💚 What does *your* team need going into 2024?

Hello and Happy Thursday,

Just like our last issue, today’s all about you and your direct team.

Whether you lead a team of 2 or 10, it’s vital that amidst the end-of-year madness, your team gets the clarity, direction, and support they need to enter 2024 primed for success.

A few weeks back, we offered you a step-by-step guide to reflecting on 2023 with your team - and the positive reaction has been wonderfully overwhelming! Thank you for all the love you've shown this guide and please keep sharing your stories with me. I love hearing about everyone's experiences!

This week, we’ve got a slate of tools (including a Team Charter guide we’re particularly excited about) to shepherd you into January with ease and organization.

To getting you what you need when you need it,

Jill

P.S. Nick L. shared this on LinkedIn today: "Jill Felska's most recent episode of Want To Work There podcast is next-level content. She has curated a deeply moving conversation between Sara Rodell and Shira Grife retelling how they approached a difficult conversation they had together at work."

If that doesn't make you tune in, I don't know what will! It truly was in incredible conversation. You can find the episode here or via your player of choice. 

Choose Your Team's Adventure!

Ahh, the end-of-year fog. That strange liminal space where our sense of drive ping-pongs between “let’s wrap this up before 2024!” and “ugh, can’t it wait until next year?”

 It’s such an easy time to get stuck, even if you’ve already done the smart, necessary work of reflecting on the year we’re wrapping up.

Well, fret not, because no matter where your team is in the year-end shuffle, I’ve got a roundup of resources to help you alchemize ideas into action, align on the right destination, or find clarity in team chaos.

 That’s right - it’s time to choose your own adventure! 

Simply read the team profiles below, choose that which most closely mirrors your own (even if you’re a team of one!), and let me direct you to the right tool for your current needs.

Option A: You have ideas, but you need action.

You and/or your team have the best ideas! You’ve loved your brainstorming sessions, you know what inspires you, you’re excited about your company’s 2024 goals, and you feel ready to thrive in your culture or environment. Everything you want to accomplish in 2024 looks, sounds, and feels awesome, but when it comes down to where to start, you get stuck. There’s a block somewhere between ideas and action, and you need help.

Enter: A quarterly planning session!

You and your team know you want to contribute in big bold beautiful ways this year, but you’re unclear where to get started. This quarterly planning process guide from SessionLab will walk you through some common blockers to moving from ideas to action, including unclear prioritization, goal overload, and lacking clarity on who’s contributing to what. You and your team can revisit each quarter, re-orienting your goals towards company-wide annual plans and goals, to ensure you don’t get stalled out or overwhelmed.

Option B: You have energy, but you need somewhere specific to direct it.

You and/or your team are never not movin’ and shakin’. Driven, motivated, and ready to achieve and produce, you’re a bunch that favors charging ahead rather than slowing down. If tasked to (metaphorically) run a 100-meter sprint at 100 miles per hour, you’d be pushing off the blocks before I could say “ready, set, go!” Thing is, you have no way of knowing if you’re all running in the right - or even the same - direction. 

Enter: A team or company vision!

If you’ve been here since September, you already know how much I value a clear, inspiring company vision to help orient teams towards the same north star. Luckily, my good friend Lois Weinblatt of True North Visionaries created a visioning process so effective and compelling that I use it in every organization I’m in. Last fall, Lois generously built out a DIY vision exercise exclusively for my Want To Work There podcast listeners, and I can’t sing its praises loudly enough. Want to ensure your entire team (or company) knows exactly what you’re building towards in 2024? This is the exercise for you.

Option C: You have amazing ICs, but you need better collaboration.

Most days, your team feels more like a rag-tag collection of talented individuals than, well, a team. Maybe you’re new to working together, or you’ve moved from remote to hybrid work and are re-navigating how to best collaborate. Whether it’s clashing personalities or work styles, a lack of process or communication alignment, or a dearth of behavioral and cultural expectations, something is standing between your team of individuals and the synergy you know you could achieve if you had a bit more clarity on how to work together.

Enter: A Team Charter!

Aligning on, agreeing to, and committing to staying accountable to a strong code will help your team create the cultural “glue” it seems to need (or strengthen the bond it already has!). In the process of creating a Team Charter, you and your team can unpack precisely what kind of team you aspire to be, and how you best work (together) in service to the goals, mission, and values that drive you. Once finalized, it’s something of an über-clarifier, serving as inspiration, a codex for team decision making, a clever accountability tool, even a helpful resource to share with other teams with whom you collaborate.

If you’ve never created a Team Charter before, I’ve got just the resource to get you started, and this one’s straight out of the Want to Work There tool chest.

Things We're Loving Right Now

Inspiration on Demand: Culture First Global, CultureAmp’s annual virtual event, features keynote speakers who leave me gobsmacked, with a speaker alumni list that includes Esther Perel, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, and Susan Cain. Luckily, each session is free to watch on demand - go check ‘em out!

Decisions on Demand: Did you know that there are nine (yes, nine!) different decision-making styles. Usually we get stuck using the same one or two. This free app will break you out of that rut using just a few simple questions.

Policies on Demand: Hands up if you’ve ever scoured google for templates of a new policy you need to create. I’m assuming that’s everyone, yes? Well, now you can find them all in one place, for free, without fear of plagiarism. 

Puppies on Demand 🐶: Okay, so humankind is still working on this one... But my pup Theo does has something extra important to share with you below!