Testing Team Clarity
Taavo Godtfredsen
Lessons
Lesson Info
Testing Team Clarity
Now, I've talked about this idea of time management. Now let's talk about the importance of having clarity around where you're going. And this is, I'm gonna walk you through an exercise that you can do with your team. I do it with executive teams that I work with. It's fast, highly insightful, simple, and I'm gonna teach it to you now, okay? It's called testing team clarity. And what I want you to do, well, let's first look at the data on this by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. A mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them in order to help achieve company goals. And what I always share with leaders is you can never communicate enough. A lotta leaders think they overcommunicate. I'm telling you right now that you don't. You can't possibly overcommunicate where you're going and why you're going there, and a simple way to test this with your team, and it can be done virtually or in person, and what I, and think of it like a p...
op quiz. So what I want you to do is bring your team together and I'm gonna walk you through the in-person version, and in the sheet that I gave you, in this worksheet that you're getting that I can send you, there's a virtual version, as well. So the in-person version is this. So everyone's in the room, you say I'm gonna be delivering a pop quiz. And in this pop quiz, I wanna ask you three questions. And this is all anonymous, by the way. What is your, what is our most important goal this year? What do you believe are our top three priorities this year? And then what are the two or three metrics that matter most to measure our success and progress, okay? Ask these three questions. Everyone writes them on a piece of paper. And what you can do in that moment is make a decision if you're just gonna collect data in that meeting at that time and you're gonna look at it, reflect on it, and then structure another meeting around the discussion around it so you can report back the results, or you can do it in real-time. It's up to you. And so once you collect this data, then you instantly know as a leader if you have alignment. You instantly know if you have alignment on your team. And when I've done this exercise with teams, for the most part, you know, they're fairly aligned here, and things just start going south on the second and third question, where it can be all over the map. And it's phenomenal for the leader to say, you know, I had no idea, right? It's a great opportunity to get alignment. And I worked with one leader who did this exercise, and they couldn't believe it. They, this person had 10 direct reports. Only two out of the 10 actually got these right, and those two happened to be their top performers. The rest of the eight just weren't even close, right? So a really simple exercise to get clarity on priorities to make sure we're all aligned. You need everyone to understand how their work contributes to where they're going.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
D'Ann Lapenias
I thought the class was very insightful and beneficial in helping each and every one of us discover and pinpoint our weaknesses. It was also helpful in making us reflect on what elements make up a good leader. Not only this, but it gave us tools to put the lessons into practice, not only in our workspace but also in our personal lives. Additionally, I hadn't realized how difficult it is to self assess your own strengths and weaknesses and the importance of asking others for feedback. Take this course!
D'Ann Lapenias
Taavo is incredibly inspiring and keeps it real. Everything that was discussed in the class is applicable at all levels of leadership. I enjoyed and learned alot!
Michal Levi
Did not expect to find this so relevant, but it was great. BRAVO! So glad I dropped in to this on air session during my lunch break. : ) Love what he is saying about getting feedback!!!!! Wish more leaders would do this!