Posts Tagged ‘blind spots’ Blog Index

Having managed virtual teams in the past, one of the key challenges I faced was engaging my team and ensuring they were consistently focused on the behaviors and actions need to achieve our objectives. As managers, we’re judged based on our team’s results so ensuring that your team is aligned and your blind spots are minimized is paramount!

Here are a few simple techniques that can have a tremendous impact:

1. Have regular 1:1s. In the remote world there are no water cooler chats. No break-room conversations. This means that keeping up to date with what your people are working on requires both of you to make an effort! First step: set aside 15 on your calendar at least every 2 weeks to sync-up. Talk about:
   • activities
   • accomplishments
   • blockers
   • upcoming deliverables.

   Deb Richardson from Mozilla recently outlined a great strategy for having 1:1’s. This shouldn’t be a micro-management activity….rather the process should be collaborative with both parties contributing to the discussion. The key is staying in sync. All too often we assume that when our people are out of sight and not asking for help that everything is just fine. Stay focused!

   Bonus technique: when having 1:1’s with remote employees use a video conferencing solution like Skype. The extra human touch will add a high value personal dimension to the interaction.

2. Share recognition. Ken Blanchard’s classic business book, The One Minute Manager,  talks about feedback on results being the #1 motivator of people. Unfortunately, with remote team members it’s easy to overlook the small but important things people do to drive results for the business: delivering above and beyond customer service to a key client, or going out of your way to help a colleague meet a deadline are both behaviors than can easily go unrecognized. As a manager, missing out on these moments not only means you’re losing opportunities to motivate the individual with some well-time kudos, but you’re also missing out on opportunities to demonstrate to the rest of  your team what desired behavior looks like!

   So the next time you hear of any recognizable action, share it with the rest of your team. Not only will you help engage them but you’ll be helping to set the performance bar ever-higher!

3. Use feedback to make virtual life better. From the mail room to the executive suite, every employee in your company has ideas on how their team or organization can work better together. This goes double for remote employees who sometimes struggle to stay connected to the mother ship. From web conferencing techniques to weekly team email updates, as a manager, your responsibility is to get these insights out into the open where you can act on them! So how do you do this? ASK! For example, every month consider asking your team for ONE suggestion to improve visibility and communication across the group (refer to my post on making one thing your superpower for more insight into this technique).

   By revealing these operational blind spots and incorporating even small recommendations into your routine, you’ll notice tremendous results and productivity gains with each passing month!

Additional Resources

There are certainly no shortage of resources out there to help managers understand how best to manage and connect with remote team members. Some focus on a comprehensive list of principles and strategies, while others offer a few quick tips.

Tags: 1:1, blind spots, deb richardson, dria, Feedback, geography, ken blanchard, Mozilla, one minute manager, one-on-one, recognition, remote team, Tips, tricks, virtual team

Product & Community

58590 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/3-tips-for-focusing-your-virtual-team/3+tips+for+focusing+your+virtual+team2010-07-05+15%3A01%3A40David+Priemer

This is part one in the Johari Windows posts. You should start here and then read the follow-up Gazing through my Johari Window for the results of the exercise.

Those of you who took any psychology courses in university probably remember needing to have someone wrench you from the depths of a self-induced  self-diagnosis abyss. I clearly remember paging through my Psych 101 textbook and becoming increasingly anxious with each turned page as I realized that I was suffering from an unbelievable combination of manic depression, multiple personality disorder, ADD, sociopathic tendencies, and a litany of other debilitating disorders. If you were looking for me by the end of the semester, you would have found me curled in the fetal position under my desk, crying and breathing shallowly into a paper bag.

Which brings us to the most important thing I learned in that class: self-diagnosis is useless. There’s a good reason your doctor rolls her eyes when you walk in with a sheaf of ‘medical’ information from the Internets, ranting and raving about how you’ve only got a few minutes to live. It’s the same reason that we all need feedback from our colleagues, clients, and mentors to properly understand our own performance. Marshall Goldsmith, renown executive coach, wrote an excellent book about the value of feedback called What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Among many, many other excellent points, Marshall has this to say on the topic of self-diagnosis:

For one thing, I’m a little skeptical of self-diagnosis. Just as people tend to overestimate their strengths, they also tend to overrate their weaknesses. They think they’re really bad at something at which they’re only mediocre or slightly poor — an F when they’re really a C minus. In other words, they see cancer where a professional would see a muscle pull.

The book obviously has a lot to say about feedback, which is where it gets really interesting for us. Section three (How We Can Change for the Better) starts off with a description of Johari Windows:

Psychologists have all sorts of schemata to explain us to ourselves. One of the more interesting ones is a simple four-pane grid known as the Johari Window (named after two real characters, Joe and Harry). It divides our self-awareness into four parts, based on what is known and unknown about us to other people and what is known and unknown about us to ourselves.

Turns out that Johari Windows were created by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham back in 1955 to help people better understand their interpersonal communication and relationships (more info). The window is divided into four panes — or rooms — as follows:

The actual exercise is conducted by giving the subject a list of 55 adjectives (e.g.: bold, dependable, ingenious — see the full list) and asking him or her to pick five that describe themselves. Their peers are then given the same list and asked to pick the same number of adjectives to describe the subject. The resulting set of words is then plotted onto the grid, with shared adjectives in Public, asker-only ones in Private, and peer-only ones in Blind Spots.

Blind Spots (the circled pane) is the most interesting one and the premise that Rypple is built on. The people around you — your colleagues and clients, your family and friends — know things about you that you don’t know and those things may be holding you back. Think about how powerful the knowledge in the Blind Spots box really is and about how much more successful it would make you to tap into it (not necessarily in the monetary sense). A small sample of the kinds of things you can learn:

• From your team: your real value as a team member or leader. The ways you could be a better contributor and your team could be more efficient and productive. The things you already do well and don’t realize make a difference.
• From your clients: real visibility into the status of your accounts. Honest assessments of your sales staff. Real understanding of competitors and opportunities.
• From friends, family, coworkers: the annoying habits you have and don’t know about. The ways in which you could be a better friend, spouse, or parent. The strengths you may not know you posses or ways in which you’re hard on yourself when other people aren’t.

Those are just a few examples to give a sense of the possibilities. I’m sure you have no trouble thinking of things you’d like to know!

The Great Rypple Johari Experiment

I was inspired by this new found knowledge and decided to conduct a little experiment. I’ve sent a Rypple to the whole team and asked them to visit the Wikipedia page and choose six adjectives that describe me, and I’m doing the same while I wait for their responses. I’ll plot out what comes back to build my grid and will report back on the results as soon as I have them.

Results are up! Check out the follow-up Gazing through my Johari Window for more Johari goodness.

Tags: arenas, blind spots, customer outreach, decision support, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, harry ingham, johari windows, josephy luft, marshall goldsmith, peer review, personal review, private knowledge, professional development, psychology 101, public knowledge, quick polls, rooms, Rypple, self-diagnosis, team review, unknowable, what got you here won't get you there

Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

24422 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/johari-window-blind-spots/Check+Your+Blind+Spot%3A+Rypple+and+the+Johari+Window2009-09-29+18%3A20%3A36Jay+Goldman