In a recent interview ‘How should we rethink Australian workplaces?’, Organisational Psychologist Adam Grant* said the biggest challenge he sees for workplaces and leaders in 2024 is being able to anticipate change, not just adapt to it. He sees many leaders who are very attached to their best practices, but they’re failing to spot that many of their best practices were built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. He calls for leaders to be willing to look for better practices, to be willing to re-think how they lead, work, build organisational culture and collaborate. He encourages leaders to try stuff out, to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t (to become a learning organisation.)
As a leader, how can you best support your team to reflect, and discover better practices?
What do we mean by team reflection and why is it important?
Taking time out to reflect as a team can help teams – even great ones – to perform better. It provides a structured opportunity to share what’s going well and identify areas for improvement.
Research has shown that teams that take time out to review their objectives, strategies and processes and make changes as a result, are more effective than those who don’t. More broadly, there is promising research showing the benefits that teams can gain through reflecting and adapting – including team performance, team innovation and team effectiveness.
Our own experience is that these activities can help motivate and engage teams, support team cohesion and drive continuous improvement.
What are the key ingredients?
To unlock performance through team reflection, we recommend the following:
- Spend some time as a leader doing some self-reflection. What would you like to know more about? What don’t you know? Where might you be making assumptions that you’d like to test out? What’s the right timing to get together as a team? Are you in the right mindset to reflect with the team? Carol Dweck has some great tips on how to shift your mindset.
- Create a safe space for people to share their thoughts and ideas, to reflect and learn. By sharing our experiences, we can help build empathy and connection. Tell your team why you want to get together for a team review (ie. so they know there’s no hidden agenda).
- Have fun. Focus on creating an environment where the team reflection is something that people will enjoy, a positive experience that will allow people to think creatively and discuss new ideas.
- Have a set of simple but effective questions. Focus on asking open questions, rather than closed or leading questions, to get the most from the session.
What approaches or techniques work well?
- Focus on what’s going well, not just what you could do differently
We often find ourselves drawn to the ‘what could we do better?’ question when reflecting. While this is a critical part of team reflection, it’s equally important to answer the question ‘what’s going well?’ Reflecting on ‘what’s going well’ is a great way to start a team reflection because it moves us into a positive mindset. To strengthen this even further, get your team to capture what’s going well and then ask ‘why?’. By doing this, you can develop a deeper awareness of what contributes to your success. It can also give you a greater sense of control as a team, because you’ll be more aware of what influences those positive outcomes or experiences.
Reflecting on ‘what’s going well and why’ is similar to the ‘what-went-well’ (or three good things) exercise described by psychologist Martin Seligman, but instead of applying it at an individual level, you can apply it at a team level. As Martin Seligman points out in his book ‘Flourish’, for sound evolutionary reasons, most of us are not nearly as good at thinking about good events as we are at analysing bad events. This technique can help re-balance that tendency.
2. Look at things from a range of perspectives
There are a range of things you can reflect on as a team, for example, you could focus on:
- self-reflection (taking time out to reflect on yourself as individuals)
- team reflection (reflecting on the team’s objectives, strategies and processes, how you communicate, etc)
- ‘beyond the team’ reflections (for example, your wider organisation, the sector you work in, or even worldwide trends)
To help you anticipate change as a team, and not just adapt to it, reflecting on trends and ideas ‘beyond the team’ can be very powerful. We have delivered a range of activities with teams to help them tap into this:
- You could seek feedback from your clients or key stakeholders to get a different perspective on what you are doing well and things you could do differently. Or, you could ask them what their biggest challenges are right now.
- You could do an exercise with the team focusing on predictions for the future, then consider how these might impact the team and how you could adapt to them.
- You might look at what other organisations in your sector are doing, or best practices and emerging trends beyond your sector.
Whatever approach you take, there are great benefits in helping your team think outside the box and to spend time exploring ways you could work differently.
3. Consider combining a team reflection exercise with other activities
We’ve delivered sessions for leaders who do team reflections as a regular yearly exercise, sometimes as part of a wider strategy or team development day. We’ve seen them work well as part of a deeper dive into a team’s employee engagement survey results. And we’ve also run them as a one-off exercise, where a team has undergone a change, or where there might be some conflict, and a team review can help provide an opportunity to re-set and get back on track.
They can also work well as a part of a wider team event, alongside a presentation from an external speaker – particularly where the speaker focuses on a topic that grabs your team’s interest and curiosity – even better if it’s a topic outside of their everyday work.
In Summary
Team reflection can be a powerful way to engage your team and strengthen team performance. It can help you become more adaptive as a team. In a fast-paced world where many workplace challenges are becoming increasingly complex and uncertain, it’s even more important that we learn to become reflexive as teams, anticipating and adapting to changes around us.
Want to find out more?
If you’d like assistance in unlocking performance in your team through team reflection, or you’d like support on wider team development, please get in touch. You can also visit our website to read more about self-reflection, team development and creating psychological safety.
*As an aside, for anyone not familiar with Adam Grant, he is a world-leading figure in organisational psychology whose TED podcasts have been downloaded over 70 million times. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of several books that have sold millions of copies. You might like to think of him as the Organisational Psychology equivalent of Taylor Swift. And coincidentally, just like Taylor Swift, he is taking to the stage in Melbourne and Sydney later this month.