The purpose of this blog is to recap actions and insights with the hope you and your team will take time to discuss and take action in ways that matter to you.
But first! Please take a moment to finish this brief survey:
Review
Focused on building trust and opening communication, these are some topics we've explored together since late last year:
Feedback: The importance of feedback systems and structures (if it’s not scheduled, planned, or practiced it likely won’t happen as often as it needs to).
Unconditional positive regard: Making time to get to know one another, consistently, as human-beings beyond our roles helps us to better work through challenging moments and be more creative together to solve tough problems.
Roles & responsibilities (matrix): Creating visibility of all the things that keep your team functioning well and working together to uphold them is foundational to a healthy team dynamic where everyone feels valued.
Team guidelines: We can’t improve our working relationships and structures if we don’t have explicit and shared clarity of what those are. Making implicit agreements explicit empowers everyone to shape agreements that support everyone to thrive.
Job/role clarity: Having both direction and autonomy is essential for team cohesion and your leaders continue to prioritize clarifying jobs and roles.
Insight & action
Feedback:
Whether 1:1, with your manager, with someone you manage, as a group, make room to give each other meaningful feedback. In surveys, some folks on your teams have expressed asking for constructive feedback and STILL don’t get it.
Feedback can be a trust-building force and when brought in the spirit of learning and support is a tremendous gift. Many studies have shown that individuals on teams with healthy cultures of feedback perform better and report increased job satisfaction.
At the very least, if someone asks you for feedback, sit with it until you find something. Consider how someone’s actions (or inaction) impacted you, somebody else or a project. Even if small and seemingly "nitpicky," share what you would have liked to see instead (of what they did, said or didn't do).
Appreciation:
Sharing appreciation and the impact of one’s actions is great feedback practice. If you really can’t find something constructive to share, then share something appreciative and make it specific. The learning people crave in constructive feedback can (sometimes) be satisfied through appreciative feedback. Make sure you are specific about the action and impacts of that action. Take it a step further by sharing what their action says about who they are (in your eyes).
UPG.:
Make UPG an ongoing practice to deepen trust, bonds, and capacity to work through challenging moments or problems. Have a roles matrix? Rotate each week who comes up with a question. Here are 100 great questions to choose from. If you are a large team, get in groups of 2 to 4 and take 1 to 2 minutes each to share.
If for some reason no one had time to come up with a question, default to this prompt: Have everyone reflect on and share a moment that brought them joy. In the spirit of mental health awareness month, this is a great prompt. Naturally, when we reimagine moments of joy our nervous system settles and oxytocin rises (the love hormone, as it’s sometimes called). This makes us more available to each other, our work and to ourselves.
Team guidelines:
Team guidelines are foundational to a happy and productive team dynamic and should be built on and revisited continuously. Here’s an example to begin with. The overall goal of team guidelines is to enable everyone to do their best work within the context of their shared and individual goals.
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