Fireside Leadership Chat with Mel Weinand
November 3, 2020
How To Build Team Rules And Agreements Without Inhibiting Creativity
November 17, 2020
What I’m gonna talk about this week is about three facts. One is, it’s November 2020, we’ve had the year 2020, like you’ve never had before, where we’re doing a whole bunch of virtual work. And at this time of year, a lot of people are thinking about how do I get my team together to say thank you, for a really tough year. To kind of get them to connect a bit and have fun and just to kind of bring the juices back. And then how do I kind of prepare them for 2021 and get that to happen?
Why team days don’t work
Here’s the thing, two simple ideas – the first simple idea is for any of you who’ve been to a Team day, it just goes for a single day. And you realise after a week back, what happens? Most of the time, everyone just goes back to how they were doing things before.
The second is that often what happens to whatever you come up with, you know, all the stuff you put on the flip charts or the promises you make to one another? What happens to that? Yeah,often it doesn’t happen, and sometimes it does. But what I’ve done is I guess, I’ve looked at the circumstances where it does, and I’ve looked at the work that I’ve done over time, and I’ve turned that into a system. That means that the way I work to produce an ongoing connection but also ongoing follow through.
Five Problems
- When we think of it as a single event, the first thing that happens is that the team kind of don’t buy in. They don’t buy into the idea that overnight, some magic is going to occur, everything’s going to be fixed.
- The virtual platform doesn’t work well in one day. People get exhausted and tired.
- Essentially a team is a sense of relationships. Relationships take time to develop. They don’t just develop on one day, having a drink together or doing whatever.
- Strategy is not about words on the page.
- It’s much better to partner for change, than expecting a day to work, one single day to work.
Most of your team rather than knowing that change is gonna happen magically in just one day. They know that actually, it’s over 12-18 months that the magic happens. Over that period of time, that’s enough time for you to really change the dynamics in your relationships and make things different and better.
The virtual platform. So what I’ve been doing rather than one day, I will aim to do two hour sessions, maximum. And even if you looked at doing four of those in a month with particular objectives, that’s much better than during a single day that doesn’t have any follow through.
Relationships take time. So what relationships do I mean? I don’t just mean the relationships within a team. Often, what happens on days like this is we just obviously work on the relationships in the team. But we also take a systemic view of customers, we usually do the kind of SWOT analysis, you look at expectations of stakeholders and investors, well, this is what I do. And all of that starts to reveal the broader system, the teamwork within.
The work that I do, what it’s designed to do is essentially over time start to improve and establish better relationships, better systems, to shift the system so that all those relationships are built on mutual interest. Over time, you’re looking to change these relationships and shift these bit by bit.
Now, you can’t do that in a day. And so my point of view around strategy not being worth on the page is that it’s actually strategy in action that matters. And what I mean by that, I mean that over a period of six weeks, what’s much better to do is to take the assumptions that you come up with in your two hour session, first two hour session, and test it. Apply different strategies to try and change them and then come back. So in this first two hours, we build that, we build those strategic assumptions, we test them, and we come back, and we reflect, learn and plan for.
And that is a better strategic process.Because you’re learning from doing. So for that type of process to occur, we will go much more focused on partnering for change over a period of time. Because the external world is changing so much, you need to think about doing it that way. And a partner, rather than looking at a sort of a consultant that sits outside of the client, and gives advice, the client and the consultant intertwine and helping over time your results and new needs to be created.
Summary
So the point of today was, if you’re thinking about planning for next year, resetting, engaging your team in a conversation and helping them to feel good optimistic about the year ahead. This is not just an opportunity to feel good. This is an opportunity to be better and if you do it the old way, you know, relationships take time, the team won’t buy in if they think that this isn’t going to change in a day. And strategy isn’t developed through words on a page but it is developed by taking action, reflecting and seeing works.
Leave me a comment or Get in Touch
If you like what you hear, you want to talk about how this is how this could work for you. You can book in a quick half an hour and we can talk initially and see if we’re a good fit to work together.
I hope that’s been useful. Take care.
When you are ready…. let’s work out if we are a good fit.
If you’re a growing mid size business and you want help to get more focus in your leadership team, scaling with people and systems or leading inside and outside your organisation, then click the link below. You’ll be taken to a super short survey and then asked to book in an initial 20-minute call where we can work out if what you need is aligned with the results I can deliver.
I look forward to the chat…
