Your Team Needs a New Year Refresh

In my last post, Your Year-End Review, I described an upgraded whole-life review that you could do to gain maximum learning from the year past and set yourself up for an even better year in 2024.

The principle behind this comes straight from Knowledge Management 101:

It is only through the act of reflection that you are able to extract from an experience the lessons that can make your life easier and better.

While you now may be ready to take off like a rocket this year, that isn’t enough to guarantee professional success. As work becomes more complex, we increasingly find ourselves dependent on teamwork to complete our projects and meet our professional goals. Even if you personally are firing on all cylinders, you will be hampered if the same cannot be said for each team of which you are a part.

We know this. But what should we do about it?

Review Your Team

Consider a “New Year Refresh” for your team. Now that the last of the holiday season is behind us and everyone is back at work, take a moment as a team to review the year past and plan for the year ahead.

You could start simply with the four questions that began the personal year-end review. Before calling a team meeting, ask each teammate to take 30 minutes (6 minutes per question) to write their own answers to the following questions with respect to the team and how it performed:

• What worked in 2023?
• What didn’t work in 2023?
• What did I learn in 2023?
• What do I want more of in 2024?
• What do I want less of in 2024?

Analyze Your Team’s Foundation

As with your personal review, this is just a starting point. To really assess the strength of your team’s foundation and capabilities, ask your teammates to write down their individual answers to the same five questions written above, but focus on the four following areas of your team’s life:

• Your team’s inner well-being: How supportive are teammates toward each other? To what extent do teammates find it personally rewarding to be part of this team?
• Your team’s physical well-being: How well does your team function? How well does it manage the pace of work?
• Your team’s social well-being: Do you have enough of a relationship with each other to provide the social ease necessary to enjoy working together? Do you know each other well enough to provide context and empathy for each other’s actions?
• Your team’s professional well-being: How well does your team learn and grow together? Compared to the previous year (or previous shared project), how much better is your team performing now? Is it capable of taking on more varied and challenging projects?

Process Matters

It would be so tempting to simply call a team meeting and put these questions on the agenda. Then, one hour later, you could check this team review item off your to-do list. But I can almost guarantee that you will not get results that way that are as insightful and actionable as they need to be.

Here’s a better approach:

• Ask teammates to answer the questions individually in writing.
• Compile the results: what themes and patterns appear?
• Circulate the results so team members have a chance to review and digest them.
• Ask them to read the results and then bring to a team review meeting their suggestions of concrete actions the team can take to improve its results in 2024.
• At the meeting, put the various suggestions on the wall and ask team members to vote for the ones they believe are most effective and are willing to undertake.
• Confirm there is consensus on the top three, as well as a shared commitment to completing those actions within an agreed timeframe.
• Finally, ask team members how the team should measure success. Then, once you have consensus on those measures, track them. (This New Year Refresh will provide a baseline against which to measure performance over the remainder of the year.)

Watch the Replay and then Run a Better Play

Sports teams focused on success take the time to watch replays of their games and analyze what happened. Then they build that learning into their strategy and training. What is true for sports is true for knowledge work. Without this shared exercise of review, analysis, strategizing, and commitment to a new way of working together, teams cannot improve. Instead, they are trapped in a doom cycle of underperformance and increased frustration.

That doom cycle may be what you have come to expect from working in teams but that does not have to be your reality in 2024. Try a New Year Refresh for your team to see how much better your teamwork can be.

[Photo Credit: Matteo Vistocco]