chapter 13
Using Supercharged Teams and the 30 tools in your team
Whether you are working in a small or large team, face to face, in the same building or across the world from each other, this set of tools will help you as a team member or leader to reset your ways of working and achieve your goals by becoming a supercharged team.
It is up to you to use the tools in the way you feel will suit your team – there are no hard and fast rules. Each tool is intended to be useful as a stand-alone, and can be used as and when they are necessary. When you read the overview of the 30 tools (summarised here for your reference), you may already know which ones your team needs most. However, there are some that should be done in order. For example, you need to choose your team and set a goal before you agree what you will deliver and when.
What you will learn in this chapter:
- • How to use the 30 tools to supercharge your team.
- • How to decide which areas to focus on.
- • How to diagnose your team’s strengths and areas for improvement.
- • How to plan your supercharged teams workshop.
How to use the 30 tools
Chapter by chapter
When you create or join a team, agree to work through the book, chapter by chapter together. On a weekly or monthly basis, everyone in the team will read the same chapter, and decide which tool or tools are relevant for your team. Depending on the issues you want to cover and the time you have, set aside either a few hours, half a day or a full day to work these through. Ask different people in the team to volunteer to run each tool, rotating the facilitator role in turn so that everyone has a chance to prepare and lead an exercise, and have that same person be responsible for writing up the results and sending them to the team within a few days.
Prioritised issues
If you are in an existing team and there’s a particular issue that needs resolving, identify the chapters you need to focus on. You can do this by asking every member of the team to read chapter 1 and be ready to say the top two chapters, issues or tools they believe the team needs to focus on. Get the team to write their top two or three points on separate Post-its and share them in a team meeting, grouping similar answers together. Start by working on the area, chapter or tool with the most mentions.
One-off tools
If you’re in a team that’s working well and there’s no immediate issue to sort out, keep re-evaluating and resetting by choosing a tool to use each week or month as an energiser, team exercise or break from the team’s work. Give each person in the team the chance to choose the tool they want to do per meeting, making sure everyone in the team gets a chance to choose. Or, choose the tool randomly by asking someone to pick a number between 1 and 30 out of a hat, or ask your leader or stakeholder to pick a tool for the team to work on. The important thing is to always keep resetting your team, don’t stop. Things change, and the tools help you to keep the team fit for purpose and supercharged.
How to choose what to work on in your team
If it’s not immediately clear to you which tools your team will most benefit from, use this guide to help you choose. Supercharged Teams tools fall into four need areas:
- 1A strong foundation for teamwork:
- 2Planning for success
- 3How we behave together
- 4Increasing our chances of success
- • chapter 9: Get support from leaders
- • chapter 10: Engage your stakeholders
- • chapter 11: Build a new culture
As a team you may choose to focus on the main issues first, doing those tools, then coming back to the others as relevant. You could choose to focus on the tools in one need area only, or work on more.
If you’re not sure which area to focus on, you may find it useful to ask the team to decide using some team diagnostic questions.
Diagnostic questions
Ask your team, leaders and stakeholders to answer these questions to identify your team’s strengths and where there’s room for improvement in each area. Discuss each of these questions as a team before deciding which specific tools to use, or send these out in advance and ask team members to share their thoughts beforehand, combining the answers into themes that you then work through.
The foundations of great teamwork:
- • Do we need a team, do we have the right people in our team, do we have enough time to fully participate and are we motivated enough to achieve what we want to?
- • What are the strong foundations this team already has?
- • What do we need to do to improve the foundations of teamwork in this team?
Planning for success:
- • Do we know what we want to achieve, the project scope and how we will get there? Are we clear on outcomes, timing and deliverables?
- • Where are we aligned on what we want to achieve, and how?
- • What do we need to improve our vision, goals, roadmap or alignment?
How we behave together:
- • Have we clearly, deliberately and openly agreed the rules of engagement our team commits to that will help us to work together well? Are we clear how we will deal with or avoid conflict?
- • What are the strengths, talents and ways of working that help this team work well together?
- • What are the small and bigger issues we need to resolve or plan for?
Increasing our chances of success:
- • Do we have the right support we need from our leaders, and have we considered how to keep our stakeholders involved? Are we aware of the culture we work in and how that will affect our teamwork?
- • What will help us to keep leaders, stakeholders and the wider business on side?
- • What do we need to consider to anticipate any issues with leaders, stakeholders or the organisation if we want to succeed?
Once you know which areas you want to focus on, and the order of importance, plan a team workshop to use the tools in.
Supercharged team workshops
Depending on the time you have and the importance or urgency of the issue, consider the amount of time you have for a team workshop to run some or all of the tools you need in your team.
If you are working on a complicated project, allowing one full day to plan for success will definitely be worth the time you spend by saving you from setting off in the wrong direction. If there is a major issue that needs sorting out, but you have limited time, it is better to do something in two hours next week than wait a month for the time to do a four-hour session. If you can plan to do a two-hour workshop as soon as possible, then a four-hour session later on, it means you can decide closer to the time how to use the four hours well.
Here are four possible supercharged team workshop lengths, along with guidelines of how much you can achieve in each session:
Two-hour workshop
- • One chapter, and one tool.
- • Prep work for each team member will take 30 minutes (to be completed before the session).
- • Share the prep work in the session and identify key themes, ideas and ways forward.
- • Agree who will action the outputs.
Half-day workshop
- • One chapter and two tools, or two chapters, one tool from each.
- • Prep work for each team member will take 60 minutes before the session, 30 minutes per tool, for two different prep work tasks.
- • Consider how to order the session so that the first tool creates a good starting point for the next. For example, use Tool 8 ‘Reframe your aim’ followed by Tool 9 ‘Project navigator’ if you’re working on one chapter, or Tool 9 ‘Project navigator’ followed by Tool 11 ‘Why our work matters’ if you are working on two different chapters.
- • If you are working on difficult topics that will challenge the team, consider starting with something easier and more positive to set a constructive mood before moving to a tougher task. For example, use Tool 10 ‘Define team purpose’ before moving to Tool 20 ‘Conflict predictor’.
One-day workshop
- • Three or four chapters with four tools maximum.
- • Prep work for each team member will take 60 minutes before the session, either 30 minutes each for two different prep work tasks (and the other tools are done in the room without prep work), or 20 minutes each on three different tasks (leaving one for the session). This is because it’s often unrealistic to ask people to do more than an hour of prep work.
- • Consider which two tools will be best for the morning, often a positive one, then a challenging one, before doing another easier tool straight after lunch followed by a challenging one at the end of the day.
Five-day sprint
- • Five chapters, one tool per chapter, or five tools from a few chapters.
- • Monday to Friday at a set time each day (I suggest 9am to 11am before people get involved in other work).
- • Before each session, assign a pre-read and prep task for the following day, and make sure people have booked time in their diaries to do both the prep work and the sessions.
- • A possible supercharged teams sprint could look like this:
- • Monday prep work: Each person answers all the diagnostic questions in advance of the session in a Google sheet.
- • Monday session: Review the key themes and agree areas to work on for the other four days, assigning facilitators to each of the remaining four sessions.
- • Monday actions: Facilitators will choose which tools to use and design and send out the prep work tasks to be completed for the rest of the week,
- • Tuesday: The foundations of great teamwork, including prep work, session and actions.
- • Wednesday: Planning for success, including prep work, session and actions.
- • Thursday: How we behave together, including prep work, session and actions.
- • Friday: Increasing our chances of success, including prep work, session and actions.
To build team trust and keep things fair, don’t leave it all up to one person to do the planning, facilitating or note-taking. Instead, ask different team members to be responsible for different roles and days, so you could assign one person to send and collate the prep work, another to facilitate on the day, and another to write up actions and outputs per day, rotating these so each team member has a role over the course of the project.
Like any great workshop, spend as much time planning for how to use the time as the session itself. The most important thing to remember is to make time as a team to use these tools on a regular basis – just as you would exercise regularly to maintain peak physical fitness.
A reminder of the 30 tools
Chapter 2: Choose your team
- 1:To team or not to team – do you really need a team?
- 2:Turning a group into a team – make a group of people into a team
- 3:Choose, avoid or separate – choose the right team members for your team
Chapter 3: Find more time
- 4:The timetable – measure where you spend your time and stop wasting it
- 5:Meeting sharpeners – make meetings shorter and sharper
- 6:Email agreement – set email etiquette to reduce time on email
Chapter 4: What goals do you want to achieve?
- 7:Five futures – define a successful vision of your project
- 8:Reframe your aim – make your team’s objective more inspiring and ambitious
- 9:Project navigator – align on a project scope from the beginning
Chapter 5: Find your motivation
- 10:Define team purpose – why you are doing what you are doing
- 11:Why our work matters – create awareness of the positive impact of your work
- 12:Personal motivators – how you can benefit from your team’s work
Chapter 6: Agree what you will deliver, and when
- 13:The journey plan – create a roadmap to your goal that includes the challenges you may face and milestones to track your progress
- 14:Accelerate and reflect – create a timeline that prioritises actions and includes time for reflection and refinement.
- 15:Measuring success checklist – plan to measure the success of your project outcomes, outputs and journey
Chapter 7: Ways to work together
- 16:Three-point check-in – build trust and develop empathy between team members
- 17:Our team rules – deliberately choose the team’s rules of engagement
- 18:Distance culture code – set up the best ways of working if your team is in different locations
Chapter 8: Dealing with conflict
- 19:Opinions and instincts – identify disagreement and misalignment early on
- 20:Conflict predictor – predict the conflicts that might arise and avoid them
- 21:Six reasons why – learn from recent issues and prevent them from reoccurring
- 22:Individual intervention – address conflict with an individual in your team
Chapter 9: Get support from leaders
- 23:Direction of travel – understand your leaders’ targets so you know if you’re going in the right direction
- 24:Leader listening tool – really listen to your leader to develop true connection and understanding between you
- 25:Customer quiz – connect leaders with their customers
Chapter 10: Engage your stakeholders
- 26:Secret stakeholder survey – understand what your stakeholders think
- 27:Building session – get yoaur stakeholders to build on the team’s work
- 28:Start well, end well – start and end stakeholder meetings constructively
Chapter 11: Build a new culture
- 29:Code your culture – understand what people working in this culture do, and why
- 30:Create your culture – begin culture change with your team
Key take outs
- • The 30 tools are designed to be used in the day-to-day working life of your team.
- • There are tools for all stages of your team journey.
- • The 30 tools can be used to develop your team’s strengths and develop areas for improvement.
- • There’s a supercharged teams workshop to suit all timeframes – from two hours to a five-day sprint.