Squadify Connects

So many challenges that teams take on today are new, so a crucial part of our agile approach is learning. Getting good at that will accelerate your team and give you better outcomes.

Some keys to a successful retro:  Give everyone a chance to reflect and have a set of points that they then share on a whiteboard or similar so that it’s not just the vocal folks like us that get a say  Secondly, keep working psychological safety. One of the best ways to do this is to set the tone, especially for question 2 – what didn’t go so well.   You lead the way – call out some things that y...

 Your team is now really clear on what it's doing and crucially not doing in the month sprint. That lies ahead. This week, we're looking at what happens along the way to make the sprint a success.

 This week we get into action and share the secrets of teams that plan and execute together with total transparency. There are sophisticated versions of this, but as you know us, we keep things very simple and we'll get you started as an agile team in just a few days.

We've talked a lot about getting your clarity as a team really nailed down. And in this episode we'll take it to the next level. How can you maintain clarity of direction and also adapt as conditions change, and as you learn?

Teams are here to get stuff done together. So this new miniseries on execution is going to be action packed, and we hope will become a key part of your leadership toolkit here at Squadify. We've built and work-tested a form of agile that any team can use to unite and accelerate. And we're gonna let you in on some of those secrets.

When Squadify looked at the rankings of the specific team tracker questions from its global set of over 30,000 team members and then aligned it to Dr Timothy Clark's model of psychological safety, the findings were really enlightening. It's also incredibly useful for leaders navigating challenging environments today. So today's Connect aims to give laser focus to the specific things that leaders s...

It is being said that challenger safety democratizes innovation. That's a pretty powerful capacity to have in a team, and so we explore the practical tips and insights to make it happen.

We've taken a look at making sure that team members are included and that they have the ability to learn. This week's Connect builds on that foundation and gets to the crucial part of being in a team when everyone feels able to make a difference.

Being able to grow and develop skills on the job is both motivating and helps the team to build the collective muscle to meet new challenges. But sometimes the fear of getting it wrong means that it's just not quite as safe as we may think to speak up.

Feeling included is a foundational part of our human D n A. We're actually hardwired to connect, and even our stress response is there to check for danger every few seconds. So creating inclusion in your team as early as possible is a key priority.

 psychological safety could sound like a soft topic, and you might imagine that a psychologically safe team is a place where people are just nice, but there's an awful lot more to it than that.

In a world where people support each other and share the workload, role clarity could look a little old fashioned and even a barrier to teamwork. But good fences make good neighbours, and role clarity and its interdependencies are actually at the heart of team success.

Strategy is a big word. Well, it isn't that big, but it can be very complex. But as you expect from us by now, we like to keep things simple. We've looked at why your team exists and what it wants to achieve. This week we look at how it will get there.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this Connect is going to be mega dull, and for pressing play with that sinking sense of years of KPIs coming at you that make little sense, or you have no control. Have no fear; this is a great topic, and once mastered can have a huge impact on aligning your team.

Warren Bennis a leading scholar and a key light in building effective organizations over this century once said Creating a compelling vision, one that takes people to a new place, and then translate that vision into reality. Once you have clarity on your why or purpose, the next step is to craft the vision of the destination that you are seeking.

Simon Sinek tells us that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And the same applies for people working in your team. Creating a sense of purpose, which provides meaning and alignment, is crucially important and the focus of our Connects today.

Before we start to build your clarity on a page, we need to make sure that it's anchored by an external focus. Your team needs to serve its stakeholders and know the context that it works in. Checking on that first will pay huge dividends down the line.

We do a lot of work with teams of all kinds, and one thing we can say is that they think that they know what they're trying to achieve and how they will do it. But in fact, they generally don't. This Connects sets up the rest of this mini-series so that you can lead a team that is not just going places or being really busy, but knows where that place is and how they'll get there.

Aligning your team behind a clear direction that everyone understands is motivated to achieve and can deliver to is probably one of the most fundamental keys to success, and also where a whole lot of challenges can lie. Welcome to today's connect, the first in a mini-series, focusing on alignment, bringing your people together, and helping them make sense of their work and actually achieving more.

There's probably not a single business or organization on this planet that is just content to stay with the status quo. And given so many changes in our ways of working, markets and economies, you can really understand why. But making the actual change is often harder to do in your team. So understanding a visual journey to your next transformation is gonna be incredibly valuable to lead you and y...

Hybrid work can be exhausting at times. Fatigue and burnout are two big factors to manage. So today we conclude our series on leading in hybrid by going back to you and making sure you are looking after number one okay.

Working in hybrid and remote teams offers huge benefits in terms of flexibility, time saving, and availability of talent – not to mention the benefits for the environment. But leading in hybrid requires a few new skills, so we have three tips for you today based on our research with the London School of Economics.

Teams are made up of individuals, but how they work together as a team makes a huge difference to performance. But what is that secret code of skills and behaviour that are going to make the team really work well together? That's what we're looking at this week; the last of the three Cs: competence.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is a well-known quote from management consultant Peter Drucker. You can have the best strategy and direction, but if your team aren't set up for success, it'll become really difficult to properly succeed. So this week's episode is focusing on our next condition for success: climate.