Pivoting Your Team

supporting a group to become more reflective, get higher quality information, uncover your biases, and better understand what people mean.

Rather than opinions, inference, or the impact it may or may not have had. This tools comes in seriously handy during conflict, to separate what folks did from what you took from it.

Turn the misunderstandings of conflict into potent opportunities for well-rounded and impactful conversations that lead to more deliberate outcomes.

Get crystal clear about what people want to have happen, what is needed for that to happen, and how they/you will know when or if it has been done.

Given the evidence and feedback, you then will use Developmental Tasks to take experimental action to try out a new way of doing something and create flexibility in your habits.

A participant summary to keep with you, review, and turn to before meetings, during conflict, when things are confusing, or just to keep these tools alive in the culture for you and new folks.

AEI: Attention, Engagement, and Intelligence

Working with groups of individuals, Pivot is profoundly committed to the team and partnering with them to move to the best team they can be through firing up their attention to themselves and each other.

Trust and engagement is cultivated in the group as individuals are guided to thoroughly listen to themselves and each other through creative, non-judgmental activities and reflection.

Then, the magic happens: ATTENTION.

Pivot supports groups to create a network of attention, where individuals are more capable to hear, understand, and collaborate with their own and each other’s way of being and doing.  Fortunately, appreciation lends itself to less conflict, more whole-group intelligence, and more effective outcomes, start to finish.

Which inevitably makes the room smarter.

Teams and groups transfer this intelligence to their intended outcomes, projects, and purpose.

It’s a bottom-up, simple-to-complex process and iterative, we take the same basic tools and apply them to more complex experiences.

• First, I’ll introduce a language of inquiry using a game we call Five Senses so that we start noticing how quickly we make assumptions and what we can do about it.

I’ll invite everyone to pay attention to their own patterns.

Then, I’ll invite them to pay attention to other people’s patterns.

• This process makes apparent everyone’s hidden architecture so the group knows how each person is when they’re working at their best / worst.

Once people start noticing more and more what their patterns and other people’s patterns are like, this starts to create a network of attention.

• And by creating this network, we raise group intelligence so that the group is better able to have and support shared outcomes.

These skills create intrinsic motivation and people take charge of what they want to have happen because they can have an impact now, and the leader doesn’t need to work so hard to motivate them externally.

• For example, the Clean Feedback model to feedback productively, clearly, and safely about what is going on by separating “what happened” from inference / impact.

This process gets real and honest, clearing away a lot of “stuff” that muddies the water and exacerbates misunderstands.

• It requires composure, courage, and curiosity. The more team leaders model these out, the more you’ll be creating space for everyone else to do the same.

• Drama will occur when people get together. The question is how to unpack the drama so that the group can learn from it and become anti-fragile.

Better together: Individuals make fewer assumptions about each other and find small shifts that make huge impacts on working well together

Advocates: Self-and-group awareness supports everyone in maintaining the most effective work and culture for everyone involved by advocating for their own and each others best practices

Deep respect: Clearly see your own inner “rules” and paradigms. know that others operate uniquely, and that all are important to the whole

Prevent drama and contempt: Get folks talking more effectively through issues with clear, simple, curious guidelines to move through the most dense of drama

Crystal Clarity: See clearly what is happening, what you/they would like to have happen, and the steps necessary to get there

“We have shorter and more productive meetings.”

“When we make a decision now, it sticks. We don’t have to go over it again.”

"We get less emotional when we’re discussing conflicting ideas.”

”It’s like the metaphors (used in SM) put a distance between the ideas and each of us - we’re both talking about an idea, not criticizing one another.”

A team looking for a common understanding of “who we are” and way to explain it to customers used these tools to, together, come up with a metaphor that was simple, clear, and better illuminated the important attributes.

I will guide you briefly through the technique I would eventually expand upon with your group. We would:

• Clarify what you are seeing now

• Confirm what you would like to have happen

• You’ll get a feel for the tools I use

• I will learn about you, your needs, and if/how I can support