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Punchy, actionable insights and tips to make the life of the team leader a breeze.
[00:00:00] Pia: We meet many teams who struggle to agree. Sometimes decisions are left unmade for months or even years with an inevitable impact on team effectiveness. In this Connect, we're going to explore a way to shorten that cycle while bringing people along with you. I've used this approach to solve months old problems in less than half an hour, so the next few minutes should be a very good use of your time. I'm Pia.
[00:00:25] Dan: And I'm Dan, and this is Squadify Connects. It's easy for teams to fall into the trap of thinking that they can have effective conversations just by talking. That's what we do in normal life, right? Yes. But these conversations often favor the more extroverted members of the team and often have no direction. When you need to come to some sort of an agreement in a business context, you need structure in order to hear everyone and funnel things towards an agreement.
[00:00:52] Pia: So the structure that we're talking about here is called an aligned decision making approach. It's a catchy old name or ADM. And guess what? It's based on the three Ws, and it's basically Grow that we saw in the coaching Connect, but it's for a group, so let's unpack it.
[00:01:11] Pia: Some, perhaps you need to facilitate this process and help people move from one stage to another, and particularly for larger teams, use some sort of facilitation technique like Post-Its or Whiteboarding so that everyone gets a say.
[00:01:25] Dan: So here are the stages. First of all, goal. This is your W1. Have the team contribute to this and see if you can set a desired outcome for the decision that you are making. Your reality your W2. Again, use a technique to have everyone contribute to a picture of the current state. This factors should be aligned to the goal, so keep things on track and don't let the conversation drift into other topics.
[00:01:48] Pia: And then options, which is W3 part one. This is a great opportunity for a brainstorm. What are all the things that you could do? Keep the process visible and capture every idea, keep these options open, and it's referred to as a sort of divergent phase of the process. You're trying to broaden the thinking so that you have the most options and so that you have the best chance of agreement. Now take things a little deeper and explore the implications of these options. What are the requirements for resources, time, money? What are the impacts would that option have on the team or stakeholders?
[00:02:26] Pia: And then W3 part two is will. At this stage, you may wanna use some way to have the team vote to land on a decision. When you have your agreement, it's worth pausing to check on commitment. Did the process deliver an outcome that people can truly get behind?
[00:02:45] Dan: So this week, try out the aligned decision making process. You may have a zombie decision on your team. You know, the ones that won't go away but won't actually die? Uh, that would be ideal, but if not, perhaps try putting a strategic question into play with your team and see if the ADM can deliver an outcome for you.
[00:03:04] Pia: So that's it. It's the end of this miniseries on rockstar skills. Hope you are now feeling a true rockstar, and as we promised, we didn't give you loads of new acronyms, tools, and mnemonics. The W3 is your friend in many of these skills. It's outcome focused, it's fact-based, and it's action orientated. You are always looking for the goal first, what's happening, and then the options between the goal and the current situation. And which leader would not want to be seen as goal orientated and successful? So thanks for listening and experimenting.