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For those of you just joining us, this newsletter will arrive in your inbox every Friday. In each issue you can expect to read about something I’m loving that week, a useful tool, my favorite read, one tip and one lesson.
Let’s dive into this week’s content.
This week I’m loving
The days my LinkedIn feed still impresses me. Tuesday this week, was one such day. So this week I’m sharing the love for Dave Bailey’s incredible content on team development. Here’s what caught my eye as I scrolled on by.
The best way to develop your team is NOT by giving feedback.
Here’s why:
Feedback isn’t what many managers think it is. It isn’t a conversation, it isn’t advice, and it isn’t asking questions.
Feedback is information about reactions to a product, person’s performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement. (Oxford English Dictionary)
Dave points out that sharing our reactions to someone’s performance is not of very much use to them. In fact, giving feedback can make someone defensive which can trigger their fight or flight response. Apart from being a terrible experience for your team member, this acute stress response also inhibits learning. And as a result, quite clearly, sharing your “feedback” isn’t helping your team member.
Dave goes on to share a framework from David Peterson, Director of Executive Coaching & Leadership at Google, called the GAPS framework.
Image credit: Dave Bailey
This framework is aimed at increasing motivation and helping someone discover their own insights that support their development. He also highlights Peterson’s critical insight:
Conventional wisdom tells us to help others learn with feedback, but the more productive approach is to help the person reflect on where they want to go: their goals and success factors.
So the next time you sit down for a 1:1, focus on what you can do as a coach, don’t give feedback.
Tool of the week
This week I was working on a project that needed a low-tech home for some user stories to support getting an MVP software over the finish line.
This was an opportunity I always love to have. The opportunity to use Trello.
I’ve been a fan of Trello since the very beginning. And, like my first crush in high school, I’ve loved it ever since.
Trello was the first tool on the market to offer a great Kanban experience. As you get to know me you will learn, that I think visuals are way better for supporting teams who need to share and translate knowledge.
Trello is by far the simplest project managemen tool I’ve ever used. In fact, I think lots of people who use it don’t even realize it is a project management software, which might be the best compliment for a project management software.
First, Trello digitized the sticky notes you had on your commandeered Kanban whiteboard. But these are no ordinary sticky notes. Instead, Trello’s “Cards” allow you to add rich details to them including embedding design files and quality assurance checklists to create an all-in-one ticket-like sticky.
Next, Trello organizes cards into a Kanban experience using “Lists” to organize the Cards. The beauty of this though is even though it is loosely based on Kanban, you can actually use any framework you like to organize the cards. For example, I often teach teams to create a visual Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) using a Trello board.
And that’s it. Just like that your team is off and running. They can even have conversations about their work within the platform keeping all their discussions right on the relevant Card for easy future reference. No more hunting for emails, or trying to remember what Larry said in Monday’s meeting.
Sure, you’ve got labels, and stickers, and automation fun, and many many integrations and other fun things to play with, but really, using just two simple steps your team can go from analog to digital with ease.
And perhaps Trello’s greatest feature, with a free account you can run 10 projects with unlimited cards and lists.
An interesting read
As generalist PMs we will often be dabbling about in organizational strategy. We just can’t help ourselves, the big picture is always top of mind.
But dabbling can be tricky.
Strategy is a capability that a shocking number of businesses struggle with. In fact in their Strategy Crisis report, the team at Strategy& revealed that 1 in 5 companies has no list of strategic priorities.
Image credit: Unsplash
Another source of problems with strategy is the mismatch between culture and strategy. This week’s read comes from the team at strategy + business and discusses this problem and how to overcome it.
If you don’t have time to read it now, here’s the Coles Notes:
Working on a strategy that isn’t a fit for your culture means you are trying to pursue a strategy that your organization isn’t ready for. The remedy for this is to identify the gap between your culture and your strategy and then quantify it so that you can right size your strategy’s ambition.
Conduct a comprehensive survey of your organization beyond just employee engagement.
Define the key cultural traits of the organization using the survey results.
Compare the cultural traits with the capabilities required for the strategy to succeed.
Magnify the traits that support the company’s strategy.
Identify a small number of key gaps and identify critical behaviors that can be used to slowly evolve culture toward the desired state to address these gaps. Emphasis on the *small* number.
A tip
We’ve all done it. We’ve all experienced it. Sometimes interactions with colleagues go wrong. But it is important to remember that when this happens, you can control how you respond. And this might be a critical action that helps turn the situation around.
Here’s two things I always remember:
Assume positive intentions - this means that you give the person the benefit of the doubt and even if their email sounded pissy or they gave you a look in the meeting, just assume you read it wrong and they meant well. Doing this releases your judgement and engages understanding instead.
We all need to learn to appreciate each other’s styles. So even though you got interrupted by someone enthusiastically jumping in with an idea that just came to them. Even though Bill raised his voice unnecessarily in the meeting. Even though you had to wait 5 minutes to get a word in edgewise. Remember that each team member brings their own unique self to the team and this means that both the good and the bad come together. Our diversity is our strength, not our weakness. Doing this allows you to appreciate your colleagues as individuals who share diverse perspectives. This helps foster an inclusive team culture that can challenge each other. And these teams because highly-innovative, successful teams, if everyone can buy in.
Two simple things, fully in your control, that can change the destiny of everyone.
A lesson
Well here we are at the end. It seems today’s musings have a bit of a theme around gaps. First we talked about a model that can help someone learn about their own gaps to improve their own development. We learned also about quantifying the gap between culture and strategy to assess whether we will have strategic success. Lastly we learned about how there may be a gap between how someone communicates and how we perceive their communication - a gap that is fully in our control. This leaves only one gap left to discuss and it is an important one.
The gap between tool readiness and tool implementation.
This gap is important. 75% of organizations are not using a project management software. Which means a whole pile of you work for organizations that are trying to implement one.
And likely failing.
Why?
Most likely it is because your organization really isn’t managing projects.
How do I know this?
Well because most of you are using Excel to “manage your projects”.
Apart from reminding you that an accounting tool isn’t able to help you manage projects, I will share, that most commonly organizations using Excel are managing tasks, not projects.
This is the number one red flag that project management isn’t established.
Which is also probably pretty likely because only 46% of organizations make project management a cultural priority.
So the lesson here is - you don’t need a tool, until you have a certain baseline for project management.
Here’s your benchmark.
An organization that is ready for a project management tool will understand the following:
All the projects it has
Who works on projects and what roles they play
How to consistently execute
How to learn from project lessons
That project management expertise is needed to continue improving
When you’ve closed the gap on these 5 things you won’t have a tool gap and you can implement a tool that suits your culture and your team.