Team Coaching Experiment - Week 6 / Post 5

The software development team reported back on the two experiments from the week before: to find ways of connecting with one another outside of formal meetings and / or going via the project manager; and to share goals and priorities so as to inform one another of what is going on – and crucially, to ask for help on issues where experiencing some challenge or stuckness.  

The bulk of the team meeting became devoted to each sharing their ‘top 3 goals / priorities’.  Interestingly, some took the opportunity to go beyond work goals and to talk about their personal goals – which suggested some had really taken to heart the idea that the team discourse was too tilted towards Task and not enough towards Individual needs. 

There were some patterns in what I noticed as people expressed their goals, and also in how others responded, and so I provided some input around this at the meeting and, noticing we were rushed for time and in speaking quickly and in English some may have struggled to fully understand, I followed up with this note below….

A follow up / summary from Monday’s team call.

1.      Write down and share your top three priority areas or goals.  These can be work or personal related.  

2.     It’s difficult to know how to ask for help.  Frame the issue, succinctly, from your perspective and let others decide how they might be able to help.  

3.     Offering ‘help’.  Our desire is often to want to help, to be of service, to fix the problem.  We can be of more value or ‘help’ when:

• We ask questions that help the person reframe or make sense of the issue, rather than seeking to give our answer;
• We ‘listen to learn’ rather than listen seeking to fix or to win.  Because we live in a task-orientated and often competitive world, our listening can be quite shallow.  We listen to the point where we think ‘I have the answer!’ and / or ‘I have a better idea’.  In the suggested video, Jennifer Garvey Berger (one of the world’s best authors on how humans can grow to meet their complex lives) suggests a special type of listening to get under the surface of the issue and get to the heart of why is the issue challenging?  Listening to learn is about getting to what’s really at stake.  We tend to get ‘stuck’ when aspects of our identity feel on the line.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrg_3KlAE6o

4.     Perspective Shifting (Perspektivwechsel) is a developmental capacity I am sure we come back to at another time.  Just as asking different questions can really move a person’s thinking on, so can perspective shifting – changing the position from which you view the issue or problem, trying to see if you can stand in the position or perspective of another.  You can use each other to help…..

I notice that I am leaning more and more on Jennifer Garvey Berger’s three Simple Habits for Complex Times so let’s give the reference here as I recommend as reading: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23673

We finished with a quick check out, reinforcing a simple reflection on what had gone ‘well’ and what would make it even better.  For a group that only two weeks ago had described themselves as “Calvinist”, “task-orientated” and “culturally less attuned to talking rather than doing” the benefits people had appreciated included: being able to share feelings, getting more personal, reflecting on the challenge of being willing to open up and ask for help, an opportunity to reflect on what was really important when writing down the goals, to see / gain alternative perspectives.  Some of the ‘even better if’ included: be more clear on whether work or personal goals or both (note to self; second week of being asked to be more clear), how to work on the struggles identified, and reporting back orally it was difficult to remember each person in detail (which the team have easily fixed by creating, unprompted, a shared digital notice board). 

The project manager / product manager is now on leave for the next few weeks but seems extremely content to let me experiment with his team whilst he’s away.  I know 25 years ago I would have been more controlling and perhaps also less trusting in leaving my team with a relative stranger.  Next week I am positioning a tool to help with ‘non-linear causality’ (for which I really need a better term – suggestions welcome).  The team are watching, in preparation, this short video which I created at the outset of the pandemic to share some of our thinking and tools more widely with those working from home and / or finding they had even more challenges or more time for learning on their hands.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI2B6sUsSWc&list=PLv7JV2ICVDWTkV2DdxJHEGzLZw6HAxZV0&index=5&t=262s

And what became of the corporate client?  My initial contact, disappointed that the corporate machine, has conspired to reject an experiment got in touch to offer to personally spearhead finding a suitable experiment.  We speak this week to see how we might take forward.