How do you know which challenges your team has?

You know (or not🤷) something does not work as you expected, but cannot grasp it?

Situation:

There are things that give you the impression your team has challenges, you want to help but do not know what to do ?

Why is this happening?

There is a continuous growing process that every team is going through.

The moments when you have the impression everything is fine do not exist in reality, in my opinion, and not only.

Why? Because we all create our own reality when getting external information to our brains. We use our values, opinions, previous experiences, etc. to create our own reality and react to the outside world based on this.

If you want to get more insights on how your brain creates your conscious reality, have a look at Anil Seth's TedTalk here - if you are in a hurry, especially between minutes 3:40 and 7:20 is the main part I would recommend looking at.

You and every member of your team have an individual perception of what happens around you.

So for you to be able to see the other team members’ perceptions you want to mindfully listen to them and how they picture their own reality.

What are the simple steps You could do?

🎲 Set up One-to-One sessions of 30-45min with each team member.

🎲🎲 In every session, listen to understand them and put “W” questions like “Why”, “What exactly do you mean”, “How”, “Where”, etc., in order to get their view upon what happens right now in your team. Ask every person on your team: “What is keeping you awake in the night related to our work?”

🎲🎲🎲 Make notes out of every talk you have. In the end, cluster the challenges you have collected from your team members.

You will have then a clustered visualization of your team members’ challenges right now that you can use to help them out in the next phase.

Do you want to know what to do with this? Stay tuned for the next newsletter!