An effective team doesn’t just get along with each other. They work together on solving problems and figuring things out. Getting along and being friendly tends to be easy while actually coming together and tackling big messy problems is hard.
At a recent leadership offsite for my pillar, we decided to take this one head on; how can we work better together. Collectively, we agreed that while our teams worked well on their own, they often operated in silos when it came to pillar wide initiatives. There wasn’t any conflict or friction between them. These silos formed from habits where everyone was just trying their best to get their work done. The pillar’s teams are strong but when multiple of them have needed to collaborate or coordinate on a larger or more complex problem, that is when things have gotten confusing around ownership, priorities, and communication.
We set aside a two and a half hour block to work through this topic as we all felt it was pretty important. At first, it was pegged to be an open conversation without any structure. The intentions were good and open conversations have their place in relationship building but from my experience, they aren’t great for fixing or improving processes. Usually they end up with few tangibles or action items and with nothing written down leading to them being easily forgotten; that would waste the session. So I put together and lead a structure session specifically designed for us to start doing things differently.
Structure without slides
Good structured sessions have activities that involve everyone. They need everyone to participate and contribute. That results in everyone being understood and shared ownership in resulting changes and improvements. It is possible to do that with open conversations but structure ensures it and is generally faster.
Don’t confuse structure with a slide deck or a lecture though. Those tend to skew participation with only a few getting involved and more multitasking. Structure has activities that have everyone participate and focused.
These activities matter. People respond well to the clarity and purpose they provide. For our session, I selected two that naturally dovetail:
- Start Stop Continue: A simple, familiar framework where each person reflects on what we should start doing, stop doing, and continue doing to improve how we collaborate. It’s direct and creates space for everyone to be heard while surfacing patterns
- Mutual Contracts: A second less common one that takes those patterns and turns them into explicit agreements on how we are going to work together in different situations. These contracts embody what we collectively define as “good collaboration” in our workplace with all of its processes and practices
Step 1: Framing at the start
We opened by being clear about the goal of improving collaboration and the two activities we were going to use to achieve it. We all wanted to have this session but it was worth stating it. Explaining the activities that we would use and how they would work sets expectations for everyone on how they will participate.
Step 2: Start Stop Continue
Everyone took 15 minutes to reflect on three questions for improving pillar collaboration:
- What should we start doing
- What should we stop doing
- What should we continue doing
Miro, a digital white boarding tool, provides a slick template for Start Stop Continue with a built in timer. That made it easy for everyone to write their ideas on digital sticky notes and put them in the appropriate column. Only one idea was permitted per note which allowed us to quickly group together similar ones to form clusters; the patterns we were after.
These patterns made it clear to everyone where our pillar collaborations had been working and where they had not. The next step was to formalize what we would do about it.
Step 3: Mutual contracts
Creating these contracts can be difficult because this is where we started committing collectively to doing things differently. Here we bootstrapped ourselves with an AI, MS Copilot. We fed the AI all of the sticky notes for a cluster and asked for a mutual contract.
To use AI effectively, it’s important to give it prompts so it will process the sticky notes for each cluster in a consistent way. For example:
- What does good collaboration look like here?
- What do we each expect from ourselves and from others?
I am a big fan of using AI to get things going as it is very effective at making initial contracts that are short, concrete, and have shared ownership. That then enabled the team to quickly adjust them to be exactly what we wanted.
With these contracts, it was easy for us to make explicit commitments for each one on how we would fulfill them.
Step 4: Contractual commitments
This step we did after the offsite. Consensus on the contracts gave us direction on how to make the right commitments for fulfilling them. We wrote out what we would actually do which included behaviors, practices, and processes. We reviewed it as a team and agreed to those commitments.
The typical way of conducting Mutual Contracts is going round robin and having each team member make personal commits. In my opinion, that can lead to shallow ones due to folks not having enough time to really think about what things they want done for themselves and their teams. That is why I like doing it as a post session action item. What you lose in decisiveness you gain in depth.
Step 5: Making it durable
The final step was to post the Mutual Contracts and their commitments so we could share them with all teams in the pillar. This post wasn’t another policy or best practices doc; it was a clear communication for how the pillar was going to be more effective at working together.
We decided that we would revisit these contracts every few months during our pillar leads sync to see how we’re doing and make adjustments as needed.
Positive fallout
We are still working through some of the commitments that we agreed to. Some of those commitments have required us to work through changes in our practices. Occasionally I hear people reference our contracts or tenets. Both are great because our pillar is committed to making positive changes and improving things. Organizational and cultural changes are slow but I am seeing progress.
I cannot stress enough just how important it is in a team environment to have structures that empower everyone to participate. On top of that, it is an absolute that things that the team agrees to must be written down and shared broadly. That reminds everyone of those agreements and helps people that weren’t there to understand those contracts and commitments until they become culture.
Push Pace 