Leadership A-Z: R is for Recognition

As a professional, how much time do you spend recognizing your staff and acknowledging their achievements. The topic of recognition can be a very personalized one, and not everyone is going to value the same things or even find recognition always positive. Consider these scenarios:

* A very introverted member of staff who is extremely shy and likes to stand behind the scenes is acknowledged publicly in a full organization meeting for their achievements and is asked to stand up to take credit. What do you think the impact is for them?
* One of your top performers is given the task to leading yet another special project. This one with high visibility. This comes as they are just winding down a year long other high visibility project, and after they have indicated that they are looking forward to being able to focus more on their core tasks as they have some evolving elder care responsibilities for one of their parents. What do you think the impact is for them?

What do you use to recognize employees? Recognition programs will vary from company, to company, dependent on the industry, size, and whether an organization is unionized or now.

Here are some possible recognition possibilities:
 - Gift cards
- Staff/team lunch, BBQ
- Special sporting event - tickets or participation
- Time off
- Public acknowledgement -  by email, in company newsletter/publication, in a presentation
- Hand written card of thanks
- Note on file for achievement
- Certificate
- Take them out to lunch
- Give them a gift so they and their family can go out

and of course a simple thank you is also important!

What recognition is needed within your team. Where do you want to positively reinforce outstanding behavior?

Have a great week,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPT
Potentials Realized

Author of Effective Group Coaching and From One to Many: Best Practices of Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013)
Phone: (416)996-TEAM
Learn more about our retreat and leadership development offerings and support
 
As an author Jennifer Britton is known for her thought leadership in the area of group and team coaching. She is also a former leader and team builder who spent the first 13 years of her career working within the United Nations as well as the international aid sector. From Boardroom to jungle, beach and forest to mountains, Jennifer has worked to develop teams and leaders in more than 18 countries, and virtually many more. She founded Potentials Realized in 2004 and focuses on leadership, teamwork and coaching skills training.

Teams 365 Blog for Teams and Team Leaders

Happy New Year! I hope that you had a wonderful holiday season. One of my 2014 projects is the Teams 365 blog for Teams and Team Leaders. You can view it over at my Potentials Realized site here.

Every day this year I will be providing teams and team leaders with a question, tip or resource to help them do better work. As many of you know team development is a central focus of the work I do. With the hundreds of teams I have worked with, and supported, over the last twenty plus years it's amazing to see how similar issues are, regardless of location or industry. Please spread the news to other teams and team leaders who can also benefit from these daily insights.

I hope that you will enjoy the Teams365 blog. You can also follow the daily posts on our Potentials Realized Facebook page or at my Twitter feed.

Here are a couple of the first few questions so far this year:

You can also download your own SWOT strategic planning template here as well.

I look forward to picking up on the Leadership a-z I started in the fall. I'll be resuming regular (weekly-ish) posts on leadership  issues here at the blog later this week.

Have a great start to 2014!

With best wishes,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, CPT, PCC
Potentials Realized - Coaching, Coaching Skills Training, Leadership and Team Development, Retreats
Email: info(at)potentialsrealized(dot)com
(416)996-8326

Leadership a - z: N is for New Hire Orientation

The first 90 days of any employee's job is critical to success, for them, as well as for your team. What

are typical considerations when welcoming a new member to the team?

Consider these items:

1. Schedule time to welcome them to your team. Introduce them to all team members, as well as other influencers and connectors in the department/organization.

2. Create a series of meetings to:

Set expectations  What do they expect from you as a leader? What do you expect from them? How do these align? You may also want to have dialogue about expectations on the team level, depending on their role.

Review the job description. Spend time reviewing the person’s job duties and responsibilities. What are the performance expectations? What does good performance look like? Time spent at the start of a person’s placement is well spent in clarifying behaviorally what is expected of them.

Discuss how their role fits into the work of the entire team, unit and organization. The more you can share about the bigger picture, the easier it is for many employees to see the connections, and know what can happen to others when work is not completed on time or in a complete manner.

Discover their preferences and share yours.  Discuss what they can expect with communication, feedback, performance discussions.

Many HR departments will have a pre-established on-boarding program. As a leader or manager the time spent up front building relationships, clarifying expectations, and providing clear information abou the role and priorities can be invaluable.

Questions:

What do you want to communicate about yourself as a leader. The direction they will receive? 

What are he goals and priorities of the team?

 How does their work will fit into the bigger picture of the team and the organization?

What can they expect in terms of feedback and support?

What should they know about your style? What should they know about yours? (Learn more about styles through the Everything DiSC profile).

Have a great week,

Jennifer

 

Jennifer Britton, MES, CPT, PCC
Potentials Realized
Author of Effective Group Coaching and From One to Many: Best Practices of Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013)
Phone: (416)996-TEAM
Read more about our coaching, retreat and leadership development offerings and support
As an author Jennifer Britton is known for her thought leadership in the area of group and team coaching. She is also a former leader and team builder who spent the first 13 years of her career working within the United Nations as well as the international aid sector. From Boardroom to jungle, beach and forest to mountains, Jennifer has worked to develop teams and leaders in more than 18 countries, and virtually many more. She founded Potentials Realized in 2004 and focuses on leadership, teamwork and coaching skills training

Leadership A-Z: F is Frameworks for High Performing Teams - NaBloPoMo

A large part of my work with organizations of all sizes (non-profit, SMEs, governmental agencies and
corporate) revolves around creating the conditions for more effective team work, usually through a mix of coaching, training and other performance improvement support.  Whether I am working with a team in a one day team building offsite, or having sustained conversations over the period of months, I like to share the following definitions. First, what is a team?

 In the Wisdom of Teams, Kazenbach and Smith offer us this definition " “... a team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common
purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable” (p 45).

A framework I usually share, and get leaders and team members to rate themselves, are the six factors of High Performing Teams. Katzenbach and Smith found that High Performing Teams have:

1. Shared purpose or mission
2. Shared performance goals
3. Shared behavioral norms
4. Shared team practices
5. Shared Commitment
6. Clear Roles

Coaching Questions:
1. On a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being low, and 10 being high) where do you rate yourselves in each one of these six areas?
2. Which ones are your strengths? What can you do to leverage these?
3. Which ones are your weak areas?
4. What are some specific action steps you can take to address areas which you have a lower score. If roles are not clear, what could you do to clarify them? If performance goals are not clear, what needs to be done?
5. Who needs to be involved in these dialogues?
6. When do they need to happen?

Interested in finding out about what your team can do to address these? Please contact me or refer to the chapters on team coaching in my latest book - From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching.

Have a great week,
Jennifer


Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPT
Potentials Realized
Phone: (416)996-TEAM
Supporting leaders and teams through enhanced skills, better conversations and focused performance
Author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013)


As an author Jennifer Britton is known for her thought leadership in the area of group and team coaching. She is also a former leader and team builder who spent the first 13 years of her career working within the United Nations as well as the international aid sector. From Boardroom to jungle, beach and forest to mountains, Jennifer has worked to develop teams and leaders in more than 18 countries, and virtually many more. She founded Potentials Realized in 2004 and focuses on leadership, teamwork and coaching skills training.

Did you find this post useful and want to share it? Please do so by linking and attribution. Thank you! 

Styles and Teamwork - NaBloPoMo 9

What your style preferences in working and communicating? Do you see the world in broad strokes or fine detail? In a majority of the team and leadership programs I develop with clients we often wind up spending a significant amount of time exploring styles, and how they contribute to what's working, and what's not working within teams, decision making, and communication. A lot of teams find that using an assessment such as the Everything DiSC(R) or the Team Diagnostic as a foundation for our team buiding or team coaching work, creates a common foundation and language to start the dialogue and understanding needed.

I wanted to share one of the weekly tips on teamwork which are posted over at our  Potentials Realized Facebook page in today's blog post:















 Coaching Questions:
What is your style as a leader? How does this influence your communication, leadership and conflict management approach?
What styles exist in your team?
Given these styles, what are the needs and preferences of your team members? Hpw do they approach communication, work and conflict management?

Have a great weekend,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPT
Potentials Realized

Potentials Realized
Supporting leaders and teams through enhanced skills, better conversations and focused performance
Author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013)


As an author Jennifer Britton is known for her thought leadership in the area of group and team coaching. She is also a former leader and team builder who spent the first 13 years of her career working within the United Nations as well as the international aid sector. From Boardroom to jungle, beach and forest to mountains, Jennifer has worked to develop teams and leaders in more than 18 countries, and virtually many more. She founded Potentials Realized in 2004 and focuses on leadership, teamwork and coaching skills training.

Did you find this post useful and want to share it? Please do so by linking and attribution. Thank you!

Fostering Collaboration

Collaboration is a hot topic in today's work environment. What leads to success with collaboration and how do we know when collaboration is the best approach? One of my favorite reads on the topic of collaboration is by Morten Hansen's Collaboration. As Hansen writes, " Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration."

So what makes collaboration successful? Much of the research points to the following factors:
- There is a shared goal amongst those that are collaborating
- Shared commitment to success on the part of those involved

At the end of the day collaboration is based on strong relationships. Those collaborating need to be clear on WHERE they are going, WHAT is the purpose, and WHAT resources are available. Resources include the important component of people. What are the strengths each team/group member brings? What knowledge and skills do they offer? What gaps might exist?

Successful collaboration often rests on the skill set of those involved. Key skills for collaboration include enhanced communication skills including active listening, better questioning, as well as enhanced  skills in relationship management and influence. Many of these skills come under the umbrella of emotional intelligence.

Leaders should also consider what barriers might exist to effective collaboration, whether it is related to resourcing, goals (individual, team or organizational) which might conflict with collaboration, values, rewards and even compensation. While leaders may not have control over some of these areas (such as the compensation structure in an organization) shared identification of these barriers can be extremely useful, in creating a context for success.

As you consider your work this year ask yourself the following:
- When will collaboration be essential in my work?
- What are the specific goals around this project? Are the goals clear, and shared?
- What might create a barrier to collaboration?
- What is needed to make this successful (relationships, shared goal, commitment, resources)?

I look forward to sharing more on collaboration in future posts. The topic of collaboration, along with co-facilitation, is one of the chapters in my next book From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching, which will be released this June. 

Best Regards,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010)
Potentials Realized
Leadership, Teamwork, Coaching and Retreats
Phone: 416-996-TEAM (8326)

Questions for Leaders and their Teams

Some of the work I've been enjoying lately has been with teams - some at full day offsites, some as we connect virtually, and one where I get to meet with them face to face every few weeks. This year on our Potentials Realized Facebook page, I am posting weekly questions for leaders and their teams. These are questions you may wish to incorporate into your team meetings, or even circulate by email.

We know that high-performing teams have a clear vision, clear roles and shared commitment. Extraordinary teams aren't just born, they emerge out of conversation and work together.

I hope that you will continue to follow the weekly team and leader tips throughout the year at the Potentials Realized Facebook page. Here are the first eight questions from the first two months of the year:

1. What are your most important goals this year? What do you need to get there?
2. Which habits are working for your team right now? Which ones aren't?
3. What strengths exist on your team? How are they being leverage? How are your strengths being overused and perhaps creating a blindspot? 
4. What has been working in this so far this year? What do you want to be doing more of? Less of?
5.  What are the critical skills for your team right now?
6.  What is the conversation you NEED to have this week? What will be the benefit of having this conversation?
7. Where has the team been focusing so far this year? What's been working well with this focus? What changes may need to be made?
8. Where is the team getting the most traction and results right now?

Teams will continue to be a major focus of my work this year. As some of you already know, my next book will be focusing on team coaching. The new book - From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching, will be released in mid-June and is already available for pre-order at Amazon.

Best regards
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton, PCC, CPCC

Leadership | TeamWork | Retreats | Coaching
Author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2010)
Email: jennifer {at}potentialsrealized {dot}com
(416)996-TEAM (8326)