Designing a high-performing team - Alison Coward

Speaker

• Alison Coward
• Bracket Creative
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Video

• Designing a high-performing team by Alison Coward

Source

• Agile Greece Summit 2018

Slides

Notes

• How do you do your best work?
• Can your team learn to work better together? Do you believe that collaboration is a skill?
• Growth Mindset (Carol Dweck, Mindset)
• Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
• Members of teams with fixed mindset don’t want to challange each other, they are afraid to make mistakes infront of each other.

• Members of teams with growth mindset would outperform teams with fixed mindset.

• What new ways of working can you create together?

• Building new team habits (and rituals) What are the habbits now? What should be changed?

• Two Factors for effective teams:
  • Communication
  • Trust

HOW you work together is more important than WHAT you are working on, and even WHO you are working with.

• MIT Human Dynamic Lab - Harward Business review April 2010, “The New Science of Building Great Teams”
• The high performing, the most effective teams
  • Communicate frequently
  • Talk and listen in equal measure (no one person dominating)
  • Engage in frequent informal communication (Social channels as well)
  • Conversation is dynamic
• Google’s Project Aristotle
  • Impact of work
  • Meaning of work
  • Structure and clarity
  • Dependability
  • Psychological safety
• Dr. Tasha Eurich “Insight” - 95% of the people think they are self-aware, but only about 10-15% really are.
• Ivar Kroghrud team work user manual
• Adam Bryant interviewing Ivar Kroghrud
• Self awareness:
  • When are yourmost productive hours?
  • When do you get your best ideas?
  • What does your ideal workday look like?
• Better Meetings and Workshops
• $37 billion is wasted on unproductive meetings in US every year
• Design your meetings:
  • What is the purpose of the meeting?
  • What is the best format for the meeting?
  • Meeting rhythms

• Google ventures anxiety parties

• Braden Kowitz Check-in rounds “The more honest we are with each other, the better we work together. And that’s why check-in rounds are one of the best ways to get higher output from your team.”

• Creating trust and psychological safety within the team.

• Asana’s “No meeting wednesdays” - to get a long strech of uninterrapted time to get work done.

• Improve meetings by:
  • Have a facilitator - to step back and took an outside view of the meeting (a person who is not involved).
  • Make it dynamic (people stand up, use stickers, move things, not just sit around a table).
  • Give people time to think individually (some people, extroverts? will be quicker to speak up not giving time for others to think over the issue).
  • Decide what are youdoing in the meeting:
    • Ideas vs. Decisions
    • divergent thinking (idea generation) vs. convergent thinking (decision making)
    • You can’t do them at the same time.
• Productive Conflict (People-based conflict is bad; Task-based, ideas-based conflict is excellent, but you need to create safe space for it)

1. Brainstorming session
2. Critical mode (let’s challange each other)

• Team habbits (routines, rituals)
  • How you meet
  • How you share ideas
  • Social time
  • Alone time

• Etsy’s Sharing mistakes - Phaidon Failed it!

• How do you change behaviour?
• Bit by bit (1% change)
• Design - Test changes