Tools Archives - Page 2 of 4

Why a Quick Check-in Makes Meetings More Effective

At the beginning of the meeting, we ask, “What are you bringing with you?” This simple ritual builds psychological safety and actually keeps meetings running on time.

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Get to “Skateboard”: How to Start Solving Complex Challenges

To solve complex problems, start with the simplest solution and make it “safe to try”

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Increase Resilience with a Leadership Retrospective

Resilience is a critical skill for any leader in turbulent times—and just like any skill, it can be practiced and improved. Use this activity to reflect on your performance and the year ahead.

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The Definitive Guide to Employee Experience Strategy

This comprehensive view of key milestones for employees at your organization can help identify opportunities to increase retention.

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Memo Mori: Define Your Legacy to Revitalize Your Present

What impact do you want to leave behind? Set aside time to write your own obituary, and use it to guide your day-to-day.

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How to Make Decisions that are EPICS

Uncertainty, politics, timing, resources—making the right call is rarely easy. And when we talk about decision making, we often ignore critical aspects of the decision making process in favor of speed or own biases.

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How to Define an Organization

It can be difficult to give order to the mess that is an organization. After all, business is the commercialization of human interaction and well, people are messes of complexity. Our tool, the Org Charter, helps make sense of all that complexity.

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Group Decision Making Model: How to Make Better Decisions as a Team

There are lots of group decision-making models. Explore each and find one that works well for your group’s needs and circumstance.

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How to Identify a Problem by Asking Questions

In a fast paced world, we tend to overvalue speedy solutions and mistake what problem we’re really solving for. Instead of rushing to a typical brainstorm, pause for a moment and generate questions.

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Give Constructive Feedback with A Star and A Wish

You’ve probably heard of the “feedback sandwich”—a compliment, followed by a criticism, then another compliment. As someone giving feedback, this model feels safe and comfortable but for the person receiving the feedback it’s all too easy to learn to ignore any positive feedback as you wait for the “real” feedback. The next time you need to deliver feedback, try this format dubbed “A Star and A Wish” instead.

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How to Conduct One-on-One Employee Meetings

When you become a manager, or leader, your responsibility shifts. Your role isn’t to maximize the potential for the work, it’s to maximize the potential of those around you.

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How to Write a Strategy Statement Your Team Will Actually Remember

It’s 4:30pm on a Friday and your team has to make a critical decision by the close of business but you’re on an overseas flight, unreachable and unable to help. The team has two options on the table and both seem equally compelling although each have long-term consequences if they get it wrong. How will the team know, without being able to check in with you, which call is the right call to make?

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Overcome Resistance to Change with Acceptance Planning

Change may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean people won’t try to stop it: Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s research has identified multiple reasons people resist change.

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Evaluate Your Team’s Skills and Interests with a Roles Venn Diagram

It can be challenging to know what skills your team members have and how they want to develop their careers, not to mention how these interests ladder up to the tasks the organization needs. Moreover, all teams should periodically review how they’re spending their time and whether individuals on the team are happy with their workload.

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Create a “Skills Inventory” to Allocate Work and Develop Team Members

It’s easy to fall into the habit of depending on specific people for certain tasks at work, but this can lead to overdependence on some team members and underutilization of others.

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How to Build the Right Product with Pretotyping

Pretotyping can help save your team money and time on product development by validating assumptions about consumer behaviors before moving into a more elaborate prototype.

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Build a Better Brainstorm by Flaring and Focusing

In order to manage dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas from a brainstorm, take time as a team to get intentional and systematic when prioritizing ideas. Don’t default to the easiest idea to implement or the shiny new bullet.

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Use a Framestorm to Generate New Ideas

If your brainstorms aren’t yielding the innovative ideas you’d hoped for, try a different approach that involves coming up with questions about a problem, as opposed to solutions.

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Five Exercises to Address Conflict

Conflict in the workplace often arises from misunderstanding and can be addressed with overcommunication. While these five exercises are great for a new team just starting to work together, established teams can also benefit from taking a step back to consider how they’re working with others.

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How to Break Down Big Projects into Weekly Goals

No two teams are the same, and how you accomplish weekly goals will differ depending on what people need from each other. But finding a series of meetings or habits that help the team break down big projects into weekly deliverables will make you more productive and prevent end-of-project crunch time.