Too many people try to understand a team's performance by looking at its individuals, which wastes precious time, money, and talent and overlooks the reality that an individual's behavior is heavily influenced by the way the team works together. In “Team Habits”, Charlie Gilkey, founder of the coaching and training company Productive Flourishing, reveals how to improve any team's habits in a way that leads to bottom line, companywide results while also improving belonging, morale, and engagement.
We typically work most directly with a small group of no more than 10 people, and in that team, we have a high degree of influence. Charlie Gilkey, an internationally known thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people, explains how changing our team's habits can change our company's culture since that culture is always just an aggregation of its various teams' work habits.
We all know how important habits are for personal effectiveness, success, and happiness. We can apply many of the same principles and insights about personal habits to our teams. When we do, not only do we accrue the personal benefits for ourselves, but we accrue them with and for our team. If small habit changes lead to powerful results for individuals, imagine what it can do for teams. Focusing on improving how people work together at the team level means there's no need for a top—down initiative or sign—off by the higher—ups to start making our working lives better.
How a team schedules its meetings is a team habit, as is whether and how they share agendas before the meeting. How teammates loop others into emails or Slack messages is a team habit, as is whether they have the practice of cc'ing or group—bombing everyone to make sure they cover their bases. How teammates communicate about being uninterruptible, or that they are never uninterruptible, are team habits. These team habits explain how we can like the people we're working with and feel like we want the same things yet find ourselves regularly flummoxed about how hard it is to work with them.
“Team Habits” offers a Team Habits Quiz, allowing readers to discover the patterns and areas for improvement on their business team. Gilkey offers tips on Communication ("What needs to be communicated NOW versus what can wait"), Meetings ("The ultimate question to determine whether your meeting was worth it"), Belonging ("Why getting your teammate coffee isn't about the coffee"), and much more.
