The deep work in teams

The deep work in teams is trust.  

Trust is complex. When trust is perceived as a condition dependent feeling, it can feel non-actionable. Trust matters because teams move at the speed of trust. If you want to accelerate anything about a team, you have to grow trust within the team.

We now know how to do this. 

We teach teams to work by trust building agreements rather than by tension building assumptions. We teach them to share stories of struggle and progress that grow their sense of mutual connection and belonging. We teach them how to use social technologies to become more inclusive and transparent together. All of these build trust. This is the deep work of teams.

Strengths-based leadership development

In a strengths-based approach to leadership development, we engage and align existing abilities in new ways. We come from the reality that when leaders grow, it's because they have learned how six things:

• How to understand leadership as an art in order to identify areas of leadership impactable by learning
• How to form new learning questions focused on their interests in growing their leadership as art
• How to get feedback on where they are succeeding and progressing in their learning questions
• How to work on their learning questions by combining existing abilities in new ways
• How to to turn new combinations of abilities into new habits
• How to make new habits more normative for leaders by creating agreements on engaging them

The alternative to role playing

The idea of role playing is to simulate an interaction for the purpose of practicing specific skills. It's useful when we have discrete interaction skills to practice and master, like presenting specific kinds of information or asking specific kinds of questions. 

When we want to help people learn more than mimicry, we use Scenario Mapping. We use selected scenarios to map out five key interaction elements.

• What to expect and prep for
• What to listen for
• What information and questions to share
• What could go wrong and responses
• What to follow up and follow through on

This helps people form a mindful and agile approach to new, complex and challenging interactions in their work. The most important part of the process is the learning based critique following live practice in real interactions. A learning based critique is structured around 6 questions:

• What went well and why?
• What was unexpected? 
• When did you feel most and least confident? 
• What do you know and assume about how well you did? 
• Could you get better feedback on how well you did in the future? 
• Based in what you learned, what would you do or try differently? 

Managing perceived work overload

What does it mean when people on teams express they're overloaded? It means it's time to explore and inquire more. Here are some of the maybe's: 

• They're not asking for or offering help enough  
• They don't know there's a more efficient way to do things  
• They spend more time trying to get what they need than doing what they need to do
• They do a lot of rework because of less than useful requirements  
• They don't spend time together experimenting with ways to accelerate work  
• They work in a low-trust and low-freedom culture that slows things down

The more we know about actionable contributors to overload, the more we can manage it intelligently. 

What to never do in whiteboard sessions

If you want an engaging process, where people are actually smarter and better together, never have one person control the marker, no matter how smart or important they or others think they are. Make sure everyone records everything they think and say. If you want to cluster and sequence ideas later it's faster to use cards on a table as the whiteboard. This approach reduces and often completely eliminates dominating, disappearing and derailing. It keeps everyone optimally involved. 

The trust-creativity connection

Being creative together takes trust. Creativity together exists to the degree we share trust. Trust happens when we can depend on others to respond to our contributions with curiosity, appreciation and adding value to our ideas. A space of weak trust makes us less creative together. Trust is the magic of collaborative creativity, 

Why non-profits can struggle with boards

Honestly, it's because they don't always need them. 

Boards were inventions of a different age. There is no logic to the story that they should be a useful construct today. We need to keep network weaving community resources to support the success of non-profits in whatever flexible and inventive ways we can. 

Assessing growth capacity

Neuroscience makes it clear now that our brains have unlimited learning potential. When it doesn't seem that way, about ourselves or others, it's because we can have stories that we don't. We tell ourselves and each other stories that we have limits.  

Growth capacity becomes more clear to the extent we work on learning new things that matter to us. We don't know what we can do until we give time to learning and practicing. This is true for us and others. What we have done so far is not a reliable assessment of what's possible.

What to do with a boss who struggles with leadership

There are many varieties of bosses. There are those who struggle more or less just with being human beings. Some come with more baggage than they or any relationship could sustainably carry.  Some have grown into wonderful leaders skilled in helping others grow in positive ways and with positive impacts. 

When we have a struggling boss, we can  be a source of positive feedback to them. We can help them make and keep small promises. We can help them become less unconscious of when they impact their world in positive ways. We can build trust by making and keeping small promises. We can model what we want to see. None of these are magical. They simply create the conditions that can support their growth. If they don't have sufficient growth capacity we might need to move on to a boss who does.

Making learning core to performance

Learning comes in a variety of forms. There is learning of discovery, improvement, improvisation, experimentation, research, imitation, storytelling, practice, feedback and mastery. Learning is expanding our knowledge and know-how. 

When learning grows, performance grows. It's that significant. Everything we do in work can focus from an intention toward ubiquitous learning. Without exceptions. 

What we should do about our unconscious biases

We could begin arguing that biases, conscious and unconscious, protect us from the uncertainty of the unfamiliar, the stranger. They have tribal utility. 

In diverse urban social-ecosystems, biases can preclude the kind of collaboration that makes us smarter, better and faster together. People do their best when they feel included in how things work. People support and invest in what they help decide and create.

Reality is, some biases will stubbornly remain unconscious because of our belief systems. And we will have conscious biases that will stubbornly remain in tact because they override considerations of data. 

This being so, one of our choices is to include and collaborate even with people we view through the lens of inherited and invented biases. Only when we act on these purpose, whatever our feelings, can we discover what realities lie behind the confines of our assumptive prejudices. It is unrealistic to expect that bias purging can precede actions of including. 

One best way to deliver feedback

Feedback to others doesn’t need to be delivering our sincere or manipulative judgements, assessments or observations, especially when they shut down openness to learning through confidence depleting defensiveness or inflated self-esteem. 

We can deliver feedback simply by expressing what we want to see possible. It is expressed in the positive and feels to people like a fairly to mostly realistic ask. We show interest in how our ask could in any way be a concern to them. And we offer to help make it as easy as possible, unless we edit our ask to be more accommodating. 

The magic and media of instrinsic motivation

We know that one of the differences between higher and lower performers is their motivation. Higher performers tend to work with internal motivation. Lower performers who need more leading tend to work with external motivation.  

Focusing on leader praise, contests and tangible rewards fosters external motivation. Four ways to support intrinsic motivation include: storytelling, learning questions, habit building and feedback. 

In storytelling, we share stories of things done and gone well. Learning questions are the questions that represent what people want to discover, improve and master in their work. Habit building is the growth of habits that support metrics. Feedback is what supports learning questions and helps grow habits.

Prepping for the Agile Canvas

Here are four questions that prepare people well for any collaborative planning effort organized by the Agile Canvas. 

• What elements, considerations and questions do we want to make sure we address in the plan? These become the organizing themes in Dreaming and Clarity conversations.
• What are some of the unknowns and uncertainties we have going into this effort? These inspire Clarity questions. 
• Who needs to be at the table, for all or part of the process? This makes sure we have all necessary and available perspectives and stakeholders for the Gifts conversation.
• Is there anything in progress now that will be important or necessary for our efforts here?  This grounds the Doing conversation in ongoing actions.

(Actual) leadership power

While we can talk all we want about having power as leaders, ultimately our power equals the trust and credibility we have earned with others. People support others they trust. If we instead try to lead by fear, there is no trust and people will do what they can to not support us.  We engender trust with compassion, walking our talk, making and keeping promises, being a dependable sounding board. At least.

Do we need to get rid of weaknesses?

If we define a weakness as a poorly timed strength, we can’t and don’t actually want to get rid of them. We just need to substitute a different strength when we would use a strength in a poorly timed way. If my strength of procrastination is poorly timed with time sensitive tasks, we just need to swap it out for our strengths of being impulsive and reactive. 

The best way to do strategic planning

Strategic planning works best when it is question-based, engaging, strenths-focused and agile.  

The process is realistic when it is based on questions rather than assumptions. We turn statements of what we want to see possible into new questions because questions have 3-5 times more power than statements. We work from our unknowns as questions because what we don’t know is more strategically significant than what we do know.

The process is supported when stakeholders are engaged in it rather than people we have to convert to it. People support what they help create. We are smarter together in diversity of perspectives. We can include any number of people in any strategic process. 

The process has rigor when it is focused on our strengths rather than our deficiencies. When we make progress toward our strategic success it is because we have effectively leveraged the strengths we have.

The process is resilient when it has the ability of being agile and ongoing rather than periodic. Even the best laid two or five year plans start to go out of date after just six months. Because of this, we refresh the plan every two quarters because the world has changed, our learning and changed, and we have changed our world. 

Leader as confidence builder

The work of leader is to help people grow confidence in their strengths and those of each other. When people work with this kind of confidence, they take and share initiative. They have the courage and passion to grow.  

This is the work of making sure people are focusing on and learning from their progress and success. It is asking people to act with strengths they want to grow. It’s making sure they have useful feedback from everyone they work with and impact. It’s the work of minimizing factors that could diminish and deny their goodness.

New talent success

Wise organizations put at least as much emphasis on the quality of onboarding as they do the quality of new talent selection. How new hires are socialized is vital to engaging their strengths and passions. Helping them form new habits is at least as important as the histories they bring to the table.  

What business are we in?

No matter what we say about what business we’re in, the clearest and perhaps most reliable picture comes from our customers and clients. What they think is what ultimately matters. Understanding how they define value from us is the secret to our success.