Designing a team day on working to purpose
In December we ran our team day within the Research in Practice and Research in Practice for Adults events team. I pitched it as an opportunity to identify what ‘good looks like’ and as an opportunity for us to really figure out how we can support each other, which is going to be critical in the upcoming months. Having blogged previously about Servant Leadership, it was also a chance for the team to identify issues and to generate their own solutions (check out Neil Tamplin’s post on Turn the Ship Around for the rationale behind this).
I tried to design the day in a systemic way. We started by looking at our purpose so that we each had a good understanding of what we’re working to. It gave us a clear focus for the rest of the day and meant that we could reign ourselves in if we got carried away. It was the team day equivalent of agreeing the ground rules at the start of a training session. We also compared and contrasted these with Research in Practice and Research in Practice for Adults’ own five year aims and how they fit together.
Our team goals
How would we know when we are working well? We grouped our ideas into key themes, which helped us to get consensus around our goals. This part was really about understanding what a good events team looks like. It gave us benchmarks for success and indicators that will tell us when we’re on the right track.
Behaviours
What behaviours would we each be demonstrating if we were meeting our goals and how would we demonstrate these behaviours?
We used Diamond Ranking to prioritise these (which is taken from a brilliant handbook of facilitation techniques for community development), with the most important at the top. By ranking the behaviours as a group, we encouraged discussion and dialogue around what we expect from ourselves and our colleagues.
There’s some discussion in the wider world about how appraisals add value. I’ll be feeding the outputs from this exercise into our own one to one meetings because it gives us the opportunity to take ownership of the process by identifying as a team what good looks like.
On the suggestion of my colleague Ami, we then tweaked the format by creating our own personalised diamonds to highlight the behaviours that we each deemed to be important as individuals. This was really useful as it helped us to better understand what our colleagues wanted from their co-workers.
Value work
Our last exercise was around understanding how we create value for Research in Practice and Research in Practice for Adults. What are the most important things that we do to keep the show on the road? Could we do these better?
Thanks to Dez Holmes for the suggestion of using Stephen R. Covey’s Circles of Influence here. It helped us to think about the positive, pre-emptive steps that we can take to improve what we do. It helped us to think about what was within our gift to change, where we could talk to others to influence change and what was out of our control. As a team we identified potential actions that we could take, what steps I could take forward as a line manager, and I also sent the outputs to our Director and Assistant Directors to open up conversations about issues that were outside of our scope of influence. This also helped to show to everyone that the day wasn’t a waste of time, and the subsequent messages showed what was likely to change as a result.
It’s too early to evaluate the success of the day as a whole as it was set up to look at how we work in the longer term. If anyone does want to take this forward and to adapt it to suit your own needs, I’d love to hear from you about how you do that. Good luck!
