The Power of Conversation

You are at a lunch or dinner function and there are seven people at the table. Initially the conversation involves the table as a whole, but as people begin to eat, the conversations devolve into smaller groups. Perhaps four people at one end will have one conversation while the remaining three people will have a separate discussion.

This is not unlike your team. You may come together often to meet and talk as a larger group, but the majority of the discussions come in smaller subsets.

We encourage you to replicate that dinner conversation pattern at work with the imapMyTeam reports.

The next step is engaging in conversation.

Just like what happens at the dinner table, engage the one, two or three people that you regularly interact with and with whom it is important that you work well with. You are already talking to them all the time anyway. Take your working together to a new level and jump start your conversation with one of the imapMyTeam reports.  Have everyone print it and talk about what it means to them.

Conversation allows people to personalize the information in the reports so you can hear it directly from them. That will help you make better use of it. After talking about the report, use the Notes function to capture any key personal insights.

Involving your teammates in conversation is powerful. Take 15 minutes to take your relationships to the next step.

Telescope/Microscope

There are times that it is absolutely necessary for you to use your ‘telescope’ to get the big picture, strategic look at the organization and the competitive landscape on the distant horizon. There are times when you need your ‘microscope’ to look at a single ‘atom’ within your business.
Both views are important, but very different
.
imapMyTeam provides both the macro and micro relationship views to you.

When you need the instant insight and the big picture of relationships there is no better telescope than the individual team player grid, or the team dynamics grid. There reports help you look at yourself or a group of people in a broader way, capturing the dominant characteristics that contribute to the way we work and work together.

When you need the microscopic view to put particular focus on a nuance of behavior you have several narrative reports available to get that close-up look.


A flexible and powerful tool, imapMyTeam.com accelerates your ability to see and understand both relationship perspectives. Use it to gain the microscopic as well as telescopic views of the people you work with. 

Trust Me

Trust is sometimes tricky to build and easy to destroy.  And sometimes we don’t even know what we’ve done to cause people to lose trust in us.

There are two common types of trust in the business world; trust in you as a person of integrity and trust in your capability to do the job.  We need to keep our word and be people that someone else can count on.  But, we also need to have the skills to be able to deliver the business value expected of us. 

To help you build trust with your team mates, use the report How to Build Trust with Them to understand what is most important to each person on the team.  Notice which comments in the report deal with integrity vs. capability.  Where do you need to do some work in order to build trust?

To access this report, log into imapMyTeam.com

90 Days of Different

Memorial Day ushers in summer. Summer brings long days filled with activities; a break from school for kids and most of all-summer vacations with family and friends. Summer means fun.

Among all the summer fun the stark reality is that business does not take a vacation. Deadlines don’t change, customer expectations don’t change.

So summer also brings special scheduling challenges. Vacations mean people are away- so someone needs to cover for you while you are gone. You need to cover for others when they are gone. For the next 90 days there is a good chance that your team will not fully be intact – that is very different than at any other time of the year. Enjoying time off for one of us means juggling work to cover for one another. There remains pressure to perform.

You might be one of those people who will try to stay on top of things by working on your vacation. While your program or business team may require some level of engagement while away, it’s important not to cheat on your family or the recuperative process. It is not fair to you; it is not fair to your family. It may be bad for your health. Vacations should not be stressful. Vacations are meant to be restorative.

Put imapMyTeam.com to work for you this summer in many ways:

Start by running your ‘What You Should do to Re-Energize’ report before you go away on vacation or take that long, extended weekend. It is personalized to what energizes and rejuvenates you. Take advantage of the tips.

When back from vacation-or if after covering for others for several weeks- watch for signs of stress in yourself or in your teammates and use the ‘ How to Succeed Under Pressure’ report to understand and then contend with the type of pressures we may be feeling when we are stretched thin. There are tips to help you and your colleagues stay on track.


There is a cure for the ‘summertime blues’ it is just a login away, right at your fingertips at imapMyTeam. 

Trust: The Change Accelerator

“Trust is like the air we breathe. When it is present nobody notices. When it is absent everyone notices.” - Warren Buffett

There are many reasons why trust is critical in the business environment. But perhaps one of the most important in today’s VUCA [ Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous] environment is the ability to create change more easily and quickly.

When trying to survive and thrive in a turbulent, ‘permanent whitewater’ world, you need to trust your colleagues, people who work for you, your manager; they need to trust you.

Without trust, there is no credibility, and very little if any chance to create change at the speed necessary to survive. No ability to influence change means necessary changes are delayed and your business pays a cost for being less responsive to customer needs, the marketplace or your competitors.

Each of us tends to be build trust in a way that makes sense to us. Unfortunately, that means we may inadvertently breach the trust of others because what they need to build trust is different from our preferred way of establishing trust.

ImapMyTeam.com helps you sort through that complexity with three important views on trust.
In the center of your home page, use the drop down menu for My Reports to view these that describe your key trust related traits:
1. How you build trust based on your strengths [How you encourage trust]
2. What you need from others to trust them [How others can gain your trust]
3. How your trust will erode if the trust needs are compromised [When your trust level decreases]


When change is required, trust is essential. Work on how you build trust with others in order to accelerate necessary change.