How do you know which team challenge to solve first?
You have a list of challenges that your team is facing and what do you do with them?
Situation:
Let’s suppose you know which challenges your team is going through - if you did not identify them, here is how you can do this.
If you followed the one-to-one approach to collect challenges from the linked post above, the best would be to ask for your team's permission to share with the whole team the challenges you have collected in order to be able to solve them.
What to do with them? Where to start helping them solve them? Which one is the most important for them?
Why is important to know which challenge to start with?
Your team members have different perspectives of the same situation, and probably also different psychological needs. It can be that you are dealing with a multicultural and/or neurodiverse team so all of these add complexity to the context.
Can you decide which challenge shall be solved first?
I would totally recommend not to for several reasons:
the decision of which challenges are bringing a bigger impact on the team when they are solved is a team asset - these are their challenges, not yours, they own them and know more about them
the team needs autonomy, the power to decide, to choose; in case they do not have this, it can be they reject, or offer resistance instead of a collaborative approach
you are not their hero, but their guide; it is about putting your team in the center, you are supporting them to take decisions, and create solutions and action steps but do not run on the mountain for them, let them do this.
What are the simple steps You could do to help them prioritize their challenges?
🎲Create an opportunity for your team to come together for 30 minutes at a specific time when they are all available; can be online or in person.
Prior to the session, create a virtual board or physical sticky notes with all challenges you have collected. Cluster them and eliminate duplicates. You can also rephrase some of them to catch more in one phrase if they are similar. Each challenge will have its own sticky note.
🎲🎲 Give the team time (depending on how many sticky notes you have - i.e. for 20 sticky notes give them 4min) to read the collected challenges in silence (this means no talking while doing this). Give them an additional 3min to add new ones if they have this need while adding to cluster them already. It is like a check that what you collected is good enough or maybe meanwhile they have new challenges that are burning for them.
🎲🎲🎲 Give them 3 sticky dots and ask them to read again the new ones (if any) in silence and then to vote on the challenges they consider to be the most pertinent to solve, without discussion. They can vote on their own sticky notes and can put more than one dot on one challenge if they relate strongly to it. They shall vote on the challenges sticky notes and not on the cluster sticky notes.
Facilitator hints:
🤹It is very important to explain the dot voting activity to your team in a way that they understand this means deciding as a group about a certain topic. Their vote counts and it is important to be mindful of putting dots on the sticky notes they can relate most to.
🤹🤹 After dot voting you as a facilitator will re-arrange all sticky notes in the order of voted ones so that you have a real visualization of the priority the team decided to tackle the challenges they have.
One phrase summary:
After you have collected team challenges, important is to guide your team to decide which ones are the most important for them to solve first and visualize a prioritization using mindful dot voting.
Now you are ready to guide them in solving their challenges one by one, in the order, your team decided to. How to do this? Stay tuned for the next newsletter!