Finding out who’s next to us
Don’t be shy, Find out who’s next to you now with Personal Maps!
So you join a new company, big or small, and you have to join a team, but there’s still no real connection with the people who make it up. Being new is never easy and perhaps even less in the professional field. They have hired you (or you have let them hire you) and, from the first moment, there are some expectations placed on you.
The first meetings follow one another, in which you are introduced, and you tell them, mainly, who you are as a professional. Nonetheless, just as we physically have two legs, our professional brand also has a personal «paw.»
This paw is discovered little by little as a result of spending at least eight hours a day side by side with your companions (that is, when you discover it). Although we cannot help it: we are continually leaving behind clues related to our mood or humor, likes and even hobbies. Lift your head off your keyboard now and look around you: do you know your teammates? Do you know anything about them, other than what their football team is?
Creating Connections
The first contact I had with a personal maps was in a course where we used this technique, created and named this way by Jurgen Appelo (author of Management 3.0). When you’re told that you have to talk about your private life with the person sitting next to you casually and whom you don’t know at all, let’s not kid ourselves, we’re not usually enthusiastic about it. However, once you put it into practice, it’s fascinating. Do you want to know what is it and how does it works?
Personal Maps is based on two fundamental ideas: visual management, very much in line with the Lean philosophy, and mental maps. While the primary goal is to create connections, also is generating empathy to maximize the effort of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. By getting to know each other, we build networks that, in turn, facilitate communication and, therefore, the work that we all carry out together.
Using more generic categories (e.g., education, work, hobbies) and moving towards more specific ones (technical or professional skills, objectives, values, passions) we can build the map of our team (or our teams). We can detect what makes us tick (valuable information to grow the most motivated teams for specific projects), what skills or certifications we have and what we may need at a particular time. Moreover, all this without having to analyze each of the CVs with a magnifying glass.
We get to have a complete view of the «backpack of experiences» and skills of the colleagues, and more so if we do sessions on a continuous basis (for example, when someone new comes to the team). We even have the opportunity to orient the staff mapping as evidence of our interactions as a team, on the road to real continuous improvement.
Strengthen the team
The better we know each other, the better our communication is and, besides, the chances of innovation are exponentially enhanced (shared trigger-motivators).
This technique is profoundly useful in managing the interconnection between «old» and «new» working paradigms. Our contexts are unstoppably changing and mixing at a fast pace: teams made up of very different profiles, both in terms of skills and age (from the generation known as baby-boomers or golden workers, through generations X and Z, and into millennials), or in terms of professional relationships (freelance, knowmads…).
The result is the development of teams with two fundamental characteristics: increasingly distributed and increasingly multidisciplinary. Teams where we have all the necessary skills to achieve a specific goal. It is here where the personal map becomes a great ally, as it reduces the distances more related to the mentality while strengthening the team and facilitating everyday’s path.
It is also a tool for decision making. For example, if I know that Pablo has just had a baby, I can understand that it may be hard for him to get up early (since newborns are not very good night companions) and I can consider setting up the meetings a little later, and not early in the morning. It may seem anecdotal, but nothing could be further from the truth. In this way, a sustainable rhythm and mode are created in the teams that innately push the projects to success.
In our team, we use this tool not only as part of our group coaching but also as an entry point to get to know each other. When, during this year, I became part of this project, we carried it out as a knowledge tool on the second day, and the result was surprising: not only did we have a lot in common on a personal level, but we also discovered common professional strengths.
Although theorically simple, it is not an easy tool to implement, as it is the case with all those that in one way or another «touch» the personal lives of team members. Therefore, it is necessary to have an introduction strategy in the organizations (let’s leave the elephant out of the gutter when it comes to managing changes). Even when they are good ideas, they are not automatically adopted because they are good themselves: we will need a dose of diplomacy and patience. As a starting point for our strategy, we can take what Jurgen Appelo proposes: «manage the system, not the people.»
So that’s it, by drawing a small part of one’s (or a partner’s) history, by sharing to the extent that we want a sketch of our skills and aspirations, joining a team and company gets more enriching.
This year we have started to track the number of connections per team. We’re using one game we call Bingo Connection. Every time an employee got a connection with another employee, they can shout BINGO and write it down on our wiki. Not surprisingly, as more we introduced the practice into the organization more meaningful connections were created.
We also found that when the number of meaningful connections increases, the happiness index have tend to increase too. Maybe that can lead to better productivity within the company.
Personal Maps is a fantastic practice that you can bring to your teams with a relatively little cost and with excellent results in the short-term. What are you waiting for?
Don’t be shy, Find out who’s next to you now with Personal Maps!
Image: (c) 2011,Soumya, Creative Commons 2.0
