 Hi everybody. I hope you're all well. There we go. You can see some little applause, images, emojis coming up. Thank you. Yeah, so I assume that, like me, you've been having to adapt how you've been working over the last few months and adapt again as things change. It's been a constant changing beast the last few months of the world. I think it's going to be continuing for a while yet. So my talk here is around how great teams stay great remote. So I'm originally talking about great teams when my book first came out. But then being able to see how a lot of teams have responded differently to the circumstances that have been forced upon them over the last few months have been quite interesting. I've noticed a few things. So I thought I'd play them back in case they're useful or helpful to anyone out there. Things that are around teamwork and around just general organizational stuff that you only really see when a huge amount of pressure is applied. It's amazing what you see when you're under pressure. One thing that I've noticed is how quite a lot of organizations who have invested in their people and their teams and their development and their autonomy over the last couple of years, let's say. Those organizations have had much better responses and much less disruption than the organizations that haven't. So those companies that haven't really sort of brought into the agile values, the agile principles, what they've tended to do is revert back really to trying to micromanage their way out of the panic with lots and lots of meetings, lots and lots of check-ins, very little trust and people being able to not really get on with their work because they're constantly going from Zoom meetings to Zoom meetings. The other interesting thing I've noticed is that teams that we're working really, really well together, teams that I would probably classify as great teams, they've taken to remote working a lot more seamlessly. It's been quite almost seamless for them. Before the pandemic, to me at least, great teams were key to organizations that were working in a complex environment anyway. And most of you on this call here are probably in those kinds of environments. Anything that's involved in building new products, building new services, anything to do with software, I mean, I'd argue almost anything to do with people really is complex. And I think things are just, the complexity has been dialed up a little bit more now. So for me, great teams are absolutely key to organizations, first of all, surviving because a lot of organizations find themselves under a significant threat right now, but also thriving because there will be winners that come out of this. Any threat, any big event, any extinction event, there are winners. So my aim here, my talk is going to try and cover three points. First of all, what do I think is a great team. Second of all, how does being remote change things. And thirdly, what I've seen great teams do in order to stay great remotely. That's my plan. I'm going to be talking for about 40 minutes, which should give us about 20 minutes for Q&A. So feel free to think of any questions you want to ask as we're going along, maybe note them down in the chat or just keep them to yourself and maybe send a message to Stanley, however you want to do it. So that's my plan. So first of all, what's a great team. And I'm very lucky because over the last 20 years or so, not only have I been part of teams, some of which I would classify as great. But I've also seen lots of teams as well because I get involved as a consultant, I get involved as a coach, I get involved as a trainer. And I've been in lots of different organizations in lots of different industries. So I get to observe things and when you observe things, it's very different to being part of it. So you get to notice things that perhaps you wouldn't notice you were in the middle of something if you're in the middle of the team. So I've been very lucky to be able to effectively observe almost an anthropologist of teams in a way. And so I want to just share with you my definition of greatness. It's not exclusive, it's not perfect. You may well see something very, very different in the great teams that you've seen or been part of. But when I took almost a wide angle view of all the teams that I've been part of and tried to look at some of the things they had in common. So I came up with five key things that were present in all of the great teams that I've seen or been part of. So the first thing that I saw was self-improvement is integral to how that team works. That team, if they're great, they actually, if they're not improving, they're not happy. They don't tend to improve simply because they've been told to. They improve because they want to. And it's at the core of what they do. So they're good at delivering stuff, but delivering stuff isn't good enough for them. They want to get better at it. They want to develop their skills. They want to develop how they're working together as a team. All sorts of aspects of self-improvement, but the theme of self-improvement is there. As is quality. So great teams generally take a huge amount of pride in what they do. They want to put their name to something because they're proud of what they've done and they want to be associated with it. And that sense of intrinsic desire to build something that they're proud of rather than just meet the quality bar that's been prescribed by somebody else. That's another theme that I've seen in great teams. I think the easiest characteristic to pick out of great teams that I found was this sense of unity, the sense that we're in it together, that we are committed to one another, that we are bonded and we sort of stand for, succeed, fail as a team. I said it was the easiest thing, but actually it was quite hard to write about in many ways, but I'll come back to that later on. So we've got self-improvement, quality, unity, audacity. I get questioned about this quite a bit. What do you mean by audacity? It's not necessarily the easiest English word to translate or to transfer across cultures, but basically they have confidence in themselves. They step up and challenge. They're brave, if you like. And brave might have been a better word, but it wouldn't have allowed me to make a really cool acronym. I went for audacity. They're audacious in the goals that they set themselves. They're audacious in the way that they go about trying to reach those goals. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. But the final thing, which I don't want to be forgotten because a lot of people want to hear talking about agile teams. They talk about it being fun, it being psychologically safe and talk about improvement and talking about failing and talking about learning. And all those things are absolutely, really important. But great teams, if they're not delivering, they're not great. They actually want to get stuff done. They want to deliver something that people want. They take pride in getting something out the door. Nothing will stop them from delivering something. So those are what I've found to be important hallmarks of great teams. Before I go any further, I want to make a really strong point here in the times I'm going to be making or telling stories or talking about the best. And good enough is good enough. One thing that I've picked up from a lot of the organizations that I've been lucky enough, and in some cases unlucky enough to be part of, is that just having a good team would be a massive improvement. Just being part of a good team would be a massive improvement for those individuals. A lot of the places that I've been in have taken the approach of throwing people together and saying you're a team now. And that's not a team. It's a group. So a good team is good. Don't beat yourself up. Don't worry if you look at some of the things that I'm talking about here and say my team's nowhere near that. That doesn't matter. The idea behind Team Mastery is to try and find a way of meeting teams where they are right now, acknowledging the successes and the strengths that they do have and then giving them some things that they can focus on if they want it to become better and a way of celebrating the milestones along their way on that journey towards their definition of greatness. So I'm not interested in picking out the faults in bad teams. I'm not interested in anti-patterns. I think that's easy. I think it's lazy to look at anti-patterns and where teams have gone things wrong. For me, I think it's a little bit more helpful to look at what can work rather than what doesn't work. And bear in mind that you're going to spend a long time whenever you're part of a team. You're going to spend most of your time trying to arrive at greatness rather than being great. So if you can try and find a way of what we say, enjoying the journey. Enjoy the process of becoming great, not just everything will be all right when we become great. Now enjoy your journey along the way, if that makes sense. So I want to talk about some of these characteristics in a little bit more detail. I haven't got a huge amount of time to talk about a lot of the detail, but I want to set things up in terms of what is great first of all so that we can then look at what's different when we go remote. So good teams improve themselves, great teams improve the system. So all teams, when they start out working together, they've got a great opportunity to get better because they're starting from scratch. So when you look at a team to begin with, they've got huge capacity to improve because there are so many areas that they could get better in because they're kind of almost at zero in so many different areas. So getting better as a team, that's a good thing, but the great team really looks outside their team and they're focused on lots of little things as well as the big things. Sorry, I can't forward too far. One of the things that I mentioned in my book is the British cycling team, the Olympic cycling team, and more importantly a guy called Dave Brailsford who was the team GB cycling coach. Now many years ago, well not that many years ago in fact, team GB cycling were not very good. One of the things that Dave Brailsford brought in was the idea of tiny gains. So yeah, we want to get better at all the big things that make up winning a cycling race, but his philosophy was to improve everything by 1%. And if you can improve everything by 1% or if you improve by 1% every day, then the compound effect of all of those tiny little gains is going to be huge and that could be anything from the comfort of the seat to the time you go to sleep or the pillow that you use in your bed. Something completely unrelated on the surface to cycling, but looking at all those little things that you could improve by 1%. So great teams don't just settle for the big 80%, we're 80% 80-20 there. They'll be looking at making something that's working really, really well, work even better. And that's something that I think stands out from a lot of the teams that I've been part of. And as I'm talking, I'd like to sort of invite you to think of some of the teams that you've been part of in the past. They could be work teams, they could be teams from outside of work, they could be sports teams or voluntary organizations, maybe even your family and think, okay, so when were we really, really at the top of our game? When was I part of the team? I thought, you know, this is really, really good. I like being part of this. This is really successful. And just reflect on whether you notice any of these patterns in those teams from your past. But great teams as well as improving the little things also start looking outside of their own particular area. So there's a limited amount of benefit that you can get from becoming a high-performing team in a dysfunctional system. And once you become high-performing in a dysfunctional system, you can almost be a sub-optimization. You can be really, really good at doing the wrong thing, if you like. And the coping mechanisms that we put in place can be really hard to break. So great teams look at outside of their direct scope of control and look at improving the system, even if that means making it harder for themselves but making it better for the system. Great teams also focus on quality. And it's rare that I find a team that doesn't know what's wrong. If they don't know what's wrong, it's very rare that there aren't people around shouting at them telling them what's wrong. So good teams find it pretty easy to know what's wrong and then find a way of fixing what's going wrong. And that's a good thing. Remember, good things are good things. Great teams, however, don't just fix what goes wrong. They go even further because great teams know that in a complex environment, there are always going to be unknown, things that you can't actually proactively plan for necessarily. But they don't take the approach of, well, we can't plan for it. So let's just ignore it. Instead, what they tend to do is that they will actually develop their ability to respond when an unexpected event hits. What I tend to call planning to improvise. Now, that could include being able to cover other people's roles within the team if you need to. And in fact, I've got to be careful. I don't want to put a spoiler on this here. I'll just say that my favourite story in the book is in this section because it actually shocks quite a few people when they read it. But it's a really, really good example of a great team proactively raising the bar. Great teams, like I said before, they're driven by pride in their work. They have a personal sense of attachment to the reputation of what they're building. And they look at developing resilience and redundancy within their ranks. That when almost whatever comes up, they can cope with it. And this might sound strange. This might even sound perhaps dangerous to a degree. But actually a lot of the great teams that I've come across have actually seen new problems coming up as something almost cool in many ways because they see it as an opportunity to test themselves and learn something. Now, I'm not suggesting they go out there and deliberately break things just so that they can fix them. But they don't look at the problem that emerges as, oh no, something else has gone wrong. It's a, oh, that's interesting. Let's figure out how we're going to deal with that and what we can learn from the fact that we didn't see it coming. Which I think is a really important aspect of resilience within teams. And if we can develop that within our organisations, then organisationally we become much more resilient and able to not just survive but actually thrive within change. So that's quality. Unity, it's rare that you see or rare that I see a team that's successful that doesn't really have a clear goal. All right. All good teams have goals. Now, sometimes those goals could be tightened up. Maybe they could be made a little bit more sexy or inclusive, but they typically have a goal of some degree. Something to work towards and focus on over so that we can focus together rather than I'm focusing on my bit, my own area of self interest. But surprisingly few teams in my experience have what I would call an identity. All right. But again, if you think back to when you were part of what you would consider to be a great team, would you be able to say that your team had an identity? Something that you know you stand for, you know who you are, you know what your common principles are. You don't need everything specified about how you should act in different situations because you know how as a team, your values and principles would lead you and your teammates to act. You know what you stand for and you know what you won't stand for. And I said a lot of organisations, what they call a team isn't a team. It's just a bunch of people pulled together for a project, but a great team knows who they are. They know, they're taking into account all the values and personalities of the individuals, their likes, their preferences, their skills and crafting them into a common cohesive team identity. Something that we're all proud to be part of. Often it's got a symbol associated with it, whether it be a team t-shirt or a logo or a name or something. Something that we know we are part of and we like to be part of. We're social animals, we like social inclusion. So if I'm part of a team that has an identity, then there's no glossing over the fact that I'm going to have to trade off a little bit of me to be part of this team. I'm going to have to sacrifice a little bit of self-interest for the good of the team. Now hopefully that trade will be mutually beneficial because if it's not, then why would I bother as an individual? And this is where the identity comes in because I know what I'm getting in return. I know I'm becoming part of a group that has my interests at heart as well, that has my back that I can rely on, that I have something in common with, that we can achieve better things together than if I was on my own. And then with that identity comes a number of interpersonal commitments. So I'm committing to my teammates and you can expect things from me and I can expect things from you in return as part of my team. And that's where that unity really comes in. In terms of audacity, I was quite interested when I, so first of all I took my experiences, but then I did a little bit more deliberate research on this. And one of the interesting things I saw around teams, audacity and their bravery is that great teams, yeah, they challenge things, they challenge processes, they challenge policies and limits and systems and assumptions, but they'll also challenge themselves and their teammates. Now, I, perhaps naively, I thought it would be a lot easier and a lot more common for people to catch their teammates doing good things than doing bad things. But what I found is it was a lot easier for teammates to catch their colleagues and point out when they weren't doing things right. Now that's valuable. Okay, it's really, really useful if my teammate tells me that I'm doing something that is harming the team or harming the product. Right, because I don't want to do that. As a person, as a professional, I don't want to do something wrong. And if someone can tell me that, then I can stop doing that thing. Really useful. But what I found really powerful is when my teammates tell me that I'm doing something right. So when they've noticed something that I've done that's helped the team or helped the product, and my teammate can actually take time and specifically call that out and tell me personally that I'm doing something that they and the rest of the team find valuable, I found that to be a hallmark of the great teams. The good teams don't do that as much, all right, which I found really counter-intuitive. Because I thought it would be a lot easier to tell someone something happy, something positive, than to tell them something negative. But in the not so great teams, you don't see either of those. The first thing that a good team does is they're able to give feedback on things that aren't working. And it's almost then they feel comfortable to tell them what they appreciate, what they recognize, what they value, which I found strange. But I don't know whether you have similar experiences, whether it's different in different cultures, I'm not quite sure. But great teams, they do take risks. They will risk failure. They go for it. But in order to do that, they need to know what's working and what's not working. And if a team can't give feedback to itself through individuals, then they're not going to be brave enough to make those audacious leaps. So that's audacity. And then the final one is around delivery. And the good thing around an agile approach, so I've focused on agile teams within Team Mastery, is that with the agile approach and we've got these built-in cadences, we've got the rhythm of frameworks such as Scrum, we can become predictable in a good way. And then once we become predictable, we start delivering almost a regular amount of work in a repeatable time box, then we can plan and we can manage expectations a lot easier in an uncontrollable environment. And once they're in a rhythm, generally good teams figure out ways of getting faster, safely, without compromising quality and so on. But great teams don't just find a rhythm. Okay, so now rhythm is really, really valuable and then you can speed up. Great teams find flow and they know when they need to slow down in order to find that flow sometimes. So what I mean by flow is that magical, well, almost magical feeling of sort of forgetting about the concept of time. So you'll know it if, well, I'm pretty sure that all of you would have experienced flow at some point in your life, whether you realized it is flow or not. You might have defined it as being in the zone or something else. But basically just stuff gets done really quickly, really effectively. And not only that, it feels good. And you look at the clock at the end of the day and think, wow, was I really working for that long? It didn't feel like that. It just sort of flew by. Then you were in flow. And the difference, one of the differences with great teams is that they actually focus on trying to consciously get into flow. A lot of teams will almost stumble across it accidentally and think, oh, that was nice. But great teams actually try and look for patterns. So when were we in flow? When weren't we? What was a pattern when we were and when we weren't? And let's try and adjust our environment so that we give ourselves the chance of becoming, replicating those conditions, if you like. So that's good teams speed up. Great teams know when to slow down. Great teams focus on flow. Good teams focus on rhythm. So that's my sort of introduction to what good teams, great teams are. Nothing really to do with remote there. I think those are pretty universal in my experience, but remoteness changes things. Now, of course, you're probably well aware that remote teams are nothing new. Back in trying to think now around about 2003. I made a huge effort in my office in Bristol in England to try and get all the members of my scrum team to be sitting at one block of desks in the office. Now these people, they were in the same office. They were on the same floor of the office, but they weren't sitting together. And we thought it was really, really important worth the effort to get telephone numbers. To move their desks and so on to get them all around one block of desks so that we could hear each other. We could speak to each other really really quickly. We could pick up on all the unspoken conversation and stuff. It's and since then I don't think I've ever really been in a truly co-located team for any period of time. So remote teams are nothing new, but we are now in certainly in a new situation because almost everyone is remote. So before we would have had sort of hybrid remote teams. Now we have this sort of uniformity of remoteness and that does change things. And I'm going to give a quick overviews to some of the areas that these things have changed. So first of all, looking at let's move this out. So self-improvement starting on the left and going across to the right. So self-improvement with regards to being remote now as maybe you can see my background. I'm in a shed. So I'm in a shed in my garden, a wooden outbuilding which gets very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. But I'm on my own. So isolation has increased even if I wasn't talking to anybody when I was in the office. I was around people and that's a very different feeling. So as a result of isolation, some of our needs are not being met as human beings, as social animals. So we're missing out on small talk. We're missing out on human connection. We're missing out on informal chats, just collaborative problem solving. Yeah, it's great because we can have some peace and quiet and get focused and get stuff done, the introvert side of us. But there's something that's not being met now by being stuck on our own and that's made things harder for lots of reasons. In terms of quality, we've probably, if we haven't already, you must be getting pretty close to Zoom burnout. The fact that you're on a Zoom call now when you're not at work is a huge honour for me because I know how overwhelming the amount of time we're spending on things like Zoom just has become overwhelming. When we're faced with screen time and things like that and just sitting at the same place at the same time, innovation can drop. And we've just become a little bit more zoned out, we've become a little bit more burnt out and we start making mistakes. We make more shortcuts, not necessarily consciously either. So quality can easily drop if we're getting burnt out through being remote all the time and having to, it takes a lot more energy to have a conference call online than it does to have an in-person meeting. Unity challenges. This is an interesting one, for me at least, because suspicion increases when we don't see people. We become a lot more suspicious of people, their actions and their intentions when we can't see them. Now even before the pandemic, people were apparently 35% more likely to feel bad things were being said about them when they were working remotely. So if I was at home, working from home, I was 35% more likely to think negative things were being said about me than if I was in the office. So I'm generally worried about what people are saying about me. A defensive mechanism when you think people are saying bad things about you is often to think or say bad things about them. And when we're suspicious, it's much harder to collaborate and we're in a negative frame of mind. We're under threat. When we're under threat, we can't think innovatively, we can't think creatively. We're thinking about survival, we're thinking about self-preservation. So all of those things that have made unity harder. Now, thankfully, I haven't seen a lot of this, but you've probably seen some of the reports of some organizations looking into tracking and surveillance tools, putting surveillance tools on people's computers so that they can track when they're working, when they're not, when they're under break, when they're not. And that sense of trust is much harder to actually invest in when we are remote. So it takes a bit of a hit, that sense of unity as a team. In terms of audacity, it's a lot harder to be brave when you don't feel you have people around you who can support you. Even though you're still part of a team, you don't feel like you're making decisions as a group. You don't feel like you're making collective commitments as much. And it's very easy to become overwhelmed when you're working remotely. One of the reasons for that is because the social cost of giving someone a task is higher when it's in person. So it's easier to get overloaded remotely. And I've managed to get into a little bit of a habit now of turning off notifications. But during the day when you're working remotely, the amount of notifications that are popping up and distracting your focus and stopping you from actually delivering stuff increases massively. So those are some things that mean that working remotely has made it harder to be a great team. But what do great teams do in response to them? So in terms of self-improvement, great teams consciously adopt what we call a growth mindset. So this is from Carol Dweck. This idea of, all right, I might not be able to do it now, but that doesn't mean I can't do it ever. So they'll often add the word yet, so we can't do that. So rather than we can't do that, we can't do that yet. Great teams learn about what's going on. All right, they're curious. And in terms of needs being met, I said quite a lot of needs aren't being met if we're isolated. One framework that I found really, really useful here is what we call the human givens. So this model asserts that the human beings have a number of what we call innate needs. And if those needs aren't met, then people will struggle. And so to cope with sudden isolation, you'll find great teams regularly checking in with their teammates. Just to make sure they're okay. So great teams will check in with each other, any kind of dysfunctional behavior. Okay, it's probably because of a need not being met. In terms of quality, teams will actually take on less work. Okay, now that's nothing new really. But trying to work towards this idea of single piece flow, having fewer and fewer pieces of work in progress at any point in time, allows you to keep that quality level high. Yes, it feels a little bit inefficient to begin with, but rather than batching things up and trying to make progress on many different things, we need to try and get into a point of just doing less stuff to get more stuff done at a consistent level of quality. And one thing that teams will do that is they will set boundaries and they will notice their triggers. So what do I mean by that? Well, boundaries could be around discipline, discipline around when you're working, when you're not. Okay, we've lost a lot of the routine of our pre COVID world, of our commute to work, of our things that we've been doing regularly for a amount of time, which says right now I'm in the office, work has started. Well, I'm kind of living at my place of work now. So I don't really have that routine anymore. I don't know where my boundaries are, but great teams will put those boundaries in place. It could also be around working progress limits. That's another type of boundary that teams will put in place to try and stay great remotely. And when I say trigger, what I mean by trigger is something that sparks a response in us. So if we notice that things are causing us to be distracted, causing us to feel overloaded, causing us to take shortcuts, what is it that's causing that? What's the trigger? If we can identify it, then we can manage it better. Great teams do that. In terms of unity, this is a pretty good indicator of how well a team is doing. And great teams ask for help. That's something that I found. It takes a certain level of vulnerability, a certain level of confidence in one another to be able to say, I need some help. So you might not get those visible indicators that your teammates are struggling now, but great teams look out for it. They'll be looking out for, you know, I actually coach a lot of people who find it really difficult to ask for help. And there are lots of reasons that underpin that. But quite often, one of the common, I find this fascinating. One of the common reasons when you dig deep into why people don't ask for help is because they see it asking for help as placing a burden on somebody else. They see it as giving somebody else an obligation. But then when I ask them, when somebody asks you for help, how do you feel? Very rarely do they come back and say, oh, I feel, I feel like they placed a burden on me. I feel obligated to help them. They see it as a great opportunity to help and to satisfy someone's need. So a phrase that I've come to use a lot is be generous and ask someone for help. Give them the opportunity to feel good about themselves by helping you. And when someone asks to help, be selfish and help them. Don't feel bad about helping them because it makes you feel good. The other thing that I think is a really good sign that great teams do is they take conscious effort. They take time out to appreciate each other. They consciously look for opportunities to catch their teammates doing good, doing the right things and appreciate them for it. This I threw in as a sort of random, not random, but just a really throwaway tool if you like. It's got a lot of traction, a lot of people quite like this. This is called a user manual. In terms of creating that sense of unity, great teams will learn about each other. And I said about this sense of suspicion. If you don't see people, you generally think less favorably of them. But if you feel like you know them, then you think more favorably of them. If you have something in common with them, then you generally think more favorably of them. If you understand how they work, you generally think more favorably of them. So a user manual is a way of, it kind of is what it says. It's a troubleshooting guide for how to get the best out of Jeff. So you can put anything you like on this user manual. In the top corner you can see lots of sports boards, because I like sport. I like music. My favorite color is green. I have certain skills. I think I'm a good listener. I think I can come up with lots of ideas. And when the time's right, I can be quite brave. But I don't like people being late. I don't like a sense of injustice or unfairness. So if you see me getting sort of angry or frustrated, look for whether it's to do with time management, whether it's the fact that I'm tired, whether there's a sense of imbalance there or injustice. There are times when I do my best work, and there are ways of getting in touch with me that I prefer. There are things that really drag me down. Long meetings that don't seem to have a point really drain me. And if you think that I'm, you know, if you've got this sense that I'm mad at you, because I sent an email, that implies that I'm mad at you, there's some troubleshooting guides. And just sharing this information about you with your teammates is something that I found great teams, not necessarily using this particular structure, but something like this, getting to know one another creates that sense of unity. Audacity, what the great teams do to help them when they're remote, they take action, all right? Rather than wait for permission, great teams will go out there and they will do something that they know is in good faith, all right? They will get on with something. It will be safe. So if it does go wrong or someone catches them, they're not going to lose their job or the company won't go bust or the regulator won't come in and find them or send the CEO to jail. They're not going to be reckless, but they will be able to go out there and just do something rather than wait around, all right? And great teams will, one of the tools that great teams will use to do that is what we call fear setting. Now fear setting is a technique I took from a guy called Tim Ferriss. I can Google his talk on TED.com or YouTube or something like that. Why we should set our fears as well as our goals. Basically looking at the concerns that we have as a team or an individual to a decision that we would like to take or an action that we would like to take. Listing out all the specific things that we're worried about might happen as a result of doing that. And then proactively thinking, what can I do now that would reduce the chances of that concern becoming a reality? Which is what we call the reduce. Then there's the repair, which is what if it does happen? How could I recover the situation? And how could I look at that concern in a different way? Is it statistically or objectively unlikely? Or actually could it be an opportunity disguised as a problem? And by going through the process of fear setting makes it a little bit easier for teams to be audacious, especially when we're remote, because a lot of the assumptions we have about taking action are unconscious. And then finally, the sense of delivery. Great teams will look to get into a sense of flow. How do they do that? Well, they actually look at things. They look at the time they're spending at work, how they're spending it. They're looking for patterns of when they are in flow and when they're not. What can they eliminate? What can they focus on? What can they do more on? And they're looking at that not just their own, but as a team and their teammates. So is it better to change our working hours now we're remote, because we get more done between these hours or these hours the kids are going crazy. So we're not going to get a lot done. So let's change our times. Great teams will have that conversation. Another technique here is saying no politely. So avoiding that sense of overwhelm. So I want to be able to say no, but I don't necessarily think I can. So just thinking about how you're wording it. So rather than just saying, no, I can't do that thing. Well, I could do that if you make this job disappear for me. Or let me ask this person who is quite senior, if I can stop working on their thing so that I can do your thing. Or I can definitely get back to you that on that by the end of the week, buying yourself a little bit of time. Great teams will have really good ways of saying no to things or not yet, or yes if. It's a different way of saying no. So that's the basis of my talk. So great teams have a number of characteristics that are in common, but being remote increases isolation, increases burnout, increases suspicion, increases overwhelm, and increases distraction. But by taking a number of these things into play, looking at setting boundaries, looking at triggers, looking at what needs are not being met, taking a positive interpretation of things, learning about each other, setting your fears and being able to say no politely allows you to deal with the extra challenges that being remote brings in. So great teams. What do they do? They help their teammates get their needs met. They set and respect mutual and individual boundaries. They help each other understand each other, surface and tackle fears and concerns, and do less stuff to get more stuff done. And that's my 40 minutes. So we've got a little bit of time for Q&A. So screen sharing has stopped. Windows closed. Okay. All right. So hopefully you've just got me on your screen now. Hopefully that's probably not a good thing for most people. It is. Okay. So how do we want to do this, Stanley? I saw a couple of things come up in the chat window. Have people been sending you them remotely? Yeah. In the chat room, there is a question from Richard that asked, how is the human givens compared to muscle? Yeah. So there's all sorts of models out there with regards to needs. And I'm not necessarily suggesting one is better than the other. For me, the main difference between Maslow and the human givens is that Maslow has almost, well, it does. It's called the hierarchy, right? Maslow's hierarchy. So there's this, then this, then this, then this, and this, and the self-actualization at the top. The human givens doesn't say that any one of those needs is more important than the other or comes first. It's just the case of that any one point in time, any of those needs might not be being met. So for me, it's a case of, I think it's a lot more leveling. It's a little bit less judgmental in that if I feel my basic needs are being met, I might be a little bit less safe in admitting that, if you like, because we should all have our basic needs being met. Whereas all of those needs are our basic needs in the human givens. So that's probably the reason why I prefer it, but it almost doesn't matter which model or framework you use. What's more important is that you have this idea, for me at least, that if something's going on, it's not because that person is an arse. It's because they have a need that's not being met. It's easy to look at dysfunctional behavior from a boss or from a colleague and think, oh, they're just being a jerk today. No, they're reacting to the situation that they're in. How can I help them get their needs met? So that's kind of my explanation. Does that make sense, Richard? Yes, it does. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you. Thanks for your question. Next question from CJ. So how do we get from a normal team to being a great team? How do you get from being a normal team to a great team? Well, first of all, I recommend starting where you are and appreciating where you are. And whenever I work with a team, I would generally ask them the question of how they would define a great team. Because it's more important that they're more influential and powerful if that team themselves can define the kind of team they want to be. And it's got to be an opt-in thing as well. So it's a case of, right, you now need to become a great team. I'm telling you to become a great team. Do you want to be a great team? Because if you do, maybe I can help you. But if you don't, then don't worry about it. Maybe good enough is good enough. But first, start where they are. And then, well, I'll give you another inch. Maybe this is overkill, I don't know. But outside of the world of work, I'm a cricket coach, a sports coach. And when I was trained to become a sports coach, I was told about this concept of player-led coaching. So what I was told to do as a coach is not to come in and observe and find out where the team is deficient and defies training practice schedules for them to get better at it. My first question to them when they come to training is, what would you like to get better at this week? Based on how they performed in the previous match or something like that, where would you like to get better? And my number one objective of training sessions is not that they get better. My number one objective is that they want to come back next week. And I found that mind-blowing for me. As someone who'd come through a more traditional approach, almost textbook sports training approach, this sense of what do you want to get better at as a team? I'm going to assume that you want to be a good team. Given the choice between being part of a good team or a nuh team, most people would choose to be part of a great team. So what does that mean for you? How can I help you get there? And I think that's a really big part of what I would call servant leadership. Next question, Muhammad. Uma, how do we get started with this user manual for teams that are in different levels? So when we say different levels, do we mean different levels of skill, maturity, experience? What do we mean? Maybe maturity. Okay, so one of the things I like about the user manual is because I'm creating it myself. I'm completely in control of what I put on there. And depending on how much I trust the people in my team, the more or less vulnerable I might be in what I share. So on my user manual, I put some of my defects on there. I told people that I get nosebleeds now and again. I've got dodgy knees and I get really annoyed by unfairness. And I'll often find myself backing up a point of view that I don't believe in simply because I think it's being unfairly treated. But I might not decide to trust another team with that level of disclosure about myself. So that's, for me, the way that we start this in terms of just, again, meeting people where they are. So you're in control of how much you share. And what I find is that over time, these user manuals are a living document, if you like. So as we learn more about each other, we start adding to that user manual. And so more mature teams, more mature people would start with a more in depth, perhaps, or more deep user manual than others. Does that sort of answer the question? Yeah, I mean, like, if you seem to cut more of our working agreements, you start somewhere with minimalistic questions, and then what we could have treatment in which is a lot, there will be a very disciplined working agreement that also covers the behavioural aspects and energy analysis. Yeah, for me, it's an interesting one. It's almost like what came first, the chicken and the egg. Do you go for the user manuals before you go for working agreements, or do you do working agreements first? For me, having really strong working agreements in place can make the user manual a more rich and deep experience and exercise. But equally, am I likely to agree to good working, good strong working agreements if I don't know who I'm working with? So for me, it's not necessarily about which one is the right one to start with. It starts somewhere, but then keep iterating on it. So either start with the user manuals and then get your working agreements in place, and then go back to your user manuals once you've got good working agreements in place, or again, start with the working agreements, use those to get a certain level of vulnerability and trust with the user manuals, and then go back to enhance your working agreements once you've got that level of trust built up again within the team. All right. Depends. Yeah. Thanks. Good. So there is another question that is related to user manual. I'm going to skip to that. Where can we know more about user manual concept? So the easiest thing for me to say there is Google it, but don't worry too much about getting it right. All you really need to know about that user manual is that you can put anything you like on it, and it's about helping your teammates know a little bit about you. That's all it is. All right. So you choose what goes on there. The one thing I personally speaking, the bit that I like the most is the troubleshooting bit. You know, if you see Jeff looking like this, what's that like? How do I deal with that? That's really useful, but sometimes that takes a little bit of time because we don't know what Jeff's like yet. So don't worry too much about going out and following a particular format. Start your own. All right. And just think, you've all read a user manual before. You've all read user manuals that were dreadful, and you thought, I just can't read this anymore. And you've all read some that have been really, really useful in helping you use that product. Try and focus on the things that help you use that product well, whether it be images and graphics, whether it be a little bit of fun, whatever it may be. Just start with something rather than try and copy someone else's. But there are some out there that, you know, if you type user manual for team building into Google, you'll come up with some examples. But yeah, just have the confidence to start yourself with your team. Okay, next question from the Bashis. How does the concept of operating instructions work? Do all team members prepare one for themselves and jointly discuss with the team? So this is the user manual again, yeah. So the idea there is that, yeah, you would write your own user manual. Now, over time, I've seen teams move away from that when they become a little bit more comfortable with working together. So if Stanley and I have been working together for a while, I might actually put some suggestions on Stanley, or as a team, we put some suggestions on Stanley's because he can see things differently to we can. And we can collaboratively do that together. But my general view from what I've seen is start off, you're the only person that knows you best and you're the only one who knows your level of safety that you're willing to share. You might find that by doing this in a few rounds, so rather than I'll read out all of my user manual first of all, we'll do the hobbies first of all, for example, go around the team. And then we've got that sense of safety, so I feel a little bit more comfortable with sharing a little bit more in the next rather than one person has to read out that whole user manual first of all. But again, it's voluntary. No one should be forced into sharing more than they need or want to share. Next one is actually a request and a question from Richard. Request for another session with Jeff to talk about player-led coaching and how it has influenced team mastery. Yeah, it's something that when I think about it, when I say my mind was blown, it was, why did that seem so such a surprise? Why wasn't that normal? The idea of you want to get better, so what do you want to get better at? Yeah, there's an idea that perhaps some of these, I'm coaching 10, 11 year old kids, they don't necessarily know what's possible. But instead of, so again, I'm a cricket coach to this analogy might not translate very well. Rather than coming in and saying, okay, this is how you play a particular shot. This is where you put your foot and this is how you position your arm and this is how you move the bat. Setting them a goal, saying, right, I want you to, we're going to throw 20 balls at you. I want you to try and hit the ball through those two cones however you can. And then reflecting on how successful they were and asking them to think, well, what would you like to try to try and increase that number? And this sense, this was brought about basically because England invented the game of cricket but became the worst at it. All right. And part of that was because we'd coached talent out of people. So all of the other nations that were playing cricket had what you would call unorthodox players, people who didn't play it the way it was supposed to be played by those old Victorian gentlemen who invented the game. God damn it. But English players were all taught to play it properly. So that we had coached talent out of people because if you couldn't play it properly, then you weren't going to play it at all. And that was such a shame to see these kids who could do something quite remarkable, just not be able to play it. That's where it came from. And I think that's something that we see in the workplace as well. We have problems in front of us that are really, really tricky. And following other people's recipes or cooker cutter solutions or textbooks isn't going to get there for us. We need to let people be creative. We need to let people innovate. We need to let people bounce ideas off each other and share my half idea with your half idea and come up with something that might seem a bit stupid, but it gets the job done. Okay. Next question. My kudip. Are great teams personality agnostic or is it fine for great teams to always look for a certain kind of people to join the team? I don't think great teams are personality agnostic. I don't necessarily... So in the book, I talk about personality traits and getting that balance within the team a little bit. And it's not that... So all models are wrong. So you do the Myers-Briggs, you do disc, whatever. They're all wrong, but they can be useful. And where they're useful is it starts the conversation. So as a team, what do we need to be successful? And that's not just about the skills for example, in terms of technology. But I like coming up with new ideas, but am I the person that really sees them through? Well, not always. So you don't just want a bunch of people who are really creative and never really seeing anything through. And as a team, maybe we can see that. Now, it could well be that one person in the team has that skill within their locker, but we just haven't really unlocked it yet. Or it could be that we need to change the composition of the team to be more successful. All of the great teams out there are constantly looking at whether we have the right balance and whether we can meet those challenges from within, or whether we need to change the composition of the team. Most of the challenges that I see within the workplace can be solved with less churn and more coaching. So that sense of self-awareness, not just as an individual, but as a team. And it's not a judgment thing. It's a bad person because I don't get things to finish. That's just a struggle that I have, but I have strengths in other areas. So it's not about judging me for that. It's about how as a team can we deal with that and the knowledge that if we leave it to Jeff, it might not get finished. It doesn't mean Jeff's a bad person. So talking about the openly as a team might allow us to solve that problem without changing the composition of the team. Next question by Yvonne. Curious to know the difference comments between team versus larger group identity. Yeah. This is probably one of the challenges that all organizations face, right? Is that we can get things working really, really well at a team level, but then how does that translate to the organization? We don't want to standardize, but that team shouldn't be successful at the expense of the organization. So in my slides, I talked about, you know, good team improves themselves. A great team improves the system. So great teams do look outside and will even enhance others at their expense because they know it's the right thing to do from a system perspective. Now, there will be perhaps a number of incentives, positive and negative that influence teams' willingness and ability to do that. But generally speaking, from an organizational perspective, we want those individual team identities to flourish so long as they don't sacrifice the overall organizational success. Now, one place that I saw do this really, really well was trying to get some level of... What's the word I'm looking for? Overlap, maybe? Anyway, each of the teams, their identity, they had a certain level of consistency therein that their identity would be some form of music group, okay, whether it be Slayer from Heavy Metal or it would be the Spice Girls or whatever. Their teams would have an identity linked to a music group, but the departments would be festivals. Okay, so the idea being that a band or a group is great, but a festival is even better. And if you have one group that's dominating the festival and everyone else, the festival's a failure. And that metaphor is what helped span from a team to a department to an organization. But standardizing is a really dangerous place to be because even in one organization you're going to have different contexts. You're going to have some squad, some teams that are going to be exploring, and you're going to have some teams and some squads that are going to be exploiting, some teams that are working on a very predictable work, repeatable work, and some teams are going to be working on new, unpredictable work. So you don't want to try and standardize because then you're going to get the worst of both worlds rather than the best of both worlds. Okay, let's do a couple more questions before we close. How often do successful remote team meets or communicate? That's a good question, and the easy answer is up to them because there isn't a standard cadence. So generally speaking, it's how... What's the phrase that I was told you the other day? Simplicity is the amount of... Maximizing the amount of tools not used and also maximizing the amount of meetings not needed. I think that sense of how can we be successful as a team with minimal disruption? So from a remote perspective, great teams make greater use of asynchronous communication rather than everybody getting together. That's not... They'll never always get everybody together, but they won't be always disrupting everyone completely whenever they need to discuss something. So they'll make better use of asynchronous chat tools that allow them to have more fully focused conversations rather than constantly brainstorming. So that's... It's about trying something, picking a cadence and then inspecting and adapting it as a team. As you grow as a team, your cadence will change. That's normal. Okay. Jeff, are you okay to do last three questions? Sure. Okay. The last three. So let's see. Simon will be the last question. So first of the last three is by... Doing a user manual entail a lot of trust and vulnerability. Any suggestions on how we can get a team to build trust quickly and remotely? So I think the first thing for me with regards to trust is that many people unconsciously think of trust as a binary concept. Either I trust you or I don't. When in fact I can trust you to this match and I can trust you to this much or I can trust you to this much or this much. And so looking at that in terms of do I need to trust you completely right away? No, probably not. I only need to trust you a little bit and to prove that they are worthy of that trust I've got to give you a chance to prove yourself unworthy. So I give you the chance to break a commitment. I give you the chance to break my trust. I give you the chance to break a confidence or break a promise. And if you don't, then I might be willing to trust you more. So my advice in terms of building trust quickly is to make promises to one another quickly. But small promises, small commitments and then once you keep them, then your trust will go up. Don't go for big promises and unkeepable promises and unachievable commitment straight away because that's just going to reduce trust to the negative. So yeah, and that idea of almost iteratively doing the user manual. So I'll share a little bit about my user manual and then we'll go to somebody else and we'll go to somebody else and nobody's laughing about what I said. I'll be a little bit more confident to share it a little bit more next time. That just building up that trust iteratively and incrementally. How can we, the team members, create a great team despite having a command and control manager? So it's a tough one and my answer here is probably going to seem a little bit superficial but there's a lot to it, trust me, which is that I'll go back to my phrase earlier on that no matter what dysfunctional behavior you're seeing it's coming from a need that's not being met. So without knowing the individual, my approach within that team would be to try and be the best that I could be but also to try and figure out what need that person has that's not currently being met and if I can meet that need in a different way than what he's asking for which is currently through command and control then maybe we can both win. If I see that as an enemy, if I see them as somebody who is trying to sabotage my work or they're a jerk, they don't trust me then I'm going to be working against them rather than with them. But if I can help them understand what their need is and help them find a way of meeting that need then their dysfunctional behavior becomes less necessary. Does that make sense? Okay. Last question by Simon. A new team member joining or team member living is a different team. What kind of recruitment specific teams have great teams? Simon, you may want to elaborate. It's more, I mean, thanks again really much for this session. I'm just thinking that when you have a team member living or if you have a new team member joining to me at least it's a new team. So you need to redesign a lot of seeing interaction and you are just sharing about trust that certain number of exercise needs to be done. So I'm always interested and when you have been observing those great teams did you notice anything on the ways of hiring people? Yes. And it might sound surprising. So great teams will actually include an element of discomfort. So does this person make us feel a little bit uncomfortable? If they don't make us feel uncomfortable we probably shouldn't be hiring them because they're not adding anything to the team. All right. Yeah, we'll be looking for skill sets. Yeah, we'll be looking for all that kind of stuff in terms of will they actually enable us to leverage more value and we'll be looking for, you know, do they have a generally positive mindset? Are they going to be a team player rather than a selfish jerk? But also will they bring a little bit of an extra dynamic that we're missing within the team? Now, I say that might be quite surprising because if you give a team the chance to hire someone the easy thing is to find someone they like. And so what I found, good teams will, they will go through all of that stuff and they will find someone that doesn't disrupt the team harmony. They enable them to carry on developing. But great teams will actually go past that into a discomfort zone because they know this person coming in will take them to a new level. But it will be uncomfortable while they get there. Now, in order to get past that bias because generally we are biased as human beings is they will ask someone slightly neutral. So for example, a scrum master to say, what do you think we're lacking as a team and that could take us to another level? And it's got to be someone they trust. But that's, it's a risk, right? But great teams are audacious, they do take risks.