Transcripts
1. Introduction to High Performing Teams: I think the biggest misunderstanding about collaboration and high performing teams is that if you're collaborating well with others, you're all getting along really, really well. There's no friction, everything just flows. But that's not how it is. In great collaborations and high performing teams. Sometimes there's a little friction because there's different working and personality styles. Different working and personality styles are actually essential to doing incredible work, to doing the best possible work. My name is Jill McAbe. I am the founder of an agency Boom U, I help teaching and coaching businesses get off the ground and grow faster I'm also the best-selling author of a book called It's Go Time. In It's Go Time, I teach an all in step-by-step system for going from blocked to unstoppable in business and life, and before I founded my agency and wrote my book, I used to be in leadership development. Specifically, I would work with organizations in periods of change where they were trying to up level, like already very successful organizations going; hey, how could we do even better? I'd work with individuals and teams and collectively help them learn tools to grow their performance. In this class, I'm going to be covering six essentials that you can use to dramatically improve the working climate and the work you get done when you work collaboratively with others. First of all, you're going to learn how to get started, or if you're already working with a team, how to reset, to set yourself up for success. You're going to learn the four working styles and how you can play a team to its individualities and strengths. You're going to learn the three laws of more productive meetings. You'll learn a decision structure that's going to help you say goodbye to analysis, paralysis and that endless decision-making. You're going to learn essential communication techniques for building better rapport and changing minds, and you're going to learn the number 1 proven way to improve motivation. The essentials we're going to cover are applicable to you, no matter who you are. You could be a team leader. You can be a member of a team. You could be working with clients, you could be working with colleagues you could be working with peers, you could be working with a spouse or a family. You could be on a sports team. You can be absolutely anyone and benefit from this. All of us want to succeed. All of us want to be in situations where we can do our best work and grow and all of us want to be able to do that when we're collaborating with others. There's an African proverb that really captures the spirit of this class. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I'm excited to get started, let's jump in.
2. Setting Up For Success: One thing I want to get out of the way right up front is if you happen to be already collaborating with a group or you've been working with people and you feel like, "Maybe we're past our ability to be great collaborators, maybe we're not meant to be collaborators, but I'll take this course and learn stuff that I could use in the future." Back in the days when I was working in change leadership in organizations, it was so common that I would get started working with a group and they would be like, "There's no hope with us." People would pull me aside and go, "It's not going to work. It never works, forget it." People just had lost hope. They were in situations where they got used to that person on the team who never did their stuff and time, they got used to unproductive meetings. They got used to the people who always took over the meetings. They got used to the people who never spoke up in meetings. They got used to the meeting after the meeting at the water cooler. They just got used to so many things and they got this idea, just because it had happened before that they weren't going to be able to move forward. Every time I worked with group, they were able to totally put those things behind them and they were able to move forward. They were able to collaborate more effectively, come up with ideas together, even start socializing more. So many things shifted. Why did they shift? I remember one of my most recent clients was in Singapore in construction, and it was the patriarch of several companies actually. A very old man needs given up the CEO role, but he's peaked in on the work we were doing with his executives. After about a week of working together, he said, in a cute grumpy way, "Why do they like you so much?" I said, "I show them processes and tools and steps to let their talents shine." Who doesn't feel great when they can do their best? Who doesn't feel great when the environment is supporting them in doing their best? As you come into this training, as we dive into those six essentials, really hold the place for whether you're starting fresh with a group or whether it's time to go and reset and have a fresh start with a group you're already with, these things the way I have always put them to use is on a reset. If you get to start fresh, lucky you, but if you have to reset, they work equally well.
3. Where to Begin: When you want to start or reset a team to set it up for success, you can do amazing collaboration together. What's the number one thing you have to do? You probably already know this. It's to have a common goal. It is so important to have a common goal. Yet I know from my work it's very, very rare to have one. When I used to get started with organizations before I launched my own. It used to go a little bit like this. CEO, "Hey Joel, people aren't empowered. They're always coming to me. They're always checking with me. They don't come up with solutions. They do stuff on their own. How come?" These would be pretty successful organizations. I'd say, "Okay." They're smaller like their CEOs of maybe like 30 to $100 million businesses. But they were smaller and they'd say, "What's going on here?" I'd say, "Okay" or when people are coming to you and checking in with you for everything. That usually means there isn't a common goal and so they don't know where they're going. So they have to check with you constantly. "Oh no. They know." I'm like, "Cool." "So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go and I'm going to just ask each of them. I'm going to pull them aside. I'm just going to ask them. What are the goals you're working on? Your project? What are the measurements of success? I'll just pull them each into a room and if they can all answer the question the same way, great. We'll check that box and we can move on to the next step of your organizational turnaround." "Maybe they're not that clear." When you want to start out with a team to set it up for success or reset a team to up the level of success. Setting the goal is job number one. T here's two types of goals. Actually three. There's two plus one. There's two types of goals that you have to start with on the team level, on the collaboration level. First of all, you have to look at whether your group is coming together for singular project, or whether you come together regularly. A lot of times groups come together regularly to do work. In that case, you really want to set this intention for the group. What is the overall purpose of this group? Why are they coming together? Why are you collaborating? Where are you hoping to get? What are you hoping to achieve when you get there? What's the end game? Within that you want to look at, each time you're in a group, you're usually working on one or maybe two projects at a time. Every project needs a clear statement of success. When there isn't absolute clarity on the project level on what success of that project looks like. You're going to have a hard time bringing the best out of each individual member, because collaborations, we come together, we chat, we go off, we do work, we have to be able to break away and go. "Okay. Where are we going here? What can I do? I can't be my best if I'm not using the same metrics of success that you are. I'm going to be stamped and the leader or someone's going to have all the power." Of course, at that point you're just going to constantly have to call that person for every step of the way. That can be really exhausting. That's one level of success or level of project goal setting that you really need. We've got the overall purpose of the group and then we've got that project level of success. So if you're just working on just a project, that's where you start. You always start by crafting the goal together, making sure everybody has a really shared understanding with objective measurements of success and you all agree. We are like, "Yeah, this is how we'll measure it. That looks good. Great way to begin." Now, there's another dimension here, there's this plus one. We really aren't great collaborating as a group unless we're really carrying about each individual member. A team is not just one kind of blob or a collaboration is not just one kind of unit, it's a collection of individuals. So to make collaboration work, we have to treat it as a collection of individuals that each matter a lot. So the next thing you want to do to make collaborations go really well is take a little time and check with each individual member. Say, "Hey, why are you on this team?" What do you or working group, or do you want to call it? "What do you want to get out of this? What's in this for you? Where do you want to go? What are your goals? What are your personal goals for performance?" This is just so important to individuals. Also having clarity. "I'm on this team because I'm going to grow in these ways. I'm going to set myself up for a different opportunity. I'm going get to develop XYZ skills." Whatever it is, having that articulated and having each other know about each other's goals gives you all opportunities to support each other as individual. So by supporting each other as individuals, as you work towards a common aim, that's collaboration. It's about the individual and it's about the group.
4. Action Item #1: It's time to take what you're learning and put it in to action. I've got an action guide for you, you can go grab it where the information exactly sure where it is, but I know I've uploaded a file for you called Action Guide for this course, go ahead and find it and then when you do and you download it, and you're going move to the first page here, Setting Up For Success. The first step is to really do a Team Charter Activity. Now, something to understand is that you may not consider yourself a team. You may be working with one other person. It's really the same thing. If you want to think of team or collaboration, the two concepts are interchangeable if you prefer one over the other, use that. First you're going look at Collective Outcomes. Of course you're going to have to talk to whoever you're working with. I personally have a number with my agency, I have a number of people who work with me, I would talk to each of them about these things if we had distinctive groups. We would talk about why are we collaborating together, what are we here to do in my case, it's to make my clients well, we're really excited about getting our clients clients and making our clients lots of money. We really exist to make the lives of our clients awesome. Of course we have more detail around that but the big picture is like we have measurements and how much money we want them to like 5x their investment with us that's actually down here in objective measures. Basically we're like, what do we exist for, and we would fill that out collectively and then would come down to look at like objective measures of our collective success, tongue twisted here and we would say, well our objective measures are, like I said we might be looking at like we want them to 5x, this investment or 10x that investment, we are looking for very specific things around that. Of course we are looking for other objectives like that. We enjoy our days, that we're having fun. Like there could be lots of things that we could put in here, and I think that's really important. That would be the Collective Outcomes but individually we're like, why are we doing that? My reason for running this agency, it's very personal, it's just very driven by my own personal motivations for really seeing how many people have suffered and been frustrated by this field and wanting to make that better for others. My measures of success around that, but the people I work with, they're actually very passionate service people, but they might be interested in advancing their career and being a part of a certain type of an organization and earning more money and doing better in the world and so we would have different things here and it's really important that we're all explicit about what we're looking for so we can help each other achieve it. That's setting up for success. What I want you to do is go and work, like just pick someone that you're working with and do this and you're just going to see how cool it is, just to figure out your collective outcomes and your individual outcomes. Then I want you come, I want you to post in the projects area and tell me what was it like when you created this clarity around why you're working together and what you want for yourself and with the other people want for themselves. What happened to your collaboration and your rapport and how well you're getting along after you had these conversations. I want to hear about it. Post in the project area, that's your first action item, go ahead and take it it's going to make a huge difference to your collaborations.
5. Introduction to The 4 Working Styles: Ever hear people say, "Well, I'm not perfect, but they're not perfect either. He's not perfect, she's not perfect." I often contemplated that expression and wondered, what on earth it means. I can't honestly figure it out. Perfect in my mind, perfect is something that we might achieve on a manufacturing process. I'm currently filming this class with a camera. I would imagine that there is a perfect for that. But as far as humans go, we're all built very differently. If there were perfect in the context that we use the word, I think we would all look exactly the same, sound exactly the same, be the same shape, the same size, say the same thing, have the same belief. I mean, I don't understand it. I also think it wouldn't be very much fun. But there's a movie called The Stepford Wives and it's like this concept of this weird town in the US where all of the wives are exactly the same and it's creepy. It's like a creepy dark story, and that's how I feel about the concept of us all trying to be exactly the same. What we all, I think know, is that there are differences in people. What I think not everybody knows is how critical it is that you compliment when you're working in a collaboration, that you actually have people who have very different styles working together because each style has some advantages and has some blind spots. So if you want to be in amazing collaborations, what you want to do is have people who have complimentary skill sets. I'm going to share a way of thinking about this that I really like. It's very simple and easy to understand. I've been using it for years. I am certified in personality profiling tool called Tilt. Lot of Silicon Valley companies use it. I highly recommend you go check them out. You can check out Tilt 365 or Tilt. But I'm going to give you in broad strokes way of thinking about four working styles because whenever I teach people about this, they get it right away. They're like, "I know someone like that." Or, "That's me." What I'm going to talk to you about are the advantages of those working styles, the blindspots of those working styles, and why you want to come together and have these complimentary working styles and what that looks like. These working styles come in no particular order. I'm just going to go through them. We've got impact. Impact is working style. They're people who come up with a lot of ideas. They have ideas, and they take those ideas and they put them in action. That person on your team or you, who just constantly say, "We could do this, we could do this, we could do this, we could do this," and they go for it. They don't necessarily check, they don't checks some balances, they don't necessarily do a ton of research, they trust their gut a lot and they move. Cool, that's my working style. Next one, kind of similar to the impact, called connection. Connection are people who are also very idea generation-like. They, "Oh, we could do this and this and this." Constantly solving problems, constantly having ideas. But instead of following your gut and just putting them in action, there are the kind of people who get on stages and give talks about what's possible and inspire people. They actually inspire other people to get up and take action. They are called Connection. Then we've got a type called Clarity. Clarity are more fact and data-driven than idea-driven. Clarity people are really more just people who want to make sure things are done properly. They want to make sure things aren't falling through the cracks. They, like the connection people, really like to connect data and people. So if they get information, they're constantly wanting to share that information with others. They're like, "Did you know this and blah, blah, blah that. I found this out and that out." So they're sharing great stuff with others. Then there's Structure. Structure, so cool. They are very data-driven, they're very process-driven. They do things a certain way and in what they do get the job done. Structure, gets the job done. They're just like boom, boom, boom. They get the job done, and they get it done the same way every day.
6. Pros & Cons of The 4 Working Styles: Let's take a look at these four types and talk about each one of them and maybe some of the pros and some of the cons. Let's look at that impact again. We've got somebody who's got ideas and they take them and they put them in action. Well, what's good about that? They're coming up with ideas, they're progressive, they're moving forward, the only constant is change. You need an impact on your team if you want your team to progress and your collaboration to be leading edge, you're almost certainly going to need an impact on it. But what's the risk? If you're constantly just having an idea and going for it, do you think you're going to succeed every time, or do you think you're maybe going to fall and bruise your knee a few times? Exactly. You know that failure culture, like let's fail forward, fail often, it's that whole learning culture, that's totally a something an impact would say. What are some of the blind spots of an impact? They tend to be so excited about ideas and going forward that sometimes they freak people out. Because other people are like, "No, that's too fast, it's too risky, what do you doing? There's no proof about that." So they're needed, they're needed for progress, but they can also sometimes be running off ahead and no one is following them, like, "Okay, we don't know what's going on." That's what you've got with an impact. Then we've got that connection. Connection are really good for impacts, so actually to work with a connection would be a really good thing, because they both share ideas. They're like, "Yeah, ideas, ideas," and the impact's running off and doing it. The connection actually can run around and make sure that there's people with the impact person. Connection is a great person to have on a collaborative project, because they're really good. Everyone's like, "We don't understand what that person is doing," and connection can be that link between what that person running off and doing stuff is doing and helping everybody else understand how valuable that is, so great role that the play. Now let's look at clarity. Clarity is somebody who is going to be that checks and balances. If there's a mistake being made, clarity is going to be like, "You guys need to look at this. If there's really going to be a problem, that clarity person is going to check it and go, "Not to spoil the party here but you probably want to see this." That's the good thing, is that they can keep a team safe. One of their blind spots is that they can come times be so risk adverse that they forget to act. They're just constantly like, "What if, what if, what if, what if," and they can get stuck there a little bit. If you've got a clarity in the team, make sure you appreciate them for the carefulness they bring you. If you are a clarity, Make sure you constantly tell yourself into action and say, "Okay, I've checked, okay, I know, okay, it's time to go. It's time to get going. It's go time," like my book. Finally, structure. Structure: you want a structure in every great collaboration you want that person who's just going to get the job done. I mean, who doesn't want the person who's going to get the job done, and they're going to get the job done the same way as they did yesterday and the systems they are going to choose, are going to be tried and true. A blind spot is that they struggle with progress and any collaboration where you try to maintain the status quo. I mean, come on, if we're not growing, we are not growing, we want to grow. That's the blind spot for a structure, is that sometimes reaching into a better tomorrow is hard for them and they need a whole lot of convincing. You've got the impact going, "I got these ideas," and the structure is going, "Hang on a minute, I'm not just changing the way I do everything. We did that the last three times and everything fell apart. Can we prove that this works first?" You've probably already found yourself in one of those four working styles. You'd probably go, "Yeah, I always have ideas and talk to people about them," or, "Yeah, I always have ideas and just do them in like half of them don't work out but the other half are great," or you're like, "No, I just get stuff done and I just wonder what everybody else is running around and doing, I'm the structure, I just get stuff done," or, "You're like, "No, people were about to lose this and take that risk and I saved the day." That clarity is the one that's saving the day, so everyone has a role. With these personality styles, with these working styles, what you're going to find are different strengths. Anytime you've behaved a certain way for a long period of time, you're going to develop these strengths and capacities in that arena. It's really good when you are on a team to share those and to say, "Hey, these are my strengths, these are the things that you can come to me for, these are the things that just come naturally to me." There's two things you can do when you're in a working group and collaboration where you know someone's strengths are, someone strengths. You can look to them when you need that. You can go, "We need this now," and go to that person who has that. The other thing you can do is, just because you have a tendency to one style doesn't mean you can't develop yourself in any of the other styles, so you can declare what you want to learn. That can be really cool in collaborations because maybe there's someone's who's got to working style and you're like, "Gosh, I wish I was a little more careful," and then that clarity person says, "Yeah, I'd be happy to show you some of the ways that I work or vice versa. I'd be happy to show you some of the ways I come up with lots of ideas and to move forward and new stuff," or, "I'd be happy to show you," and all of the members could really show each other some things. Not only can we declare our natural talents and strengths, but we can say, "Hey, I've really been interested in developing these other skills and we can learn on that collaboration. Maybe we can partner up here and partner up there and start swapping and trading some of our skills."
7. Examples of The 4 Working Styles: First of all, a book is a project that's about way more than one person. So many people contributed to my book, that's why there's pages of acknowledgments. Because it's truly a team and collaborative effort, even though my name is on the cover as an author. In the case of my book, you might not know there's actually three levels of editing. There's structural editing, line editing, and there's copy editing. Each one needs a different personality style. The first one, structural editing, is the first edit if you're writing a book. It's where they actually take the author's manuscript draft, and they completely rework it. They pull out from the whole thing, and they can see it for all its parts and go, "Now, that part that you wrote at the end belongs in the beginning, that part doesn't belong at all, this paragraph needs to." They do this big organizational. They literally get it all in the right order, and their ability to do that is absolutely amazing. I sent in 90,000 words for my manuscript and he backed to me at 70,000 words. They chopped 20,000 words, and I didn't even miss them. I'm like, "Where were those words?" I couldn't even find them. They reorganized, that is a restructure mind. A kind of person who goes, "No, I know the system. I know what it looks like. " Restructure mind could do that. The next level of edit comes from something called a line editor. A line editor is someone who works within a paragraph to maintain the author's voice, but to make it sound a bit better. A line editor will come in and find an opportunity to make something sound a little more magical here, a little more lyrical there, and they add a sense of storytelling. If you've ever read something that hurts, really well-written, has a lot to do with the author, but has a lot to do with their line editor as well. That person almost certainly is going to be a connection style of person. Somebody who can connect ideas with people. They're going to be someone who can really see how people think, and how to frame ideas in a way that they think that way. The final edit that comes in on a book is copy edit. That's the grammar. Making sure you doubted your eyes, crushed your teeth, didn't misspell anything, used dashes the same way, semi-colons the same way, headings the same way. They check for final readability and they also checked for consistency throughout. That is all the way a clarity role, making sure it's all buttoned down and accurate. That's collaboration. Just right there, I want you to realize that you're not going to have like incredible work unless you have an incredible team of people who are different. What's going to happen when people who are different? We're going to be like that idea person running off into the future and that clarity person's going to go hold up. That can be irritating sometimes, because why do you keep pointing things out? But then it's my book, and sure that can be irritating sometimes to have people who are different styles. Why do you never want to change? Why do you always want to change? Why do you always have to have new ideas? Why do you always have to find the problems with ideas? But I wonder if you could just shift that thinking a little bit and realize, "I'm really lucky to be on a collaboration." That's how I thought about my editing team of people who could see the whole picture and move things around. People who could find the little problems. The people who could make my writing just a little more lyrical and readable on places, like cool. If we can learn to celebrate our differences and say, "There is no perfect model out there." How cool it is that we're different and how can I surround myself with people who compliment me?
8. Law #1 of More Productive Meetings: To collaborate, we need to congregate. We need to meet and talk, and exchange ideas. We come together in this thing called meetings, and that's where we do that. But the lion's share of meetings that are going on out there are crazy making for many of the people in them. They're not nearly as effective and productive as they could be. When I did my change leadership work, I actually teach a whole course on how to have more productive meetings. People would actually go from, I would start working with the organization and maybe showing up to meetings. Afterwards, he'd be like, "It's over? That was fast." That's really what can happen when you put a little bit of attention into how you are constructing your meeting. These three laws, less than this doesn't work. The first law of more productive collaboration when it comes down to when you're meeting together is going to be building rapport. You've got to build rapport to do better work. A study with MBA students illustrates this really well, the importance of building rapport. They took these MBA students, these are people working online and they put them into two groups. One group was told to get to work right away. They were just like get to work right away. Just dive in and get your negotiation done, get the best deal you can for everybody involved. The other group was told, meet but start by building some rapport, get to know each other, get along, whatever, then moved to the negotiation, get the best deal for everyone you can. What do you think the difference was? The group that got straight to business only had success 55 percent of the time. What that meant was only 55 percent of them were able to agree to a negotiation. The rest of them just said, this isn't working and gave up. The group on the other hand that built rapport first and then went into the negotiation, had a whopping 90 percent success rate where they were able to come to a good negotiation. On top of that, those negotiations were 18 percent better for both people involved. This is a very powerful and numerical lesson around what building a little rapport can do in your workday. We often think time is money. We don't have time to sit around and get along. But I don't think you have time not to with differences of 55 percent to 90 percent success rates. The cool thing about building rapport is it's very easy to do. It only takes 5-10 minutes depending on how many people you're going through and it absolutely transforms the productivity that you're going to have in that session.
9. Law #1 Examples - Activities to Build Rapport: Here are some ways you can start your meetings and gatherings to have and be a lot more effective. You can just do a simple check-in. Check-in is the most basic of the getting started things. Just saying, "How are you today? Does everyone want to share a couple of words about how they're doing?" Check-ins can be really effective in an ongoing system because it's like if someone had a really bad day, someone had a hard day getting into the office. If they poured their hot water or hot coffee all over their lap this morning, or whatever happened, or they have a parent who's not feeling well, or a child who's not feeling well, they have this moment, the opportunity to share it. So if things are going really well or if things are not. But just something as simple as, "Hey, let's just do a round table and see where's everybody at? How are you feeling today?" Some people are going to go I'm feeling great, and some people are going to go I'm not feeling great. But what's really cool about that is during that session where you're meeting, if that person declared that they're not feeling great, there can be compassion for that person. Not everyone else wondering, well, why are they not contributing today? Another one that I really love it and I do this when I'm working with a new group for the first time is, I work in a business context, but I always ask people to share a hobby because it's like sometimes we're so focused on work work work. It's like no. So it's like what's a hobby? I love asking the question, what's a hobby or where you like to spend time. It could be from reading to parachuting. At a recent meeting someone was like, "I'm really interested in astrophysics." I was like cool. So neat. Other people were like, wow, what's the latest thing you learned about astrophysics? So it can be really fun just to ask people, "Hey, what are the fun things they like doing in their spare time?" One of my favorites, as well is funny trip experience. What's a peculiar thing that happened to you on holiday that really stands out? I've heard so many entertaining stories as I've asked that one. That can be really cool because a lot of people like to travel and so they can share stories about where they've been, talk about it later at lunch or whatever. "Oh, I wanted to visit there." They're going to ask each other on the same lines, if I'm working with large groups, I might say what are favorite movies? What are favorite TV shows? That's always great to get people talking and rapport and going, "Oh yeah, I like that." You can start talking about those stories. If you have a team that has known each other for a really long time, I love, what's a fun fact that you probably didn't know about me? I'll never forget when I was a working team and someone was like, I went to university for chemistry, I changed over to, I can't remember like history and I had more credits in modern dance than any other thing. I was like, that's actually genuinely hilarious. But there can be these fun facts. So that can be these really cool things where we think we know people, but there's this fun thing from their path. This last one I got from the Jimmy Kimmel show, it's a game of true or false, where you can make up a silly story, and I do like to keep things fun and light, always keep it fun and light when you're doing this and you make up a silly story or you tell a silly story from your past and people have to guess if that's a truth about you or if that's a falsity about you. That can be a really fun thing to do. You have everyone guess is it true or false and you tell them. I did it just recently with a group, people loved it. What it does, it actually just lightens the mood. It builds rapport, and it also actually gets the creative juices of your brain flowing. There are so many good things that come of that. So make sure that we are collaborating, you're always taking a moment to connect. It doesn't always have to be some 20-minute tell me your whole life story affair. It can just be like quick stories like, Oh, here's a two-minute story, a two-minute story and if you start to fret and you feel the minutes slipping by, just let that go, let it go because it's not about how much time. I can tell you as performance expert, I've studied performance for 20 years, high performance. It's not about how much time you spend on something but the quality of that time and if you take a moment to connect to the people that you're collaborating with on a personal level using one of those activities or lots of other ones. At that moment, you're going to find your collaborations just come together, your creative juices are flowing, your minds are more relaxed, more good stuff comes, you're going to do better work in less time. So make sure you are always taking those few minutes to connect.
10. Law #2 of More Productive Meetings: Law number two, align to an outcome for the meeting, and yes, that's an agenda. I'd like to take it even one step further than your agenda. What will a successful outcome of this? An agenda is a list, and agenda is we're going to cover this, we are going to cover this, we're going to cover this. What is a successful outcome? If I were to create a successful outcome of this segment, right now, what would be that you understand that you want to create objective criteria for success. One of the things that I think is not a good idea is to set these meetings for an hour,and we meet for an hour. Why can't a meeting be 15 minutes? Why can't a meeting BY 20 minutes? Maybe it could be. Meetings should be done when the work that needs to be covered has been covered. I would be like, okay, so we're here today to, and list the outcomes that you want to achieve, and make sure everyone's on the same. Does anyone have anything to add to this? Does anyone need anything else? I really believe in agreeing to the agenda at the beginning; not just sharing the agenda, but agreeing to the agenda. Is everybody cool with this? Is there anything else that needs to be on here? That's collaboration. That's making sure everybody has a voice. Maybe there's something they need to talk about and get on that meeting, and then you work on each item. Say, okay, what do we need to figure out here, and everyone agrees, and then start talking about it. But you know that's not w hat's happening. If that's happening on your meetings, you're literally a unicorn. That is not how people are meetings and just start talking about stuff. What do you need to do so that you could potentially have a slightly shorter meeting and maybe get out of there in 40 minutes or 30 minutes? How do you know when you're done? It's as simple as that. You take every line on your agenda and you say, this is what we're working on and this is what we need to figure out, and then you ask simply the question, how will we know when we're done? When we know what? What do we need to know to stop talking about that? Well, we need to have for ideas and we may need to make a decision or we need to know and we decide. We need to hear from everybody what their input is, and you just decide like what do we need to do with this line items? It's beyond just putting it on the list. It's stating, before you start doing any work, it's stating, how will we know when we're done talking about this topic? Then you do that topic, and then you come to the next item on your agenda and you go, okay, what success can it look like here? What are we tracking to in this conversation? How are we going to know when we've talked about this enough? We're going to have this and that and the other thing, and the cool thing is, when you do that, sometimes like 35 minutes have gone by and you're like, we're done. Okay, bye. There you go. There's 20 minutes, 25 minutes of your day back; and sometimes you're going to get to that hour point and you're going to go, we didn't cover all this. We had too much on our agenda. Well, great. Get off the phone an hour and say, okay, well, one of your next action items is to re-meet and go back to that agenda. But if you stayed true to each agenda item and you agree to what a successful outcome was, and you agreed to how you'd measure that, then what you can know that you did in that hour was great work. That's kind of meeting where people say, wow, that hour's gone already. That went by quickly. Because we were tracking to something and we were staying on track.
11. Action Item #2: Back with your action items for the four working styles, this one's quite fun. To do this one, I really want to think about your individual contributions and motivations. You're going a little bit beyond what you did in the former activity with the Team Turner. You want people to just really be clear about what they're bringing and additional things they might want to learn. The name and pronouns I prefer to go by are, you want to complete one of these for each member of your team. It really is very respectful to just ask people what their name and pronouns are. Especially you want to say the name and pronouns I prefer to go by, sometimes people have a name when they start working with you, maybe they gave you a formal name, but that's not really the name they prefer to be called by. It's nice to just sometimes just explicitly state it, so that you have that rapport and of course pronouns. If someone has a preferred pronoun, you're going to want to use it to make them feel comfortable and to show them that respect. That's just an easy thing to throw in there. Then of course, you are going to have to either get them to watch that video where I cover the four working styles, maybe those videos or share it forward and try to remember and teach them, but really take a moment and think about, where do you think you fall? You don't necessarily have to get a tilt assessment online to figure this out. Sometimes it's not saying you can't be a little bit of all of these things. It's just like, where's your happy place? Where are you happiest? Where are you most comfortable? Because your working style that you're most comfortable with it's good to let people know what that is. We're like playing a collaboration or deemed with strengths if you will. Then you want to have each person declare skills I bring can teach others are. What can you share? How can you help others grow? Skills I want to develop in this collaboration include, be explicit about the new skills would be great for you, for your career. Find out what other people want for their career. It's cool. You'd be surprised what you can learn and then bait behaviors you can count on me for include. This is where you're just stating, I'm always on time or you know what? Sometimes I'm late. Be honest about what you will and won't contribute and you'll have better relationships. Just by declaring, let them know what to expect from you and find out, ask others to declare what you can expect from them. This really creates this amazing foundation just to be clear about all the stuff. That's your action items for the four working styles and playing a team or collaborative effort to its strengths really amazing to declare these things when you are done. I want you to go to the comments area, the project's page and I want you to tell me do you have good representation on your team of impact, connection, structure, clarity? No. Do you have too many people in one area or do you have good balance? Probably if you do have good balance, there's probably places where there's friction but it's also good because you have these different skills. I'm really curious, like tell me about it, did doing these activities give you a greater sense of how you can work with the other people on your team, and these declarations of what skills you can bring or teach others, behaviors you can count on. It's really great if you come and report back on how that's working. The reporting back itself will help you learn even more and I can't wait to hear how that's work for you.
12. Law # 3 of More Productive Meetings: Law Number Three about how to have way more productive meetings is so simple, so easy. You're going to love it. Everybody summarizes their own to dos. This is incredibly important. You know how sometimes at the end of the meeting, one person lists everything everybody has to do? No. I've been a part of a lot of working groups where one or two people known for never got their stuff done on time and it was like, "Oh, I never got to it," it annoys other people. But when I've gone and talk to those two people, one or two people, "Okay, what's going on? How come that your stuff isn't getting to the meetings?" They are like, "I am so bogged down, I'm doing the job of three people, two people were fired. All their jobs came to me. I think this is next to impossible. They just throw work at me. I've told them in the past its in human and they don't seem to listen so I just say yes, it's easier and no one really cares." I've actually had that happen. It makes sense. We're not actually asking people for their deliverables and we're not actually asking them for what's possible for them. These two things will dramatically increase the engagement of your working group, if you just simply say at the end, "Okay, everybody recap there to do's and when they can do it by." It's the next steps and each person takes the turn and goes like, "Okay, well I committed to this, this and this," and you say, "Okay, so when can you do it by?" They go, "Here, here and here, " and if there's any dialogue about, "Wow, we need it sooner, but I can't" and whatever, that can happen right then and there. So make sure you leave five to ten minutes for this closure activity, it's really important because if there's any calibrating or aligning to do, you do it right then and there. What will invariably happen is people go around and list what they're going to do and when, somebody will miss something and, that could be me or that could be someone else. We said, "Oh yeah, I'll do that," and then forgot to write down. No biggie, that's where someone else on the group can say, "Hey, I think you mentioned that you're going to do this." It's like, "Oh, yeah." "So can you repeat your commitments?" When you get in the habit of this and when everybody understands how important it is, it's totally worthwhile. When someone just reads us what we're supposed to do, our brain doesn't really register it. But, when we repeat what we're going to do and then we think about and go, "I can't do it and I've got to do this and this and this and this. I can slot it in here." When we are actually thinking consciously and carefully about what we're committing to were actually figuring out when it will go on our schedule. We're more likely to show up. There's actually a recent research that demonstrates that this is true. In medical centers, of course, they have a big problem with people forgetting or not showing for appointments. Just a problem when they're turning away people because they [inaudible] and then they're not [inaudible] because people aren't showing up. In this recent study, what they did is instead of filling out the appointment card for people, they hinted it to people with pen and let them fill in their own date and time about when they're supposed to come back. Just having someone fill out their own date and time at a medical center increased the number of attended appointments by 18 percent. It makes a big difference. Take that little step and just say, "Hey, what is each person doing and when are they committing to get it done by?" It'll be a game changer for you.
13. The 3 Laws Case Study: So we've just covered three of the six essentials for getting along and having better collaboration and having better outcomes and even just those three of the first six essentials can make a huge difference. During my master's in leadership, I came together with a group nearing the end of my master's in leadership and we followed all those protocols and just the ones that I've given you in the first three and we had incredible results. When we did our team charter, we created what was the purpose of our group? What was the purpose of the assignment? What was group success? A plus, what was individual success that we got to develop our skills, that we got to learn new skills, that we got to learn new content matter. We all knew it, everybody wanted to learn and specifically how they wanted to grow. We shared our contributions and what we were good at, and we shared our working style and what our way of working and interacting was? What others could expect from us? and then we saw and we covered, we were so good at the three laws of meetings. That was really proud of us, the first time we came together after we figured out all the purpose and every other time after that, we had one week project, like got it Monday. We have these little windows, a break here and a lunch there and to do it on the Friday, it's big presentation day and we came together in these short sessions. We have an hour and there's five of us would be like, tell us a story about a trip you are on. We'd be like, can we really take 15 minutes to tell this story, we have to get to work, but we followed the process we were doing our master's in leadership, we trusted the process, we followed the process. We take that 15 minutes to socialize and then five minutes at the end to recap and say what we were doing. So we'd have like 40 minutes to do all the work. What we did this all week-long, we follow the structure really good alignment to goals, really good rapport building on the team, really good honoring what each person wanted to learn and contribute, really good at honoring our commitments and seeing when we could do them all of that. The presentation day was Friday, on Thursday at 6:00 PM. We'd broken out like 3:00 PM to finish working on it and we were done at six. We're like, we're good to go and so we all went to dinner, we all had a drink together and it was wonderful. Presentation day comes along. It was stress central in the classroom there were teams that apparently had blown up overnight. People weren't getting along. They were fighting, people redoing, hating what their team members had done redoing it through the middle of the night, not talking to one another, not having, just so much drama. Not all the teams, but a few of the other teams were having a lot of drama and we were just sitting there going, we had a lovely dinner, we had nice drinks. We had a good time. None of us were naturally people who would hang out, but we had an amazing collaboration and got that A plus. I will tell you that it can feel so counter-intuitive that 15 minutes or ten minutes that you're taking to build rapport, you just can't afford them. That first meeting where you just talk about the goals of the group and the goals of the individual, that you can't afford it. I hear you. During your master's they're constantly trying to create pressure they're constantly trying to give you big projects and not enough time to do it and see masters in leadership, they wanted to see if they can break us. That's what I think anyway. They probably didn't or maybe they did. I don't know. But I'm just saying that's what it felt like at times, but we trusted it, we stuck with it and that was probably one of my greatest lessons in how people who are completely different can come together and do amazing work together and it feels fantastic when you do that. So what I want you to do is go and make a plan for how you will talk to your working group and how you will set up some laws of your meetings. Make sure that you're starting with just being people with each other, making sure that you're aligned to goals like so you have this, agenda. But you also know what success like so, how will we know when we're done before you begin so that you can go, we're done early and then always finishing with that. Everybody claims their own topics. Everybody says, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do it by when, and you fill in any blanks in conversation. But those three essentials are going to be game changers. But there's three more essentials. Next, you're going to learn how a decision process can help you eliminate indecision.
14. Action Item #3: This one is so much fun. You're ready for your more productive meetings and it doesn't have to be a meeting. It could be call, it could be, a zoom, It could be a whatever. I just want you to have your three laws action plan. I can't wait until you do these and report back in the comments area. You're just going to start with a rapport builder, favorite things, share a hobby, TV series, movie, trip taken. Don't do that all in one. It's just favorite things. One day you share a hobby, another day you share TV series, another day you share movie, another day you share a trip taken. Play around. It could be a favorite food, It could be,use your imagination. Always keep these things fun, always get yourself in a good mood for work. You might decide to play surprise stories, share fun story from the past, can be a trip that no one knows you took or something nifty that happened or play true-false. These were the ones in the training and I just want you to go ahead and pick from this list, use them and see what happens. Next, set objective agendas. What are we talking about today? How will we know when we're done talking about each item? Again, if you want to be great at collaborating, you want to be phenomenal at goal setting. So if you are, do not feel you have phenomenal goal-setting skills, I highly encourage you to take my goal-setting masterclass because I do talk about the neuroscience underpinnings of goals. It's a bit technical, and the common problems with goal setting and goal setting that's in harmony with the brain's natural rhythms. If so, if you don't feel you're masterful at goal-setting, highly recommend that class and you'll get better. You don't need to go to that whole giant goal for every little thing you do, but it will actually get you really good at setting goals quickly. Law number 3, I want you starting every single conversation you have with anyone, get each person's list on commitments and when they're going to complete these by. I can't wait until you have your next collaboration phone call meetings, Zoom, whatever it is and report back, and let me know how that went. I know that these three laws are game changing. I want to hear about what's happening in your collaborations and how these simple things that you can do make a huge difference.
15. Decision Structure: Decisions, decisions. How do we make decisions? We want to collaborate with others. We want to do our very best work possible. But then there's these things that we have to make. We have to make decisions. We constantly are needing to figure out how to make tomorrow better than today. We're constantly having to move forward without certainty, without being sure something's going to work, without knowing, and it can be hard enough to make decisions on our own. But when we try to make decisions collectively, it can be even harder. One of the things I've seen really take a team offline is when you do all this work together, and then it feels like the decision's coming out of left field and you didn't influence that. To get over that, one of the things you can do in your collaborations with others is decide how you're going to decide. Just take a moment, and prior to every project, prior to anything where a decision has to be made, you can just stop and take a moment and decide how you're going to decide. There are four main ways of how you make a decision. There's voting, you can vote. How many people want to do this? How many people want to do that? You can have consensus. You can say, "Oh, everybody has agreed, and therefore, we should move forward." Ta da, lovely. You can have command. Everybody talks and talks and talks, and then one person goes, "This, I declare we will make this decision," and they just make the decision without anybody else's input. Or you can have something called consult. Consulting is where somebody is charged with making the decision, but they talk to each person and carefully consider everybody's input and then finally make a decision. Each one of these decision styles has pros and cons. Voting. What happens in a vote? One person says, "I want this," one person who says, "I want that." Somebody wins, somebody loses. Feels good to win. Most people don't feel great when they lose. From a collaboration standpoint, voting is typically not a great way to make decisions because it will usually make some people feel left out. A lot of people want consensus. A lot of people are like, "Oh, we should all agree to everything." If you've ever tried to work with consensus, then you will know that it takes forever for everyone to agree on everything. We've already established that there's all these working styles. There's people who like to go for things, there's people who like to be careful, there's people who like to talk about stuff, there's people who like to just get stuff done and make sure that it's a good, clean process that you're guaranteed will work, and there's a spot for all of those things. But those four people are not likely to agree easily to certain decisions. Consensus can be really great on something like the purpose of your group, something that you all have to believe in. But on moving projects forward here and there, sometimes it takes more time than it's really worth, and you have to decide if it's really needed. Then we've got command decisions. People who just come along and go, "It'll be this." That's clearly not a great way to make decisions because that just alienates people, so we move on. Then we've got consult, there's consulting decisions. Consulting decisions are when somebody says, "Okay, I'm going to be charged with the final decision," or "You and I are going to be charged with it", or "You and you, or Fred and Mary, are going to be charged with it," but they'll first consult everyone. This can be a really good form of decision making that can weigh in the group's opinions, and perspectives. But really leave the final D with someone who's accountable for those outcomes in the group. Again, this comes back to why it's so important to have both the purpose of the group and a goal established for the project because when those things are established, it's clear who should make certain decisions. That's a real benefit and saying, "Well, you're going to make decisions about this, and you're going to make final decisions about that, and you're going make final decisions about the other thing." You figure it out based on what your competencies are, what your skills are, and then you'll have a voice in those other decisions. In and around decisions and decision process and how to just be much better at making decisions and be able to make them more quickly and more powerfully is actually just to state up front, what kind of decision is this and who's going to make it and why are they going to make it and why are they the right person. That's function one around making better decisions. Just deciding how you're going to decide, deciding who's going to decide, and more importantly than anything, don't wait till you're making the decision to declare how you're going to make it. But make it right up front when you're setting the parameters for success around the goal. Decide then.
16. ABCD Decisions for Better Decisions: Beyond declaring how you're going to make decisions, who's going to make the decisions, and getting that up all up front, there is a process that will lead you to consistently better information and decisions every single time. This is the A, B, C, decision process. Let's just quickly go through it and then I'll expand upon it. A is align to what you want. B stands for, broaden your options. C stands for compare contenders, and D stands for detach and decide. Now, let's break it down. A align to what you want. I can't actually remember a time somebody came to me and said, "Jill, I have this decision to make." and I said, "So tell me how are you reading success? What will have to happen for you to know that was successful?" I have yet to have someone go these are the parameters that will tell me I was successful. That's where analysis process comes from. We're trying to make a decision, but we don't know where we're trying to get without decision. Two, broaden your options. Before I dive into how to broaden your options, let's look at why to broaden your options. How do a lot of decisions get posed? Should we do this? Or that? Should we do this or not? Well, as it turns out, the research shows that when we ask the question, should we or shouldn't we do this? We fail 50 percent of the time. We have a less than optimal outcome. Just by asking that question. When we ask the question, should I do this or this? When we have two options, we ask the question, we have two options. It's only slightly better. We fail 33 percent of the time. I think you'll agree that failing one in two times is not okay, and failing one in three times is not okay. According to research, we are far more likely to make a great decision, when we start with three really good viable options. This is where it's like so incredible to see what happens when I guide groups in coming up with those three options. It's like, well, what could we do? Like let's think about the outcome we want. By shifting the question from should we do this or that, or will the law and just saying instead, so what could we do? What else could we do? What else could we do? You just keep asking that question. You just keep asking it over and over and you'll get a lot of stuff. To get to those three options, sometimes one really cool technique, and this is really fun if you're like, oh, but I really like this or that. Can we do this and that? It's a really powerful option. Can we do this and that. Another really fun one if you're super stuck and you're like, "But I can't think of that third option and I can't. I can only think of these two." By the way, the third option is there, is just your mind is telling you it isn't. If that's happening, there's a really cool little trick you can play. You can say, what if it were impossible? What if it were impossible for me to do these two things? Then what could I do? If you take your two options off the table, it's called disappearing options, and pretend they don't exist and say, well, what would I do if there was no way I could do those two things? That could allow your brain to go off into the different directions. Now we've aligned to what we want. We've got three fantastic options, we're like, "I can't choose between these three fantastic things." Then it's time to compare contenders. Now, a lot of people when they're ready to compare, they use something called pros and cons. What are the pros? What are the cons? Well, I was very surprised to find out that pros and cons is in fact notorious sleep, terrible, terrible tool for making decisions. In fact, apparently what pros and cons does is just help us just relive our biases and old behavior. It actually really we're close to new possibilities when we use them. This is bad because when we're making decisions, we want to be able to really see the information in front of us for what it is and the goal that we're aligning to for what we want. We really want to have this neutrality and pros and cons doesn't give us that neutrality. What you do instead? What you actually do instead, is you pretend like you're a lawyer. You could pretend like you're building a case, and you take each of your great and fantastic options and you make a little case. You say, well, this would be the best if? You look at your alignment and you go, well, the reasons that this could be the best option are, and it would be the best option because, and you really look at all the ways that it can be the best option and get you towards your alignment. You build this positive case towards your alignment with each of those other things. Then you can really see amongst those contenders, which of those three options gives you more of the things you are looking for. Then D is decide. Decide how you agreed to decide. What did you say you're going to do up front? What process did you say your own follow. Follow a process that you committed to up front? The other thing you want to do is not be emotional. The other thing that really goes wrong in decision-making is sometimes we're just like overly confident or we're overly nervous or overly afraid. We're worried if we fail, how others perceive us, what will happen. We get all these fears, we get all these insecurities or we get this over-confidence. What has been demonstrated in the research is if there is sort of high emotion, either fear or confidence, that often we can make much less good decisions. It's actually been shown that people who have the emotional centers of their brain are muted and they don't feel as much emotion as other people, are much better investors and they make more money on the stock market, because they're really able to see data and information for what it is. You want to put that to work for you and you want to make sure that before you make important decisions for you or your group, that you're really taking that moment to detach and then decide and just really sit back for a more complete picture of ABC decisions, take the full course. But for now, even with that, you can start to realize, there's a lot that can be done to make better decisions.
17. Action Item #4: With your ABCDecisions action item. Now, with this particular one, I have given you a super abbreviated training on ABCDecisions. So you've got a super abbreviated action item. If you have important decisions to make, I highly recommend you check out my full class ABCDecisions because I do talk about the big mistakes that people make in decision-making, and go into more depth. But, I wanted you to have something that you can go with right away. So applying ABCDecisions, you've got aligned to what you want. I've got lots of questions in the full class, but for now, you can think about what you need short-term, what you need long-term, I can help you think about it. What's your ultimate goal in this situation as it pertains to the decision? Broadening your options. You just go for it, is there a way I could do both things? This and that, especially if you're stuck with that like, "Yeah, there's two options, how could you do both? Maybe you could do a lot of some and a lot of another." Explore that. I love this one, if you're really like, "But there are no other ideas." You're trying to get that third one, what could you do if your favorite option wasn't an option? So go ahead and figure that out. Comparing your contenders. You do select those final 2-3 best options and what would have for this to be my best option. You've really created that case, like wow. You're almost , "Why is this my best option? If it's not, it will become painfully evident. But don't forget you've picked two or three really good options. So now you are like, "Wow, that is a good option." In the full training, I have a lot of questions under broadening your options. There's a lot there actually to help you really expand and get some new ideas, and finally detach, and decide when you are free of emotion. Cool thing you can ask is, "Which of your options could you believe in, even if it doesn't work out, and why?" That's really cool because you're like, "Yeah, even if that doesn't work, I believe it's the right choice." That's often a sign that you're not overly emotional. So this is a quick use on ABCDecisions trademarked tool that when you start using it, I actually want to hear about it. Go and post in the project area because I know when I teach this to executives, and entrepreneurs and my clients, there's nobody who doesn't go, "Where was this? I needed this tool. " Now, I do teach them the full to all, but I think conceptually, this makes sense and it can help us make better decisions, and better decisions lead to better outcomes, better businesses, better lives. So there you go, your action item. Let me hear about a decision that you are making and how did this create some structure for you in your collaborations? Did that make it easier for you to have conversations where you were guided? Most people I've worked with, they almost use this as an agenda when they're working with others to come to decisions. Can't wait to hear how you use it.
18. Communication Techniques: Dialogue vs. Conversation: Great communication with others. That's at the heart of everything. That's at the heart of our collaborations. That's at the heart of our friendships, of our family relationships. I mean, collaboration, communication, those two things are interchangeable. Great collaborators, high performing teams have a distinctive form of communication that is actually quite different than how most people communicate and they do something called dialogue. I first heard the term dialogue when I got certified in executive coaching. Traditional communication or conversations as I was taught, work a little bit like a tennis match. You talk, I talk, you talk, I talk, you take turns and as it happens, that's not how great collaborators communicate. Great collaborators are very interested in knowing the best of what everybody else knows. They're very interested in developing their own knowledge by discovering the knowledge in the people that they're working with. You don't get the best information in someone when they just have one turn, what great collaborators do, they ask somebody several questions. Dialogue is actually just that. It's when someone says something and you say, tell me more, that's interesting, well, how'd you learn that? Tell me more. It's when you let someone talk three, four or five times and really allow them to expand on what they know. Tell you how they learned, what they know, really share the backstory of what they know. It's such a powerful thing to do for learning, for building rapport, and for having a group that will do phenomenal excellent work. I've taught dialogue to a lot of groups and so I can tell you that it's very easy for me to describe that. It's so easy, give someone five turns, but it's much harder in practice. Especially because what usually happens in practices, somebody says something that we disagree with and when we disagree with something, we don't want to give them three to five turns to tell us more about what we didn't believe. That's very irritating. We don't want to do that. Now, what we want to do is shut them up and let them know how things work and we want to tell them. That's not where great collaboration comes from though and that's actually not where understanding comes from, and it's not where frankly the best work in the world comes from. The best work in the world and the most smartest, most capable people in the world are able to listen to someone else's point of view, even when that point of view is diametrically opposed to their own. What's interesting is when you have two people in a group who have like diametrically opposed views such as politics. There's this friction and like they can't work together and a part of them is locked off and they're not going to be amazing collaborators. But if you let each person tell their complete story of how they came to arrive at that. It's just understanding takes place and people start getting deeper relationships with each other. To do that is really hard. I work with groups and I get them. Like with each one, at some point during the training, I give them a card and I have them tell me how they feel about some contentious topics and I buddy them up based on two people who have completely opposing views and I have one person talk all about their topic that the other person completely disagrees with and the only thing the other person and allowed to do the entire conversation is say, "What I hear you saying is" and then repeat the person's words." Can you tell me more about?, well, how did you come to arrive at that?" All they're allowed to do is ask questions as if they were a reporter, but one that was like a friendly reporter really interested in learning more. People go into this activity freaking out. They're freaking out. The panic is like, I can't possibly listen to someone talk about that for three minutes and they're just so stressed out. In like three to five minutes later, they're smiling. Three to five minutes later, they're really understanding how someone came to arrive at this opinion that was so much different than you are, and they really build this new level of bond. In that time they find other places they can connect. Then there's that timer I let them have their three minutes and the first person or three, five minutes and the first person has to do that and it's such a powerful activity because people go into it so sure that they're not going to succeed and they come out of it smiling, friends, able to connect. Sometimes they change minds, sometimes they don't. What they always do is they develop respect for each other and that needs to happen in great collaborations and so dialogue is really important. Letting someone share views that you don't instantly agree with, is how you become more intelligent. It's how the group becomes more intelligent. It's how you become more compassionate, it's how you do better work.
19. The #1 Proven Way to Improve Motivation: Performance is often measured as motivation times ability, whether we're looking at an individual, a team, organization we are looking at those two factors. I am going to assume right now that you have the ability, you have the internal ability, you're skilled, you've got people on your team, they're skilled, and now you've got five of six essentials of having more effective collaborations. What's the sixth one? It is the one, it's the number one most powerful thing, that you can do with others that will make them more motivated. So if you have the ability, the next box, you want to check, is that motivation box. You want to get that part of the equation. Now for years I thought, and I think it's fair to say that most people think that how we motivate others is with money, and how do we motivate others is by congratulating them for a job well done, when we finished projects, and we celebrate or we have milestones, and we go out to dinners, and, or we do whatever. But actually, the greatest motivation does not come from that. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, wrote an article called The Power of Small Wins that was published in the Harvard Business Review, that really turned the way we see motivation around. A lot of people think that we are motivated by path on the back or a job well done but actually, people are more motivated by a sense of progress and I thought about that and I thought, you know, this makes a lot of sense because when I look at my own life, and I think of the big things I've achieved, even my book, even writing was like an epic undertaking to finally get my book, it's go time written and even as I wrote that, I had wanted to write it for such a long time it's a big book, it's like a big book that covers how to have breakthroughs and like reach another level of performance I want to share. But it was like it took me so long. But when I finally published it, it wasn't like that wasn't where my greatest motivation came from, it was those days that I spent with curled up fingers going, I really want to get this book down and I wrote the book over Christmas some days when there was too much action happening around my house, I would literally go in my car and I live in Toronto, Canada, it's cold in December and I would sit in my car just to have quiet. Those are the times I felt the best, when I was moving towards the finish line of my book. Take a moment, and think about yourself. When you're in project and you're working towards it, you're going and you're making progress, and you have insight, and it's like, when do you fill out your bars? If you're anything like the people I work with, when you hit the finish line you're just like, what's next? Yeah, that's nice [inaudible] It's pretty cool, what's next? That our greatest motivation, comes when we're in it, when we're doing it, when we're moving towards it, when it's finally happening, it's like wow, it's that sense of moving towards a finish line. Remember how we started, these six essentials. We started them with knowing what the goal was that you were working on. Yet again, there is another one of these essentials, that falls apart. If you don't have a clear goal with your team. This is such an easy one to do, it's just to go, wow, great progress, it's not harder than not. Oh, did you solve that little thing? Cool, way to go. It's the little start with my book, it would be did you write that chapter? Did you get that tough paragraph done? Did you do that research? It's those little pieces that make us feel fantastic, that we're moving towards something, it's not always the big hero. So when you're collaborating, and you're meeting, make a point of regularly sharing your wins. What was your win today? What was the best thing that happened today? Pay attention when the people you're collaborating with are making moves towards your common goal, and maybe even pay attention when they're making moves towards their own goals. You're going to see a trans-formative difference in how much morale, and how good people feel when you start focusing on the wins, focusing on more importantly, the small wins. The little steps along the way are what matter most of all when it comes to increasing motivation. The critical half of the performance puzzle, motivation times ability equals performance for you and for your collaborations.
20. Wrap Up & Bonus : So we've now covered six essential steps to having more effective, more productive, more enjoyable collaborations with others that will bring out the best in you and the best in them. You learn how you get started or you can reset with a team by really establishing your goals, your goals for the team, the purpose for the team, and your individual goals as well. You learned about the four working styles and how you can start playing a team to its strengths. You've learned that it's great to have these differences. You learned the three laws of more productive meeting. You've got to start with some rapport building, social, getting to know you time, and then you're going to make sure that every meeting it's clear what the goals are for that meeting. You can call it an agenda, but what has to be clearest of all is, how do we know when we've talked enough about this? Then of course, we want to finished meetings by letting people declare what they will do and when they will do it by, and you're going to see people meeting their schedules and promises. You've learned decision process that's going to help you stop with analysis paralysis and spinning your wheels on decisions. You're actually just going to be like, "Okay, got it. First of all, we're going to declare how we decide. We're going to use ABC decision." You learned about dialogue. You learned about how we don't want to have table tennis or tennis games of conversation. Your turn, my turn, and we don't want to have anything that we can't talk about. That's like, "Oh, we don't talk about that because we don't know how to talk about that." No, we want to learn how to take a moment and let other people share their views with us and how they arrived at them. They'll listen to ours as well when we start giving them that respect, and that's where the highest performing teams in the world, that's what they do. Then we learned that it's not just always about celebrating the big finish. Because what really feels the best when you want to increase motivation is what really feels the best. It's actually that process all the way through, and we can just ask on a daily basis, "What was a win today?" If you keep doing these six things you're going to have incredible outcomes. What's likely to get in the way of putting this stuff to use in your life and having way better collaborations with people. I think the biggest thing that people tell themselves is that they don't have time. That one sounds very nice, but they don't have time. If you follow the process, you'll actually be amazed at what can happen. There's this one time I was facilitating a group, it was during the COVID thing and so it was actually a group that had to totally shift and reposition their business. I was doing these rapport building activities and I could see somebody just getting so annoyed. It's actually the person who'd set up the session like, "Why aren't we working? Why aren't we getting to work and solving this problem?" I could understand why that person was visibly annoyed because it feels like getting right to work is more productive. Just feels like it. But I didn't and I held true and I give them that time to warm up, and the outcomes of our session were truly awe-inspiring. This group re-envisioned an industry and it wasn't about using every minute of those three hours to work. That's I'd say the biggest thing that holds people back from doing this. These six things that you learned, they are a framework. There's so much more you can do. There's these little nuances, but less than this is problematic. That's it for this class. Really glad that you took the time to build your collaboration skill. Once again, I am Jill McCabe, the best-selling author of "It's go time" a book that will teach you a step-by-step system or how to go from stuck to unstoppable in business and life. I've got a copy for you free. You can just go and hit on my bio page. There will be a link there and the link is on the video here, and you can go and just click on that link and grab a free pdf copy of that book. It's my gift you a thank you for checking out my class on collaborating essentials, so glad you could join me.
Jill McAbe, Business & Marketing Strategist
