Check out the Team Habits Resources and Worksheets
Check out the Team Habits Resources and Worksheets
Three worksheets to guide your team's rocket practice
Now that Team Habits is out and in your hands (I hope), I wanted to loop back around and make sure you're aware of the resources we've created as companions to the book. They'll help you with the rocket practice ahead of you.
Long-time readers know that I love creating worksheets and aids for the ideas I share. We've created 17 worksheets ranging across the entire book, but I'm going to share the three today that I think will be catalytic for the most people.
Depending on interests and requests, we may make Word/Notion/Google versions of some of these, but I've decided to start the roll-out with PDFs since they'll work for everyone with no training and won't send people on a tool rabbit trail. Printing them out to use in your solo and team brainstorming is probably going to work better, too. (Unless you have a broken printer, in which case, maybe that's the first thing to work on. 😜)
“5 Transformational Team Habits” Is A Great Primer for Today’s Post
I recorded “5 Transformational Team Habits” with Jonathan Fields a little over a month ago (while I had COVID) so you may have missed that one, too. During the conversation, I discussed the three levels of decisions and opening meetings with non-work wins.
You can click the link or listen below:
Okay, let's get into today's worksheets. I’ll share screenshots first so you get the gist from the content and you can download the worksheets if you want to use them.
The "Remove Decision-Making Bottlenecks" Worksheet
Spreading who can make decisions is an incredible force multiplier for a team. It decreases the need for a lot of team chatter, removes stagnation, and cuts unnecessary meetings that essentially revolve around who makes the decision.
This worksheet takes the three levels of decisions from pages 68-71 and applies them to a specific project. It's often easiest to see what decisions can and need to be made in the context of specific projects, so it gives the double benefit of guiding your team to get smoother and faster progress on a project as well as working through the model.
Because 'project' is a pretty flexible word, it can easily be applied to larger-level initiatives. For instance, opening a new market or launching a new product are projects. Use the flexibility of 'project' to your advantage here.
Suggestion: whenever you see an L3 decision, get clear about why it's a Level 3. Schedule another team discussion block to discuss how those types of decisions are made so that the team can know what to feed the team leader and higher-ups.
The "Meeting Template" Worksheet
As I was writing this chapter, I knew people would want a meeting template worksheet. I also knew they'd probably want templates per meeting type but that would get out of hand quickly. Over the last 16 years, I've learned the hard way that having 18 different worksheets for the same thing makes things worse.
Sure enough, about half of our advance readers asked for a meeting template.
This meeting template doesn't fill in all the blanks for you, but it has the essentials. Six rows of meeting types are ample for the different blocks of a meeting.
For example, if you open with Non-Work Wins, that's a row and may take 5-10 minutes, depending on the size of your team.
Closing with the next action blocks (that are seeded in the second part of the worksheet, shown below) will take 5-10 minutes, even if you capture them as you go along.
So, for a standard one-hour meeting, that gives you about 40 minutes to get into a topic. Lots of people are going to be tempted to try to squeeze more in by giving other blocks 5 minutes, but the reality is that if something can be explained in five minutes, an async update is probably a better medium for that.
Suggestion: rather than trying to get more topics covered in a meeting, spend more time on individual topics where there can be a conversation.
That 40 minutes would be better spent on one or two essential and powerful topics or activities that are best done through real-time conversation. Practicing this will get in-the-work or in-the-projects conversations with the 2-3 people working on those projects, rather than the full team who doesn't need to know or be involved. (Note that this worksheet dovetails nicely with the one above; Level 2 and 3 decisions may need to be surfaced during a full-team meeting, but Level 1s amount to chatter.)
The "Pick Your First Habit" Worksheet
The main goal of this worksheet is to get you to focus on one category and small habits to change.
For instance, capturing the next actions at the end of meetings is a tiny team habit. As might be keeping the meetings to 30 minutes long.
Practicing "Shoot, Move, Communicate" (from Chapter 10) is a tiny team habit.
The second step of the worksheet (shown below) helps you articulate and anticipate positive and negative effects. Remember, when you change a team habit, it creates both positive and negative effects.
To continue the conversation about subtracting meeting blocks, the "negative" effect that it might create is that people working on a project will need to figure out how to talk shop about that project themselves rather than having a default time during the team meeting. The project will probably start slipping if they don't create that time.
Anticipating those "negative" effects helps your team avoid the predictable downstream effects. They'll often discover that the activities they need to do to account for the new team habit actually work better for them.
In the example of project buddies needing to find their own time to talk, they may see that they can go deeper and have better conversations without feeling like they need to explain what's going on with people who aren't in the project. Or maybe they see that they can have two short project check-in conversations a week at times that work best for them without having to triangulate that with the rest of the team. (And, again, the Levels of Decisions worksheet helps because it’ll help them guide the scope of their conversations and when they need to loop someone else in.)
Regular Updates on Team Habits Content Ahead
The last few months have been a whirlwind, especially with me getting COVID the week before and during the book launch.
But I’ve also been stuck on a few things related to Substack for a couple of months that I’ve gotten a lot of clarity about over the last few weeks. I’m also excited to share another resource with premium subscribers today or tomorrow, too.
Thanks for bearing with me as I got well and sorted.