Speaker 1
I was probably the only person who took it that literally, not surprising that you would do the same. And then our last idea for action, our Greg Betta, is called Leader AQA. So this is any question answer. And what this does is it creates a space for the team to ask their manager any kind of question. I think for managers can feel maybe quite vulnerable, because, you know, you might not know what those questions are in advance, but people could submit them. You could use something like Type 4 or Slido, so that people could submit questions to you in advance. The advantage of using something like Slido is that people could upvote them as well. So you could send a link to the team. You could say, I'm going to do an AQA in our next meeting together. If you've got questions, you can submit them in the mum's room here. And you can also look at what's been submitting an upvote them. So you can do that, or you could just do it in the meeting. Whatever works for you. But what this does is it gives people a chance to ask maybe some tough questions that they might not have worked. They're like, oh, do I ask this in a one-to-one? I don't want to put this on email. You know, there could be all kind of confidence gremlins getting in the way of them asking those questions. And you suddenly make it very, very safe for that to happen. And it means that people can hear the same messages. So you might have one brave person in the team who asks you this question in the one-to-one, but then it doesn't necessarily get shared across the team. But it means that everyone can hear it. It is coming from you. You know what matters to people, and you create a safe space for them to ask those questions. So there's quite a lot about the consistency of your communications and the psychologically safe culture you're creating just by doing this leader AQA in a meeting. Yeah, I worked with a company recently where they do this, and they do use Slido. It's always anonymous, and everybody does the upvoting, and they've just got so used to doing it. You know, it's become like a ritual and a habit for them. That they were like, we get questions on absolutely everything and anything. So it's just created this openness where they know leaders are prepared to answer any question. So I just think it's a really nice thing to do, and particularly actually might work for something like using Slido anonymously. That would work for really big teams very well in our team, which is quite small. I sort of think if you voted it, you're like, oh, there'd be five votes. And it wouldn't quite have the same impact. I think that the Prince Boys are a really good one. So a couple of extra ideas to finish from our brilliant community on LinkedIn, and there were some lovely ones that people shared. So thank you to everybody who sort of got in touch and gave us their ideas. Sarah Worth suggested a version of Petra Kutcher. We'll put a link to Petra Kutcher in the pod note and in Podmail where we put everything about the podcast. But essentially this is you share a number of slides. It's normally 20. Sarah said her team actually do 10. So again, play around with what works for you. But every slide is timed at 20 seconds. And so what's nice about this is you get rhythm and energy. It's fun and it's fast. It's sort of the opposite of like the death by power point that we probably all experienced. And I think you usually give people a theme. So you might just have a theme of who am I? That's the question. Who am I? 10 slides, 20 seconds each. If everyone did that, it's fast, it's furious, it's fun. Everyone will do that in a slightly different way. Maybe you do one per team meeting or maybe everybody has a go. But it's a really nice format for people to sort of have a play with. Georgina Bowers shared that they do something called a team agreement. I have done this before in a few different ways. What I really like about this is you are very clearly as a team signing up to, right, how are we going to work together? How are we going to use tech? How do we make decisions? How are we going to celebrate success? How do we resolve issues? And as Georgina rightly says, a brilliant way to build psychological safety, create a climate of trust. I've done this a few times in leadership teams in particular, and it's been so useful. The thing that I've never experienced done quite so well is like keeping it alive. But I really like the idea here of the transparency of this. And we've actually talked about this in amazing if like how do we sort of write down sort of how we do things day to day, how we do operate as a team. And we haven't got there yet, but it's definitely something we've got in mind. So I really liked that one. Celis Gupta shared that she went to something organized by a think tank called Sigma Squared Society. I was like, oh, sounds fascinating. And during the day, every group was given a problem to solve, but they were presented with the topic a couple of days before. Everyone was asked to do some research, so you got some time to think and come up with some solutions. So you allocated a topic, and then you went into a slack group, but during the day, you were brainstorming and learning together. It sounded like it was all brilliantly moderated. And if you went off an attention, everyone was sort of brought back to, well, what's the problem we're trying to solve here? And what I really liked about this one, which was the first time I think I'd seen an idea in this way, was sort of connecting the what we do before with what we do in the moment. And sort of giving everyone a bit of space to sort of go off and do their own thing. And I suspect those discussions were better because of it. You know, if someone just said to me, okay, well, how are we more innovative in our processes? I'm not great on the spot, and I'm not spontaneous, but if I know that we're going to be talking about that, I might go away and read something, listen to podcasts, or it's just sort of percolating in my mind. So I really liked that connecting the dots with sort of the before and in the moment. And then Louise Emily, who is an artist and has loads of really interesting workshops, she had one which was about kind of getting closer and connected, a bit like some of our Spotify ideas, where she asks people to introduce themselves, and rather than just saying, you know, your name and your job title, which always feels a bit like it's a bit boring.