One element of creating successful teams at this time period is to engage in scenario based planning or pre-mortems. When I teach the From Vision to Action Leadership Training, I remind students that the best leaders are scouts, namely they explore an idea in order to obtain key information or perspective. As many have learned, the higher you go in an organization, the more you need to think rather than simply do. Thus, the concept of being a scout is not the physical act of scouting as much as the cognitive act of scouting, namely guiding a process whereby the company "explores" a strategic idea or concept in order to learn key information about how people are thinking and perceiving what is going on currently or possibly in the near future.
Years ago, I facilitated a morning long discussion about a possible scenario based on Congress making a series of choices related to funding non-profits and how the organization would respond both strategically and operationally. In the following year, Congress did not make all of the choices discussed but close to many of them. The outcome was that the organization handled it just fine. Folks were uncomfortable but they had already walked through it mentally. Therefore, they could handle it better.
Another way of doing this is to do a pre-mortem instead of a postmortem. The goal of a postmortem or after action report is to understand the cause of a past failure or success and the lessons learned. “In a pre-mortem, you imagine a future failure and then explain the cause,“ writes Jack B. Soll, Katherine L. Milkman, and John W. Payne in their article called “Outsmart Your Own Biases” in the May 2015 issue of the Harvard Business Review. This technique, also called prospective hindsight, helps you identify potential problems that ordinary foresight won’t bring to mind. The benefits of this kind of work is that it tempers optimism. We tend to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the effort needed to get something done. It also encourages a more realistic assessment of risk and helps prepare back-up plans and exit strategies.
As we do this level of work, we need to be very clear about what we mean by the word “team”. In all of our busy days during 2020 and the global pandemic, we forgot some things, namely that “… local experiences… are significantly more important than company ones.” This insight comes from Marcus Buckingham, Marcus and Ashley Goodall in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, Harvard Business Review Press, 2019. As they note, the truth is that people care which team they are on and that teams help us see where to focus and what to do. The big thing is that only on a team can we express our individuality at work and put it to highest use.
This week, ponder the following insight by Donald Miller: “Behind every successful person, there is one elementary truth. Somewhere, some way, someone cared about their growth.” Then, go out into life and be that kind of person.
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