Join the ASQ Team and Workplace Excellence Forum on Tuesday, June 15 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, for ASQ Storytime, a fun story share where you are invited to share your stories as a quality professional. Stories may either be free-style or in PechaKucha style on the themes of “Driving out Fear” or “Quality Life After the Pandemic.”
Prizes (books) will be awarded for the best stories (voted by participants) in each style category, for funniest, education, and “Thing I will use tomorrow”
Teams exist to execute to organization objectives. In order to meet these objectives, a team needs a vision of itself. There are eight major elements to a team’s vision:
Consistency with organizational objectives: The team vision should be aligned with and derive from the organization’s overall purpose and strategy. Teams are sub-elements in a wider organization structure and their success will be judged on the extent to which they make valuable contributions to the overall purpose of the organization. In some circumstances a team may decide that it is important for its own values, purposes and orientations to act as a minority group which aims to bring about change in organization objectives – perhaps like a red team.
Receiver needs: Teams focus on providing excellence in service to its customers, whether internal or external.
Quality of work: A major emphasis within organizations is the quality of work. The relationship between quality and other functions like efficiency is important.
Value to the wider organization: Understanding the importance of the team just not for the wider organization but beyond, leads to team cohesion and greater team effectiveness. Team members need a clear perception of the purposes of their work.
Team-climate relationships: Team climate refers to aspects such as the warmth, humor, amount of conflict, mutual support, sharing, backbiting, emphasis on status, participation, information sharing, level of criticism of each other’s work and support for new ideas.
Growth and well-being of team members: Growth, skill development and challenge are central elements of work life and teams can be a major source of support. Teams provide opportunities for skill sharing and support for new training. Teams need to be concerned for the well-being of its members, including things like burnout.
Relationships with other teams and departments in the organization: Teams rarely operate in isolation. They interact with other team and departments within the organization. Teams must be committed to working effectively and supporting other teams. Avoid silo thinking.
People are exposed to points of view different from their own. If the arguments are good enough, people can change their mind to adopt better beliefs. This requires structure, such as “Yes…but…and“
The back-and-forth of a conversation allows people to address counterarguments, and thus to refine their arguments, making it more likely that the best argument carries the day.
There are a few principles to make this team collaboration work.
Clear purpose: What is the reason for the collaboration? What’s the business case or business need? Without alignment on the purpose and its underlying importance to the organization, the collaboration will fail. The scope will start to change, or other priorities will take precedence.
Clear process: How will the collaboration take place? What are the steps? What is the timing? Who is responsible for what?
Clear expectations: What is the specific goal or outcome we are striving for through this collaboration?
Clear support: Problems will arise that the team cannot handle on their own. In those cases, what is the escalation process, including who and when?
As we move through of careers we all have endless incidents that can either be denied and suppressed or acknowledged and framed as “falls,” “failures,” or “mistakes.” These so-called falls all enhance our professional growth. By focusing on the process of falling, and then rising back up, we are able to have a greater understanding of the choices we have made, and the consequences of our choices.
Sharing and bearing witness to stories of failure from our professional and personal lives provide opportunities for us to explore and get closer to the underlying meaning of our work, our questions of what is it that we are trying to accomplish in our work as quality professionals. Our missteps allow us to identify paths we needed to take or create new stories and new pathways to emerge within the context of our work. As we share stories of tensions, struggles, and falling down, we realized how important these experiences are in the process of learning, of crafting one’s presence as a human being among human beings, of becoming a quality professional.
We may not have asked for a journey of struggle when we decided to become quality professionals, but the process of becoming tacitly involves struggle and difficulty. There is a clear pattern among individuals who demonstrate the ability to rise strong pain and adversity in that they are able to describe their experiences, and lay meaning to it.
It is important to recognize that simply recognizing and affirming struggle, or that something is not going as it should, does not necessarily lead to productive change. To make a change and to work towards a culture of excellence we must recognize that emotions and feelings are in the game. Learning to lead is an emotionally-laden process. And early-stage professionals feel exceptionally vulnerable within this process. This field requires early-stage professionals to hone their interpersonal, technical, and organizational skills, all while turning their gaze inward to understanding how their positioning in the organization impacts can be utilized for change. Novice professionals often struggle in terms of communicating ideas orally or in writing, being able to manage multiple tasks at once, staying on top of their technical content, or even thinking critically about who they are in the broader world. Early-stage professionals are always on the brink of vulnerability.
The day is coming where parts of my team will be returning to the office. However, the days of expecting everyone to be in seat 5 days a week are probably over for a while and the definite reality of hybrid teams is something we need to prepare for.
Hybrid teams have members working in very differing situations, with differing levels of autonomy, ability to socialize and access to the team leader. It will be a key activity to ensure that all team members are treated equally and fairly, regardless of their work arrangement, moving forward. Especially since everyone will be dealing with vulnerabilities, both those back in the office and those remote partially or fully.
Here are some key steps I am planning for, based on advice from this Forbes article.
Relaunching the Team with a Kickoff: As a leader who started remotely almost a year ago, I feel an acute need to meet my team in person and celebrate with them. This will also be an opportunity to kickoff this new chapter in the team’s life.
Level the Playing Field: Ensuring everyone has equal access to me will be key. Team meetings will be fully remote, with on-site folks logging in from their desks. I’m keeping a calendar to track how much face-to-face I get with people and I’ll be looking for opportunities to connect in multiple ways.
Over-communicate: I’ll be honest, I am a little tired from the volume of communication is going on now, but going hybrid means I will need to double-down on my efforts here. I’ll be keeping my consistency meetings, my team meetings, my skip-levels, the over sharing of things I find interesting. I’ll also be looking for ways to recharge myself so the exhaustion level feels a little less.
Understand the individual work styles: It is time to update the communication charter.
Establish New Hybrid Team Rituals and Norms: Learn from what has gone right and create some new rituals. I will be looking for some real innovation from the team here.
Deliberate inclusivity will be critical as we enter this new phase. Planning now as we get ready will lead to better results. Now is the time to start updating your team ground rules.
Here is my current agenda for the team kickoff, developed using SessionLab.
Activity
Description
Breakfast
Introduction
Review Agenda
9 Dimensions Team Building Activity
9 Dimensions is a powerful activity designed to build relationships and trust among team members.
There are 2 variations of this icebreaker. The first version is for teams who want to get to know each other better. The second version is for teams who want to explore how they are working together as a team.
Break
Team Self-Assessment
This is a structured process designed for teams to explore the way they work together. The tight structure supports team members to be open and honest in their assessment. After reflecting as individuals, the team builds a collective map which can serve as the basis for further discussions and actions. The assessment is based around 6 dimensions. Each one encouraging the team to reflect and analyze a different and crucial element of their behavior.
Lunch
Spy
A simple game that will have everyone running within minutes. Very effective to fight the “after-lunch” dip.
Engineering Your Team OS
This is designed to work as a standalone workshop or as a companion to the Team Self-Assessment tool. Using reflections and insights on your working process, your team will ‘update’ its operating system by making deliberate choices about how to work together. The goal is gradual development, not a radical shift. You will design an ideal-state for your team and slowly work towards that.
Break
3 Action Steps
This is a small-scale strategic planning session that helps groups and individuals to take action toward a desired change. It is often used at the end of a workshop or program. The group discusses and agrees on a vision, then creates some action steps that will lead them towards that vision. The scope of the challenge is also defined, through discussion of the helpful and harmful factors influencing the group.
Investigations of a Dog 