At the beginning of the month I ran a day session for a finance leadership team who wanted to address their personal impact, in preparation to decide the kind of impact they wanted to have as a team. Most of those at the session were responsible for other people, but there were a few new [...]
Getting together for a concentrated period of time can be incredibly beneficial for a team.
During team-away days, those issues and concerns that are never a priority but that need to be discussed can finally be addressed. Team members can find out how everyone else is getting on and help each other through sharing advice or information. During team-away days, everyone can have an input into future strategies, increasing their commitment to the success of the team.
In order for a team-away day to be successful, to create results that can be directly applied back at work, the team leader has to put in quite a bit of work. Yes, it is your responsibility as leader to make sure the away-day is as successful as possible.
Here are ten things you can do to make sure that your time together is fruitful.
1. Define the purpose of the day and share it with your team members.
Be specific. For example, it might be that you are not performing as well as you used to: what have you observed? How do you think a team session can help you? Or maybe you are a leadership team who rarely have time to sit down together. What specifically would you like to address?
Discuss your ideas with someone from outside your team if it helps you to formulate your ideas. Or better still, discuss them directly with your team.
2. Gather input.
Before you decide on the objectives of the team-away day, ask your team members if there is anything they would like to address. If you receive a number of suggestions but can’t incorporate all of them into the final plan, make sure you address them at some point, so that your team members don’t feel like their input was completely disregarded.
3. Set some outputs for the session- or some questions.
What would you like to achieve by the end of your session? How will it move your team forward? Or, if there are no pressing issues but you know that your team would benefit from spending some quality time together, prepare some questions like:
“Do we all feel like we are making the most out of everyone in the team?” or “Are we getting complacent and risk not developing as professionals?”
4. Decide who will facilitate the session.
You will need to give some thought to this. Sometimes it is useful for the team leader to facilitate the whole session. This is a good idea if you are collaborative by nature and have a knack for facilitating discussions. If, however, you are not sure whether your team members might hold back from fully contributing, for fear of appearing to challenge if you are in charge of the day, then I suggest that you find someone from outside the team to be in charge of the day’s programme. This could be someone else within your organisation or an external facilitator.
In both these cases, it is very important that you communicate with them as much as possible what your concerns are and what you are looking to achieve. The added benefit of bringing someone from outside your team to facilitate is that you yourself might not be aware of when people are disagreeing with you or just need more time to think before they can move on. Furthermore, your own creative thinking might be suppressed if you are having to monitor the group process as well as contributing to the discussion.
Personally, I think away-days work best when the team leader and facilitator share the responsibility for moving the day along. The team leader can make sure everything that needs to be covered is covered, while the facilitator can look after the group process. If you don’t want to bring in someone from outside your team, you might consider asking one of your team members to chair the discussions or be in charge of moving the programme of the day along. This is a good way of sending out signals that you value independence and unofficial leadership within your team.
5. Plan.
Plan what you need before you have the away-day.
Plan what should happen during the session.
Plan what will happen after the session.
6. Do you need a change of airs?
If you are having a team session to address issues that need creative thinking (and probably all of them will, or else you wouldn’t need to set quality time aside to tackle them) it is a good idea to leave your habitual surroundings, to move away from a place which might induce routine-thinking habits and which team members might associate with a specific way of working.
Look for somewhere simple, within your organisation, for example, maybe somewhere your team doesn’t regularly use; or use external facilities, making sure there are areas close to the room where you can get some fresh air.
If you are not able to use a room or facility different to the ones you regularly use, then do something different with the space. If you are using a meeting room, change the table layout, place a tray of biscuits in the middle, do anything, however small that signals: today is just a little bit different.
7. Make sure everyone is heard.
If you are organising an event to pull everyone together, make sure it does just that. Discussions might take a long time if everyone has to voice their opinion, but it’s in listening to a range of ideas that the best solutions will emerge. Make sure that the quietest members of the team have an opportunity to express their opinions throughout the day.
8. Wrap up discussions.
As I have mentioned, on days like these, discussions can be lengthy. There is nothing worse than feeling that you have contributed to a discussion which in the end, has led nowhere. So, make sure you wrap up your discussions: what is/are the outcome/s? Is there an outcome? If not, what shall we do about it? Can someone take responsibility for following it through or shall we revisit it at some other point? If so, when?
9. Follow up, follow up, follow up.
End the session or day by deciding how you and/or your team members will follow up the decisions that have been made or the questions that have been raised. Will you be communicating by e-mail? Is there an online space you can use? Maybe you can all catch up in three months time to revisit the outcomes of the day and update each other on any actions you have taken.
10. Turn this into a real team-building opportunity.
Building a team cannot be done in one session, it is something that has to be continuously addressed. Consider how the events of the day will contribute to the team being stronger when you are back at work.
Will it be an opportunity for everyone to communicate face to face so that when they need to collaborate at work, they can do so more comfortably?
Will the day make everyone aware of how different team members are contributing to the team’s goals?
Will the session highlight everyone’s strengths and positive qualities so that work can be allocated and distributed in the best possible way amongst team members?
Team-away days can help a team make a huge leap forward and as such are worth the investment: but this investment doesn’t start and end with the day itself. It begins with the preparation, continues with a thoughtfully planned session and ends… well, it should never end.
Photograph credit: Chris Baker http://www.hectorz.com/
It’s official. Sleeping is essential for survival. We still don’t know exactly why we have to sleep but we know that it is essential to keep us healthy and alert. Our immune system is replenished during sleep. Our neurons fire away making sense of the day and retaining what we’ve learned.
A friend of mine went through a stressful period in her 30s when she only slept four hours a day. She thrived – but now she has very little ability to recall what you told her last week. My father used to be knocked out by his Parkinson’s disease until he found the right sleeping pills. Once he managed to sleep well, things got much better. (The debilitating effects of some neurological diseases are caused by lack of sleep). I’m sure many of us know that if we have a fever, the best thing is just to go to sleep. (Mum, are you listening?)
While I don’t need to point out that during times of stress we are more likely to sleep less, I do want to state that in times of high pressure, sleep should be a priority and not a luxury. Yes, during busy periods, we might work longer hours and cut down on our sleep. However, make sure those “busy periods” become the exception and not your rule.
Stress and Sleep
The problem with arriving home late in the evening after a stressful day is that it takes a while to “wind down” and break down all the adrenalin generated.
The problem with relaxing over a glass of wine is that the mind gets used to using an external substance to relax. (Plus alcohol decreases the quality of your sleep.)
The problem with trying to sleep when you’re stressed out is… that it’s really difficult to go to sleep when you’re stressed out.
So, if you are having trouble sleeping or you feel especially tired during the day, see if any of the following suggestions help you. (If, however, you are someone who is able to get a decent night sleep no matter what, please add any of your own suggestions below!)
Don’t let your wakefulness stress you out
First of all, don’t give yourself a hard time because you can’t sleep. Instead, value the time you are giving your body to rest. Focus on your breathing to try to stop your mind from wandering off and consciously relax your muscles.
Don’t toss and turn
If you are unable to sleep, don’t continue focusing on your breathing and on relaxing your muscles forever. If you are lying in your bed for 20 minutes and are getting restless, then get up. Read a book (fiction, please), watch TV, listen to a podcast, to the radio… Do that for about 20 minutes and then try to sleep again.
Get it all out
If your thoughts are getting in the way of having a good night’s sleep, get them out there. Is something bothering you? Write it down. You had an epiphany? Write it down. You’re wondering what you will write in that dreaded e-mail tomorrow? Write it down but DON’T send it, just write it down on a piece of paper.
Don’t take my word for it
There must be some truth to phrases like “why don’t you sleep on it” or “things will look better in the morning”.
An experiment carried out in 2010, showed that, in a group of people learning typing skills, those who had a good night’s sleep improved their skill by 20% while those who didn’t sleep overnight had forgotten everything in the morning.
Sometimes you don’t even need a full night’s sleep for it to make a difference in your cognitive skills. In another experiment, a team of volunteers had to memorise the layout of a computer-based maze. They were then dropped at a random starting point to see if they could get to a specific point in the maze. All volunteers had a 5 hour break and were then tested again. This time, half of them had taken a nap lasting about one and a half hours. You can guess where I’m going with this. Those who had slept for a bit improved their “maze-solving time” 6 times more than those who hadn’t slept.
A full night’s sleep, a long nap, what’s the best way to administer our sleep? Besides knowing that the average person needs around 7 – 9 hours sleep to perform at their best, it depends.
A recent study showed that recalling words improved after a night’s sleep, but it also showed that this improvement was larger or smaller depending on the individual.
So, monitor your sleep patterns. Pay attention to what helps you go to sleep. When you begin to feel like you’re not performing at your best, consider sleeping as a way of recharging your batteries.
Look after yourself. Don’t neglect your sleep.
Jan 312012
I admire people who come up with creative solutions to their problems, so I wanted to share this Scientific American article with you.
The authors of the scientific study were trying to understand why laughter makes us feel good. One of their theories was that when we laugh, we release endorphins, our internally manufactured painkillers. So they thought that measuring the level of endorphins released during laughter would be a way into understanding the physiological process of laughter. However, measuring the level of endorphins a person is producing can only really be done through a spinal tap (ouch!). In addition to this, they wanted to measure laughter in a social situation, so they took their research to the Edinburgh Fringe.
The scientists got creative.
A way of measuring the level of endorphins in a person is to measure their tolerance to pain. So the scientists found different ways of making people feel pain. They had to do this straight after they experienced laughter, so they got their subjects to lean against a wall in the sitting position until the pain in their legs got too high and they fell over.
I will not go into the details of the experiment here as they are clearly explained in the Scientific American’s blog (click here) but I will of course summarise their findings.
The pain threshold in those people who had attended a comedy at the Fringe and therefore had laughed in a group, were able to withstand more pain than those who had watched a documentary on their own or watched a comedy on their own.
This means that:
Laughter can reduce our perception of pain and
Our body responds to comedy more strongly when in the company of others.
Maybe we should start taking this research seriously and laugh more often when we’re down.
Or maybe we are doing this already: the mechanics of crying (really, proper crying) are pretty similar to the mechanics of laughing. So maybe the body is already protecting us by trigerring off a similar mechanism, if only a less appealing one.
Jan 242012
Sometimes we think we could be happier if…
I’m sure more stress is caused when pondering over what could or couldn’t be done, what we should or shouldn’t change, than by the actions of doing and changing.
Some years ago, I came across a way of tackling this that has helped me enourmously to remain happy at work and in my personal life, but mainly at work, as this is the area where I have to take most decisions. Let me share this with you. Who knows, it might be of some help at some point.
- (Let’s write a list.) Identify what is not right.
- Is changing this beyond your control? Then stop worrying about it and come up with strategies to deal with it.
- If changing it is within your control, decide whether you want to change it. Really, do. If you are going to change it do it soon, it won’t change by itself. (Or it might, but not in the way you desire.)
- If you are not going to change “it”, accept that you are not going to change it and move on.
In case I haven’t expressed myself correctly, here is a more succint way of saying more or less the same thing.
“Focus on what you can do in any given situation, rather than on what you can’t do or aren’t allowed to do.”
Bruce Rosenstein in Learn from Peter Drucker, Leadership Excellence March 2010
WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY AT WORK?
It seems like an easy question but, apparently, it’s not. According to Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), people are not very good at predicting those things that make them happy.
It is also possible that the things that are keeping you engaged at work would be classified as “small”, such as solving a small problem, getting a difficult phone call over and done with or helping a colleague at work.
Identify what makes you happy and see if there is any way to do more of it. Give yourself time to think about this: just because it’s not obvious, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Once you have identified “it” you will be more alert to the possibilities that might form themselves around you. See what things at work can be changed or eliminated to create space for more meaningful activities – “meaningful” to yourself, your team and your organisation.
We spend so much time of our lives at work (or thinking about work or the possibility of work) that we deserve to give ourselves a chance to be as happy there as we can. Not always possible, but worth striving for.
Was this post useful? Make sure to read Roll Out Your Happiness Programme.
Illustration by arte_ram
The Globe awards have just been awarded, the BAFTA nominations have already been announced. With all this talk of glamour, maybe it’s time to roll our your own happiness carpet.
It might sound a bit hippy-dippy, but happiness at work continues to attract the interest of psychologists and neuroscientists alike.
I set up a training business with one goal in mind: to enable people to be happy at work. Okay, two goals in mind, to enable people to be happy at work and make a living out of it. For me, the most effective way of doing this is to work with managers and leaders in organisations, as they have the ability to influence other people’s happiness at work.
By being happy at work, I don’t mean elated (although that could sometimes be the case). I mean being engaged with the work, challenged but not threatened, pleased to be working with those around you and feeling like you make a difference. Even through setbacks, I can be happy if I feel like they are temporary and part of a learning curve. Even routine work can make me happy, if I feel it would be missed if I didn’t carry it out. When the work itself is not particularly challenging, I might enjoy the company of others who seem supportive of what I do.
Yes, it pays to have happy people at work.
- Happy employees show, on average, 31% more productivity.
- Happy employees show, on average, 3 times more creativity. (There goes the whole myth of the unhappy creative person out of the window.)
- Employees scoring low in “life satisfaction” (the standard metric for measuring productivity and happiness) stay at home 1.25 days a month.
So, a happy employee is more likely to use their time wisely, be more able to solve problems and turn up for work.
I think I can stop now advocating for the need to have happy teams and begin to talk about what we can do about it.
A HAPPY YOU
The first step in creating (or, if you’re lucky, sustaining) a happy team is to make sure that you are happy yourself.
If you feel like you could be happier at work, here are some simple things you could try out. There is no way that I am going to attempt to understand your individual situation without having met you first. However, in order to change, you will need to develop new habits and those I am about to suggest, have been proved to work. When these activities were taken up by a group of tax managers during a time of high pressure (Dec 2008), their life satisfaction scale moved from 22.96 (out of 35) to 27.23 after four months.(Source: Positive Intelligence by Shawn Achor. HBR Jan/Feb 2012.)
So, why not give them a try?
Choose one of the following five activities and carry it out every day for 3 weeks. (Don’t give yourself a hard time if you skip a day or two, we don’t want to create unnecessary pressure!)
- Write down (or type), three things you were grateful for.
- Write a positive message to someone in your social support network.
- Meditate for two minutes.
- Exercise for ten minutes.
- Write down briefly the most meaningful experience of the last 24 hours.
Chances are, that one of these will work to make you feel happier or help maintain your sense of thriving. Furthermore, if you respond to this exercise in a similar way to those who took part in the study, you will rip the benefits for months.
CATCHY HAPPINESS
Happiness is contagious: we can’t help feeling good when we’re around those who are happy. I mean genuinely happy, not in-your-face absolutely fantastic. It is therefore worth continuing to invest in yourself and lead by example. One of the things you can do which will raise your happiness levels, is to help others. Yes, in the words of psychologist Daniel Gilbert (author of Sumbling on Happiness):
One of the most selfish things you can do is help others.
Sounds good to me – if you go out of your way to help your team members, you will benefit both your team and yourself. If you want the data to support this argument, here it is.
In a study involving Harvard students, Shawn Achor found that those who went out of their way to help others were 10 times more likely to be engaged in their work. (Source: Positive Intelligence by Shawn Achor. HBR Jan/Feb 2012.)
Being happy, engaged, connected, in flow… all different ways of describing the desired state when at work, where we spend an enourmous amount of our life.
NEXT WEEK: To Change or Not to Change – how solving that dilemma can make us happier.
Dec 212011
HELP!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Little Bit More Done by Oliver Burkeman
If the title (or the cover) makes you smile, then you will enjoy the book. For not only is this a sober review of self-help (personal and professional) literature which also sits well in the genre it is mocking, but it is also a funny book.
HELP! addresses most of the areas covered by self-help, pop psychology and pop business books such as Productivity, Wellbeing etc. My favourite chapter title has to be “Follow Me: Gurus, God-Men and other questionable characters.” This chapter starts with the author’s visit to the Church of Scientology and continues with his observations on concepts and books such as Emotional Freedom Technqiues, “The Secret” and numerous ones built around the number seven.
Oliver Burkeman might well be preaching to the converted, but he manages to extract the most achievable methods and those concepts based around common sense. Here are my favourite.
FORGET ABOUT PASSION
Is looking for your “passion” more hassle than it’s worth?
I’m very lucky that I have built my professional career around things that I care about and enjoy. Many people say I’m passionate – perhaps what they mean is that I am over-excited too often. I know many people who just really like their work; or some who are just happy there; and some for whom work is a means to an end. They are all happy, yet none of them are following their “passions”.
Burkeman goes even further and warns of the dangers of always searching for passions that are out there, rather than exploring different ways of doing what you’re already doing that will bring you satisfaction. In any case, he much prefers Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow”, the complete immersion in an activity that makes time whizz by. I agree. I can’t say that I am passionate about spreadsheets but time never seems to go as fast as when I’m tackling my accounts. And you know what? I do enjoy it.
We don’t need new information on how to be happy anywhere near as much as we need a dose of perspective.
NOT BEING A SPECIALIST IS O.K.
This one is very close to my heart. I have so many professional interests… I am quite good at some, o.k. at most and I have acknowledged that I’ll never be any good at the others so have adopted them as hobbies.
So why shouldn’t I celebrate that I have a broad range of interests and skills? Well, for one, it makes it really difficult to talk to people about what I do. It’s makes it difficult to market my services. Sometimes I get too wrapped up in what I’m talking about (some would say “passionate”) and I run the danger of coming across as unfocused.
So I was glad to be reminded, that, actually, it’s o.k. not to be a specialist. Having a conversation about this the other day, someone said: “But surely having a broad range of careers is the way forward, Charles Handy talked about a portfolio career.” Yes, he did and I welcomed it ten years ago. What he didn’t mention is that sometimes you have to hide some portfolios and choose which to show to whom. Only sometimes though.
THE SECRET IS OUT:
Psychological studies support [...] that the people we follow as leaders are the ones who decide they’ve got what it takes to lead.
Enough said.
INDIVIDUALS: TAKE CONTROL.
Lastly, I also welcomed the reminder that, even though the world seems to have gone a bit mad and information is constantly demanding our attention, we are still in control (or at least, can still be in control) of whether we process it or not.
“Information overload” is a questionable complaint: if we couldn’t handle vast amounts of information, we’d have a breakdown each time we stepped into nature or a busy street. The real trouble is that we have defined too many things as worthy of having the power to distract us. The best time-management strategies are about reclaiming this power.
Recommendation
This book might not change your life, but then, that’s not what it promises. However, it will remind you of the need to question those who promise to turn your life around in 200 pages. Furthermore, it can also serve as a pointer to plenty of other interesting stuff and, after consideration, you might even find that some of the ideas can indeed help you to “become slightly happier and get a little bit more done.”
Above all, I hope it will make you think and I hope it will make you smile.
P.S. Thanks Amazon, for your Kindle Daily Deal – otherwise I wouldn’t have come across or purchased this great title.
If you have read the book and disagree (or agree!) with anything I have mentioned, feel free to leave your comments below.
Dec 192011
Blatant resistance to change is obviously a hindrance. But it can also be a sign that there is something we have overlooked, something we have missed.
Far from immediately dismissing a “no” or “I disagree”, we’d be better off asking “why?” and then listening (really listening) to the reply. None of us like to encounter resistance, but if we see it as a red flag rather than a stonewall, we can use it to help us move forwards.
Here are five reasons why we should welcome resistance.
1. No plan is perfect – someone might have identified the flaws.
We don’t know the details of everything that is going on (phew!). People might resist a new idea or a new procedure because it will impact on their day to day operations in a way that we might not have anticipated. There might be information we lack because it has not been necessary until now to share it.
Ask people to be specific about their objections: why do they see it that way? In which ways will it impact them? If they can only explain their resistance as a gut feeling, what might be a more appropriate option?
2. Resistance can provide a different point of view.
You can’t please everyone. In almost every situation, some people will end up being better off than others. However, welcome resistance in order to have access to another point of view.
Ask on what are they are basing their opinion. Have they “been there before”? Are they just letting past experience get in the way of development or are they really being able to see things in a different way?
3. No resistance? Is no-one taking ownership?
I’ll just go along with it. If it doesn’t work, it’s not my problem.
That’s the last thing you want anyone to think. Resistance is the first sign that people are accepting they will have a part to play in the new order. They know the change will affect them and they might just be looking out for themselves. Or they might really be concerned about the effect the change will have on their work, the team and the organisation.
It is not easy to voice resistance – nobody likes to be the one preventing others from moving forwards. It takes courage to speak out – find out what lies behind this.
4. If we don’t hear any objections: does it really mean they aren’t there?
Worse than hearing people’s objections is not hearing them. Make sure you create an environment where people can voice their disagreement if it’s there.
It’s much better to hear that people are unhappy or disagreeing with your plans than for everyone to go along with them, uncommitted and waiting for disaster to strike.
(For more on the dangers of no-one voicing their opinion, see Healthy Disagreement.)
(For ideas on how to create an environment where people feel free to speak out, see Fomenting Transparency.)
5. Welcome objections from people who care.
Sometimes all that people need to buy into a proposed change is to feel like they matter, like they are being heard, like they have been taken into account.
Anticipate their objections and have answers to their questions. Don’t dismiss resistance you hadn’t anticipated. Ask yourself: Why? Why did this take me by surprise? How can I address it?
Don’t pretend to have all the answers. If an objection takes you by surprise, ask for more information, ask for time to consider it. If you end up sticking to your guns, explain why, show that you have considered all the options and decided on what you think is best for everyone involved, for your team, for your organisation.
More importantly, for your own state of mind, by dealing with resistance in this way you might feel like you are using it to make things better in the long-term rather than just pushing people away.
Dec 142011
I’m no technophobe (I don’t even have a smartphone) but i have become a complete advocate of the Kindle.
It’s doing wanders for my mind, my creativity and my back (it’s lighter than a paperback).
If you own a Kindle but fear that you are not getting the most out of it or you are wandering whether to get one, pay a visit to my blog to find out about the Five Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Kindle.
Pilar
Pilar Orti is the director of Unusual Connections.
 Taming the Psychological ContractThe psychological contract is the perception -and this is the key word – of an employee of the mutual obligations they have with their organisation. These perceptions are influenced not just by the formal contract of employment (that would make things relatively easy) but by all the implicit and explicit promises made during his/her time [...] |
