It is widely recognized that ‘awareness’ is the first step towards ‘change’.
But in our hyperactive, always-on-the-move corporate world, where ‘noise’ is all around, how can we create ‘awareness’?
Well, maybe the first step is a bit counterintuitive… it’s to slow down and take some time to reflect. Take a moment to ask these questions:
• What are we doing well?
• What can we improve?
• What are our next steps?
Our Skillful Collaboration assessment is a tool that gives leaders and teams guidance for this reflection.
The Skillful Collaboration model is built around four places where teams practice the everyday human skills of collaboration.
The first is during conversations: How well do you as a team actually talk, listen, and think together? Do you give voice to your ideas and your concerns? Do you listen to learn from each other? Do you create new thinking together, or are you stuck in old thought and behavioural patterns?
The second is when making decisions: The logic for this being the second place is simple — if you can’t have skillful conversations in a team, then how can you possibly make skillful decisions together? And as you make decisions, what types of approaches or processes do you use? Who has the authority to decide? How are you acknowledging and overcoming your biases? And how do you ensure commitment to the decisions?
The third is all about team meetings: teams make decisions in meetings, right? So with this awareness, how do you structure your meetings accordingly? How many decisions can you actually ‘fit’ in a meeting? Who do you invite? Who will facilitate the process? And what is the intention of each agenda point? All critical thoughts — even before you start the meeting itself.
And fourth, we get to my favourite ‘place’ — Learning through Peer Coaching: when teams are having skillful conversations, making skillful decisions, and running skillful meetings, how can they stop from time to time, get onto the balcony, and observe themselves — as 1:1 peers and as a team — with an intention to continuously improve their ways of working and their relationships?
This framework gives teams awareness of how they can approach collaboration!
And the Team Assessment creates awareness (the step towards change) of how the team are currently collaborating together.
Would you like to be the first to get this awareness in your team?
Why not slow down right now and take five minutes to complete our assessment?
The individual assessment is free — here’s the link.
