The All-Crucial Last Step: The Formal Team

11	Jul
	2013

Future of Learning

Central to my beliefs about taking control of your career is the idea that everyone not only needs a lifeline learning team – that counsels you with candor and bolsters your confidence as you move toward your goals – but also a “Formal Team,” the fifth and final ring of the continuous learning circle we’ve been discussing throughout this series.

The formal team is the workplace-centered, high-performance, peer-to-peer community that becomes a lifeline for self-directed advancement and improvement. Imagine your actual co-workers supporting your skills and personal development on the job. Who else sees you at your professional best and worst? Who better knows your strengths and weaknesses and where you are holding yourself back?
Intriguingly enough, the distinctions between what you get from your lifeline learning team and your formal team may quickly blur. Since the arc of your career is an indispensable element in your personal growth, your supporters in a lifeline learning team become well-versed in the subtleties of your job and the complexities of your organization (not just the quirks of your personality). I like to describe the formal team as a means of hijacking an often wasted piece of professional time and energy – the staff meeting – into a trusted peer team to help each other achieve career and development goals.
Repurposing the Staff Meeting
In most cases, staff meetings are routine, mundane affairs of information sharing where executives read to each other like 5^th graders giving reports. At regular intervals, people attend, often without enthusiasm, or hope they'll learn something that could improve the work they do. That’s why the staff meeting offers a remarkable opportunity: tap into the richness of this group for collaborative problem solving and individual growth and accountability.
After all, you are sitting around a table with people that you should know nearly as well as your family (you’re at work as many hours as you’re awake at home). If you could develop the appropriate trust, empathy, support skills and desire to help each other do better professionally, wouldn’t it make sense to discuss your intentional learning plan with these colleagues in some formal fashion – with time set aside to focus on why team members’ learning efforts have, or have not, paid off?
Of course. Just as it would be valuable for individuals in your team to help each other identify weaknesses and goals, develop learning plans, augment their strengths, and analyze successes and failures in other rings of the continuous learning circle. They can even work together on innovation and problem solving that could benefit the company. In essence, the staff meeting cum formal team could become the ultimate answer to the perplexing question: How do we accelerate informal and individual intentional learning in an organization?
Steps for a Successful Formal Team
*Step 1: Articulate the Formal Team’s Vision
High-performing teams have exceptional degrees of candor and accountability in service of each other. To get there, a strong sense of individual safety needs to exist among the team brought about by accelerating trust through intimacy and generosity coached into their behavior in staff meetings. It is a constant and iterative process until a new set of habits and behaviors emerge.
In our experience, it takes six meetings for habits and behaviors to begin to change. In the end, a formal team session may not look like any other staff meeting you’ve ever attended, with each meeting coached less by leaders and run more by team members as a group. It’s important that formal team members, in effect, take a “loyalty oath” to each other to have standards to strive for.
*Step 2: Develop a Deep Reservoir of Trust
It’s essential for the formal team to be a safe place for feedback, advice, learning and improvement. This is why we spend so much time creating deeper relationships within the team, which, in turn, accelerates trust among team members through greater empathy. All real trust emanates from the connections we make based on personal intimacy and empathy.
The process I use in a formal team to inspire personal trust begins with sharing vulnerabilities through telling stories of past experiences that shed light on current behavior. The most significant question I ask early on is, “What experience or influence of your past do you think most contributes to who you are and how you behave today?” This question starts the sharing of wonderful and painful memories, exposing vulnerability and creating empathy, and open talk about goals – all of which builds trust. After this exercise, a visible and palpable difference can be seen among the team, particularly in the support offered by some who had been less engaged previously in the group. This exercise is followed by a caring criticism session in which each team member is told what their peers at work believe is holding him or her back.
In the end, these initial sessions can create such profound levels of trust that the rest of the work of the formal team becomes relatively easy.
*Step 3: Gain Unwavering Support from Leadership and the Organization.
Leaders are all too often afraid to unleash collaborative problem solving and drive diverse ideas out into the open for fear that these bottom-up insights may unearth a secret that they would prefer not be revealed. As a result, these leaders hold organizational change and development conversations one on one, in hub-and-spoke fashion, so they can control the information and analysis and decision making.
I saw this behavior play out to the worst outcome at a large global software reseller. Its staff meetings were merely opportunities for reporting rather than open discussion or sharing of insights about each other’s challenges. The only person who spoke during or after each report by the business unit heads was the division leader.
Mercifully, there was a break before long – and that’s where the real valuable conversations broke out: in whispered discussions over coffee by everyone save the two men who had been arguing at the meeting. When we reconvened, I requested that we revisit the discussion but, this time, let everyone participate. We did, but to no avail. The senior people in the room were unable to allow an open discussion and instead quashed others’ insight at every turn. Nonetheless, I pushed to have their points of view heard. Although the division leader never implemented any of the ideas he heard in the room that day, the team was energized by the meeting. The participants felt that it was the most valuable staff discussion that they had ever had at the company.
*Step 4: Nailing Down the Nitty-Gritty
Finally, the formal team meeting needs formal rules and regulations, such as how often to meet and for how long; whether people can attend via videoconference if they are not available; punishments for members that are not punctual or frequently absent; and rewards for the most active members.
Summing Up
While we’ve reached the end of the phases of the continuous learning circle, the perpetuation of improvement and the beginning of another cycle through the five phases of learning continues. As we said before, you don’t move through the continuous learning circle just once: You revisit your goals again and again, identifying your hard and soft skill gaps and moving forward to gain the knowledge and resources to close them. This happens by moving across the concentric circles from the outside in and the inside out, repeating and growing each time.

We’ll be here if you need a refresher.