Improve your Team Culture with this 15-minute routine.

Improving team culture is a challenge that is universal to all leaders. At their roots, teams work best with a shared purpose, good communication, and collaboration. Like a rowing team, everyone must have a cadence for working together and rowing in the same direction. One of the primary roles of a leader is to bring talented people together, create that cadence, provide guidance, and help them to achieve more together than they could apart. Implementing Recognition, Obstacle, and Win (ROW) meetings can help leaders achieve these goals. ROW meetings improve communication, encourage recognition and bring visibility to obstacles in a time-efficient and effective way.

ROW meetings are about developing a cadence for communicating the good and bad things happening in a business. These meetings are typically 15 to 20 minutes long. Each participant comes to the meeting prepared with a 2-minute recap of their week. The summary should include recognizing one person for doing a great job, one obstacle they needed help with, and one team win they wanted to celebrate. Since each participant only has 2 minutes, it forces them to be brief and only focus on the highlights. These recaps should mirror the trailer for a movie. The goal is to provide enough information for people to know what is happening in the person's area of responsibility. If anyone attending the meeting is interested in learning more, they can follow up after the meeting with questions or suggestions.

Recognition of Employees

One of the hallmarks of a good culture is recognition. Adam Grant and Francesa Gino's research has shown that expressions of gratitude can help build employees' self-efficacy and social worth, motivating them to engage in prosocial behavior. Thanking employees for a job well done is one of the best ways to improve a team's culture. Employees go to work every day, doing their job, and many never hear a thank you from their peers or boss. Organizational culture improves when leaders maintain a process for slowing down, considering the contributions made by those ad them, and expressing gratitude.

A supplemental benefit of this routine is how it supports people in getting to know each other. During group meetings, there is a tendency for some extroverts to dominate conversations and for everyone else to listen. The imbalance of communication can create group thinking and blind spots within a team. The two-minute target for each participant ensures that everyone has an equal opportunity to communicate. More value is generated during the meeting because there is a greater diversity of thought and inclusion of everyone's ideas.

Sharing of Obstacles

Each participant will share one obstacle they needed help solving. Initially, leaders might be uncomfortable voicing challenges if it is different from the norm within the organization. It is common for employees to be private about the barriers preventing their success until they have done everything possible to solve the issue independently. The hesitation to share challenges creates unneeded pressure within organizations and can slow down the removal of obstacles. By individuals being vulnerable in the group setting, other participants that have prior experience with similar obstacles can assist the person in need. In addition, when there is a commonality in challenges, participants can partner together to find solutions.

Obstacles are like weeds that prevent organizations from reaching their full potential. Employees within organizations do their best to pull weeds. Often the process is long and complex because employees need more tools, resources, and power to address complex issues. Managers are essential in getting employees the tools they need to overcome barriers. The ROW meetings provided a cadence for managers to check in with employees. As they inquire about challenges, they can provide tips and guidance for addressing opportunities. If they cannot solve the problem at their level, the manager can bring it to the meeting and seek advice and support from the team.

Celebrating Wins

The final segment of the recap is a review of wins for the week. Celebrating successes is essential for locking in learning. In Whitney Johnson's book Smart Growth, she evangelizes celebration's role in cementing lessons learned and strengthening relationships. Leaders work hard to drive results. Time must be allocated for them to feel the joy of their team's accomplishment. Sharing of wins provides examples of excellence for the broader group. It also creates opportunities for individuals to be more aware of success outside their direct business, which can both motivate and inspire others to greatness.

Talking about team wins during group meetings helps the team focus on the big picture. Most organizations operate in silos. For information to be shared, it has to flow up one silo to the leader and then back down another silo. The multiple communication points can be slow and weaken the benefit of the message. Often this results in team members focusing too much on their silo and not dedicating time or energy to thinking about what is vital for the overall organization. Good teammates care more about winning the game than their individual performance. By celebrating the wins generated across the different teams, the collective group can take pride in the overall organization's progress.

Insights

Weekly meetings can be an excellent way for a leader to do a temperature check with the team. When things are going well, meetings will be super positive, high energy, and upbeat. The organization will feel healthy, similar to a person with a 98 degrees temperature. When the obstacles are growing or when stress rises, the meeting will have a completely different feel. There will be more negativity. People will struggle more with finding and talking about wins. And the group will spend more time discussing obstacles. When this occurs, it will feel like the organization has a fever. Just as you would take an aspirin and get some rest at the first signs of a fever, it will be necessary for the leader to take steps to bring the team's temperature down collectively. The best way to address the tension is to recalibrate goals and verify that project timelines are realistic.

Summary

The ROW meeting approach can effectively establish a culture of recognition, positivity, and accountability within the team. It will ensure that every member of the team speaks during each meeting. It encouraged them to spend 66% of their time talking about positive events in the last week and only 33% of the time on obstacles. It challenges them to prioritize, summarize and be direct with their communications. Recaps will be 2 minutes, so there is not much fluff. Speakers must communicate what is essential and pass the spotlight to the next person.

The call will be engaging because multiple voices will be heard, and the topic of conversation will be focused on the remarkable things that are happening in the business. Team members will find it refreshing to get obstacles brought to the table, and the group will feel a greater sense of cohesion as they discuss ways to solve problems after the calls. Implementing this 15-minute-a-week routine can do a lot to improve the culture of an organization. The practices leaders establish say a lot about who they are and what is essential. Leaders who build routines around recognizing team members, capturing obstacles, and celebrating wins build a strong foundation of trust within their organization. The very trust needed to build a strong culture.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching services for managers, executives, and small business owners.

For tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

Interested in working with an executive coach?

Why work with an Executive Coach?

When I tell people that I am an executive coach, one of the first questions I hear is, what does an executive coach do? If you break down the words, executive means administrative or managing responsibilities, and coach means instructing or tutoring. At its most basic level, an executive coach helps individuals learn how to be better administrators and managers. But they really do so much more. An executive coach is an important partner that can help leaders reach their full potential by helping them to understand better who they are and who they want to be. Professional tennis players like Serena Williams who are looking to perform at their highest level work with a tennis coach. The same is true of top-tier singers like Beyonce, who frequently work with vocal coaches to help them expand their range, sing with more strength, and perform at a consistently high level. Professional athletes, vocal performers, and other professionals who work with specialized coaches know that no matter how good an individual is, there is an opportunity to be better and more consistent by working with a knowledgeable coach. Executive coaches can do for executives and managers what sports coaches do for athletes. Coaches help people to pause, reflect, learn, and continuously improve. One of the best-kept secrets of top-performing business executives and owners is that they work with executive coaches. Executive coaches are not discussed much but are essential to how talented executives and business owners reach their full potential.

My experience working with a coach

I worked with an executive coach when I was first promoted to Vice President of Operations. It was indeed a life-changing experience for me. The coach I worked with helped me to

• Clarify my professional goals

• Reflect on who I was a leader

• Define who I want to be

• Take on new perspectives

• Build new skills

• Be more strategic

The clarity I gained from working with a coach helped me feel more confident as I transitioned into a role that carried significantly more scope and responsibilities than any of my previous roles.

Clarify my professional goals

One aspect the coach helped me with was clarifying my professional goals. For most of my career, I focused on climbing to the next rung on the ladder. This served me in my career because it drove me to identify how I could excel in my current role. I knew I must first demonstrate mastery in my current role to advance. I would also take time to understand what skills, knowledge, and network were necessary to be successful in the next role, and I would spend time building toward those future needs. I felt like I had made it to the mountaintop for the first time in my career. I landed my ideal job of being an operations leader in geography close to my extended family. I could build an organizational culture, influence strategy, and run a multi-state business. With no next role to work towards, I had to re-evaluate how I would define success. My

coach helped me to explore my values, define my priorities and put words to what I wanted to accomplish going forward. For me, the goal was improving the quality of my employees' and Franchisees' lives. I knew that we had opportunities within our culture. Employees felt overworked and undervalued. Franchisees felt under-supported and unheard. I made it my mission to listen more than I spoke and to work on behalf of the employees and Franchisees within my zone to simplify operations, streamline priorities, and refocus our attention on serving customers and driving profitable growth.

Reflect on who I was as a leader.

After we explored what I wanted to do, we spent time researching how I would do it. As you move into higher levels of management, your role shifts from being

• an individual contributor responsible for managing yourself.

• to a manager of managers responsible for managing others

• to a functional manager accountable for segments of a business

• to a business manager responsible for the overall business

• to a group manager responsible for multiple businesses

• to an enterprise manager accountable for all operations

Each of these shifts requires developing new skills and changing how you spend your time. As you move up the ladder, you spend less time doing and more time leading. For example, one of the things that I greatly enjoy doing is building spreadsheets and analyzing data. This skill helped me stand out from my peers early in my career. I allocated hours weekly to building and analyzing data which enabled me to build my business acumen, improve my judgment and anticipate emerging trends. Now that I was in a senior executive role, spending time putting spreadsheets together was no longer the best use of my time. Every time that I built a spreadsheet myself, I was

• robbing someone junior to me the opportunity to build their data analysis skills

• reducing the amount of time, I had for other leadership activities

• not leveraging the skills and knowledge of others

My coach helped me understand that what got me into this role was not what would help me thrive. That I was more than a data analyst. I was a strategic thinker, a communicator, a developer of talent, and an inspirational leader. For me to excel as a Vice President, I would need to be comfortable wearing many different hats and be purposeful in not wearing the hat that I wanted to wear but the one that was required at any given moment.

Define who I want to be

With a sound foundation for who I was, we were able to begin to craft who I wanted to be. This was one of the most enlightening parts of my working with the executive coach. I defined my leadership philosophy while pursuing my MBA and during other leadership development training. I felt grounded in my leadership approach and felt like it served me well, especially since it afforded me three promotions in the prior four years. As I began working with my coach, it became clear I was the leader that others wanted me to be and not the leader I wanted to be. To get ahead, I developed masks I would wear when dealing with Senior Leaders because I thought being myself would not be accepted. I need to be an "executive," which I had interpreted as being reserved, stoic, agreeable when dealing with senior leaders, resolute, never wrong, and willing to do anything to get ahead.

Wearing these masks was fatiguing. I

• am not a stoic person

• enjoy speaking my mind

• admit when I am wrong

• do not believe in winning at all costs

• enjoy a good debate

• care deeply about people

• am playful

• am a big believer in the health debate.

These are all aspects of myself that I readily showed to my direct reports but cautiously shared with company leadership. I am at my best in an environment that encourages creativity, the exploration of new ideas, openness to failure, comfort with conflict, and two-way communication. For the most part, this is the culture I had built underneath me. Through discussions with my coach, he encouraged me to define better the leader I wanted to be and try to help influence cultural change at the organization. He helped me believe that I could help be the change I wanted to see within the organization. It just required me to be myself, post great results, and communicate to others how leading differently could lead to better results.

Take on new perspectives

One of the skills that supported me in removing my mask was the time we spent exploring the different perspectives. He helped me to understand that I did not need different masks when dealing with people but different intentionality. When I interacted with Senior Leaders, they did not want me to be a yes-man that went along with everything they said. Being a yes man would lead us to make bad decisions because there was information that I had that Senior Leaders needed to lead the organization effectively. They did not want me to undermine their authority by challenging them during inappropriate times. If I was concerned about a policy or direction, they wanted me to address it at the proper time and place. In general, they preferred that I voice my concerns before making a decision. If a decision had been made and there was a need for a course correction, Senior Leadership's preference was for me to bring it to them privately and then to bring it up in group meetings. By slowing down and better understanding my leader's perspective, I was able to influence better and be more effective. My coach would encourage me to observe my actions from different vantage points.

• How would my peers look at what I was doing?

• How would my supervisor look at what I was doing?

• How would my direct reports look at what I was doing?

• How would my indirect reports look at what I was doing?

A leader's responsibilities were not to anyone stakeholder. Leaders have various stakeholders that are all looking to them for leadership. A leader can only perform at their highest level once they consider all of these perspectives and make the best decision based on the information they have. Leaders also need to be willing to learn and course correct when mistakes are made. Learning how to take different perspectives will help leaders to make fewer mistakes.

Be more strategic

One of the most significant changes you must make as you move up the corporate ladder is improving your strategic thinking. At higher levels of an organization, leaders must learn how to deal with scale, leverage, and resource constraints. The first and most important word that a leader must know is no. Learning to say no is essential because saying no, enables your organization to focus on the most critical priorities. When I took over the VP role, the biggest complaint of the team was

• priorities changed too frequently

• it was not clear what was important

• that we were asking people to do too much

Too many priorities, lack of clarity, and inconsistent vision are common challenges for businesses. The world is pregnant with possibilities, but you only have so much time and resources. As a leader, you must set the direction and define what is important. Keeping the team focused on what is important puts your organization in the best position to generate sustainable results.

Build New Skill

As mentioned earlier, moving to higher organizational levels requires you to develop new skills. An executive coach will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses through the coaching process. Then they will assist you in developing plans for building upon your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses. One important skill for me to develop was scanning for opportunities. When I found them, I needed to do a deep dive into problems, communicating a need for action to the person responsible for the issue and then giving them room to work without my interference. Everyone within an organization has a role and a responsibility. The role of a business manager is to provide guidance and direction to their employees. It is up to the employees to determine the best way to address the opportunity. To excel as a leader, you must be comfortable delegating, trust others, ask tough questions, and allow employees to take action without micromanaging. Employees need the opportunity to try, learn, fail, and succeed on their terms. This is the only way that they reach their full potential. This requires leaders to better evaluate risk, define objectives, establish trust, and create open lines of communication. Employees need to understand their leader is there to support them in accomplishing their goals.

Summary

Working with an executive coach can help you perform at a higher level regardless of your professional development phase. A trained executive coach is taught to

• Listen to their client and help them with self-discovery

• Challenge their client to identify limiting thoughts

• Engage their clients in thinking more deeply and from different perspectives

• Understand the role that emotions play in interactions with others

• Recognize stress and the impact that it has on decision making

• Develop strategies to help facilitate personal growth

• Identify values and the role they play in motivation

Business leaders seek out coaches because coaches can help them grow. This growth can be related to a new job, a performance challenge, or any other growth opportunity. If you are looking to grow as a professional, you should work with a coach.

Create Performance Development Plans that Really Work

Developing people is one of the most critical responsibilities of a leader. Whether running a multi-billion-dollar retail company or a small local restaurant, a company's success is directly linked to its ability to help its employee acquire and master new skills. As the capabilities of employees increase, so do the organization's capabilities. When employees improve their technical and soft skills, they enhance their company's ability to generate revenue, cut costs and improve customer satisfaction. There is an old saying that a general goes to war with the army they have, not the army they want. While this is true, a leader's army tomorrow can be better than the army they have today if they invest time, focus, and attention in helping their employees develop.

Establish Trust

Trust must be in place to help your employee establish an effective personal development plan. Trust is essential because it enables you and your employees to be honest about short- and long-term goals and what is necessary for each of you to help others achieve their goals. The employee, boss relationship works best when it is mutually beneficial. When you take the time to show your employees that you care about them and that you are looking out for their best interest, they will be more likely to care for you and to look out for your best interest. Leaders build trust over time through small acts such as listening, showing concern, holding confidentiality, and providing support.

Commit to using the tool

Once leaders establish trust, they can work with their employees to create personal development plans. Personal Development Plans are a highly effective tool for defining the areas that an employee wants to focus on developing, along with what actions they are committing to take. Much like any tool, it is only effective if used as intended. Hours are wasted annually by employees and supervisors working on Personal

Development Plans that are talked about once and then put away and forgotten for a year. Developing Personal Development Plans and not using them is like purchasing a shovel to help you plant flowers and then keeping it in your shed for an entire year. At the end of the year, you will have a shovel but no flowers. For this reason, leaders should re employee's personal development plans need to be a living document that is reviewed monthly. During each meeting, the supervisor and the employee should discuss every year by

• What was the plan?

• What results were generated?

• What did you learn?

• What changes need to be made to the plan?

Developing the plan

As leaders develop a Personal Development Plan, it is important to clarify the goals of the plan. First, there must be clarity on what the employee needs to improve to best help their career and the company. Many times, there are areas of employee performance that leaders would like to see improvements in, that the employees are not aware of being an issue. Before a leader ventures into the developmental opportunities, start the conversation by talking about what the employee is currently doing well. This is an important step because it helps to build the employee's confidence. It will also help to put them into a positive state of mind. Studies show that people are more engaged and creative when they have a positive mindset.

Next, a leader needs to discuss the areas of development that would best help the employee reach their goals. As a rule of thumb, a leader should share three positive areas that an employee is doing well in, for every developmental area that is discussed. During this discussion, it is important to make the distinction between what development can help them to excel in their current role, in addition; to what could help them prepare for their next opportunity.

Note, some employees will communicate that they are not interested in career advancement. They may do this for various reasons including previous disappointment around not receiving promotions in the past, lack of confidence in their ability, or a host of other reasons. If a leader believes an individual has the potential for career advancement let them know you believe in their potential and encourage them to be open to taking on more responsibilities. A leader may see something in them, that they do not see in themselves. By the leader communicating belief, they can inspire the employee to consider possibilities that they previously could not imagine.

Once there is alignment around the areas of focus, it is important to make sure there is a shared understanding of the urgency that opportunities should be addressed. As a leader, it is important to be clear with employees about the areas of their performance that need urgent attention. If an employee has a critical deficiency that is negatively impacting the company, and potentially putting their employment at risk this should be clear to the employee. There should be no ambiguity when it comes to performance deficiencies, and those should be handled through performance management conversations. When it comes to Personal Development Planning, the urgency should be driven by the employee. A leader can frame up the benefits of them moving fast, for example, if a promotion opportunity is coming, and it is in the employee's best interest to learn a new skill to qualify for the opportunity. But in general, the employee should own the pace of implementation of the plan.

As you conduct the personal development plan conversation with an employee, it is always good to ask them what areas of development they would like to work on. Many times, employees will demonstrate more energy and in persistence working on items they have selected on their own. For this reason, consider swimming with the current, and leveraging their existing energy towards achieving a developmental goal. As a leader discusses with them the items they would like to work on, it is beneficial to help them to understand how working on those items will help their career. For example, if a leader has a salesperson that would like to work on building on presentation skills, they can discuss how developing these skills will help them in their current role, in addition to helping them in future roles. This will help to give more incentive to pursue developing those skills.

Once a leader understands what the employee believes they should be focusing on developing, it is time to share with them the developmental areas that they believe could add value to their career. As a leader does this, it is important to communicate to them the benefit that they believe this developmental action will have on them in both the short and the long term. Going back to the example of the salesperson, if this individual has the desire to be a manager in the future, then one of the skills that they will need to develop is coaching and training skills. As the leader is talking with them about potential areas for growth. They can tell them that training others is a key skill for leaders to develop. The leader can encourage them to reflect on what makes them good at selling and ask if they would be interested in developing training for new hires. In developing this training, they would have the opportunity to work on putting together presentations, in addition to gaining experience training others. In this way, you are killing two birds with one stone. The employees get an opportunity to work on developing their presentation skills, while also gaining new experience in training others.

As a leader conducts personal development conversation, it is beneficial to identify 4 potential areas of development. One aspect of human nature that is universal is a desire for control. By a leader working with an

employee to identify multiple areas of development to work on, they empower them to choose where they want to focus their attention. As a leader and employee discuss the 4 potential areas, they should rate each on two variables. The amount of effort believed necessary to build the new skill or behavior and the amount of value it will generate.

The effort here is a very broad term. Effort should be considered in proportion to the time, money, and resources required to make progress on the desired skill or behavior. For example, if the employee decides that they want to improve their coaching skills, they could consider doing this by becoming a certified coach. It would be important to understand that the process generally takes a year, can cost over $15,000, and requires around a 180-hour commitment. Clearly defining the amount of effort required can help the leader and the employee discuss any constraints that might get in the way of the employee reaching their goal. This will help both parties determine if the effort required is worth pursuing.

When it comes to value, it is important to discuss the predicted value that will be added to the individual and to the company through the development activity. Value can be determined in many ways, but revenue growth, time savings, and improvements to customer experience are great places to start. For

example, if an employee is already very competent in developing presentations, they might want to take a new course on building power points. This course might be fun and interesting for the employee but may provide little incremental value to the company. It is important to discuss with the employee what value will be generated by the employee pursuing the activity.

Once the leader and employee have discussed the amount of value and effort related to each potential area of development, they can now work with the employee to prioritize which development opportunity to pursue first. The prioritization activity should help to guide the employee to identify what focus area would benefit them the most. Since this is not a perfect science, the leader and employee should not get stuck feeling like they have to execute the items that are low effort and high return. Logic would say the employee should focus their energy on these items, but the reality is that humans are not logical beings. Emotions drive behaviors. If an employee is dead set on doing an activity that falls in one of the other quadrants, don’t fight it. The most important thing is that the employee is growing professionally. Leaders frequently get stuck trying to get employees to develop in areas that they have limited interest or motivation to work in. When this happens time and energy are wasted trying to influence change vs accepting the employee for who they are and leaning into their strengths and passions. Follow the natural energy the employee has towards the areas they want to develop. This will allow the leader to help the

employee develop, while also building additional trust. There will always be another opportunity to revisit other developmental opportunities.

As the leader and employee finalize the Personal Development Plan, it is important to discuss what activities will come off the plate. Leaders have the tendency of working with employees on identifying what new actions, behaviors, or skills they want to see a person develop but walking away prior to getting into a discussion around divesting activities. Employees only have so much room on their plates, and leaders provide a great service to them when they help to prioritize what they should and shouldn't be working on. Employees' things-to-do lists are like full plates at a cookout. There are a lot of good things on them, but before you can add more, you have to take something off. If an employee’s plate is full, a leader should help them to decide how to make some space. Space can be made in three ways. They can make room by eating some of the food, which means working on their current task. Once they end a current

project, they will have space to add another. They can give some food to someone else, by delegating some of their tasks. Or they can throw some food away, which means just walking away from a project. Depending on the importance of the task on their plate to them and to the company a leader can help to determine how best to make room.

Leaders give a great gift to employees when they help them with personal development. Employees trust their leaders with their careers. The better able a leader is to develop talent, the more successful they will be in attracting great leaders, and delivering against their own professional goals.

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