Introduction
Watch our webinar with Nick Fewings, where he delves into the practical insights from his book, “Team Lead Succeed.”
By participating in the webinar, you will uncover actionable lessons that can be readily applied to enhance your teamwork greatly. Nick will emphasise the significance of understanding your team composition and the effectiveness of your collaborative efforts.
Video
Watch the video below, download the presentation or audio, or read the full transcript of the webinar.
About Nick Fewings
Nick Fewings, Director of Ngagementworks, is dedicated to improving teamwork effectiveness. He has successfully developed teams globally, employing his expertise to make a positive impact.
Nick is renowned for creating the Team DyNAmics Model, a comprehensive framework measuring team effectiveness in 16 crucial areas vital for achieving high performance. As an accomplished keynote speaker, he has graced over 500 conferences worldwide and recently authored the bestselling book, “Team Lead Succeed.”
Project management training
Project management efficiently coordinates and oversees tasks, resources, and stakeholders to accomplish project objectives within defined parameters. It involves leading and empowering teams, effective communication, and collaboration to ensure successful project outcomes and maximise team performance.
A project management qualification equips individuals with valuable skills and knowledge to plan, organise, and coordinate projects effectively. In turn, this enhances teamwork, productivity, and successful project outcomes.
Knowledge Train offers project management courses suitable for individuals with varying experience levels. So, whether you’re a novice or an experienced professional seeking to polish your skills, our courses can cater to your requirements.
Click the relevant links below for more information about our project management courses.
Agile training
Agile methodology emphasises flexibility, adaptability, and collaboration to drive high-quality project outcomes. Obtaining an Agile certification equips individuals with valuable skills and knowledge to apply Agile principles, techniques, and frameworks effectively. This enhances teamwork by promoting effective team communication, collaboration, and adaptability, improving productivity and successful project outcomes.
At Knowledge Train, we offer a range of Agile courses tailored to meet the needs of individuals at various experience levels. Whether you’re new to Agile or an experienced professional looking to enhance your skills, our courses can boost your confidence, improve your competence, and propel your career in Agile project management to new heights.
Click the relevant links below for more information about our agile courses.
Transcript
Here’s the full transcript of the video.
00:00:03 Sevcan Yasa: Hello, everyone, thank you so much for joining us today. And we’re just gonna give a few more minutes while people enter.
00:00:19 Sevcan Yasa: Hello, Natalie.
00:00:53 Sevcan Yasa: So, I think we can start now and so just to give everyone a short background. I’m Sevcan and I’m the Marketing Executive for Knowledge Train, Knowledge Train and agileKRC are in partnership. Today we have Nick with us. So, Nick, thank you so much for joining.
00:01:09 Nick Fewings: Pleasure
00:01:10 Sevcan Yasa: And just before I do head over to Nick and right at the end, after Nick gives his presentation, there will be a Q&A session. So, while Nick gives his presentation, if you do have any questions, please write them down in the chat and right at the end we’ll go through them all. Thank you, everyone so, Nick, over to you.
00:01:29 Nick Fewings: OK, Good afternoon, everyone. It’s a absolute delight to be invited to present on this webinar on behalf of Knowledge Train and the just so you’re aware I can only see the slides on the screen at the moment. So, I can’t see any of the chat window. So, that’s why Sevcan suggested that at the end of the session I’ll take questions and answer.
00:01:57 Nick Fewings: So, today’s session is about giving you some thoughts and ideas and strategies for your individual, but also team success. And I thought we’d start because I think some of you have connected with me on LinkedIn already, but the for the majority of you, you probably haven’t. So, I thought best to give you a little bit of background as to who I am and why I call myself a teamworkologist. So, a teamworkologist is a word that a phrase that I came up with because I wanted to try and give people an understanding of what I do.
00:02:43 Nick Fewings: So, a teamworkologist is a person who studies the dynamics of teamwork, and I use this knowledge to help teams become more effective and more efficient and achieve great success. And I do this through my company called Ngagement Works. And the for those of you like to know, I reside in Bournemouth, which is on the South Coast in Dorset, but originally my city of birth is Plymouth in Devon. So, a bit of background about me before we get into the to the meat of the webinar. I’m a behavioural psychology and I got my accreditation when I used to work for Barclays Bank. That’s where my career started I worked for Barclays for 20 years and during that 20 years when I became a Project Leader and an Operational Leader.
00:03:49 Nick Fewings: I got my accreditation in behavioural psychology to give me a better understanding of a who I was, but also who the people were in my team so that I can motivate and inspire them in the ways that met their needs. Over my career, after I left Barclays for the last 20 plus years, I’ve been working with teams around the globe to help them become more effective, more efficient and achieve greater success. So, these are some of the companies that I’ve worked with.
00:04:29 Nick Fewings: I’ve worked with hundreds of companies, and I’ve profiled thousands of individuals during my the last 20 plus years, and when I’m not working with teams. The other thing that I do is a I speak at conferences. So, I’ve spoken at conferences throughout the world I’ve spoken over 500 conferences about teamwork and achieving High – Performance. Predominantly in the UK, but I’ve also spoken at conferences in most of the capital cities of Europe and then further afield I’ve spoken in the US and the Far East and the Middle East. The furthest from the UK being Bali, I spoke in Bali just before a we hit the pandemic.
00:05:26 Nick Fewings: And the last thing about me is that based on the work that I do with teams, I created a model called Team Dynamics and Team Dynamics measures 16 areas of teamwork and I’m going to give you a bit of an understanding of that model to get you to consider. How you might measure different aspects of your teamwork. The last project that I undertook was during COVID and the nobody wants a team, team development specialist or a conference speaker when we were all in lockdown. So, I’m not one to sit here twiddling my thumbs, so I thought, right, what I’ll do is write a book.
00:06:13 Nick Fewings: Based on my knowledge and experience, so I wrote a book that was published in March 2022 called Team Lead Succeed. And it’s become an Amazon bestseller, and it’s all about behaviours, teamwork and leadership, hence the title. I started off with team first of all, because there are more team members than leaders in the world, so I wanted to write a book that team members could actually utilise and make use of. And the this is one of the quotes that I use “Great teamwork, just doesn’t happen. It happens in teams that work at being great”, so team leads succeed is a resource for teams to use to help them achieve success. And as we’re in the world of Project Management, I was delighted that it appeared a review appeared in Project, which is the Association for Project Management Journal and the great review was completed by Richard Noble, who some of you may know. He held the world record land speed record in Thrust 2, so I’m going to share some snippets from.
00:07:42 Nick Fewings : My experience, but also from Team Lead Succeed. So, what are we gonna do in the webinar? A first of all, I’m going to give you an understanding of the reasons why projects fail. Then, we’re going to look at what underpins the success of KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. And then I’ll share some learning about the importance of knowing how effective and efficient your teamwork is. And finally give you suggestions from Team Lead Succeed to help you and your team achieve High – Performing and great success. So, I hope you enjoy the next 50 plus minutes of this webinar.
00:08:30 Nick Fewings: OK. So, a question, who wants their problem succeed and no need to answer this because I’m sure your answer is going to be yes; we all want our projects to succeed. However, unfortunately, not all of them do succeed, and based on research from white papers and research that you can easily find throughout the world wide web. A 70% of projects failed to achieve their desired goals, and when I’ve studied these white papers and the research about projects, there’s a theme that occurs and the top three reasons why.
00:09:19 Nick Fewings: A lot of projects fail, either following one, a poor understanding of the skills of the team. Which is quite frightening you know, we sit with people sometimes, in offices and now with hybrid working a lot of the time we’re on conference calls et cetera with our team members. But a lot of team, don’t understand the skills that they’ve got. And when I talk about skills, I’m talking about two sorts of skills I’m talking about behavioural skills, so that’s how we communicate, how we make decisions. Our body language, so behavioural skills of the team.
00:10:04 Nick Fewings: But equally important is an understanding of the technical skills that your team members bring to the team. So, have they got the technical skills of being an accredited Project Manager? Have they got some other technical skills such as, you know, they’re really good at Excel spreadsheets or they’re great at putting together presentations using PowerPoint or Canva or other such tools. So really good to understand both the behavioural skills and the technical skills of teams, because that is a certainly is a blocker in achieving project success.
00:10:50 Nick Fewings: Secondly, lack of common understanding of the team’s purpose, and I’ll explore that with you in a little more detail later on. But your team’s purpose is what does your team exist to do? What does that enable and what are the benefits? And then finally, little or no understanding of how effective or efficient teamwork is. So, these are the big items why projects fail to achieve their desired goals. And as I said, this was research that I undertook based on information that was readily available to me on the Internet, and I tested this out when I spoke at a conference in China in Beijing.
00:11:35 Nick Fewings: And I just asked the delegates, there were 170 delegates from around the world, and I asked them this question, you know, what is it that holds back your project from succeeding? And again, they reiterated a couple of things that I shared from that research. We don’t know the skills of our colleagues and our team. And secondly, we don’t have the tools to help us understand how good or bad our teamwork is.
00:12:05 Nick Fewings: So certainly, that research that I undertook was echoed by those people at that conference. So, I’ve done some research myself in terms of the model that I created and the project teams that have used it initially to understand their teamwork, and Sevcan is going to share a pole at this moment in time just to get you thinking about effectiveness and efficiency of teamwork. So, Sevcan, if you could share the poll that would be appreciated.
00:13:02 Nick Fewings: And at the moment I can’t see the poll results on my screen so Sevcan. If you could give me an indication of what people have said that would be appreciated.
00:13:12 Sevcan Yasa: Yeah, will do. Oh, we’ve got a tie, interesting.
00:13:24 Nick Fewings: Interesting ohh, do let me know haha.
00:13:34 Sevcan Yasa: OK. So, we’re 5% we have three people who selected 5% and then 10%, we have eight people. And then 20%, we have eight people again and then 25% we have 1 person and then 60% we have 0.
00:13:59 Nick Fewings: OK, great. OK, I’m gonna put you out of your misery, in terms of which groups of people were correcting this. In terms of which teams are high, performing, which percentage of teams are High – Performing, only 10% of teams are High – Performing, so those eight people who chose 10% well done to you. And average performance 50% of teams, which frighteningly leaves 40% of teams being actually dysfunctional, frightening statistics. But these are statistics from project teams that have used my team dynamics model to measure their effectiveness and efficiency for the first time of using it and quite frightening in terms of only 10% actually High – Performing for the first time.
00:15:04 Nick Fewings: And I think based on working with those teams, there are a number of problems that have caused this ineffectiveness, inefficiency in their teamwork and what they’ve shared with me is that. A lot of the problem is historic learning, historic learning that’s been given to leaders in how to lead their project teams and also to team members in terms of how to run project teams effectively and efficiently. Secondly, too much focus on task, we work in a very fast-paced world these days and quite often project teams have been forced down this route of making sure that tasks are completed on time and sometimes that causes big problems in itself.
00:16:05 Nick Fewings: And the third thing is again feedback from these teams that quite often there’s too much reliance on software. Software is excellent, you know in its right place and used it the appropriate time. However, some project teams there is an over reliance on using software as the engine to drive forward the project itself. So, these are the problems that people have said that they’ve faced. Again, I like to test out what people say to me, and I tested this out with the European Programme Directors conference that I spoke at and just simply said to the European Programme Directors, what are the things that you talk about when you get together with your project teams for your team meetings.
00:17:02 Nick Fewings: And these were the things that they came up with on the flipchart we recorded them, and they said they talked about risk. They talked about scope, schedules, progress, key performance indicators, costs, safety margins, profit, and PTP which forgive me, fails my memory as to what PTP stood for, however there was a common theme here is that they actually weren’t talking about people or relationships very much focused on task.
00:17:42 Nick Fewings: So, I think the solution is quite simply we’ve got to focus as project teams and individuals. We’ve got to spend more time on understanding who’s in our team and how we can enhance our teamwork, because that’s gonna drive your projects forward, however there is this caveat that I’ve found it far too often. Leaders and also teams they’re expected to deliver High – performance, yet they’re unaware of the tools that will help them to achieve it. And I don’t know if that brings true with you in your project, but a lot of the time understanding who’s in your team and how effective your teamwork is.
00:18:32 Nick Fewings: Teams aren’t given those tools or they don’t understand those tools in their organisations. And I think the key thing is what they tend to do is they focus on their KPI’s. So, a lot of projects are really focused on their key performance indicators and aren’t aware of other tools that will help and support their projects. I’m sure that you use KPIs on your projects, and invariably those key performance indicators will be similar to some of these on the screen you’re likely to have key performance indicators around your budget, your project spend, your deadlines, the workload that you’ve got coming up and the deadlines that have got to be achieved. So, I’m sure that all of you have some sort of key performance indicators that are similar to this.
00:19:36 Nick Fewings: And most key performance indicators that project teams use come back to this model here. You may have seen this model you may have heard of it. It’s often called the Iron triangle or the cost time quality triangle. It was created in 1969 by a guy called Doctor Martin Barnes and basically, what this Iron triangle says is that if you have to change one of the apexes, it will have an impact on the other two apexes. So, for instance, if you need to increase the quality of your project. Invariably that will probably take longer in terms of time and certainly your costs will increase because you can have to pay people for a longer period of time. So that’s an example were increased quality has this impact on both time and cost.
00:20:53 Nick Fewings: And equally you can do the same with the other two apexes there of that triangle. However, keep performance indicators are only as good as your teamwork. So, if your teamwork is not effective and efficient, then it will have an impact on your key performance indicators and this is what a lot of project teams don’t think about, they don’t think about the effectiveness and efficiency of their teamwork, and wholly and solely are focused on their key performance indicators. And when I talk about effectiveness and efficiency, effectiveness is doing the right thing so that’s your purpose, what your team exists to do. And efficiency is about doing things right, so that’s using the skills, the knowledge and experience.
00:21:52 Nick Fewings: And of your team members in the best way possible and also making sure that you are resourceful with other things that you have to hand so resourceful in terms of your costs and maybe utilising software to help you achieve your goals. So, there is a marked difference between when we talk about effectiveness and efficiency, so effectiveness doing the right thing. Efficiency is doing things right and when I spoke at a conference in Singapore about High – Performance Teamwork, I just threw out the question to the 600 project managers that were at that conference and just asked them how many of you measure how effective and efficient your teamwork is?
00:22:47 Nick Fewings: And surprisingly, or maybe not, only 1% measured their teamwork, and again, that has a direct correlation to how well you perform against your key performance indicators. And we’ve gotta remember that it’s people that deliver projects and we achieve success through our teamwork. So actually, understanding how effective and efficient our teamwork is vital, because if you don’t understand how effective and efficient your teamwork is. How do you know how much better you could be as a team?
00:23:31 Nick Fewings: So, there’s two foundations upon which you achieve High – Performance Teamwork. The first is, as I mentioned earlier, knowing who is in your team and that is about knowing who’s in your team from a behavioural skills, perspective, but also from the technical skills as well. So, behavioural skills probably the easiest thing you can do to understand behavioural skills is to use personality profiles. I don’t know if some of you use them already there’s quite a few on in in the marketplace. The well-known ones are MBTI, Myers Briggs, Myers Bridge type indicator which is gives you 16 different aspects of your personality.
00:24:24 Nick Fewings: There’s disc is another one, I use a colourful 1 called clarity 4D which measures your personality based on the psychology of Carl Jung and uses 4 colours red, yellow, green, blue to give you an understanding of what your behavioural makeup is.
00:24:47 Nick Fewings: Behavioural skills we can get from personality profiling, technical skills we can get from various sources. We can get them from people CV’s, we can get them from HR records, we can get them from asking them, you know, going out and saying what technical skills do you bring to the team? So, that’s an important aspect and foundation. The other aspect is, as I mentioned, knowing how effectively and efficiently you work together as a team.
00:25:22 Nick Fewings: And this is why I created the Team Dynamics model which I’m going to just share with you in a moment. Because I understood that teams sometimes don’t understand what’s going wrong or what’s working well within their team and as a team leader, I was very inquisitive when I used to leave my teams, I’d ask them lots of different questions about teamwork. To understand and make sure we play to our strengths, but also if there were challenges that we discussed them as a team and we came up with practical ideas to overcome them and that for those questions that I asked my team, team members, they formed the basis of this model that I created to measure 16 areas of teamwork.
00:26:22 Nick Fewings: There are 16 what I believe elements of teamwork that we can measure, and we should understand if we are to achieve High – Performance and first of all, there are what I call the red elements and you can see them on screen now at the top it’s accountability. So, do we know who is accountable for what within our team. Decision making, which is who has the authority to make what decisions purpose, which I said will go into in a bit more depth in a moment, is about understanding what your team exists to do. And vision is more aspirational, it’s what do we want to achieve as a team in two years, three years’ time. So that’s aspirational vision of the future going back to purpose. Purpose is what they call operational that’s what we do here and now whereas vision is aspirational. So, I call these elements strategic actions.
00:27:29 Nick Fewings: Then we have what I call the blue, the blue areas. So, this underpins everything you do as a team. So, it’s about planning, do you have plans in place for your project team? Are those plans actually just written and then putting a draw or are they updated on a regular basis? so, planning really important. Do we have effective and efficient processes? You know if you were not in the office for maybe a month, you were off ill or off on your travel somewhere. Do you have processes that are written down that people can pick up and run with?
00:28:14 Nick Fewings: Reflection so, the bottom left, Do you take time out from actually doing your day-to-day activities and sit down with your team and reflect on what’s going well and maybe not? What is not going so well? So, a lot of teams, once the project starts going, it’s like that snowball, it’s running down the hill, it just gets faster and faster and bigger and bigger. But it’s really important that on occasions in your projects you actually take time out to reflect and find out what we need to continue doing well and what we need to change to make it even better.
00:28:53 Nick Fewings: And then roles in skills which as I mentioned earlier on what behavioural skills have, we got? What technical skills do we have, and are people in our project team in the right roles so that we can make use of those? So that’s what they call Framework Mapping, it maps out a framework for you and your project team to working.
00:29:17 Nick Fewings: Then we move on to the yellow so, the yellow is about collaboration. How openly do people collaborate and share their knowledge and skills with others? What’s our team communication like? Does it work for everyone when we communicate?
00:29:36 Nick Fewings: Environment is about the culture that you create, so the project, the project environment you work with is it positive? Do you celebrate successes along the way? So, is it just a headstand? Get on with things or is there camaraderie that builds a positive culture and then transformation is about coming up with new ideas to make things more effective and efficient. So, I call those creative interactions they’re interactions between individuals and invariably, there’s a creative outcome to them.
00:30:12 Nick Fewings: And then finally the green. So, on the right-hand side, we’ve got commitment, how committed our team members to the success of the team. And then bottom right do we value and appreciate diversity, how effective and efficient are our team meetings? You know, do we go to team meetings, and they start and end on time. Do they come to our team? Meetings end with actions that we then review at the next team meeting to make sure that those actions have been delivered.
00:30:49 Nick Fewings: And then finally, trust how strong is trust within our team. Do people trust each other so that we can work together collectively as a team? Do we work together for team success rather than individual success, so is there a trust around that area? So those are the 16 different elements that make up the model and the green is coactive connections, Coactive means they’re alive and they’re working, and connections is about relationships with individuals within the team.
00:31:31 Nick Fewings: And so, the model enables teams to measure their team effectiveness. So, through a series of online anonymous questions, we can understand with a team how effective they feel their, their teamwork is. And as you can see, we’ve got some other data and information here we can look at the top eight elements, those things that are working reasonably well, but we can also see what are the things that are causing this team problems. So, with this team, we can see that the bottom three are, are all in the blue the Framework Mapping. They’re saying that they’re planning their reflection time and their processes aren’t working that well.
00:32:21 Nick Fewings: So, we can see here this team as an example their effectiveness is 66%; High – Performing Team usually score 85% or above. This team falls than the average category, it’s in the low end of the averages. And the those teams are developing or dysfunctional sometimes, as I call them, they you can see that their score is usually below 65%. So, as I said, this team is an Average Performing Team, and we can also look at different other aspects of teamwork.
00:33:10 Nick Fewings: So, Framework Mapping and Strategic Action they all task related, so this team has scored those 64% and then the creative interactions and coactive connections, they’re all about relationships between people. So immediately this team could understand that there was an imbalance between task and relationships. And we could also see that the Framework Mapping here was the lowest at 55%. And as you can see by the graphical representation with the dots that the four Framework Mapping elements were the bottom 4. So, it gave an idea to the team of what they needed to work on, but also what they needed to celebrate.
00:34:01 Nick Fewings: You know, decision making was quite good, team meetings and their vision and commitment, all reasonable scores there. So, we could see the very good areas of teamwork, the areas that were good, and then the areas that were poor. So, in measuring this, we can then actually do something about it. Now the other thing to that I like to share with you in this model is that there are different levels.
00:34:34 Nick Fewings: So, if we look at the elements in Level 1, which is Purpose, Trust, Planning and Collaboration, those are the most important things to get right and to make sure that they’re working well within your team. Because if those aren’t working well, they have the most impact on the whole area of teamwork and effectiveness and efficiency, so if those are performing badly as a project team, you really need to do something about it.
00:35:12 Nick Fewings: So, I thought I’d share with you the most important one, Team Purpose. A lot of commentators talk about trust being the most important, but in actual fact team purposes and the and the analogy to bring this to life, I explain is. When you actually go and decide that you’re gonna put yourself forward for a particular project job, a particular project. You look at the job description and you start to understand well what is the job about and how does that job play into what the project team exist to do their team purpose so.
00:36:01 Nick Fewings: In verbally you go for that job for an interview based on the job description and what the Team Purpose is all about. You actually don’t go for that job based on the fact that people trust each other. You don’t know who is in that team at that moment in time. So, it’s Team Purpose that is really, really important. So, Team Purpose, the understanding of what the team does, what this enables and the benefits this delivers. And again, based on research I’ve done for our team, four out of 10 team members actually, say they don’t understand that their Team Purpose, they don’t understand their objectives.
00:36:48 Nick Fewings: And for me, that is absolutely frightening so, if you think about your team and how many people you’ve got in your team, you know potentially 40% of them actually don’t really understand what your team, your project team is existing to do or the objectives of your team.
00:37:12 Nick Fewings: And the so, teams who are faced with the problem around Team Purpose I create, I get them to create a Team Purpose Statement, and this is something that you might consider doing as an activity with your project teams. So first of all, a Team Purpose Statement is made-up of three elements. First of all, what you do, what that enables and then what are the benefits so quite simple. So, the XYZ team exists to do certain things that enables other things to happen and then you should result in some benefits. So, a Team Purpose Statement should be motivational, it should motivate you and your team members. It should take no longer than a minute to explain somebody else. It should have no Jargon some teams, if they are creating a Team Purpose Statement for an internal organisation then they might use a bit of Jargon in it.
00:38:25 Nick Fewings: However, if you are going to share this with people outside of your organisation, you should have little or no Jargon. And the reason being you want it to be understandable you want other people to understand it. So, on the screen now I’m just going to share an example of a team that I work with a few years ago now and the this team was in finance.
00:38:52 Nick Fewings: And the team were called the bean counters their affectionate name was the bean counters. So, as you can imagine, they had quite a low morale. Other pits of other areas of the organisation did not value and appreciate what they did. So, when I started working with this team, I got into discussion and I said OK, well, what do you do as a team and on the top right, you’ll be able to see what eventually they came back with.
00:39:26 Nick Fewings: To produce monthly accounts that are as accurate as possible as quickly after the month – end. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that’s not very motivational, that’s not inspirational, that’s not gonna get me out of bed enthused to go in and work with this team on a Monday morning each week. So we set about reflecting, taking time out from the day-to-day activities to actually create 18 Purpose Statement.
00:39:58 Nick Fewings: And this is what they came up with and I’ll give you a couple of moments to read that.
00:40:17 Nick Fewings: And I think you’ll agree with me that’s slightly more motivational and inspirational than the original thing that they said that they did so much so that they actually started to feel good about themselves as a team. That they were doing something that was beneficial, beneficial for the organisation and as a team, they decided to share this with other parts of the other departments in the organisation that they work with.
00:40:51 Nick Fewings: And I checked back in with them three months later and they said that they were no longer called the bean counters. Their morale, you could the morale and the and the positivity was actually tangible when I walked into their department and started chatting to them, you could feel that something quite seismic had changed within them all because they had started to realise that what they did added value to the rest of the organisation. So, it can have some really positive benefits for you and your team.
00:41:32 Nick Fewings: So, here’s another example, this is my team development learning organisation and I keep this top level. So, this is my due statement that I exist to provide learning and development solution. I don’t tell people initially that those solutions can be online face to face via webinars speaking at conferences just very high level. And what does this enable? What it engages individuals, and it motivates teams and the benefits it helps them to achieve even greater success, so very top level, no Jargon. I can tell people within a minute and people understand it and get it.
00:42:20 Nick Fewings: So, my recommendation to you is when you’re next with your team and you’ve got some time to undertake this activity. So, your next team meeting, first of all, get people to write down what they think your Team Purpose is. So, get them to write it down individually and then get each person to share what they’ve written, plus share what you’ve written as well. And I think you’ll be amazed at what people have written down I was working with a leadership team of 10 recently in one of our biggest public sector organisations.
00:43:07 Nick Fewings: And first of all, I challenged them, and I said, Are you a team? They all said yes. And I said OK, in that case, what I want you to do is write down. What your team exists to do, What your Team Purpose is.
00:43:20 Nick Fewings: And I got them to share what they’ve written down and I got 10 different answers. And I said, if I was a leader, a new leader joining your team, and I asked Anne what she did and she told me one thing and then I asked John, what he did, what the team did. And he told me something else I’m gonna be immediately confused on day one.
00:43:47 Nick Fewings: So, that led us into the activity of then creating our own Team Purpose Statement. So, maybe something for you to consider as I said, Team Purpose is the most important elements of those 16 areas of teamwork, so it’s really important that everybody understands what your team exists to do. What that enables and the benefits and of course, if you all create it in doing so, people will buy into it.
00:44:23 Nick Fewings: And then if you get new team members on board your project as the project continues through its life cycle, one of the first things I would suggest that you do is you share your Team Purpose with those new members of your team.
00:44:41 Nick Fewings: So, I hope that’s just giving you some food for thought in terms of Team Purpose and something that you can actually do almost immediately with your team and enhance understanding of your Team Purpose with team members.
00:45:01 Nick Fewings: So, in summary, before we go on to questions, number one, think about how you and your team can measure your team effectiveness and efficiency, especially if you’re, you know, one of the 99% of teams that aren’t measuring their teamwork as a minimum, ensure everyone knows what your team exists to do, so your Team Purpose Statement. What that enables and the benefits and three, really importantly, don’t be afraid to speak up when you feel that your teamwork could be better.
00:45:41 Nick Fewings: Quite often I’ve sat in team meetings and somebody’s mentioned something about their teamwork and they’ve done it quite sheepishly to start off with. And then as soon as they’ve shared it with other people there’s nods of heads around the table, so if you think your teamwork could be better, always speak off about it.
00:46:07 Nick Fewings: Thank you for listening I’m gonna take questions in a moment. Sevcan asked me to share this slide here so that you are aware of the courses that are available through Knowledge Train. Do you want to add anything in terms of this slide Sevcan?
00:46:28 Sevcan Yasa: And just in terms of this slide, if anyone wants any more information, you can always e-mail me. I’m gonna quickly pop my e-mail. Alternatively, you can register chat with the course you are interested in, and I will always e-mail you. So that’s about it, thank you so much for the presentation, Nick. So could we move on to the Q&A now if you do have questions, please pop them in the chat. I know that I think it was Gail that would ask the question if I’m not mistaken.
00:47:08 Nick Fewings: OK, I’m going to come back online, so I’ve stopped sharing at the moment so that I can see the chat options.
00:47:22 Sevcan Yasa: Yeah, we do have a question.
00:47:24 Nick Fewings: OK.
00:47:25 Sevcan Yasa: It’s about the middle of the presentation.
00:47:28 Nick Fewings: OK.
00:47:35 Nick Fewings: OK from Gail, Hi Nick, would you open them profiling team members before commencing project work? Yes, Gail I mean, if you’ve got the opportunity to do so, I would quite it wasn’t very often quite often we get a project team that’s already in situ. However, I added a number of occasions where I was able to pick and choose who I wanted on my project team and therefore behavioural profiling was really useful to me to understand the different strengths and challenges and skills that different people have. So, understanding what my project goals were, what we had to achieve enabled me to get the right sort of personality types, but also those with the technical skills as well to enable me to create the team that I felt best supported that project.
00:48:38 Nick Fewings: So, I’d say, yeah, right from day one, you know, as said out of those 16 elements of teamwork, trust is second place. So actually, understanding people behaviourally is a really good way to kick start your project. So, I hope that answers that question for you.
00:49:02 Nick Fewings: Have we got any other questions that have come in?
00:49:07 Sevcan Yasa: I think a few people are typing.
00:49:10 Nick Fewings: OK.
00:49:16 Nick Fewings: Becky, you mentioned that you experienced different team members giving different versions understanding of their Team Purpose. How did you get them to the same understanding? Quite simply with the with that team, that leadership team of 10 that I mentioned, I split them into two groups to get them working as two groups, 5 in each group to then take the best of what they’d all written down.
00:49:46 Nick Fewings: And each of those two groups then created a new Team Purpose Statement that they agreed with, and then we shared the two and took the best of both.
00:50:01 Nick Fewings: So, it was. It’s a lovely way to do it because people enjoy working in smaller groups so and we get different perspectives and we get different views, but we could we can share those views and ideas and then to come to consensus at the end. So yeah, it didn’t take great deal of time I would say that the majority of teams that I work with usually if it’s a team between 10 and 12 individuals, you can get a Team Purpose Statement that everybody’s agreed.
00:50:37 Nick Fewings: Probably within 45 minutes and what I say to people then is just share it with people and just give them time to gather their thoughts and maybe polish it a little bit. So yes, you can do it quite effectively and quite efficiently. So, I hope that’s giving you a better understanding of how to do that. OK, so hopefully Becky, that’s helps you. Yeah, great.
00:51:14 Nick Fewings: Any other questions from other people?
00:51:19 Sevcan Yasa: Just when people think of questions, I’m just going to quickly open a survey.
00:51:25 Nick Fewings: OK.
00:51:31 Sevcan Yasa: So, if people could fill it out, that would be great.
00:51:39 Nick Fewings: This is where I start panicking.
00:51:42 Sevcan Yasa: Well, there is surely positive feedback.
00:51:58 Nick Fewings: This is nearly as bad as looking at my reviews of my book on the Amazon. When you get notification of a of a new review, there’s all that panic sets in. Is it gonna be good or a bad one? I mean, it’s fortunately to date, I think and the this morning in the 96% of the reviews of the book have been five stars, but part way through one of the reviews I’ve got is it’s been a two star. It’s been the only two-star review and it was interesting when I read it, it was certainly from someone of a particular behavioural style and type, so I can understand exactly why they didn’t actually like the way the book had been written.
00:52:53 Sevcan Yasa: Yes, that’s understandable I’m sure your book is great. It is the best-selling on Amazon, right?
00:52:59 Nick Fewings: Yeah, I mean we can end the poll and I’ll just in the last few minutes whilst if people haven’t got any other questions, is it OK to end the poll and reshare my screen?
00:53:13 Sevcan Yasa: Yeah, let me just.
00:53:19 Nick Fewings: Right, so if I could just share that as it. Let’s have a look.
00:53:36 Nick Fewings: Share a screen yeah. So, if people have enjoyed this and do want to connect with me. Can you see that now on screen?
00:53:49 Sevcan Yasa: Yes, we can.
00:53:49 Nick Fewings: So, if anybody’s got any of the questions after the session that they want to share with me, please do so. If any of you use LinkedIn, I use that actively, probably more so than Twitter I do a lot of articles on LinkedIn. So, if you want to continue the learning then feel free to invite me to connect. And I’m also on Instagram so you can see all the places around the world where people are reading, reading Team Lead Succeed. Fascinating so, if you’re into photos, I get people who have bought the book to take a photo of it where in the world they’re reading it. So, it’s been to Alaska, it’s been to deserted beach on the on the island of Fiji, it’s been to the USA, it’s there’s some quite creative photos that people have taken of it, where it’s been in the world.
00:54:53 Nick Fewings: So please feel free to do have a look at that. But yeah, any questions do consider connecting with me and I’ll quite happily answer any questions that spring to mind after this this webinar.
00:55:11 Nick Fewings: OK. Have we got any last questions while I was sharing that?
00:55:20 Nick Fewings: There we go, that’s not bad 5 minutes before time. Anything that you need to add Sevcan?
00:55:30 Sevcan Yasa: No, let’s just wait for a few more minutes I do think people are writing, yeah.
00:55:33 Nick Fewings: Yeah, no worries.
00:55:43 Sevcan Yasa: Cecilia, I do hope you were able to see the presentation, but just on a side note, it has been recorded and I do have the presentation slides so everyone will receive the recording and the slides in PDF.
00:56:05 Sevcan Yasa: We have a question.
00:56:09 Nick Fewings: OK, let’s see.
00:56:13 Nick Fewings: How do you measure the 16 elements from the model? Basically, Carolina people come to me and say, can we actually use the model. And what happens is there’s an online questionnaire, so there’s only 48 statements, 48 questions that are asked of team, team members, individuals. The 48 statement responses are anonymous.
00:56:50 Nick Fewings: So, you never get to see what an individual has scored a particular question, however their amalgamated results go to produce the overall report. So, I hope that answers your question, Carolina.
00:57:16 Nick Fewings: If it does, yeah, it does, great.
00:57:26 Nick Fewings: Any others?
00:57:39 Sevcan Yasa: Doesn’t seem like there’s any more questions.
00:57:50 Sevcan Yasa: And I think we can start ending it. So first of all, thank you so much Nick, for joining us today.
00:57:56 Nick Fewings: Pleasure, pleasure, thanks very much the opportunity.
00:58:00 Sevcan Yasa: And thank you everyone for joining. If you do have any questions, you can always e-mail myself or Nick. He did provide his contact details and it will also be on the slides that I do send out. And you will receive the recording and the slides, most probably next week. If you are interested in any courses, please feel free to e-mail me and thank you so much for joining everyone.
00:58:27 Nick Fewings: Yeah, thank you, thank you for your time. Good to meet you virtually, ok and thank you very much for your help Sevcan.
00:58:36 Sevcan Yasa: No worries, my pleasure.
00:58:37 Nick Fewings: Ok well, take care everyone.
00:58:40 Sevcan Yasa: Bye everyone.
