#2 🤝 Handshaking
In today's Blindspot: ⌛️ a 2500 year-old practice that you're probably not doing correctly, ⚡️ the 5 disciplines of highly effective teams, and 📝 sharing notes.
I came into a new job with a clear strategy for how I wanted our team to have an exponential impact. I was confident that, if executed properly, the strategy would yield impressive results for the company.
I made big changes in my first six months. I changed the KPIs for success, killed some initiatives and spun up others. I let go of some team members who were not the right fit for what we needed to do, and I empowered others who had been underestimated previously. These initial moves were about reformatting the team to be in a position to have an impact.
As you can imagine, I created a lot of friction in my first six months. My executive stakeholders challenged me on the success KPIs I was setting for myself & my team, my team was not bought in either and they could feel the lack of executive buy-in. Colleagues felt let down, no longer receiving the same output they were used to and unsure of what to do with the new, promised output.
Thus is the plight of the 'expert' leader, who knows all the right moves to make and doesn't take the time to bring everyone on board. It took me a long time and a number of tough conversations to understand that leadership isn't about having the right vision for the future, it's about bringing everyone along with you.
This blindspot took on a lot of different forms:
People don't see themselves in my vision for the future.
I don't communicate proactively
I don't create a clear roadmap
Because I didn't make sure that everyone was on board with my plan before executing the plan, my plan was doomed to fail from day one. I thought everyone was on board, because the quiet people said nothing and I was given enough rope to run freely, but in reality, I was building up some huge handshake debt.
🤝 Getting the Handshake
Handshakes date back 2500 years as a sign of peace - I'm here for you, you're here for me, we've got nothing to hide. Handshakes at work operate the same way. It's a sign of trust that you reach out, show everything you've got, and say "will you do the same?" It creates an opportunity for someone to give you feedback on your plan, provide a suggestion, raise an issue, or just feel involved in your plan.
We shake hands at the beginning so that we can move forward peacefully and efficiently. You know you've got a handshake when someone imitates your action. Here are some examples of good and bad handshakes:
✅ "Is this good for you?" "Yeah this is good for me."
❌ "Any questions?" "No."
✅"Have I understood correctly?" "You have."
❌"What do you think?" "Yeah, go for it."
Handshakes should be explicit. Great leaders give firm handshakes, even if their counterpart is initially limp. They bring you in tighter and make you see that this here is a handshake.
📚 The 5 disciplines of a High-Performance Team
As I've opened up my horizon to see how my actions & decisions affect others around me, I was drawn to Leadership Team Coaching by Peter Hawkins. He focuses not on the qualities of great leaders, but of great teams, creating some great foundation for the role of the Leader in initiating, receiving and seeking out handshakes from their team, the C-suite and other stakeholders.
Hawkins outlines five core disciplines:
Commission: understanding what's being asked of your team
Clarifying: transforming that purpose into a mission that only your team can accomplish.
Co-Creating: working together to solve challenges and achieve the mission
Connecting: engaging with stakeholders
Core Learning: reflecting, learning, and interpreting.
This model is valuable at multiple levels as it fundamentally ensures a handshake. You can use this model for creating OKRs:
Check in with your N+1 and align on what is needed from the team. Handshake on the priorities.
Build OKRs with your team with the Commission in mind. Handshake with your N+1 on the OKRs.
Prioritize team OKR achievement over individual OKR achievement. Handshake with your team each week to make sure there is nothing blocking them from achieving the team goals.
Check in with stakeholders. Handshake on their needs.
Reflect at the end of each quarter as a team before. Handshake on the learnings and begin the process again.
This same model can also be applied to everyday meetings:
Iterate the purpose of the meeting at the beginning
Build an agenda with meeting participants that will achieve that purpose
Facilitate generative dialogue to achieve the meeting goal
Check in with participants throughout the meeting to make sure it’s going the way they hoped.
Share notes at the end of the meeting.
With this model, I've been able to catch my impulse to just start working, and stop and ask myself "Have I gotten a handshake on this yet?"
Small handshakes can be done asynchronously - a clarifying message or an email to make sure everyone's on the same page; however, when starting out, I recommend seeking out handshakes in meetings, as they will give your meetings an explicit purpose (get a handshake) and it will be easier to read the soft cues that someone is giving you a limp handshake.
⚙️ Share your Notes
The biggest validation I've gotten from this method over the years is the recurring appreciation that team members and colleagues provide me on the quality and consistency of my notes.
At the end of any meeting, I post my notes on to the company knowledge base and ping anyone for whom the meeting notes are relevant - participants, stakeholders, dependents, and often my team if it's a topic I feel they would want to know is being discussed.
This is a critical part of getting the handshake - agreement on what needs to be done after a meeting, agreement on whose help you need in order to be successful this week - and sharing it asynchronously creates the opportunity for everyone to react, comment, or agree with your notes.
There is something comforting about seeing someone's notes from a meeting - you understand how they processed the information, and you see what they didn't take notes on as well.
Some tips for sharing meetings notes:
Avoid the urge to take notes on everything. If you have 'raw notes' during a meeting that are exhaustive, trim them down to what's important - if it's too long, no one reads it and it might as well not exist.
Start with the most important information: I put a to-do list at the top of the meeting notes called "⚡️Next Steps" so that before people read my notes from the meeting, they already understand the conclusions.
If there are unanswered questions, you can share them asynchronously, but be careful about leaving it too open-ended: some will take it as an invitation to debate the question, while others will take it as something to reflect on further. Be clear about the next steps if you share an unanswered question.
I have also dabbled on and off with sharing my weekly planning on Monday morning (I prepare my week on Sunday evenings) in order to make it clear what my priorities are and aren't that week. I've found this to have mixed success - it very often turns into a kick-off of all the things I want to work on at once, which is both great for me to start all my priorities Monday morning and overwhelming for everyone else.
I find this works best if the whole team is doing it as well, and then you need to be careful as these types of activities tend towards "proof of work", where employees feel they need to have a certain amount of bullet points per week and there is no real dialogue around what is shared.
Start / Stop / Continue
🟢 Start paraphrasing what stakeholders are asking, expecting or committing to do and ask "have I understood correctly?"
🟢 Start asking for an explicit handshake on a decisions that require stakeholder buy-in.
🟢 Start listing out the stakeholders who are key to the success of your initiatives and asking yourself whether you have an explicit handshake on the strategy.
🔴 Stop working on projects where you haven't gotten a handshake on the project plan.
🔴 Stop letting projects continue within your team without explicit handshakes from all stakeholders.
🟡 Continue connecting regularly with key stakeholders and asking them if there is anything they are unclear about.