Team Building to Team Development (3 of 4)

Part 3 of From Team Building to Team Development. A twelve month buddy program, a thirty second meeting add-on, and why most recurring things die by month three.

This is Part 3 of a four part series on why CliftonStrengths® workshops fade and what to do instead. It follows an earlier series on facilitating your first workshop, and it starts where that one ended: with a workshop that went well, and a Monday that did not.

This is the least impressive article in this series. That is deliberate, and it is also why it is the most useful one.

In Part 1 I argued that a workshop is an event and events end. In Part 2 I argued that booking another workshop is a nap: it relieves the symptom and spends the pressure that would have built a rhythm. So here is the alternative, on an actual calendar, with no inspiring language attached to it.

Strengths Buddies

A team at AbbVie I worked with set up something they called Strengths Buddies.

Everyone got a buddy. Once a month, you met with your buddy. And every month there was a short program that walked the two of you through a specific conversation about growth, about development, and about being aware of your own talent themes.

They ran it for a full year.

That is it. I want you to notice how ordinary that is. No platform. No dashboard. No annual event. No budget line anybody had to fight for.

Two people, a recurring calendar invite, and a prompt so neither of them had to invent the conversation.

It is the close, made permanent

If you read my earlier series on facilitating a workshop, you might recognize the shape of this.

One of the best ways to close a workshop is by asking every participant for three things. A sentence about one of their themes. The name of one person they will say it to. And the date they will do it by.

Strengths Buddies is that, except it never expires.

The name is your buddy. The date is monthly. And the sentence changes every month, because the program hands you the next one.

A workshop gives a team the language. This is what gives them the reps.

Why recurring things die by month three

Here is the part worth understanding properly, because it explains most failed initiatives, not just this one.

Most recurring meetings do not die because people stopped caring.

They die because somebody has to think of what to talk about.

Month one is easy, because the workshop is fresh. Month two is fine. By month three the person who owns it is staring at a blank calendar invite twenty minutes beforehand, and cancelling feels like the responsible thing to do. So they cancel it. And then it is dead, and everybody quietly agrees it was a nice idea.

Not apathy. Blank page.

So when I look at why the AbbVie program survived a full year, three things did the work.

1. It was on the calendar.
   Anything not on the calendar loses to everything that is, every single time, and it does not matter how much anybody believes in it.

2. Somebody was expecting you.
   This is the same reason a workout partner beats a gym membership. Accountability is one of the most powerful drivers of behavior we have, and a room full of private good intentions has none of it.

3. Nobody had to invent the topic.
   The program handed them the next conversation.

That third one is the one people skip when they build this themselves, and it is the one that quietly kills the other two.

The version you can start on Monday

Most teams are not getting a full twelve month program approved this quarter. I know that.

So here is what another team I worked with did instead. They did not create a single new meeting. They tacked a quick question onto meetings they already had.

In planning meetings, they went around and each person shared thirty seconds on what their talent themes could bring to the thing being planned.

In beginning of week meetings, after the decisions were made and the weekly priorities were set, they went around and said how they would accomplish those priorities using their top themes.

In debrief meetings, they talked about what worked for them, and how they had used their top themes to make it work.

Thirty seconds a person. In a meeting the company was already paying for.

The part that surprised me

This language compounds.

Over time you do not only get to know yourself better. You learn how your team works. Nobody scheduled that outcome. It came out of hearing the same people describe their own thinking, over and over, in the ordinary course of getting work done.

Do this weekly for one quarter and your team will have had more strengths conversations than the workshop itself contained.

That is not a slight against the workshop. That is just what reps do.

Expense or investment

None of this is impressive.

All of it costs a fraction of what you already spent on the workshop, and it is the part that decides whether that workshop goes in the budget next year as an expense or an investment.

That distinction is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the actual conversation somebody has when the line item comes up for renewal, and the answer is determined entirely by whether anything on the calendar followed the day.

Get the prompts

I have a one page guide with twelve prompt questions you can use to set up your own Strengths Buddy program. You set your own cadence, whether that is once a week, which I recommend, or monthly. It works just as well as a meeting add-on if a buddy program is too much for where your team is right now.

It is free. Reply to my weekly email or send me a message on LinkedIn and I will send it over.

In Part 4 I will show you the three steps all of this sits inside.

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More in this series

Part 1: Why Does a Great CliftonStrengths® Workshop Still Fade?

Part 2: Why Your Team Stopped Using Their CliftonStrengths® Language

Part 3: What Ongoing CliftonStrengths® Development Actually Looks Like (this article)

Part 4: The Three Steps of Team Development

If you are planning a workshop

I facilitate CliftonStrengths®, team development, and first-time manager workshops. If your team has one coming up this year, connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what you are planning.

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