Insights
Does Your Team Cheer Each Other On?
When Lily Zhang of the US Ping Pong team was playing for gold, Ant was right there in stands cheering her on. And you can tell he is truly excited for her. This is the person we all want to be on a team with. A person that wants to win and one that will cheer us on with full throated support.
Communication Chronicles: Sitcom Reflections
Each of these workplaces, despite their unique challenges, offers valuable lessons in communication, teamwork, and caring for one another. The choice ultimately depends on your personality and what you value most in a work environment.
Communication Chronicles - Insights from the Yoga Mat
After understanding the "Why" of the poses, it became easier to understand how to adapt and if I needed to do something completely different. Here is how you adapt this to team communication: Share what outcome people are trying to get to and why it's important. Be succinct: Explain clearly with as few words as possible. Be consistent in how you communicate
Team Communication Lessons from Jury Duty
Here is how these could apply to any other communication challenge: Know the problem(s) you are trying to solve. Know what your audience needs (and in what order). Deliver the shortest most succinct messaging that can solve for both. If possible, get feedback, learn, iterate.
The Hidden Complexity of Team Communcation
When it comes to team communication, things are often more complex than they appear. Just like adding an ingredient to soup changes every bite, adding a new person to a team changes every group interaction. This complexity scales quickly and can become challenging to manage without the right tools and strategies.
The Power of a Spotter in Team Meetings
By appointing a “spotter” in your team meetings—someone whose sole responsibility is to observe body language and verbal cues—you can ensure that these often-overlooked signals are captured and addressed in real-time. This role can help unearth key insights and balance the extrovert/introvert equation, ensuring everyone's perspectives are considered.i
The Human Communication System in Teams
Using this as a mental model makes it easy to see why and how communication breakdowns happen, especially in teams.
For this post, I'll dig specifically into the system itself, applying the 5 stages of a communication system to people, and then extract how this impacts people and teams in various scenarios. Once you see how the system is easily applied, you'll be able to deconstruct communication challenges in a new and simpler way.
Hierarchy of Communication Challenges: Unveiling the Layers
Effective communication is often cited as the cornerstone of successful organizations. However, communication issues are typically symptoms of deeper, underlying challenges. By understanding these layers hierarchically, companies can pinpoint where true communication challenges lie and address them more effectively. Let's explore this hierarchy and uncover the root causes of communication breakdowns.
An Easy Team Building Question to Boost Connection
Here is why I think its such a powerful question:
1. Its safe: We don't know much as kids, so whatever we wanted to be was guided by the small world we understood.
2. It's fun: This brings us back to a simpler time, and when we use LEGO's, this adds to the playful nature of the question, and a playful time in our lives.
3. It's somewhat revealing: Not too deep, but it can show passions that may still be alive today
4. It allows us to see others with more depth and dimension.
Discover Your Team’s Passions Through Team Building
Dale Carnegie said "To be interesting, be interested. People get animated when they get to talk about their passions. When done correctly in groups, this adds to the depth and dimension in which people see each other. When we know people better, we share more easily, are more vulnerable, more forgiving, and more open. The key is to make this feel natural and not forced.
Facilitated Team Building is Better than Free Range Team Building
Think of the variety of team building events you’ve done- Most of them are free range. Happy hour, games, and even volunteering can be energizing and enjoyable, yet the interactions between people aren’t designed to connect. You are hoping for randomized collisions to help people connect. Facilitated events creates collisions and harnesses them to create connection with intent.
Solving for Conflict in Teams
I have found that through the many workshops I have done, that MOST of the time, when everyone gets a chance to share their wants and needs, it's not all that hard to build out win-win scenarios. Everyone needs to slow down, define the problem clearly, and flush out all perspectives. Once the nuance of the situation is unearthed, it's simple to see the higher level solution.