Teams are funny things; on the face of it, if they are competent and all have the same goal it should be easy to get everyone to pull in the same direction and make good things happen… alas, if only it was that easy.
Instead getting a team to trust each other, be engaged, be committed, take ownership, collaborate, be creative, think critically, challenge each other effectively, communicate effectively, be aligned, feel psychologically safe, make good decisions and be focused is an absolute herculean task.
There are 12Cs of motivation that influence an individual; of these 6 are Core to themselves (i.e. independent of others) and 6 are Contextual (i.e. heavily influenced by the team and environment around them).
Their relationship with their manager, their colleagues, the wider business and how they fit in makes such a difference as to whether they give their all or more like they just show up physically going through the motions.
I long ago realised that you can have a collection of very smart, capable people but that does not guarantee high performance.
We see this often in sports in particular where a team of superstars are often less than the sum of their parts; in fact, it is proven that the collective cohesion of a team is the most important factor in performance.
So the question is: how do you accelerate that cohesion in a group?
Luckily for you, my job is to do exactly this: at Shiageto Consulting we are regularly called into underperforming groups and tasked with turning them around through increasing the team levels of IQ, EQ and FQ.
It’s not just underperformance we support but a large part is helping new teams gel quicker so that they can hit the ground running or helping enhance existing teams by agreeing a common set of objectives and a strategy to get there.
That’s why a typical week for me is likely to involve facilitating: a leadership offsite, a company away day, a team ways-of-working session, a strategy workshop, kick off sessions, mediations, prioritisation workshops, problem-solving sessions, idea generation workshops, pitch rehearsals, board meetings or just regular team meetings all with the aim of making them more cohesive and impactful.
Phew! That’s a lot of team time on top of all the soft skills training we do.
Fortunately I absolutely Love it!!
Over the years, I’ve worked with all sorts of teams: tech teams, legal teams, engineering teams, marketing teams, consulting teams, Retail teams, banking teams, energy teams, Health teams, professional services teams, operational teams, strategic-thinking teams, back-office teams, senior leaders, mid-managers, junior employees, new teams, established teams, teams that didn’t even realise they were a team, happy teams, sad teams, teams that are too nice, feuding teams, cerebral teams, get-your-hands-dirty teams, mono-culture teams, multi-cultural teams…
Basically you think of any type of team and I’ve probably been in the middle of them pumping up their effectiveness.
Whatever team I am working with, whether I am parachuted in for a one-off session or I’ve got 3 months to work with them, the following is my 10 step go-to playbook that I pull out — you will see that it relies most upon pumping in a lot of EQ but also draws on ensuring there is strong IQ and FQ in the team.
Of course, I tailor each interaction to the specifics of the group I am working on but this is a good summary of the steps I will typically go through.
Feel free to unashamedly copy this format and, I assure you, you won’t go wrong.
[Step 0: Meet The Individuals] — max out the EQ to start strongly
Step 1: Set The Tone For The Session — bring a blend of EQ and FQ
Step 2: Make Sure People Are Mentally In The Room — carry on the EQ and FQ emphasis
Step 3: Get Them To Share Basic Info — add to the EQ pool
Step 4: Create Connections — raise the EQ even more
Step 5: Get Them To Open Up About Problems/Ambitions — keep the EQ high and begin to bring in more IQ elements
Step 6: Get Them To Start Working Collectively — ensure EQ is sufficient so you can dial up the IQ whilst maintaining FQ
Step 7: Get them to Reveal A Bit More About Their Personality — back to delivering full on EQ here
Step 8: Get Them To Agree Future Ways of Working — add even more EQ
Step 9: Get Them To Own Next Steps — ensure there is a big FQ moment
Step 10: Get Them To Reflect On The Experience — end with a trinity finale of IQ, EQ and FQ
Let’s go through these one by one and bring them to life for you.
This may or may not happen before a session with the wider group and really depends how much build time you have. If you don’t do it before, I still recommend doing it after the team session (particularly if you will be working with the team over a longer period).
The objective of this step is threefold:
i) Start building personal trust with each person
ii) Get insight into as much of their personality as possible
iii) Get them to reveal their WIIFMs (What’s In It For Me) and WAMIs (What’s Against My Interests)
How you do this is up to you but I find bringing your natural charm and flexibility into these conversations is key. You want to create a nice safe environment where you build rapport, use active listening and create the space for them to talk honestly.
If you have done this right, a good set of open questions should allow the individual to open up and tell you more about themselves (inside and outside of work) as well as their hopes, dreams and frustrations.
I generally find that 45–60 mins is the sweet spot for these sort of conversations and they are best done in a more informal situation (e.g. over coffee rather than in a boardroom).
I could write 10,000 words alone on this one step of how to build trust so quickly with a stranger [maybe that’s another article] but, believe me, get this right and it sets the tone for working together — that’s why I find it invaluable for a leader to do at some point early on in any new team setting.
The tone you set at the start of any session is absolutely vital; it doesn’t matter if it’s a short in-office meeting or a multi-day offsite.
As the facilitator/leader/person at the front of the room, you hold a disproportionate influence over the group.
If you are in a bad mood then don’t be surprised if the group responds in a similar mindset. It’s the same if you appear bored.
So much research has shown the impact of other psychological effects such as: Anchoring, Framing, Priming, outlining losses vs talking about gains, using negative language over positive language, adding more descriptive language, using active vs passive language, using possessive words, explaining the because of an ask, telling people not to do something vs telling them what to do, etc.
However, most people don’t realise the extent of the impact of their words (be they verbal or written) and don’t spend enough time scripting them accordingly; rather relying on impromptu phrases.
I find the more you craft a powerful opening address so that you frame things positively, using visionary language with a smattering of story telling told in an energetic tone, the better your session will be.
It’s not just tone and words that have an impact on the success of the session.
Before any session you should really consider other elements like:
There are so many potential areas that can derail the effectiveness of a team session so I find it’s best not to leave things to chance; think of absolutely everything that helps contribute to the tone or may potentially disrupt the session and incorporate planning for it.
This is where AI can come in handy, to think about things you might not be thinking about. My rule of thumb is: the more important the session, the more meticulous the thinking needs to be, so don’t just wing it.
Step 1 is also the time to outline the specific objectives and agenda of the session so everyone has Clarity. You want to also use this time to lay out any ground rules for the session [I find keeping these quite light touch is the best way rather than a comprehensive checklist of dos and don’ts].
One ground rule that I do enforce more and more nowadays, is to take everyone’s mobile phones off them in a session to ensure additional focus; despite everyone’s insistence that they are in control, I see the dramatic inability to stop themselves checking their device during a session and once one person does it, it quickly spreads — my approach to this is to do it in a calculated way (through storytelling and voluntary contribution) rather than as a tell.
Ultimately the main objectives of Step 1 is to get people really excited for the session and to continue building your own credibility as the person at the front of the room.
I find using storytelling, strong facilitation and a degre of humour a good way to reinforce the credibility.
One last thing to keep in mind about credibility, as a former boss once told me:
“Participants will judge you harshly if you can’t connect your laptop to the screen”
The point being: how you conduct yourself in the opening of a session will, rightly or wrongly, influence the perception of you so make sure things go as smoothly as possible. Just the other day I couldn’t connect my laptop at an event and it turned out that there were 2 HDMI cables. We laughed about it but I did have to put in extra effort to win back confidence in the room — a classic example of cognitive dissonance.
Whilst every leader and facilitator likes to think that their meeting, their project, their workshop is the most important thing in the world, for the participants it most likely is not the case.
They might have just come from back-to-back meetings or have just received pressing news about something else. They might have a competing project that is a higher priority. They might have stuff happening at home that their mind wanders to.
This is all natural and a common phenomenon in today’s world where people (especially senior folk) are spread increasingly thin. Not only might their focus be elsewhere but meetings begin to blur into one if they are too similar so you need to break that chain and make sure they are mentally in your room, not elsewhere.
To ensure this, I often do an Unplugged (a simple Exercise to have them release whatever competing thoughts they had before they entered the room) and ask them to self-answer three questions (on a scale of 1–10):
These really help get people to think about the session and their participation [plus it might help them be a bit more focused, risk-taking and empathetic].
To really reinforce distinctiveness (and build excitement) I might take this opportunity to do a physical activity to really shake the cobwebs; something like a quick game of 1–2–3-Clap or Kung Fu punctuation can really pique interest [hit me up if you want some more info on these or other suitable exercises].
“Never assume anyone know anything about you or what you do” is a mantra I hold dear for myself, which makes it easier to always be ready to intro myself.
It is really easy to forget this step and assume it is not necessary, especially when working with teams that have been teams for a while.
But as my work has shown me over the years, even the teams that have been together a long time still have lot of stuff to learn about each other.
So, this Step is about creating the space for them to share that info.
On the most basic level, it might be work facts like: each person’s name, job role, what they are working on, time at the company, bit about their work background, etc.
Or it might be personal facts like: where they live, where they studied, what they wanted to be when they were a kid, if they have a Family/pets, their hobbies, etc.
Or it might be temporal/session-based facts like: where they came from for the session (or where they are if it is virtual), how they are feeling about the session, what they want to get out of the session, etc.
The objective of this Step is to allow everyone some air time (thus setting the tone for active participation) and to make sure everyone gets a bit more of an understanding about each other; this will help stronger connections to be made and may also allow you (at the front of the room) the opportunity to learn a bit more about everyone in the room (especially their names if they are a new group).
I find it good to mix things up in this Step: there’s nothing more boring than getting people to just stand up and reel off a bunch of facts. Instead turn it into a game or get them to act out/draw their facts. Encourage a few questions but crucially it’s not about everyone sharing every last bit of detail; don’t be afraid to stop people if they are going on too long, this is not the only chance they will get to find out more about each other.
This is quite possibly my favourite Step of all of them; because this is the part where you are rapidly turning up the heat on the intra-team trust building.
It’s long proven that people who find things in common work better together so I make it a point to not leave this to chance.
I truly believe that one of the key roles of any leader is to do this — that’s why lightning rods and speed bumps are so important.
My go-to is to play the connection game with a team (even an established team). This is where you divide them into smaller groups and then challenge them, in a fixed time, to find the most interesting fun-fact that connects them all.
I often tell them it will be a competition against the other groups with a prize.
It’s insane just how far a group will go in the space of 5–10 mins to win; they rapidly fire through a range of topics and I’ve never failed to be amazed at what they come up with — no: “We all work at the same company” at any point.
In fact, I once did this very exercise and 4 complete strangers discovered within 10 minutes that they had all been to see the same concert in the same stadium on the same evening…absolutely bonkers! You bet that they became excellent friends after that.
An alternative to games that encourage people to reveal more hidden aspects of their life is to create shared experiences for the groups so that experience in fact becomes the connection.
An example of this that I use regularly is to give them puzzles or challenges (often against other groups) to work on collectively. Great things to do here include Lego building, assault courses, tower building, create a mini play, a general knowledge quiz — it’s important to pick an activity that fits the personality of the participants [I once chose to do a pop culture quiz for a room full of scientists; I got that massively wrong!!!].
I try and make these activities more random and teamwork based rather than skill or logic based as that can bring out the wrong outcomes.
Whatever task or tool you use, make it fun; you can weave in elements of work into it (such as highlighting their communication patterns) but ultimately the priority is generating bucketloads of connection and strengthening trust throughout the team.
Note that it may be hard to ensure an equal amount of connection building for each group so that is why you may want to regularly mix the smaller groups and run more connection activities [with many teams I do a new connection activity in the first 5 minutes of every meeting which makes a massive difference].
You can also create “offline” connection activities like having a dedicated Slack/Teams/Whatsapp channel for connection games (e.g. each week a topic is picked and everyone shares their answer — my fave is for photos of different standard stuff: e.g. share a picture of your fridge, your shower, your bookcase, your car, etc).
Another good idea is to introduce random coffee generators if the team is large or a lunch roulette where people get a small budget to eat together. Even a regular team working session (which is not a meeting but simply a time everyone works in proximity to each other or on a communal Zoom call) can help strengthen ties.
Get creative, get connecting, but don’t forget this takes effort so whilst this task can be shared amongst the team, it does require someone to be the grease/effort to get things in motion.
Once you have the right tone in place, everyone knows each other a bit and you’ve built some connections, it’s time for people to start sharing their hopes, dreams or challenges.
By this, I don’t mean going into the minutiae of their personal lives.
Many people would find that challenging so centre this exclusively about work.
Similarly you don’t want them to provide a shopping list of things; you need to help them prioritise and select something that is sufficiently important that they would benefit getting help with it— where possible get them to think about it from a team perspective if relevant/there is an opportunity (although in disparate teams this might not be feasible so finding themed challenges that others can resonate with will be an alternative).
I find getting people to answer a question of the ilk:
“My biggest work challenge/ambition right now is…”
“The one thing I think we need to collectively achieve is…”
“If we had a magic genie and they granted us one wish, I would use it to…”
The aim of this Step is to tease out what people really care about and let the others in the team have visibility on it; that way you can start to find common themes, start conversations and, invariably, people will want to start trying to solve some of the challenges presented.
The key is to not get sucked into solutioning yet, particularly if it hijacks other team members from actually sharing.
As the person at the front of the room, the task is to make sure everyone gets a chance to think and talk [this is where I use a technique of: getting everyone to think on their own, write down specific answers and then getting them to share with the rest of the group one-by-one].
When I do this, I always try to get someone other than the boss or the loudest talker to go first; this sets the tone for quieter members to be involved [although you might not want to pick the quietest member to go first].
One word of warning though: make sure people don’t start long monologues [although you do want to provide an opportunity for others to ask any clarification-style questions so that they can really understand] and make sure that you keep out negative responses to anything that is shared [it’s far too common for someone to indicate that they think someone else’s challenge is not a serious problem or similar].
You want to keep a positive atmosphere and reinforce the understanding that it is ok to share anything and that all statements are equally valid.
This may sound simple but I assure you, it takes practice and often this can be the missing sunlight that a team needs to grow together.
If it is a large team, you might want to break people into smaller groups where they share the answers they wrote on their own to their group. As an added step you could get the group to agree what they see as the collective challenge they think is most important having heard each other’s challenges.
This will help with the next Step, where ideally we can rationalise the full list of challenges into 2–3 shared challenges that the team can take forward to work on collectively.
Based on the shortlisted challenges that have been raised in the previous Step, you want to get the team to work on them collectively.
Similar to Step 4 where you were trying to find connections, this is a great Step to build shared experiences.
How you go about working on the problems really depends on the capabilities of the team and how much thinking/experience they have on the selected challenges.
You might need to help them through:
As the person at the front, it is not your role to be the expert on the solution. Instead, the emphasis is on getting them to be open, creative, focused and more.
To be honest, this is the Step that the team’s underlying behaviours will begin to come out.
Those who are used to being in charge or the most extroverted will tend to dominate the conversations, whilst quieter individuals may retract into their shell.
If the team are bad at giving each other feedback or have a tendency to argue this will usually come out too.
Other times you may find that the team are particularly subject to groupthink, making decisions based on little or no fact or used to latching onto the first idea they come up with.
This is all perfectly common as there are over 200 biases that can plague any team as they work together — the single greatest thing you can do for IQ, EQ and FQ is try to minimise these biases.
So keep your eyes and ears peeled for everything from Negativity Bias to the Halo Effect to Planning Fallacy to Loss Aversion and so many more.
Your role is to make the team aware of the biases that are hampering them most (I tend to concentrate on the ones like Availability Bias, Stereotyping and the Halo Effect that mean not all team members are treated equally).
By calling them out (in an appropriate manner) you can get them to reflect on past experiences, challenge their own assumptions, bring in more external insight and debate more.
Throughout this step, the other objectives I focus on is making sure that everyone in the team is included and that everyone is given a good chance to understand and get excited by things — this can mean having to reframe concepts or introduce them in engaging ways when you see people aren’t connecting with them. Give this little technique a go to help people work on a collective problem in a novel format
Having an ability to flex your style is key to getting maximum engagement; at times you need to help the team get detailed and logical, at other times you need to be more directive. Equally some times you need to be more open and empathetic and finally some times call for more visionary and inspiring actions — there’s a lot in common with the skills need to run a great training session.
The key is to be constantly “reading the room” and flexing as required.
This ability to “read the room” is crucial as there are constant cues from team members as to how engaged they are and how much they understand. Look for obvious body language, verbal cues and change in energy.
The final requirement that you need to help the team with is focus. Teams will love to go off-track, dive into unnecessary detail and massively overrun on time.
Whilst it is easy to let this happen, you must resist too much because it will come back to haunt you later on.
Think of it like this: because of Parkinson’s Law and The Law of diminishing returns, letting a team ramble on is the equivalent of having an open-ended gym session; invariably you think you are getting fitter quicker but each additional hour beyond a point is not giving you the same benefit and you are not lessening the need to do another gym session. Instead you are robbing yourself of hours that you could be using elsewhere and potentially building up more fatigue in the team.
Step 6 is one of the most delicate and will test the capabilities of even the best leaders/facilitators so make sure you are well rested and bringing your A-game
In my experience, interweaving Step 7 with Step 6 can be a good way to mix up the mood.
You are aiming to get the team to open up about their personalities when it comes to work so that the rest of the team can understand them a bit better and therefore hopefully start working with them better (in many ways this is a direct build from Step 3).
Many team members find it hard to put into words the small things that would get the best out of them and they certainly haven’t thought about how to articulate them to others; however this is important to do so I often focus entire sessions just on this.
I like to start by having people think about their personality type by completing a personal guidebook; this can be as simple as 10 basic yes/no questions or it could be a form of personality profiling. [As a note, I am not that fussed by formal personality tests such as MBTI, DISC, etc as I believe you can get conversations rolling through a basic questionnaire but if teams are wedded to one then we will mostly use that to build on the common language they already have].
Ideally you want people to start to think about what makes them tick at work: do they prefer mornings or afternoons, do they prefer receiving information in writing or verbally, do they prefer chit-chat or getting straight to work, do they prefer the detail or big picture first, what one thing outside of work should everyone know about them, what makes them happy at work, what makes them angry, etc.
You can make this as detailed or as light-touch as you like but once you have the information, I try to bring it to life.
Sure, having people read out their guidebook or circulate it is a good start but this doesn’t stick in other people’s heads so how about having team members run from side to side of a room as you read out the multi choice personality questions or draw their pet likes/hates as an alternative.
The real objective you are aiming for is to get people to start acknowledging where there are overlaps and where there are differences; who in the team they might need to consider a different approach for to make interactions more effective and to realise things that they weren’t aware of beforehand.
The objective of this Step is about helping the team to begin to agree Ways of Working now that they have been exposed to working collectively; for many established teams you may be able to jump straight to this as long as they are clear about the good and bad things they have experienced working together.
However, it is also worth noting that many teams lack self awareness (just as some individuals will struggle in Step 7) so this Step is also an opportunity to add any observations (good or bad) that you may have noticed about the team that they should accommodate.
Encourage the team to create a basic charter (which they can continue developing over time) from their individual preferences (AI may be of help here for a first draft) which covers purpose and principles they should adhere to for: working norms, interactions, meetings, decision making, disagreements, feedback, supporting each other, communication channels, socials, training, etc.
The charter should be agreements not aspirations, so things the team are willing to commit to. These may be small at the start, and likely to be added to over time, so you should also cover who will own the charter and how frequently it gets updated plus what happens if the team deviate from it.
One other good thing to cover in this Step (or arrange a separate session on) is to determine the different categories of decision making within the team and who in the team needs to be involved in which — think of it like a mini RACI (if you know what that is).
I normally get the team to determine Gold, Silver and Bronze level decision categories. Bronze are the decisions that can be made by an individual in the team without consultation with others, Silver are the decisions that a small subset of the team can make and Gold are decisions that all the team need to be involved in.
One last thing that is good to do in this Step is to draft what a good meeting looks like so everyone has clarity when organising or running a team meeting. You may also want to do the same for outlining a good feedback session.
This may all seem a bit basic but these are so often where areas of frustration begin to form in teams that taking the time to get something agreed can be incredibly worthwhile.
Invariably whatever you agree upon in this section will evolve over time and that is healthy.
Whilst, I may continue to work with teams over an extended period of time, invariably at some point my time working with them comes to an end; this is especially pertinent if I am only running a one-day offsite.
Which all makes Step 9, and ensuring that the team takes ownership for continuing to work on their own effectiveness, very important.
Aligned with the objective of this Step, I like to challenge the team themselves to define what this looks like.
Ideally they should be nominating owners for the Team Charter, the main Team Comms Channel and Team Meetings.
In an even better world, they actually take the next step there and then: e.g. scheduling the next Team Session, creating the Slack channel, circulating the draft Team Charter, etc.
The final Step of any interaction I do with a group is to get them to debrief.
Even the most powerful session will fade and all the things people committed to do will become exponentially harder as time passes.
So, to give the team the best chance possible for success, it is important to reflect on the session they have just had. As people in general forget 70% of what they absorbed within 24 hours, doing this at the end of a session is perfect.
My standard approach is to get each individual member to identify their top three takeaways from a session, the one area they personally want to work on and the one specific action they are going to take in the next week.
I then get them to share this (sometimes in pairs, sometimes in small groups and sometimes to the whole team); this could be an opportunity to get them to align on these reflections as small groups but this step is not always necessary.
Again, rather than make this a boring list, there is an opportunity to bring this to life through drawings, poems, short plays, skits, raps, etc.
One of my fave activities is to get small groups to make a short video (like a TikTok) outlining their agreed Takeaways and Team commitments.
Bearing in mind that energy levels may be flagging at this point but that the endings of sessions last long in the memory of participants, if you have managed time correctly then it is good to end in a formal manner (maybe even earlier than originally promised).
A nice add to that is to potentially hand out mementoes of the session (e.g. photos, certificates, souvenirs, etc) and maybe do a compliments session; this is where you compliment each member of the team on a specific behaviour or incident they exhibited during the session — for added fun get the team to compliment each other instead.
There you go, a mighty fine and straightforward way to get the best out of any team be it over one day or over a whole year.
Roll out these 10 Steps in one go or break them up [if you’re doing that, you may want to top and tail micro sessions built around one Step e.g. a 2 hour meeting just to agree Ways of Working that is prefaced with an Intro, an Energiser and wrapped up by Next Steps and a Reflection Session].
It’s pretty simple really….NOT!!!
Look, I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to do all the above without any practice; the real art comes in the nuances and being able to read the room during the session, not just following the Steps rigidly (this isn’t painting by numbers).
The best way is to give it a go, working with smaller teams at first and experimenting by overlaying your own style over the Steps.
Get feedback from the team as to how impactful your efforts are (remember the key metric isn’t whether people enjoyed the session, rather it is about: are they building more trust and more comfort as a Team — this is easy to forget at times but should be your main focus at all times).
Ultimately, if you need a helping hand then please reach out as this is the stuff that gets me all excited and one of the reasons I built Shiageto.
Good luck out there; your Team needs you! 😊
Faris
Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here
Success = IQ x EQ x FQ
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Originally Published on https://farisaranki.medium.com/
