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Quick Clarity
Trailer
Bonus
Episode 5
Season 1
Company Coaching: Unlocking Team Learning
6 Key Principles Talentism Clarity Coaches use to unlock your company’s potential.
- Start with Synthesizing [00:10:32]- Teams often lose the ability to act as an interdependent group of experts. They typically fall to the level of the system around them, starting with the blindspots and dysfunctions of the person who is at the top or leading the meeting. Every individual in a team is both responsible for their own point of view and for supporting the team to win. That means everyone has to synthesize: and form a productive perspective based on multiple sources of information and critical reasoning. No one person can surrender their right and responsibility to synthesize. But someone at the table needs to be responsible for the meta-synthesis – ensuring that everyone is synthesizing well.
- Safety Leads to Productivity [00:17:42] – People who are confused or feel under threat will stay silent during critical times, adding to the operational burden of the organization. We have found that it is rare that an important operational problem wasn’t identified or at least suspected by at least one member of a team. We have also found that that person rarely speaks up. The second impact of people staying silent is that they can’t help things get better, which means they aren’t unleashing their potential. Someone on the team needs to synthesize the level of safety and determine what stands in the way of creating more safety.
- Reorient to Productivity [00:27:08] – Most communications are unproductive at best or harmful at worst. A team that is poorly communicating cannot turn confusion into clarity and, therefore, cannot unleash the organization’s potential. Someone on the team needs to synthesize the quality of the communication and reorient to productivity when the communication is unproductive. Productive communication solves problems, fosters learning, builds trust, and ensures sync. Typically this starts with someone at the table synthesizing the quality of the conversation, sharing that observation, and reorienting to shared interests, goal-level thinking (shared commitments), design syncs, and prior agreements.
- Ensure Perpetual Three-Level Sync [00:34:13] – Teams typically fail to get in sync at any level. They don’t share awareness, understanding, or alignment. Someone needs to synthesize this failure of sync, call it out, and guide people to testing for sufficiency at each level.
- Design and Prioritize Leading Indicators [00:43:32] – teams typically become fixated on the past, not on the future. Humans prioritize small near-term risks over catastrophic longer-term risks. Typically teams jump on problems like a soccer game played by toddlers – everyone runs to the ball and kicks the hell out of it until somehow the problem moves somewhere else. Nothing is learned, and the team doesn’t win. Leading indicators require attention to the long-term issues that drive performance, like ECM clarity and trust. When teams spend all their attention on lagging financial indicators, they miss signals that the team at the top needs to prioritize.
- Constantly Drive Learning Loops [00:50:51] – everyone is always learning. It is the most human thing to do. But without purposeful learning, based on quality syncs and shared hypotheses, learning will likely be unproductive. Someone needs to hold the responsibility to ensure that hypotheses are shared, syncs enabled, and learning is guided by data, not opinion, putting a point on what was learned and how it should show up in future designs and employment decisions. Someone needs to own the speed of learning of the team and use the levers of the broader leading system to ensure constant improvement.