Creating dialogue around values and principles, building a shared understanding.
Exploring our social contract in teams, groups, with stakeholders. Inviting internal and external partners. Getting to know us, our ecosystem better. When bringing people together, how do we move beyond the shallow ping-pong of opinion?
To create shared understanding, it helps to come from a genuine intent to understand our differences. It's important to slow down, let go of assumptions. When our ego defense kicks in… relax and let’s stay curious.Get into focus and flow.
Using our bodies, we start to deepen our listening beyond words. We notice how others are making meaning, sensing energy shifts that will fuel new patterns. Having our and our peoples’ understanding of the values and principles out in the open helps us to relate to each other in more safe and creative ways.
It’s a specific way of creating an update of the way we work.
What is our position? Where are other positioned in relation to us? What is the magic made of that gets us on the same page? Looking at hard and soft dependencies, we uncover where re-calibration and re-configuration will allow for more fluidity along those pathways we can only travel together.
You know the African proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”? Let’s go far and further – together, as fast as we can. Slow down.
How do we operate, relate, and think – together?
What is our individual and collective contribution to making our values and principles come more alive in our day-to-day interactions? New capacities are needed to break through existing thresholds and allow our teams and leaders to go one step further – curiously tuning into each other, anticipating the future.
Course correction. Right now, what gets us closer to who we want to be?
What is outdated and wants to be honored because it served us so well up until here? What will continue to serve our purpose? And what wants to be re-patterned to allow for new and amazing things to happen?
Let’s appreciate and build appreciation for new team leadership styles into our team DNA (or is it our team RNA, knowing that ribonucleic acids play a major role in coding, decoding, regulating and finding new ways of expression?).
Anticipating our future, inviting it into our here and now, what picture can we draw of our best-case scenario? And how do our retrospectives, the learnings from what we know about getting to our peaks, inform our “We”? Moving forward, what values and principles will best support us in who we want to be and what we want to have?
Engaging our teams in meaningful dialogue, we prepare the field to let our values and principles be the seeds. What is it that we invite to grow on our fruitful common ground?
Let's design our agreements with care.
Turn insight into action…
We use this tool, the metaskill wheel, to encourage conversations and create awareness around values and principles. The metaskill wheel is a way of revealing, aligning and committing our leaders and teams to what matters most – thoughtfully unfolded and created together.
Want to try it?
Step 1: Create a wheel with eight wedges on the floor (think of a pizza). Using tape makes it easy. If done outside, crayon does it.
Step 2: Fill each wedge with a word (value, principle, other) that is meaningful to your team. Leave one wedge empty, a blank space.
Step 3: Let your people walk and explore the different wedges. Facilitate a dialogue that makes the words come alive with experiences, interpretations; what gesture could stand for and represent each of the wedges?
Step 4: Charge the exploration further by asking powerful questions: Where does the greatest challenge for our team live? What is our team’s biggest strength?
· Step 5: Add a topic. How do the different wedges (values, principles, other) inform that topic?
· Step 6: Create commitment. Each participant chooses a wedge (value, principle, other). How does it inform their leadership? And how do they bring it to the team?
From here, do what needs to be done to make it a rock-solid commitment, to self and others. Find accountability buddies. Add it to your team agreement.
Let your leadership be inspired. Listen closely to everyone. Awareness creates focus.
Deepen your insights…
The book Creating Intelligent Teams by Anne Rød and Marita Fridjhon is a different way to initiate, manage and lead effective and positive change in teams and organizations.
“From Alignment to Action…”, this is where you find the above tool described as metaskill wheel in “An example of intercultural competencies”.
Learn more about Anne Rød: https://www.anne-rod.com
Listen to Marita Fridjhon, talking about systems-inspired leadership: https://www.teamcoachingzone.com/mfridjhon3
You want to know more about moving from alignment to action? Send me an email or call me.