 Today we have Ralph with us. He's an author, he's a founder and he's here to talk about the art of teams. With that, I hand you over to Ralph, Ralph Olius. So welcome. Let me re-organise some windows. There we go. Welcome to this talk about the art of teams. Quick agenda, quick introduction about the art of teams, about myself. Then I would like to talk about six components to help teams to be successful. And I want to focus a bit more on team development models. So my name is Ralph Roosmalen. I'm from the Netherlands. 46, I will turn 46 on 47 on Tuesday. I've been active in the HR community, leadership change management, ministry pointo, connected. A lot of things. Just check out my profile on LinkedIn. This is not about to promote myself as a person. So that's me. Okay. The book art of teams. The book is published nowadays. You have to do it like this. And it's about six components that teams need to be successful. And it's about clarity, impact, trust, conflicts, reliable and caring about results. And I will talk about those six components in the next slides. And teams are the building stones of organisations nowadays. I mean, for me, the smallest entity in an organisation is a team. And the problems that we solve today, that we face today are so complex and complicated that we need teams to solve those problems. You can't do it alone anymore. So we need to have teams. And there are so many teams in this world that I've seen, that I think, oh my God. Or, okay, nice, but it can be done better. And I'm not saying that all teams will be high-performing teams, but there's always room for improvement. And by writing this book, I try to combine theory, why those six components are important, but also how to do it. Because often books tell you about you should engage in conflicts. You should trust your team members. Okay, cool, but how? How should I do that? And that's what is in this book. Sorry. So the first component is about clarity. And clarity is about a lot of things. It's about who is going to do what in a team. It's about who is accountable, who can make the decision, yes or no, go or no, go. It's about decision-making transparency. How do we make decisions in a team? It's about the skills, responsibilities. I mean, all those things are very important in a team. And there are a lot of teams where things are not clear. And people just make a lot of assumptions. And assumption is the model of all mistakes. I mean, it starts always with false assumption. And clarity, you need clarity on different levels. It's not just in the team, but also outside the organization. I mean, it can be very relevant for a team to understand new legislation. In Europe a few years ago, the privacy legislation was changed, the GDPR. That had a big impact. And you need to have real clarity about what does that mean for the team. What does that mean for the work that we do? Outside the team, but in the organization, you need to have clarity about security, privacy. A very hot topic nowadays. But what are we allowed to do? What are we not allowed to do? I mean, that's very important. And inside the team, how do we communicate? Do we use WhatsApp for business communication? How do we make decisions as a team? What can I expect from you as a team member? What do you bring to the team? Those kind of things need to be there. Clarity. Now, how to create clarity? A lot of tools in the book are all described in detail. But to pick out a few, the user manual for a team. Write the user manual. How can you approach the team? What is a no-go when you work with the team? I have the team. I ask the team to write your own user manual. Team Decision Matrix is a practice meant 3.0. But it really describes how you make decisions in a team when there is no management, everybody is equal. Do you apply to democracy? Good work. But always use Brexit as an example that democracy may be not the best way to go. Maybe you have an expert in the team that you are allowed to make the decision in certain area. Maybe you decide that it should be unanimous. Everybody should agree. So there are a lot of decisions, models to be applied in the team. And it's very important that I said to have that clarity in the team. Stakeholder mapping. Who are your stakeholders? How do they act together? Impact bubbles is a tool from the enchantment management. The volume is low, somebody said. I think it's your headset because when we were setting up this meeting, it was okay. The second component is about impact. Understanding what your team is changing in the world. It's so important. Not sure it's better now. But understanding what you are going to change in the world. How would the world look without the team? And if you understand what you will change in the world, that's a big motivator if you know that. So that's very important. Quickly select a different microphone. It's already better. The audio is not better. Let me know. I can change the microphones. I don't want to mess up the audio, the setup too much during the talk. So why do you need to know your impact? It's about motivation. If I know that we are working to clean the world oceans, that's a great impact. That will motivate me. And teams want to make the world a better place. That's a given. And of course everybody has a different view on what is a better place, but teams want to contribute. Teams want to know how people benefit from their actions. Because we all feel the need to create social value. That's proven by research. So understanding the impact that you make in the world is a big motivator for a team. To help the team understand the impact, you can use the golden circle from Simon Sinek. A session with why are we here? Why are we as a team in this world? And how are we going to realize the why? And what are we going to do for that? You can apply the Ikigai model. Four questions. And in the middle of those questions, if you visualize the circles, is your head short? That is your why? So what are you good at as a team? What do you love doing as a team? Because if you're not good at it, but you love doing it, then maybe you should do something else. What does the world need? If you love doing something, you're really good at it, but the world doesn't need it, then it will be hard to keep doing it. And in the end also what do people pay for? Because it needs to be sustainable. I'm not saying that you make a lot of profit, but at least it should be economic sustainable. Objective key results. A very popular tool nowadays to set goals. And it can help you to understand the impact that you're making as a team, because if you do it correctly, you can relate your objective key results from a team, directly or indirectly, to the company's OCRs. And Chemfrogs. A tool from MEN 3.0 where you can check out the motivation of people. And how does that motivation link with what we're doing? And if I find certain things as motivated, very important, and it really connects to what we're doing, I'm happy. The third component is about trust. And psychological safety is part of this. And trust is about the belief that somebody, something is good. Sincere, very important, honest. I may not try to harm or trick you. That's what trust is about. And trust, again, is also in different ways. You need, the organization needs to have trust. The stakeholders need to have trust in the team. If they don't trust the team, it will not work. The team will not be creating as much value as they can. But also on the other side, the team needs to have trust in the organization. If the team believes that the organization is not helping them, that they are sabotaging them, the team will not be able to create the value that they should do. And also inside the team, team members need to trust each other. If I don't trust you as a team member, then it will never work. Because if there's no trust, it's a negative mood. We're just being grumpy, not trusting each other, angry, I don't know, it's just negative. And by doing that, organization will imply more checks, more rules. So the cost will increase in the end. And if you believe that you cannot trust a team, or that you cannot trust a team member, it's itself a filling prophecy. You will see things like, you see, I can't trust him, I need to check on him. And if you do that, the other team member will think, hey, why do I care, because he doesn't trust me. And by that, he has engagement. And it's just a vicious circle going down. And the worst thing may be for me, because I believe in an edge of mindset, where you do continuous learn, if I don't trust you, I'm not going to give you any feedback. And the feedback that I get from you, I don't trust your feedback. So feedback will stop. The feedback cycle will stop. And to have trust in a team, you need to have knowledge. Knowledge about what you're talking about. It's about consistent behavior. It's about building good relationships with people. And being transparent in what you do. That's very important. And how can you help a team to grow trust? But again, people say you need to trust. But how do you do that? How do you do that? Again, objective key results, because it's about transparency. Create a skills and experience matrix. What kind of knowledge do you have? Can I ask from you? Feedback wrap, non-violent communication. Learn how to give communication. Don't say that you don't like that action that somebody did, but separate feelings from facts. Compliments. And get to know your team member. And that can be any exercise from drinking sodas beer to doing the defining moments in your life and sharing with your team members. But get to know the team member. Get to know the team member behind the LinkedIn profile. Who he really is or she really is. What does she really care about? What does he do in private life? And that helps building trust. Most people are afraid from conflicts. But I really like this quote. Conflicts happen when progress occurs. When there are conflicts, innovation occurs. Innovation happens. And conflicts is nothing to be worrying about. We have conflicts every day. I mean, I just had a few an hour ago a conflict with my girlfriend about what we have for lunch. And we talked about it and in five seconds it was resolved. But it was a conflict because we had a different view on lunch. So conflicts are there every day. And most of them we just resolve in minutes and seconds. So conflicts are not always, should not be linked to shouting, slamming doors, people getting upset, angry. Now that are just exceptions. We need those conflicts. And in business you have three types of conflicts. And the first two are totally okay. Have them as much as possible. Task related. How are we going to do this task? How are we going to execute this task? How are we going to plan the work? Process. How are you going to realize our vision, our strategy? What are the responsibilities? And the third one, that's the one that you want to prevent. Relational related conflicts. That's really about, hey, I'm from this village. You're from that village. I don't like you. I don't like the color of the air. I don't like what you believe in. Those are the ones that you want to prevent. And if you don't solve the first two, there's a big risk that you end up in the third one. And that one is killing for a team. So how to deal with conflicts? Again, because you need to engage in conflict, but how do you do that? So step one, just accept there are conflicts. There will be conflicts, period. Nothing to worry about. And when the mood is good, when everybody's happy, prepare yourself. Make agreements how to deal with conflicts. And the third one, if there is conflicts, keep in mind we have all the same goal. We just have different views on the situation, on how to execute something. But in the end, we all want to have this team, company, organization, department to be successful. That's very important to keep in mind. And I want to share two things that you can do to support conflicts. The first one is the conflict manifesto. Discuss this with the team. Have the team read it. Ask what they think about. Maybe have their signature on the bottom, that they agree with having conflicts. The first step is just to talk about it, to accept there will be conflicts, and that we're not afraid of conflicts. And that's something that we often don't do in a team. So take time to discuss this. Then come up with a procedure, for example like this, to deal with conflicts. The first step is, are you in? Do you really want to solve this conflict? Really? If yes, then continue. If no, then we will not resolve it. What are the facts? What happened? The things that we see happening, the things that we see that happened, things in the past, what are the facts? Okay, we have the facts. What is an actual conflict? Because definitely when a conflict lingers on for a long time, we forget about it. What is the actual conflict? Back to the start. What is the different of view on the situation? And what is the impact of this conflict on the team and organization? What is this costing us? And that's also money, but also about feeling emotions. They're also part of you, part of work. Okay, and then the next step. What are alternative, what are solutions? Looking back at the facts, at the actual conflict, about the impact that it is having on the organization. What are possible solutions? And then select one. And keep in mind, this one is coming from social accuracy 3.0, as a principle, what is good enough for now and safe enough to try. Don't go for the perfect solution. Reliable. For me, a big thing. It is, say what you do, live up to your promise, things like that. But also about the things that you agree as a team, you support as a team. We're all supporting this decision. It can't be true that if we decide to go left, that one person at the coffee machine is saying, yeah, you know, going left is nice, but we should have gone right. One team, one voice. And for me, being reliable is all about the forecast, as I call it. I mean, you don't talk about commitment. You don't talk about where the commitment, you talk about where the forecast. And I believe that a team is a living organism. It's changing every day. It's adapting. It's fluid. It's trying to find the stable state. And if that's the case, you can't give a commitment. You can only give a forecast and estimate. Because commitment is like, this is going to be nothing else, period. So I want teams to give a forecast and to be committed to deliver that forecast. And if it's so important, what is then holding us back? Because what if you're not reliable? Remember the last time you called customer service and they promised you that they would give you an answer in three days and they did not do? I will be upset. You promised you did not deliver. So negative emotions. So if you don't deliver in time, why would I care in this team? We never deliver in time. So the deadline? Not important. The team is part of the organization. An organization can be inside. Our Trapidjord team is part of a bigger system. If your team does not deliver, the flow will end. The flow will disrupt it. And again, I think that's very important. Confusing message stakeholders. Again, if that one person at Coff machine is saying that we should have gone right, then what should I think about the decisions that the team made? Is that a good decision? And I think this is very important one team, one voice. And it's hard for some people because we have so much work, it's hard to give feedback to people because we have that much increased specialization in the team, large project, many dependencies. But still, it's so important. And you can realize by giving feedback to each other. Peer reviews. Forecast and ranges. Accept uncertainties. Accept boundaries. And consent decision making. And decision making process. And decision making process where everybody is hurt in the process. And everybody has opportunity to object. High-performance teams. It's the holy grail of teams. I think in the basic, I really like this quote from Richard Heckman. Good teams meet client expectations. Great teams, high-performance teams actively shape those expectations and then still exceed them. And results is not about just pleasing the customer. I think all of us just pleasing the customer. I think also the team happiness, the team effectiveness, that will also results, that should increase, improve. And results is about, and it's an open door maybe, it's about the team accepting that individuals don't succeed a film. You can't blame one person in the team for a failure. And you need to connect the goals that we already discussed with impact with results. Because if I know that if you deliver this kind of value, this value, how it will impact the purpose of the team, that will motivate me. And how do you help team to care about results? Causing improvement, great respectives, big part of agile. Stakeholder mapping. If you care about results, you should know at least who you try to please. Cape time, celebrate success in any way. Have the team celebrate success, also small steps. And leave by example. If you make a failure as a team lead, just say so. You're also human, you know. And if you don't admit your mistakes, why would the team admit their mistakes? So this is the, as I call it, the totem model described in the book. Helping teams to have clarity, understanding the impact, trust one another, engaging conflicts, act reliable and care about results. Now the question that I often get is where does it start? Should I start at the bottom and then first get one component in place, then the next? Is the flow diagram? Should I do two things at the same time? I really believe in nature, I really believe in empiricism. And also what Scrum is saying. And you know, one garden needs a lot of water. The same garden, the same plants in another garden, maybe less water because the ground has more water already. Sometimes the soil is better, you need less fertilizer, sometimes you need more fertilizer. You need to look at your team. Depending on what you see happening in your team, you need to experiment, you need to try things out. And maybe sometimes a team needs more focus on clarity, sometimes a team needs more support in conflicts and that's up to you to decide if you work with this team. Okay, a quick word on team development models. Does your team look like this? Does your team look like robots that always act in the same way, always act predictable? I think your team looks more like this. And no worries, no one was hurt in this picture, it looks worse than it is, it was really fun. But the team is chaos now and then. Trying to find a balance, as I said, it's a living organism. The team is probably more like this, that tree in the jungle, interacting with other trees, interacting with the surroundings, having visitors, losing a branch maybe now and then, having seeds surrounding that grow into new trees, new team members. And that kind of systems, nature systems, you cannot capture in a linear model. A tree doesn't grow always exactly like this. A living organism not always grows like this. If you have kids, you know that there are years that they grow faster. Some kids are smaller, it's not linear. A living organism. Though it's really like moving a bit, fluid, it's a bit like, I don't know, exactly made by this picture. So if you keep that in mind, that it's not linear, then this model maybe looks a bit weird, isn't it? Many of you might know this model. And we say, team started forming. Then they go to storming, they have some arguments, conflicts, and then they work them out, then they are norming. Then we perform. And then in the end, adjourning. But there is no proof, no empirical proof that this model works. It's just tested on a very small group of research teams. And the University of the University of the US military did a huge research on this model and they could not find any proof. And I think the reality is more like this. Some teams directly go to norming. Some teams always pander between storming and norming. Some teams go from forming directly to performing and then back to forming. And when a team member joins, they keep performing. There's another hypothesis, difficult to work for me, on how things grow, how things evaluate. And it's called the punctuated equilibrium model. And it says, an organization, the system is stable and then something happens, it improves, it finds a new balance, it grows and then it's again stable for a long time. And that happens over time. So evolution is maybe more like stable, a comet hit the earth, dinosaurs gone, mammals grow, evolve and again stable. Ice age and again something happens. Instead of graduates linear growth. And I can give you an example. I mean a lot of organizations were trying to implement remote work, having discussion about, yeah, we need to implement teams, so let's roll out teams and projects that would take years because we need to replace link and Skype in business. And then two years ago in February, March a lot of organizations, a lot of companies went on lockdown. And within weeks we switched completely from in person to remote. And I was saying that it was flawless and that everything was good after it. But we made that transition in weeks. And if I would have asked you three years ago, do you think that the world can change from in person to virtual work in, let's say one month, two months, you would have laughed, you would have said, well, you're crazy. That's not possible. But it is. This is a model described by Conny Gorsuch, professor of human resources and she observed that teams, because she applied it in teams, she did research on teams, was stable, had a major transition where they really improved, they dropped old patterns, reviewed stuff, made that huge improvement and then continued again. And that happened always after stable period. And more interesting, she discard that old teams exactly halfway, don't pinpoint it on one hour, but exactly halfway had that moment. And she realized it was the first meeting, the kickoff, the project of whatever it is, and the vision deadline. And between that there was this moment of the light bulb. But they realized, uh oh, we're not going to make it. We're in deep trouble. We need to change. And beware, it's not the real end of the project, it was the deadline. The official deadline set at the start. And it was not that those teams were developing, improving every week a bit. It was stable, that moment of clarity and then they made a big improvement. Again, theory, and I think, okay, but how can I make this practical? So let's start with the kickoff meeting with the team. I think that's a good idea. Get together, do a deep dive, create a plan for the next till the end. But then maybe already cancel some kind of meeting halfway. And then you start with the toddler phase. Team starts working, everything is happy, all happy campers. There we go, on our journey, we're on a great value. And if you're a coach for a team, in this period, in this phase, the team think they can do everything themselves. It's like a toddler, a small kid, you don't need help me, I can pull on my pants myself, I can eat with a spoon myself, and then you see the result and the whole kid is filled with yogurt. At this moment, just protect the team when necessary, but leave them alone. Let them grow their experiences, let them dive into the project. Then halfway the project, as I said, based on the calendar time, transition meeting. And nine out of tens, they realize, uh oh, we have a problem. And most projects have this deadline issue. So there at the moment, that you think, okay, let's get together and let's review what we're doing. And probably they realize we need to make some changes. And they're going into the maturity phase. And like most adults, when you grow up, you understand that feedback can help you. You're open for suggestions. Please give me your feedback. Please give me your feedback after the session, to me, how I did this presentation, because I think I can learn from it. The team is open for suggestions. And as a team coach, Scrum master, whatever coach you are, you can help the team. You can be with the team. Support them. And they have to close the meeting. Where you enter the project, review what you've done. So that's how you could connect it to practical things. If you've got Scrum, no incident, I think, the sprint planning is there. It's your kickoff meeting. Your sprint retrospective, sprint review, in this model are closing meetings. They are there. So maybe the only thing that you need to do, is the reality check. How confident are we? If you have a sprint of two weeks, you're not going to do a meeting of one day, half way the sprint. But from my experience as a Scrum master and as a coach, doing a sanity check half way the sprint, most people think, oh, we were a bit optimistic. So do some thinking, fist of five, how confident are we? Do we need to change anything? I think it can be very valuable. If you look at a bigger approach, for example, SAFE, PI planning, the kickoff meeting, get inspect and adapt, system demo at the end, closing meetings. Three months often people have a program increment. I know teams who are implementing some kind of reality check half way that PI to some kind of review session over there. Are we still going to make it? Did the world change? Probably yes. Do we need to adapt plans? Probably yes. So just schedule that transition meeting, reality check half way the PI. So to summarize, to conclude, we talked about the TOTA model. A lot of tools try to explain why it's important, what can happen if it's not there. Next we talked about a punctuated equilibrium model. Stable, something happens stable and it was Winston Joseph who already said, never waste a good crisis. So thank you very much. This was it. If you want to know more about this check out the website out of teams. If you want, you can buy the book. I'm not going to make a big promotion of it. Any questions? We have one question. What do you suggest when the midstream sanity check shows there is no confidence in delivering all the items, but the lack of suggestions towards it? That depends on the situation. It means how to say let's, I would say, in that case guys, so we're not going to deliver it but we're not going to take any actions. I mean, explain to me how? Why? I mean, as a coach team member just asked, okay, but how are we going to resolve this? So we're heading for this wall straight into this wall brick wall. I'm not going to do anything. That puzzles me. So that would maybe be my first question. The second thing you can do maybe, okay, then just go ahead let's drive into this wall with the car. I mean, let's see what happens. Make it a learning moment. Depending on the situation if it's really an issue maybe you should intervene. But I'm not a big fan of that because taking away a learning experience for the team. So I think ask the question. So we're going straight into this wall and we're not going to do anything. That really puzzles me. And the second one is, okay, then let it happen. Then I'm just going to learn because probably this team is then still not mature enough to realize what's happening. The bigger thing maybe could be about safety. Trust. Does the team feel safe to step up? Are they afraid that organization will be I call it angry in them? Not happy when they say they can deliver something? So that's something that you could do. Just curious. All the guidance mentioned in the slide are gems. Is there a prerequisite for execution? Culture is a strategy for breakfast. I think culture can eat anything for breakfast. It can strike companies even. No. I don't believe in models where you first need to go to step one before you can go to step two, etc. I believe in your knowledge as a coach as a team member, as a lead, as a manager in looking at the team and trying to puzzle out what the team needs. And I can't say from my desk in the Netherlands write a book and tell you what to do with the team. I don't believe in that. So you need to observe your team. Most of the tools that I described today, also in the book, there are some that require more maturity. If you talk about doing an excited team where you're going to talk about defining moments in your life, really defining moments, so that could be siblings, parents that got sick that passed away, and also good things, happiness, marriage, children that were born. You need to have some kind of trust. And maybe you're not going to do that with a team that just got out of conflict mode. But I can't say that from my desk. You need to discover that yourself. You need to experiment that yourself. A coach requires to make you commitment over focus. Yeah, so if that's the case, you need to start low and then maybe create some data to show people that, hey, you see this the team is quite stable. There's always a bit of variance in the results, in the output. So maybe we should define boundaries. And as long as we're within the boundaries, it's okay. Should we try that? This is an experiment, right? Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Ralph.