TSR #6: Building and maintaining team dynamics (part two)

5-minute read

What’s in this newsletter:

• Recap from last week

• Pillars of a human-centered team

• One actionable exercise for you and your team

Pillars of a human-centered team

When coaching leaders and teams, I try to focus on the following pillars of building a human-centered team.

1. Trust 

Trust within the team needs to come first: without it every step of the way becomes that much harder.

Trust is a loaded word, and “build trust” is vague and obvious advice. So do you actually go about building it?

Understand each others’ values

The more you can understand what your teammates stand for and what makes them tick, the better.

Practice vulnerability where you can

Opening up and showing that you’re not perfect not only promotes other people to do the same, but it opens up your own growth opportunities.

Make empathy a priority

Take the time to understand your teammates’ past and how that made them who they are today, it’ll make it that much easier to help them get to where they want to be tomorrow.

Opportunity 

If you can build trust on a team up front, focus on creating opportunity for each other. How you can do this:

Define a goal

Helping your teammates define where they want to grow not only reinforces the trust you’ve built, but gives you ideas for how you may want to grow as well. Having a diverse set of perspectives can push your target growth area to be even more impactful. 

Design a system

Designing the system to enable the growth you’ve defined for each other is key. How are you going to enable growth for each other? How are you going to hold each other accountable? How can you reinforce positive feedback, and course correct when needed?

Amplify each other along the way

Amplifying each other on Slack channels so others can see the impact that each of you have, giving feedback early and often, and supporting each other's goals will help sustain the trust you’ve built and support the growth of the team.

Autonomy

Autonomy doesn’t mean not having support or figuring everything out on your own. It means having a toolkit to navigate your work without the need for constant supervision. Being able to cover the day-to-day stuff will enable leadership to provide more clarity and focus on leading, instead of managing processes. Here’s a good place to start:

Learn to navigate uncertainty 

Most of navigating uncertainty is about breaking down what you know and what you don’t know, seeking clarity in the unknown, and gathering enough information to lower your decision-making risk. The point isn’t to go through your work alone, it’s to gradually turn requests for consultation into recommendations.

Problem solve together

Most problems have been solved before, whether it’s on a different team or a slightly different context. Leveraging each other’s diverse backgrounds and perspectives will likely get you to the solution faster.

Create decision-making frameworks

Most types of decisions you need to make will fall into a few main buckets. Define these buckets, their risk, and who can own the decision for each bucket. If you need to, design an escalation path to leadership by first gathering information and context so leads can quickly make a decision without having to get onboarded into the problem.

One actionable exercise for you and your team

Have a discussion with your team, and ask the following questions.

• What do you think is more important for our team: trust, opportunity, or autonomy?

• Why do you think this?

• What area do we need the most growth in?

• What does that growth look like?

• How can we ensure we make this growth happen in the coming days, weeks, months?

Take notes on your answers, and come up with 3 actionable next steps. 

Assign an owner for each who is NOT a team lead or manager. The assigned owner can seek the support of a manager when needed, but this is a great opportunity for growth and ownership from within the team.