4 Reasons to Get Your Team Together in the next 90 Days

 

Well done! You’ve survived multiple months of masks, lockdowns, homeschooling, and uncertainty.  So have your team.

 

 

Where to now?

 

 

There may be a collective opportunity in your market that wasn’t presenting itself a year ago. You may feel that while individual productivity may have increased, collective creativity and teamwork has been challenging. 

 

 

There are 4 reasons to get your team together in the next 90 days and I’ll explain each in more detail over the next month.

 

 

 

 

Many of you will have a strategy built for 2022 and beyond.

 

 

The creation of strategy can be the easy bit,  there are two main  problems around strategy in teams:

 

 

 

 

This is either because the team doesn’t truly believe in it, it hasn’t been communicated clearly enough or a combination of both

 

 

Strategy implementation is like a theatre production. Everyone needs to know their role whether they are front of house or back of house.

 

 

Group Accountability is the culture that then drives ownership and measuring of progression. If someone lets the team down it becomes everyone’s (alongside the team leader) role to talk with them and help them succeed.

 

 

 

The second problem is that your external stakeholders needs have shifted more quickly than your approach or offer.

 

 

This happens in markets or industries undergoing rapid change. In this situation you need to think about your market as an adaptive system and treat your strategy as a series of experiments.

 

 

 

What part of working in an office have you missed?

 

 

I’m guessing its not the time playing office politics. For many people its the social events, the time spent connecting with those that you work with.

 

 

We’ve proven that working from home can be more productive. But it’s also missing some of the magic that comes from working with others.

 

 

A big element of this is the creativity that is generated from having people with diverse ideas perspectives in a room bouncing off one another.

 

 

A simple way of doing this is the create and rotate process. From a simple problem statement,  one group generates a series of possible solutions. You then pass on these solutions to the next group to extend and build upon. And then the next group. At the end, the groups come together to examine the builds and align around a solution.

 

 

So if you want to invest to  get your team together, use the time to be creative.

 

 

 

Teamwork during COVID has been galvanised by a common purpose.

 

 

In coping with the challenges placed upon us all, we’ve found a common reason to work together better.

 

 

But some of the habits that has produced are very time consuming and for many people frustrating.

 

 

For example, zoom meetings have replaced informal and social catch ups for many people. So people have their calendars booked out all day. While the use of collaboration tools like teams and slack are underutlised in some organisations or used for the wrong purpose.

 

 

There is an opportunity to reset how teamwork is done and talk about expectations.

 

 

This covers how the team interact with each other and also how they interact with internal and external stakeholders.

 

 

What is the teamwork interaction system that will work best to get work done? What is your preference for office based planning and teamwork vs collaboration software vs virtual meetings?

 

 

 

Think about any community organisation that you are a part of. What are the common elements?

 

 

 

For many teams the pandemic was the goal. ie. Lets get through this together.

 

 

However that’s like bonding over an emergency situation. It’s uniting while it lasts, but then eventually the flame burns out.

 

 

Creating new shared experiences lights the flame of community. And this is still  best done face to face. What would that look like for your team?