Could this simple practice help your team?

There’s one practice I find I’m regularly recommending to leadership teams this year, and it’s been a bit of a hit. So I thought I'd share it with you.

It’s a practice that responds to a common challenge: teams often spend time at an offsite talking about how they want to operate (desired behaviours, or ‘rules of the road’ as I call them). The whole point is to agree on how they can best work together to harness their collective strength. But then these teams get back to the real world and - abracadabra - all memory of that conversation disappears in a puff of smoke.

One simple way to stop that from happening is to appoint a ‘player-coach’.

Each meeting, or each week, one or two members of the team are formally appointed as player-coach, with the explicit job of giving the team feedback about how they’re doing against their agreed behaviours. That feedback might happen at the end of a meeting, during it, or both. It doesn’t really matter, so long as the player-coach is given some air time and the team is hungry for their perspective.

That said, I've seen the teams that consistently allocate 5-10 minutes at the end of a meeting for a player-coach debrief seem to have the most success. 

By rotating the player-coach role around the team, you’re doing two things.

First, you’re hardwiring deliberate practice into the way the team works (creating self awareness and self management).

Second, you’re creating a culture where every person in the team shares ownership of team dynamics and team effectiveness - not assuming that’s the senior leader’s job.

And while a team does need a baseline of relational trust to be able to allow player-coaches to make honest observations, the ritual of asking for feedback from one of your colleagues can be a great way to build that trust over time.  

So there you go. Could this be a useful practice in your team? Or is it something you already do (or have done)? In which case I’d love to hear about your experience!

Until next time,
Simon