Get Re-Acquainted with your Team
Sport OR work team warm-ups are important
This is a great time for leaders to get re-acquainted with their team.
And yet, and yet… you’re still seeing down-in-the-dump faces in your virtual team meetings. You feel as if some people are just going through the motions rather than being intentional about their work. You’re sensing polarized attitudes. Some people have expressed that they would rather work on their own. You notice some distrust between team members, which is worrying because you know that trust is necessary in order for people to feel psychologically safe.
Psychological safety is important in teams. Without it, folks won’t be able to respond effectively to risks and challenges. They certainly won’t be able to come up with creative solutions to problems, let alone an innovative product, service, or internal system.
Where tension exists, providing a human moment that everyone can share will help people do the work at hand with a common understanding and goal.
There are two ways to provide the environment for this, and they go hand-in-hand.
First… calibrate.
If you want to improve your team’s ability to solve problems creatively and elegantly, this is a good time to re-calibrate: review the mission, and check that everyone is in sync with the organization’s – and your team’s – values.
Next… invite curiosity, fun, and discovery.
In Light Bulb Thinking™, Phase 2 is all about Ideating… fall about laughing on the floor brainstorming, and ridiculous ideas that could actually lead to your next innovation.
Even before that… warm up.
What I’m about to advocate, though, happens before Ideating, and even before Planning (Phase 1):
A warm-up. Sports teams use them all the time to warm up their muscles, practice drills and plays and, here’s the important thing,… to create a strong team.
Warming up is equally important for work-based teams. It’s a chance to rekindle curiosity about teammates, to discover new things about each other, to wake up the empathy muscle (also important for designing a positive customer experience), and to laugh together (which stimulates the feel-good, brain-based enzyme dopamine).
Getting these muscles firing up front will grease the gears for creative problem-solving. Build a warm-up into the beginning of meetings on a regular basis – it doesn’t have to be long; five minutes is all you need. You may find that eventually people will want them at the beginning of every meeting!
If you’d like to know more about how I help leaders and teams solve problems more creatively and use warm-ups to open the door to kickass innovation, contact me at Ellia@ThePotentialCenter.com to arrange a free phone consult.
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With the right support, any individual, team, and organization can learn creative ways to solve problems. I’m hired by visionary leaders to bring serious fun and creative problem-solving to the workplace. Using Light Bulb Thinking™, we create a kickass culture of innovation.
The Light Bulb Thinking™ framework demystifies and simplifies the creative problem-solving and innovation processes, and opens the door to fresh ideas and stronger teams.
Would you like to see what tapping into creative potential could look like for your team or organization? Arrange an exploratory call - email me at Ellia@ThePotentialCenter.com.
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