they are not done.  They also have knowledge of other people’s requirements so they know who to turn to in order to tap into their expertise.  Setting clear goals and having metrics to measure them offers much-needed transparency.  Google uses OKRs (objectives, key results) to hit their short and long-term goals.  Be sure to communicate team goals so all members understand the plan for achieving those targets.

One way you can learn about other people’s roles is to have a newsletter highlighting others’ successes.  When you share what people are doing to advance the team, others can learn more about their roles and responsibilities.  If a weekly or monthly newsletter is too much of a commitment, it can be as simple as a 3-minute share at the start of each meeting.

3. Meaningful work.  People need to work on something important to them.  The meaning they ascribe to their work can be personal - it could be about solving really hard problems, utilizing their creativity, making money to support their family, or doing good work to help their team thrive.  Without meaning and a higher purpose attached to it, work can become mundane and disengaging.

If helping others is the main driver for some of your teammates, you can offer public gratitude to them when they have done something to offer assistance.  This acknowledgment makes them feel good about the work they have done.  If growing their skills is a top priority for other teammates, you can offer to support them with solving hard problems so they feel they are developing their abilities.

4. Impact. People need to know that their work matters and is making a difference in the world. 

A good way for teammates to feel they are making an impact is for others to regularly share credit or team testimonials of how their performance has advanced their work, the product, or the organization.

Psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaningful work, and impact were the ingredients that Google deemed to be vital for team success.  While every team is unique and could require different components, it is hard to think about any of these elements not helping to build stronger organizational units. 

Quote of the day: "Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision.  The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results."  -Andrew Carnegie

Q: Which aspect is most important to you? How do you find meaning in your work?  Comment and share your thoughts with us, we would love to hear from you!

*The next blog in this team series 3/10 will jump into fostering a team-first mentality.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to strengthen their collaboration for peak performance. Contact me to learn more.

What vital features comprise your amazing team?

To Unite Your Team, Build Psychological Safety (Team Series 1/10)

If somebody was to ask me about the most valuable skill you can develop to thrive in the work world - being an excellent team player is at the top.   A company is not about individuals, it is about a team, and knowing how to work with others effectively will add tremendous value to your life and the lives of others.

On one end of the spectrum, there are dysfunctional teams where personal agendas prevail and sabotage occurs.  On the opposite edge, there are great teams where everybody is growing, rowing in the same direction, and eliciting each other’s best.  The most important part of a great team is that it can satisfy a fundamental human need, which is to feel a sense of belonging through community. 

So, what are the magical ingredients that go into a high performing team?  In 2012, Google embarked on a quest to find out the answer to that question – how to build the perfect team?  They launched a major study codenamed Project Aristotle, inspired by the philosopher’s quote, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." They spent two years studying 180 teams and concluded that excellent teams at Google have the following five components: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaningful work, and impact.

#1 Quality Of A Great Team: Psychological Safety

Have you ever been in a room with your team where you wanted to contribute or speak against an idea, but you stopped yourself because you thought, this could be stupid, I could get laughed at, people will think I’m dumb, or aggressive, or something worse?  So, you choose silence.  You rob yourself of taking a risk and potentially innovating. This strategy works for you because you are protected from those doom and gloom scenarios that you conjured in your mind.  Psychologist call this impression management, a conscious or subconscious process of regulating information in social settings.

Perhaps, a few seconds later, another part of you pushes through the discomfort and you speak up.  Oops, your worst fear is realized as you are interrupted and even shunned.  There is an absence of psychological safety, a climate where people feel comfortable being and expressing themselves.  Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson says psychological safety is the “belief that it's absolutely okay, in fact, it's expected, to speak up with concerns, questions, ideas, and mistakes.”  Not having this condition can spell disaster, making teams rife with inefficiencies.

Unfortunately, most teams are not as psychologically safe.  Gallup data reveals that just three in ten U.S. workers strongly agree that at work, their opinions seem to count.  With no psychological safety, teams are holding back from interacting and potentially making mistakes.  It is when the co-pilot does not feel comfortable telling the pilot that something is wrong, or it is when the nurse does not want to speak up in the operating room for fear of reprisal from the doctor so the patient’s wrong organ is extracted.  Essentially, teams do not get to be at their best when they feel restrained. 

In a fascinating challenge, Peter Skillman, former VP of Design at Palm and Author Tom Wujec had a team-building competition where participants had to build a marshmallow tower made from spaghetti, tape, and string.  The only requirement was that the marshmallow had to sit at the top.  He ran this competition with different groups, such as kindergarteners, business school students, and lawyers.  The winner…reaching a whopping 26 inches were kindergarteners, while the average score for business school students was 20 inches.  This experiment showed that it is more about team interaction than the caliber of individual skill.  Kindergartens’ felt comfortable to take chances, fall flat on their faces, and try again. There wasn’t even an incentive that they get to eat marshmallows if they won! Business students were censoring their actions, sizing up everybody’s power in the group, and holding back their experimental approaches.  They were ensconced in too much drama and not enough risk-taking. The lawyers…well, they may have been more preoccupied with arguing in and out of their minds.

Edmondson has confirmed that psychological safety predicts quality improvements, learning behavior, and productivity.  When there is an opportunity for you to speak and feel fully listened to, you are more likely to take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed and know that even if you fail, your teammates and managers will have your back.  Gallup data supports these benefits including, “a 27% reduction in turnover and a 12% increase in productivity.”

Ways To Build Psychological Safety: 

In her TEDx talk, Edmondson offers the first three actions individuals can take to foster psychological safety and I’ve added a few more:

1. Frame the work as a learning, not an execution problem.  It is not just about completing the work but creating space to talk about the work from the beginning.  Thinking about what we can learn from one another through discussion and debate before we jump into task mode.  It is about recognizing that we all have uncertainties and we cannot know everything individually, so we need to listen fully to each other and get all members involved to figure things out and collectively solve problems.  To do that effectively, it is imperative to have all brains and voices in the game.  To prompt your team’s involvement, you can let them know that you are missing perspectives and would find it valuable for them to identify a few.

2. Acknowledge your fallibility and vulnerability.  There will be times when you make mistakes and that’s ok because they will likely yield powerful learnings in which all can benefit.  Being vulnerable and openly sharing your missteps or bad news, will invite others to share, and that builds psychological safety and spreads learnings that prevent avoidable errors as opposed to concealing that information.   As a leader, when you offer small vital disclosures, it allows others to do the same without fear of being penalized.   

3. Model curiosity and ask questions. This practice creates an environment where people can always speak up when they have simple or complex questions.  As a leader, you can ask, “what are 3 questions that would be good to gain a better understanding of this challenge?  I do not want to move on to the next topic until we get some tough questions on the table.”

4. Have clear norms and agreements.  Ask team members what they need from each other to make their fullest and best contributions.  What behaviors would they like to exhibit and commitments they like to make in service of psychological safety.  Talking about these interpersonal interactions before jumping into the business will allow for effective and transparent communication. 

5. Have guidelines for productive disagreement.  Disagreements will most certainly happen.  What is the best way you would like to be respectful of others’ opinions when this happens?  How about when somebody gets naturally defensive, how do you want to handle this occurrence as a team so the exchanges are productive?

6. Ask for help.  Mistakes can be made when people do not seek support, and some people do not feel comfortable because of fear of being judged or feeling like they should know something when they don’t so ask the question will expose that potential incompetence.  So, what are those intentional steps team members can take to raise their hand and get assistance?  Are their designated helpers?  Sharing stories of teammates asking for help can normalize the practice and encourage others to do it and not be judged. 

7. Solicit feedback.  As a leader, do not assume people will voluntarily contribute regular feedback, you want to take steps to promote and encourage this practice to make it safe for them to raise concerns.  You can change the suggestion box to a problem box that encourages them to bring issues so the team can fix them.  If they would like to offer remedies or preliminary solves to those problems, that’s great, but it is not a requirement.  This is so people do not feel pressure to also find a solution to a problem they have discovered.  Some problems are deeply complex and need the minds of the entire team so no need to carry that full burden.

Being a part of a good team is a special experience because you get to be exactly who you are and have opportunities to grow in the process. Surrounding yourself with supportive high achievers will level up your abilities.  The best teams have psychological safety, the conditions where you feel comfortable to take interpersonal risks and know there will be no consequences because it is an environment without judgment; those freewheeling contributions are necessary for innovation.

Quote of the day: “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.” -Helen Keller

Q: What does your manager do to build psychological safety in your team?  Comment and share with us, we would love to hear from you?

*The next blog in the team series 2/10 explores the other characteristics that comprise excellence in teams.

As a Leadership Development & Executive Coach, I work with teams to build psychological safety for peak performance. Contact me to learn more.

Psychological safety is necessary for building excellent teams.