TEAM HABITS

A guide to improving any team's habits in a way that leads to the bottom line, creating companywide results while also improving morale and engagement.

We all know how important habits are for personal effectiveness, success, and happiness. We can apply many of the same principles and insights about personal habits to our teams. When we do, not only do we accrue the personal benefits for ourselves, but we accrue them with and for our team. If small habit changes lead to powerful results for individuals, imagine what it can do for teams. Focusing on improving how people work together at the team level means there's no need for a top-down initiative or sign-off by the higher-ups to start making our working lives better.

How a team schedules its meetings is a team habit, as is whether and how they share agendas before the meeting. How teammates loop others into emails or Slack messages is a team habit, as is whether they have the practice of cc'ing or group-bombing everyone to make sure they cover their bases. How teammates communicate about being uninterruptible, or that they are never uninterruptible, are team habits. These team habits explain how we can like the people we're working with and feel like we want the same things yet find ourselves regularly flummoxed about how hard it is to work with them.

Team Habits offers a Team Habits Quiz, allowing readers to discover the patterns and areas for improvement on their business team. Gilkey offers tips on Communication ("What needs to be communicated NOW versus what can wait"), Meetings ("The ultimate question to determine whether your meeting was worth it"), Belonging ("Why getting your teammate coffee isn't about the coffee"), and much more.

Charlie Gilkey is the author of the critically acclaimed Start Finishing (Sounds True, 2019; licensed in Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Korean) and founder of the coaching and training company Productive Flourishing, a company that helps changemakers start finishing the stuff that matters. Productive Flourishing's website is routinely placed in the Top 50 websites for planning, productivity, creativity, and team development for creative folks. Charlie is also a former Army logistics officer, veteran, and a near-PhD in Philosophy. He lives in Portland, OR.