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Original Broadcast Date : Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Time: 8:30 AM PT / 10:30 AM CT / 11:30 AM ET
Speakers:
Geoff Bellman, GMB Associates, Ltd.
What allows some teams to deliver results that far exceed expectations? How do these groups differ from most others? What can group members and leaders do to enable these extraordinary experiences? Geoff Bellman, along with his partner Kathleen Ryan, spent four years diving deeply into self-declared fantastic teams. They interviewed people from sixty great teams, added their own experience as managers and consultants, and came to ground-breaking conclusions documented in their book, Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results. Geoff presents their discoveries about what makes for exceptional performance. Sharing the eight indicators that his study shows are key, Geoff offers up the primary needs people fulfill by interacting in groups and suggests ways of meeting those needs within work teams. See how the primary feelings reported by highly successful teams match—or do not match—the feelings you have for your team. Enhance your understanding of the most successful team experiences you’ve had and take back ideas to improve your current and future team experiences.
About the Presenters:
Geoff Bellman, GMB Associates, Ltd.
Geoff Bellman worked inside major corporations for fourteen years before starting his own consulting firm in 1977. He has written six books about organizations, change, leadership, and teams including Getting Things Done When You Are Not In Charge and his most recent book, Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results—the focus of this keynote. Geoff consults with corporation, government agencies, and community organizations in North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more about Geoff at extraordinarygroups.com or contact him at geoffbellman@gmail.com.
Presentation Transcript:
Now at this point, I would like to welcome our vast virtual audience.
We have lots of people joining us all around the world today. The Agile Connect virtual conference is streaming the key notes today and tomorrow, and we welcome them. Patrick Egan has kind of pre-announced the program to all of those listening around the world and so we welcome all of you. There's just a little special message that I want to send out to somebody.
And now I want to introduce Geoff Bellman. Geoff and I have been fast friends for about thirteen and a half hours now, I think. I have known of him by reading his books for a number of years. I've been trying to get Geoff here and we finally were able to do that; and I am pleased to introduce him. He is a consultant and an author who has worked with large corporations and agencies now for forty years.
He started when he was six, I think. Okay. long the way he has written six books about organizations, leadership, change, and life in general. You have received his latest book called Extraordinary Groups and I think it's a fantastic book. I brought it with me on the airplane ride yesterday and skimmed it again, and again was amazed that how insightful it is.
He is going to talk to us about some of the contents of that book today. Geoff has traveled the world. We kind of made a list at dinner last night of countries we had visited. But, amazingly enough, Geoff says he has never been to Las Vegas before, and so we brought him here to see what true Americana is like.
I am pleased to introduce Geoff Bellman.
Yes . Thank you, Lee. Thank you. Nice to be here with you. Nice to be here in Las Vegas. I've been here a few days. If you need any hints on what to do here that's went well, ask me afterwards, I will give if you a few. At least said I am here today to talk with you about the book. I'm going to talk with you, not so much about all the details in it that you can read, but how the book came about.
Some years ago, now about 4. Catherine Ryan, good friend, consultant, coworker and I decided that, decided that we wanted some visuals on the screen. And we're not getting them. We decided that we wanted to look more deeply into, why is it that some of the the groups that we work with as consultants really work very well, have terrific results and other cases where we're working with them it just doesn't turn out very well at all.
Some of you have probably had that experience as well. And so we decided to go out and do a little bit of field research. On that. Field research into groups in general. By the way, this is, the book has got the group label on it and the session has the team label on it. But we use the word groups in order to incorporate all those folks that are gathered together, two the twenty people that are gathered together for some purpose.
Some of them like the label of teams. Like a lot of you would. Others wouldn't like that.
Let me straighten this out, and there we go. So these are the questions that we started with, about 4 years ago. And we went out, and we talked to people from 60 groups that declared themselves as being really fantastic. We interviewed people from those groups in some depth, going to interview you today in less depth.
We asked them open ended questions, we asked to tell their stories, we gathered all that data and we incorporate it. Here's a sample of the groups that we talked to. You won't see the word 'agile' in there. You won't see the word Better Software in there. But you'll recognize a wide array of groups from motorcycle clubs to nurses to soccer players to traditional corporate project teams.
We were interested in what do these groups have in common. If you got them all together in this room, what is it that they have in common? And so we talked to them about that and I will share with you what we learned. We learned about performance indicators they have in common; we learned about needs that they have in common; we learned about feelings that they have in common.
Not to anticipate that too much. I want you to get out a pen and a piece of notepaper and do something for me. Individually, I want you to do this, knowing that you're going to share these results with a few people around you in a few minutes. Okay? So get that pen and paper outThat goes for you in the virtual audience as well.
All you virtual people out there around the world, you get out your pens and pencils, your paper, as well, and do what I'm asking of you here next.
First thing. First thing. Think about a really great team experience you've had,a team of 2 to 20 people, preferably smaller rather than larger, that went really well from your perspective.
First question. Number one. What did that team really do? List three actions that made that experience really wonderful. Actions now. Write those down, please, three. Next question. Why was that experience so rewarding to you? List three reasons why that experience was so great for you. One, two, three.
Just short bullet points, not paragraphs, brief lines, good notes for the discussions that you'll have with others later. And again, you people in the virtual audience, please do that too. And the third question, how did you, how did others feel as a result of this great experience? List three feelings, one, two, three.
Three questions, three answers to each of them, short answers that you'll be sharing with other people shortly. When you've answered all 3 questions, please stand up. You guys in the virtual audience, if, you can stand up or not as you choose, standing up gives me a sense of who's done and puts pressure on the people who aren't standing up yet.
Yeah, okay. Before you do that, when you do that when you sit down. Tell each other briefly your names and what your great team experience was. Do that now and quickly. Oh yeah you should... Okay, finish up. You are going to get more chances to talk with each other. I want to interrupt you now and I want, I want you to get used to the idea.
Please stop, please stop. I want you to get used to the idea that you are going to be talking with these people and I'm going to be interrupting you often, okay? The idea is to get you thinking. I'm going to direct you to the directions that our field study took. I'm going to get you thinking in those directions, and then I'm going to tell you what we discovered, and you compare that to what you're coming up with.
We 've been grouping for a long time, we human beings. It didn't start out recently. No, it goes back at least 200,000 years; way back to humans that weren't dressed nearly as nicely as you are today when they came to Las Vegas, no doubt. Yeah. We've been living in groups, working in groups, mating in groups, drinking in groups, playing in groups for all of this time.
We are genetically informed to group. We've been in organizations maybe 5,000 years. It doesn't compare to the 200,000 years at all. We don't know how to be in organizations very well. We know a lot about how to be in groups. Okay? We've discovered that we don't make it alone, that we survive together or perish individually.
Cathleen and I see groups as a natural unit of work. You can put that up against some of the things that you've learned in your pursuit of Agile for example. So, that's where groups come from historically. Today we find, lots of you I'm sure would find, that individuals like you often have difficulty being in large organizations but you have no difficulty being in groups, okay?
We find big organizations struggling to relate to the individuals within them. Even the best of organizations have a hard time doing that. But individuals relate very well to the groups within that organization. Groups are where we get things done. And speaking of done, let's turn to, oh, one other thing, what is an extraordinary group that That's what we call the book.
What do we mean by that? We mean a group that achieves outstanding results by their own measures and other people's measures. While the people in the group experience a profound shift in how they see the world, the emphasis here is on how they see the world. It's not on new skills, it's not on new behaviors, it's on sight.
It's on perspective. It's on vision. It's on how they look at the world around them. That's what... is all about extraordinary groups from all the others. So what do extraordinary groups do? First chance or second chance, for you to talk about that little group that you're with. Go to question number one that we put up earlier about actions, the 3 actions and over the next four or five minutes with the same group, you were talking with a few minutes ago, I want you to talk together about what extraordinary groups do.
The different groups that you were in, what do they seem to have in common? And I promise you that I'm gonna to interrupt you in four or five minutes, okay. The same goes for that virtual audience. If you got people around around, you talk with them about what their extraordinary groups do. We're getting a ton of static on this one.
Sorry about this.
It's all right.
I feel like I got you, you know, wired a hundred different ways. This one...I can't even figure out which one's on any more. Yank the other one from you. Let me just take this off of you.
Can you try putting the disc in the other pocket maybe? Maybe put the two transmitters as far way as possible, run it around the back?
Can I clip it in my belt? Yeah.
All of our virtual audience is responding to everything, so to get an answer to me of your questions, they said communicate, work together, support each other, learn from each other. One more minute. Okay, stop. Stop. Take your seat. So notice, notice in that brief discussion, any patterns that began to develop.
You've noticed the diversity of groups that you have represented? You talked about that earlier, diversity of teams. Notice the patterns that are beginning to develop, where you're doing this little bit, I'm with you doing this little bit of field research here and I'm checking it out against what we did with those 60 teams and groups that I talked about earlier.
So, you're discovering what you're finding out and here's what we found out. Eight performance indicators. We looked at all this data and we said, what really sorts out great groups from all of the others? And we made up these eight. You know, if you had the same data, you made up, you may have made up, different ones.
But you didn't have the data, we did. So here's our aim. You can put it up against what you coming up with in your group. I'll talk about each of them briefly. I'm not going to go through each of these slides in detail. I'm going to hit on what I think are some high points. Be thinking about your favorite group, as I talk about these, okay?
First, a really important and compelling one is purpose. Compelling purpose. A purpose that draws people together around what they're going to accomplish. A purpose that's ennobling. A purpose that everybody in the group, not just a designated leader, but everybody in the group understands, okay. They share it, they understand it.
They trust that each other understands. Very important in these extraordinary groups. We each know what this group is about. If I go out and do something on behalf of our group, I will use this purpose to guide my action. It is more important than the assignment that I got. It's more important than the task that I took on.
It's more important than the actions you think I'm supposed to take. In the end, I will serve the purpose of the group. Even when I screw up, if it results in that, I'll serve the purpose, and if I screw up, you guys in the group will say, "Well, at least you were trying to do what we wanted to have done." Okay. Very important one, not to sort it out from all the others, but an important one to begin with.
Second one, shared leadership. Coincidentally, about thirty of the groups that we talked to had leaders, or designated leaders, and the others didn't. It just turned out that way. Members of these extraordinary groups see themselves as leaders. They might not call themself a leader, but they take leader-like actions.
They initiate, they feel responsible for moving the group ahead. When somebody says "what do we do next" all heads don't snap toward the leader and ask her what she thinks we should do.
We all feel responsible for that. If there is a designated leader in the group, she sees to it that the group is led. She doesn't feel compelled to lead the group all the time but she knows that leadership of the group is important. Everybody feels responsible for leading in some way, initiating everybody feels responsible for outcome.
There is structure to these groups a little bit hard to understand. Like some of your groups if I were to just step in, in the middle of a group meeting of some sort, like a daily stand up meeting, for example. I might wonder, what in the hell is going on here. Because it's pretty messy. It's pretty chaotic a lot of times within these extraordinary teams.
It's more, as I say here, organical than mechanical. Yeah, it's not Robert's rules of order. It's not follow the structure extremely tightly, it's pretty messy. But everybody there understands what's going on. If that messy structure isn't working, somebody in the group will say, "This isn't working.
What could we do?" And they will structure a way of moving forward that hopefully gets them out of this dilemma for a moment and then when that works they'll go back to their messy way of operating. Just enough structure, just in time. Full engagement, everybody in the group is part of this. We were tempted to call this fun.
Extraordinary groups are fun, and a lot of them are, but there are some that are not. I'm imagining a woman that I interviewed that was part of a virtual group around North America. This group of parents shared the problem of having preschool- they each had a preschool child that had diagnosed mental illness.
The woman I was talking with her child had four illnesses. Nobody in her community had that problem, but across North America they could find forty, fifty families. They talked to each other everyday. Did they laugh a lot? Did they have fun? Was it humour? No. Were they fully engaged? Yes. Another example was a hospice team organized around a young woman who was dying.
Yeah. Not always fun, but fully engaged, so fully engaged that some of these extraordinary groups, some of - don't raise your hands - some of you have experienced this. Were, some of these groups, they were more loyal to each other, than they were loyal and engaged to anybody else in their lives.
The extraordinary group got in the way of home life, for example, or friendship. But they were bonded in really a fully engaged, extraordinary ways. A unique one for me I learned a bit on this and my co-author, Kathleen, helped me as embracing differences. In these really great groups, they see differences between themselves as opportunity.
When a problem comes up within a group, when a couple of us disagree with each other, the group doesn't say, "OK, let's not get upset, lets move on, or put that aside, put aside." No, instead they say, in the really great, extraordinary groups that embrace differences, they say, "Wow, let's exploit that difference.
Let's polarize this for a minute" and they polarize the people and then they step back and search for an umbrella that reaches across those polar positions because they have experience that has told them that embracing the difference generates creative alternatives that are not there if you don't embrace the difference.
So see how that fits with your extraordinary groups that you were talking about. Unexpected learning, people come into the group, like most groups, yeah I expect to learn something. But what they don't expect to learn is a lot of stuff that's useful in the rest of life. And many of these extraordinary teams, as they discovered how great it is to work together more or less as equals in this extraordinary teams.
They were learning about how to team in ways that they hadn't known before. They didn't come into the group expecting that. They came into the group expecting new technical skills for example. By working on this project, but not new interpersonal, intra-personal, new team skills. They didn't expect to learn things that they could take out into the rest of their lives.
They didn't expect to build their personal power and confidence by being in this group. They didn't expect to learn about that. They didn't expect the excitement that they had,n this group, working for each other. One of the first people that I interviewed for this book, Tom, recalled a most fantastic groupwhat it's like from twenty years ago.
Twenty years ago. And today, he could tell in detail what that group is about as could a couple of other members of that team that we sought out. When Tom talked about that time he got misty-eyed.Twenty years later,this was such a great group for him. He learned so much there that took him on to become, now CEO of a small organization in Seattle.
So. Yes people strengthen their relationships as many of you have experienced in these extraordinary team. We didn't label this friendship, though friendship often results. People develop great respect for each other, great loyalty for each other. They count on each other. I know, you've got my back, and you know, I've got yours.
We take care of each other, and a deep bond is created, and it may result in a really deep friendship that lasts for years. But it's a very strong, and glued together relationship that's there. The last one that we'd list and a very important one is results. Wonderful results, great tangible results, great intangible results.
The sort that I'd make on those between the tangible and intangible is shown here. The tangible results are very important to the group, to this extraordinary team.
Very important to them, to you. The tangible results are also important to the sponsor of this team, to the group or organization function that the team serves. The intangible results are important within the team. We understand, nobody else here does.
Often our clients don't understand, because they weren't part of it like we were. It might be a little different in an Agile setting. But, yes, we value those tangible results. And in ways, we value the intangible results more because we're used to delivering great tangible results. What we aren't used to is the results that we created here together that are intangible, that are hard to put words around, that are so important to us.
So that's my, our list, of 8 points. Okay?
Just check in with each other, just a minute or two, with the group. How does that, just check with each other, how does what we came up with, fit with, what you came up with? Okay? Do that right now, just briefly. I'll interrupt you, you can count on it. OK, please stop . That goes for you virtual folks around the world, too, stop in your discussion.
So it gave you a chance to check in. Raise your hand if there is, if you found a kind of general fit between the things that Kathleen and I discovered in our field studyand what you've found in you teams. Raise your hand if - good, good, so we're on the right track? Yes? So we can keep the book out there?
I know we should have checked with you earlier, but we didn't. Now, in one way you can say about all that all that stuff, those eight points and what you were talking, you say "duh, well sure, this is what great groups do".
But it's one thing to recognize it, it's yet another thing to act on it. I mean, imagine if you did, in fact you are doing it in your own way whether you know it or not, I believe. Imagine that if you came up with your eight points that are just like ours or your own eight. And what if you said "those are eight things we are going to reinforce in our group.
We are going to consciously do that. We are not going to just say "oh, this is nice". No, we're going to go after, we believe in this stuff, we're going to make this happen. I hear a parallels to Agile development stuff that I've read about recently and what I just said. Yeah going after, deciding on some things together as a group that you're going to do and going after it.
By the way, on this first section on these eight indicators, at the end of this presentation, I may get to a slide that has our website on it. It's in your material, so you can...but if you go to that website and look in tools, there are a bunch of tools that are free and that you can use with regard to these first eight points.
Now, let's get on to the second question. The second question is about why...the reasons, I asked you to list three reasons why this group performed so well. And so, I'd like to turn you again virtually and really face to face, I'd like to turn you to considering your answers to that second question.
Turn to those people that you've been working with and talk about that for four or five minutes before I interrupt, okay. Go there now . We're finishing up, finish up, take your seat please. Yeah, a difficult question. Here is eight things, eight performance indicators of what really great groups do.
That's nice, it's a nice list. You can find all kinds of research over the years on teams, about what great teams do. But why do they do that? That's the challenge, how in the hell do you get people to want to do those great things. You know, that's the challenge. Hard thing to work in. In the book, I think our more unique contribution to the field is around these points.
By the way, we don't know either about why, We don't know. But we decided it's so important we're going to make up some answers. And you're doing the same thing everyday, when you're working with a team that's difficult to move forward. Or you're finding yourself difficult to move forward. It's how do you get motivation, how do you get urges, needs, drives, to turn in the same direction for a group.
Well I'll show you what we made up, and I think it's very useful. It's not exactly right, but it's very useful and you can put it up against what you were just talking about, okay? It begins like this. We believe individuals are meeting needs when they're within groups. That's why they're there. They are on this team because they were assigned to it.
Oh yeah they were assigned, but they need to be in groups. That's our underlying assumption. It ties to some things I said earlier and we, when we look at what those needs might be, we sort them into six that end up being paired in these three statements. You have, I have, to accept myself. While moving towards the self, I could be my potential.
I think you could find that within yourselves, can't you? This is who I am and this is who I want to be. Sometimes, I'm more comfortable with who I want to be, than who I am. But both sides of that are important and that dynamics there, is a creative one that causes movement on my part, okay. The second is: in groups, we want to bond with people while pursuing a common purpose.
It is involved just make nice, lovey, oh wonderful, let's have another beer. That's nice, but it's also about what in the hell are we doing together. Okay, so there's another pairing. And the third pairing is around the world that we operate in. Understanding that world, understanding it well, and changing it.
Two different things, two different things understanding it and changing it. Not satisfied, my iconic self was not satisfied with these three statements and so we converted them into, isn't this lovely? yeah. Bowing a bit in the direction of the keltion, and a lot of other cultures over hundreds of years this symbol comes out of, and this symbol of a dynamic, never ending line and there you can see, represented in more visual form, you can see the three statements.
Each of them around a leaf of the, each, each statement paired with the other in a leaf. The sense that we're trying to give of this, is that all of this is really going on at once. But it's useful if we think of the self and what we can do about our needs, for acceptance, self acceptance, and growth it's useful, if we think of that, separate for a moment from the group and the and the depth self within that group is within our larger world and it's useful to think about, what is the reality of that world, does it exist right now and what could it be, what do we want it to be?
To elaborate on each of those quickly, here's some words around acceptance, words that might speak to you, about your accepting side of self. As I go through these six, be thinking about what, you know, what could we do with it? These are really at work within a team, what could we do to emphasize self acceptance, potential, etc, all six of this, be thinking about that.
So one is knowing who I am, being aware of it, accepting who I am. Often a struggle for us, okay. That's something that's going on within us and oftenshare it in groups but present in the groups what I want to be, what I'm reaching for, who I could be in the future.
In the group itself, there's the bond, the connections of share sense, of identity and belonging. This is like, remember Cheers? Remember that we knows who we are and the part that we play here, in this little drama that play out weekly, or comedy that plays out weekly. The other side of it, is groups that are there for more purpose.
Often groups like work groups that you're in are formed initially around this purpose. It's a mistake to think that this is all there is to it. Yes, people have a need to do thingstogether . Yes, people want to complete task. But they have other needs that they are trying to meet at the same time. Over emphasize this and you're in trouble.
It 's important, but over emphasizing it is trouble. In the world, our world, not the whole world, but the world that we're a part of, a really remarkable thing in the discussions that we had, in our interviews across the world where, the world of work, particularly were that, people's needs to one - understand the reality that they're in.
If you look at teams xtraordinary teams, a few of them take great pride in how well they measure that external world. The other part of it is changing that world. Corporate people, spiritual people, social service people wereunified in their own humble expression of, well, I'm here because I want to change things.
I want to make a difference, you know? So those are the 6 points that we've identified as needs that individuals have. Those can be lined up in the way. You may have senses as I talked about it. On the one side, there's that acceptance bond reality which is a kind of be here now. I am not doing anything about it.
It's important that I understand myself, that I'm joined with the group that will understand the world. Of the other 3 are more related to the leaning forward, to making a difference in who I am, and who this group is and what this world is. So you get that? Nod your head. You guys are virtual people, nod your head.
Good, alright. What I'd like you to do now, if, again turn to that group and say, what is this, how does Geoff's stuff fit with what we were talking about a few minutes ago, when we talkedabout three reasons why. Just take a couple of minutes to check with each other on that, please. Thank you. Do that now.
All right, stop. You're getting good at this. You're getting good at putting ideas out, listening to me and then checking my ideas against your ideas. Let me ask here, just by a raise of hands, how many of you found, could find some kind of fifth, between the points that you made and answer the question to your earlier discussion and these 6 points I just put before for you.
How many of you could find some kind of fifth? Yeah, now notice a lot fewer hands went up this time than last time. on that performance indicator, that fits so well basically question number one, what action did these great groups take? Blah, blah, blah. People got all kinds of stuff. When we asked them, the question, the third question, how did people feel about it?
Blah, blah blah. Yeah, people have all kinds of responses. When we asked them, why did the group behave in that way? People have more difficulty with it. It's a tricky realm, you know? It's a trickier realm. To us that suggested, less work in the field, less work has been done there, so let's just make some statement about the needs that people are needing and that will help them through this a little bit.
We think our 6 statements, our 6 needs are very useful. We think, that if you haven't had any previous guidance and you follow those, the guidance of those 6 needs, you read about in the book that you've all got. If you, we think that if you did that, you would be better off than just going out there and bumbling along with no sense of the importance of needs.
We're confident of that. So we put these 6 needs out there as useful okay, not as right, but as useful to you, okay? Now, on to the third question. I've already given you a hint, so the answers are easy, you know. So, what I'd like you to do on this.....is the third question is how does it feel to be in an extraordinary group?
What I'd like you to do is just... in a rather disorderly fashion, if you can do that...is I'd like you to call out, kind of one word answers, one word feelings about how it feels to be in an extraordinary group. Just call them out, and pay attention, all of you pay attention, not to hearing everyone, but hearing responses around you. Call out some.
Yeah.
Yeah. More. More. Okay. Sorry. So everybody pick one. Okay, everybody, pick one of those and call it out and I'll capture it up here with special magic, okay. On the count of 3, where did this come from? On the count of three, call out one of your words about how it feels to be in an extraordinary group.
Okay. Ready? One, two, three.
Good .
Wonder what's there? Good. Good. Originally when Kathleen and I were doing our field study, these interviews just kept getting too long. We thought one hour, hour and a half where typically they'd be two hours long. How do we end these things? Well, a nice things is. Well, how did you feel about this experience in summary?
Well we ended up with over 400 phrases, words, and we thought, you know I bet we could do something with these. So we started sorting them out. This is just a sample. They'd probably be 8-10 slides like these, but we started sorting out all these different feelings that we collected in our notes, you know.
And we said what if, what if people in extraordinary groups shared feelings about being in those groups? What if all of those groups, you should get all of those people together, like the people in this room. What if you could bring them into agreement on a number of feelings that are important outcomes from being in an extraordinary team?
What if? What the hell. Let's do that. So we started sorting and sorting, and sorting and we came up with, you know, building on the massive things that are dumped out, we've eventually came up with not 17 that's not useful, one is a very helpful How about four? Four. Good? Okay. Four it is. Oh, gone.
Consider each of these statements, And then I am going to ask you and I want your response to each of them. Thinking about the extraordinary group that you were part of that you had on your mind at the beginning of this session. Did this thing drive you and all your group. Did it? Yes. Did it? Yes.
Okay. Technically, of course, it energize us and that's important, calling us up in that way. Did you feel more connected to your group, to the purpose, to the world around you,to yourself, as a result of this? Did you feel more connected? Yes. Whether you use the word or not, whether you called it out earlier, you felt more connected and kind of as a result of that, were you more hopeful about what could be done.
More hopeful about yourself. About your groups, about the project, about the company, about the world around you. More hopeful. Yes. I mean there is something really special about extraordinary groups that goes beyond the accomplishment of the task. When you create hope in people by the work that you do together, that is a wonderful outcome, especially in the state that the world is in today, that people can feel hopeful about their contribution to this group.
Did you feel changed by this great group's experience? Softer, mixed, mixed. When it's the first time as we look through the data, when it's the first time that you are in a really great group that's kind of transformative for you, and for others. Yes, I felt changed by it. If it's the fifth time, no, I wasn't changed so much.
I've grown to expect really great groups, you know?
So those are the 4 feelings that we identified and think are present in the groups that you work in. Feelings are nice but they're kind of an outcome. Oh you have more along the way. If you're going to focus on changing a group, my suggestion would be that you focus earlier on the needs, or on the key performance indicator.
Start there, don't start with the feelings that you want it as a result. My iconic self again wanted to do something with these 4 words, and we found the perfect place for them.
In that dynamic among those needs, those are the, that center there, when you see those feelings present as people are dealing with the creative tensions I'm thinking about what to do next here. Yes, here is what we'll do next. What I'd like you to do is return to your team one last time, okay?And , and I am gonna focus you on this question.
Assume that we 've been through, we that all the input that we're going to get about the eight performance indicators, the six leaves the four feelings. Now, what do you do with that stuff? And what I'd like you to do is gather with that group, a last time, and imagine yourselves a little consulting team, a little consulting company and you are built around this wonderful model.
You built yourself that way and you're now talking about applications of it. I'd like you to talk for 5 minutes or so about how you could apply these models, these ideas. Put aside all this better software, put aside all the Agile development stuff. Imagine you are true believers in this model, give me that moment, you know.
Imagine you are true believers in it for just 5 minutes. What could we do with it? Get really practical. Gather with those people, talk about it for five minutes and I'll stop you. Do that now. You people virtually people do the same thing. I'm watching. OK? You're doing good.
It's almost over.
After when I finished, what happened? Was anybody saying anything? Ok, ya and you say evaluation. Good. They finish it - 7 minutes.
Yeah, but it'll finish before 10:00. Okay? Okay, be finishing up. Finish up and stop. As I hope you discovered in these little teams that you're on, there's a lot that can be done with these ideas. A really important element that you may not have discussed is that the team, in an extraordinary team, they decide together.
They agree together on what they're going to do. It is so useful for a team to have an underlying frame work that they all support. The smaller the team, the looser the framework can be because the dynamics of the group are uncomplicated enough, that they can handle a loose framework, as a team gets larger they need more clarity about what that frame is, as teams multiply in an organization and they need further clarity, organizational clarity, about what we do around here.
And here's heads of development raising its head again. I'm just going to touch on some ideas that Cathline and I came up with and you'll find elaborated on in the books that you have, there's a lot of application stuff related to some of these things that you'll see here. So you could use the model to do some of these things.
You could design a meeting. Say, how do we pay attention to people's needs as we meet for half a day? Or you could design a meeting that has built into it those 8 indicators. Where do we show shared leadership? Where's in ways that are beyond the initial task that was given to the group. What is the purpose that people here signed up for?
What is the people here, what is the purpose here that people see as noble in their lives? What is the purpose that would cause them to give and give and give more because it's important to them not just because it's important to the company or you could use the model for any of those other four items that are there.
You could use the model to draw out, what a group is about. You could use it to get clearer on the outcomes that they are expected so that the outcomes are intangible as well as tangible. Lots of ways that you can use these model. You'll find on page 209 of the book, there is a.of all of the main elements of what I've talked with you about here.
It's not about when you're acquainted with, when you've read the book and you think there's useful stuff here, 209 is a good page to take in the meetings.
You could go into a meeting with page 209 in hand, not say a word that anybody here can be assessing the meeting in relation to the needs that you see in this model. You could be assessing the meaning in relation to the eight performance indicators.
You could go to our website, www.extraordinarygroups.com which is mentioned here, and you could use the tools that are on that site. You could try this stuff out. I'd suggest you learn more about it than I brought to you today. I think I brought good stuff for you but I think this is kind of a teaser for the things that you can find in that book that's in your hands.
I was surprised when I started writing this book, I thought like other books I've written. This is going to be my excuse to figure out what I believe about groups. I discovered so much about groups and teams in the writing of this book. Discoveries I never expected to have, by looking more deeply into that important primary unit of work in organizations, the group, the team.
Thank you very much for the time with you today.
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Still a very entertaining talk.