The Simplest Way To Feel Calm and Centred
August 5, 2020
How To The Manage Performance Of Your Team In Uncertainty
August 25, 2020
I spoke to a client who I’ve been working with for the last 12 months and we’ve just reached the financial milestone of the new financial year. Their organisation is dealing with professional services. This client got about a team of 5 or 6 who are in her team.
In the coming year they want to make a big jump in their profile in the market and they still believe they can do it during the pandemic. And what I help them do over the last 12 months is instead of being a collection of individuals, they’ve really become a team. So they started to work on shared goals, they started to work really collectively on the key business problems they need to address and trust has gone massively through the roof.
But she asked me: How do I do this? How do I plan next year when we’re all at home? I’ve got people in Melbourne and things continue to change and disruptive.
Planning For FY21
Let me share with you what I talked her through and that way you can do it for yourselves if you need to. By the way, if you need help, sometimes you can’t facilitate these things yourself especially virtually. Some of the guys I work with they are on meetings all the time just to have that extra person there to ask the questions and to run the process really helps. I’ve been doing a heap of that pretty much since the pandemic kicked in. So just let me talk you through how this works and if you think this is something you need, just send me a message or get in touch.
The first thing we talked about is that there’s a couple of problems that happen that are purely to do with the context of the pandemic. The first one is people are like in a virtual meeting overload. Hop off one meeting back on the other and you know the impact of that is often they don’t have their best energy for some of these meetings.
The second is that you need to account for the fact that the macro environment is shifting and will keep shifting. And what I mean by macro is the external context so you can’t just do this once, it just won’t work.
The third is, you have to be really careful of staff uncertainty. So we know, fair enough there’s a bit of poaching of stuff going on right now because people are open to being given big salaries because it gives them predictability, so you know I just think you got to be really mindful of making sure you keep and retain your best people.
Design Ideas
First one is decision should be run in three chunks of one hour – 1 to 1.5 hours and I would do that over probably a week and a half, and to give people time to rest and recuperate and reenergize and get their spirit back in between. And each chunk is designed for a particular purpose and a particular outcome.
Review/Reflect
The first chunk is Review/Reflect, and what we want to look at in there are two things: wins and strengths. What is the team already doing well around their shared tasks and the things they’re doing collectively together? What’s working? And the way I kind of wrapped up with the team is I got them to summarise what is the one word that described “as is” for the way this team is performing and what they’ve done in FY20.
Future
Second is we now want to look at the future. What are the problems that still remain? And so this is the actual reason that you go problems first. Because most planning sessions everyone goes right in the future of all the things we want to be in, but actually it’s kind of fear and trouble that gets often people’s attention and right now people don’t want those fluffy kinds of out in the future challenges.
What are the things you need to do right now that we still got problems and we list them out. You could do an exercise where you rotate these around and everyone discusses the impact of those from their perspective. So what this one is the state you know, what literally is the world look like in 12 months. If we fix these challenges, the things that we can control.
Accountability and Task Clarity
This is the 3rd chunk. There are two pieces in here, one is equally really clear on that collective task so most of the key strategic opportunities in terms of the goals you want to get to, you want the team to own collectively.
I’ll give you an example, let’s say you want to create a BD culture. Because of the pandemic you need everyone to be focused on BD and you know it’s not something that can be done by one, two or three of your team members, it needs to be done by everyone.
The thing about that is if you make someone accountable for something they will only go this far, if you make everyone accountable you can get a lot of further work faster.
One individual accountability and then three part measurement system:
- have clear measures you need regular outside feedback
- literally ask your customers, ask your staff how you’re going?
- the third is a meeting schedule so that you can manage the collective tasks and agree
Summary
So let’s just review, things have changed, people are in virtual meeting overload, the macro world is shifting all the time and it’s a pretty uncertain picture for a lot of people in terms of employment and work.
This is how I’ve been doing virtual planning. Three chunks, about an hour or an hour and a half each.
- Review/Reflect, Wins/Strengths – One Word – As Is
- Future – Problems that still remain
- Accountability/Task Clarity
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
If you got this far and you are planning a session and you know you don’t want to run it because you can’t participate if you run it. And you’d love a bit of help coaching and molding the team together. Just get in touch and we can see if we’re a good fit. It’s a quick survey and quick half an hour meeting and we can see what you got in mind.
I hope this has been helpful… speak to you next time!
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