In a virtual team it is critical to build capacity given that people are working more autonomously. Time spent equipping team members with the tools to influence, be proactive and also communicate is key.
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This week I wanted to zoom into three skills related to coaching that may be valuable to your virtual or remote team. These skills are:

1. Goals
2. Listening
3. Questioning

I often am amazed at how many organizations have not invested time, or resources, into helping team members work around goals. While there are many frameworks including:

• SMART Goals
• CLEAR Goals – see John Whitmore’s Coaching for Performance writing
• WOOP Goals

I usually encourage organizations to consider what’s going to work best for you. A majority of clients I work with are aware of SMART Goals, which we morph into SMART – E Goals, E meaning Exciting. If our goals are not exciting or motivating, it’s unlikely that we will get them done.

As a quick refresher – SMART goals are goals that are:

Week 16 Focus – Project Management 101
Focus Question: What are the projects you are involved in with your business and work right now?
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Description
As small business owners we will often be managing a series of projects. Not all of us are trained in the areas of project management. Quality of a project is determined by a balance of Time, Cost and Scope. If one of these qualities change, there will be an impact on the other two elements.

Projects may be as big as a book creation which is scaled over several months or years, or as discrete as writing a newsletter.

• Certain elements are key in managing projects
• What are the main tasks?
• What do you need to ensure you get done?
• Who is responsible for what?
• What are the tasks which are required?
• What will success look like?

Story - Project Management 101
As a former project manager my world was always framed in program starts, mid-points and end of project reviews. Spending time on end-of-project review helps us reduce learning and mistakes in a second iteration.
Regardless of how big or small the project is it can be useful to talk stop and pause and see how things are going.
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Some of the questions at the midpoint could include:

• What's working well?
• What changes are needed?
• What resourcing needs to change?  (Think: human resource is, IT, other resources…)?
• Who else can we learn from?
• Are there other projects with have experienced a similar status?

In the world of project management, we want to make sure that projects are on time, on scope, and on budget. This is often known as the triple constraint and in any given project these three elements are interdependent. Think about a triangle.
If time changes, the budget or scope needs to change. For example, if you had originally ear-marked 6 months to have a book published, and all of a sudden it needs to be ready in the next 3 months, you will need to explore:
Adding more resources – paying for rush service, or bringing other people on board to help
OR perhaps you need to make the book shorter, so instead of having it be 20 chapters, publishing it as a 10 chapter book this year, and aiming to publish Part 2 of the book as a follow-up next year. 

There is a whole slew of project management tools available. Tools to explore include Asana, Trello, or other apps. 

Activity
Consider a project you are working on. What is the time, scope and budget?
Break things down into project tasks and activities.
What are the major milestones?
What needs to be done by when?
What do you want to do each month or week of the project?  Map it out/create a timeline.
Who are the key stakeholders you need to engage with and keep updated?

​Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Every month use Monthly Daily Tracker to capture key learning from projects. Noting data (milestones, completions, meetings) may help with things like Time Estimation, Process mapping or other learning for this project or others.
As you complete your Monthly To-Dos each month note any projects, tasks and activities you are working on.

There is space in each of the Monthly One-Page Planners to note projects you are starting, continuing and ending.

You can also adapt the Content Trackers or monthly trackers to track the different stages of the projects you are engaging with.
 
Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track
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“It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.” – NAPOLEON HILL
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No person operates alone. Relationships are key to our success in business. Our customers can be great advocates of our work. Likewise, fellow professionals may also be a powerful source in sharing the word and testimonial of our work.
What time are you dedicating to building, and maintaining, relationships with others?
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There are several tools included in the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner (for virtual professionals and remote/virtual teams) to help you focus on relationships. From the Top 20 list, to exploring collaboration more intentionally, I hope that you will put more of a focus on relationships this year.
Be sure to check out related posts on relationships and business in February 2019 at the Coaching Business Builder blog, as well as relationships and virtual business/teams at the Teams365 blog. 

Best,
​Jennifer

It’s likely that your virtual and remote team may not get the support they need. As I often write “Out of sight should not equal out of mind”.
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In a virtual and remote team, it can be very useful to provide peer support across the team. This might include things such as:

Mentoring pairs – If there are certain skills people want to develop, is there a way to create mentoring pairs across the team?

Peer partners - A valuable activity can be assigning peer partners across the team on an annual basis. Whether formal, or informal, having a partner people can meet with and ask questions to, can be valuable in sharing learning.

Job shadowing – Another interesting, and valuable, experience can be job shadowing virtually, where a more junior person is paired with a more senior team member. They may shadow meetings virtually and learn more about the behind the scenes work experience by co-working virtually. Consider how you might create a “take me to work day”.

Formal coffee break/meal sharing time – We learn a lot from each other informally. What are the informal pauses you can create for the team? This might involve coffee breaks where people can drop in for a chat once a week or every few weeks, or a lunch time potluck.

Co-working experiences - Where people bring projects they are working on and work together real time on a virtual platform like zoom, checking in at the top of each hour and working for several hour bursts. A session held like this once a month or more frequently can be incredibly valuable in terms of “getting things done” and also supporting learning across the team.

What are the different ways you can build in more virtual connection time across the team? This is critical for building your team culture.

Wishing you the best,
​Jennifer

​Week 14 Focus – Automation
Focus Question: What can you automate in your business?

Description
There are many tasks in a small business which can be automated. Automation brings the benefits of scaling, supplication maximizing your resources.  Think about these items:

• Invoicing (particularly installment payments and other)
• Subscriptions
• Newsletter distribution
• Content creation and distribution
• Video production

What else can get automated in your business?

Research/Story
As much as AI (Artificial Intelligence) is feared, it’s also something which can be leveraged to further level the playing field for small business.

Here’s a quick story. Flashback to 2014 and the introduction of offering on-demand video-based programs. Filming, voice over, selecting the graphics could take hours. In 2017, I found Lumen5, a video program which harnesses AI to provide quick creation and rendering of short videos. That platform now enables me to import content I’ve already created (think blog posts and articles) and then have the system convert it to a short video. Total timesaver and a creative tool!

Check out the Fall 2018 quarterly planning video here.
Check out the Vision video here.  (3 minutes)

Activity
Consider some of the tasks that could be automated in service to your work and business

• Who can help you do this?
• What will it take them to set it up?
• What will automation look like?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
Include any automation tasks in your workbook. Consider the systems you might want to automate (Refer to Section 3 - Pages 70 - 75 of Coaching Business Builder, or pages 73 to 80 of PlanDoTrack).

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

For many years in my global career I faced multiple complexities which would get in the way of a regular work day. From regular periods of no electricity, to political and natural disasters which pulled work off course. I learned early in my career the value of two things which continue to help me flourish today –

#1 – Focus – Focus when you can, even if it is for a short while. Productivity is not always about the long haul, it can also be about the short burst of focused effort. This is especially true in my world where I am regularly juggling roles, hats, responsibilities and clients. As much as I would love to have huge swaths of time to undertake my work, it’s unlikely. Therefore, focused burst of work, coupled with #2, help me (and the business) keep moving!

#2 – Be clear on the top 3 – 5 goals for the day, week and month. My world was the world of contingency planning on steroids, so being clear on what top 3 or 4 to-dos were for the day, or the week, or the month, created a powerful anchor to planning, and also feeling satisfied when EVERYTHING on the list did not get done (which was almost every day).
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What are your top 3-5 goals TODAY? This week? This quarter? Do you review these regularly throughout the week/month/quarter and adjust accordingly?

Best,
​Jennifer

Welcome to Q2! What are your top 3-5 priorities this quarter? Where do you have them enshrined or written down? Have you completed your Quarterly Planning Pages? (found on pages 139-148 of PlanDoTrack)
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As we step into a new month, it is time for a new focus. On Mondays here at the PlanDoTrack blog I will be shifting my focus for the next two months to more of a focus on virtual teams. Whether you are an entrepreneur working with an extended team, or a corporate employee leading a remote team, you’ll find these next 2 months of posts useful.

This month also marks the start of our 15th Year Celebrations. It is hard to believe but it was 15 years ago that I founded Potentials Realized. I returned back to Canada on April 1st, 2004, after having spent most of the 90s and early 2000s working across Central and South America, the Caribbean and Europe. An eye infection “gone bad” led to permanent vision impairment in one of my eyes, a significant factor in bringing me “back home to Canada”. While it’s easy to say now that everything turned out well, one of the reasons I’ve shaped such a virtual business has been in part to circumvent my limitations, as much as possible! I am thankful that technology has made the team support even easier today than it was 15 years ago, turning this into a very viable business model.

I hope that you will join us throughout the next 12 months for monthly celebrations. I’ll be sharing different case studies of the work accomplished, and each month will have a different spotlight. You can download the 15th anniversary calendar here. And stay tuned at the PlanDoTrack Facebook page for announcements!
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Now onward to our April Focus…..
The focus in April will be around virtual teams and on-boarding new members. In the virtual space, investing time in welcoming and on-boarding new team members is a very important function.

This month I’ll be sharing a variety of posts to support virtual teams with the on-boarding process.  It’s likely that you may not have a formalized process, or there may be one that is more geared to in-person work.

I’ll be referring back to a number of Teams365 posts I have offered in the past, so if you have not yet found that resource, be sure to check out this sibling blog geared for leaders, team members and others over at my main site – Potentials Realized.

Best,
Jennifer

Week 13 Focus – Quarterly Check In: Skills
Focus Question: What have you accomplished in this last quarter? What are the tasks you want to undertake in the next quarter?


Description
In addition to building in time for weekly and monthly planning, it’s also important that we build in time for quarterly planning. For some, it may be easier to break down annual goals into quarterly milestones and micro-projects. For others, you might work upwards from monthly themes and projects to quarterly plans.
A quarterly check in can look different for each virtual professional or business owner. From dedicating an hour for review to ear-marking a full day with the team to review and plan for the time ahead. Be sure to use the weekly, monthly and annual resources available to you in the workbook planner.

Research/Story
Create a quarterly review day. Put a date on the calendar every quarter can help to update certain tasks. Set a date in your calendar to look at the following quarterly items:
A. Review financials – sales, expenses, revenue. What needs to be changed? Where is revenue going? What is cash flow like? What about the accumulation of debt?
What is the financial data saying? What is that status around invoicing and accounts payable.
B. Update your metrics. Complete your statistics.
What are the things you are tracking in the Monthly Daily Trackers?
Over the course of the last 3 months ask yourself:

• What are the patterns you are noticing?      
• What has shifted?
• What has stayed the same?
• What are you surprised about?
  

C. Note programming/services delivered:

• What have you been doing?
• What has been selling?
• What engagements did you get – speaking, coaching, training?
• How much volume of work have you been involved in creating and/or delivering? What’s working? What’s not?

Ensure that you have a footprint or record of your work - What was the focus of your work, major achievements, contact details. Have you put a copy of material in your portfolio (digital or hard-copy)?
D. Focus on project related work:

• What are the projects you are STARTING?
• What are the projects IN PROCESS?
• What are the projects you are COMPLETING?

E. Examine resourcing:
What resourcing is helping you? Consider:

• Materials
• People
• IT

What are the contingency resources available to you and you ok?
F. Content Creation and Visibility:

• What is on your content calendar for the next series of time?
• What content have you created that you can scale or replicate?

Client/Customer log and statistics. How much coaching are you doing? What skills have you been leveraging?
G. Organizational Learning Check Point

• What’s working and what’s not?
• What key learning has been undertaken?
• What learning needs are there going forward?

H. What are the other things you want to review?
I. Looking ahead – What are the main priorities for the next 3 months?
What are the creative projects which are going to pull you forward?

Activity
Schedule in 15-30 minutes to undertake your quarterly review. It might include a selection of these questions listed above.

As part of the review you might also undertake or revisit any self-assessments such as Wheels you have completed.

In both the Coaching Business Builder and PlanDoTrack, I have included a Wheel of Small Business Mastery (page 8 in Coaching Business Builder, or page 27/28 in PlanDoTrack) and/or Virtual and Remote Work page 14 in PlanDoTrack).

Take a few minutes to score yourself and revisit where you are at. What has shifted? What new skills have you learned or started to master due to use? What new skills are required on the horizon?

Connection to the Workbook and Planner
In addition to the wheels there are four sets of quarterly tools throughout the two planners. Be sure to take some time to explore these tools in Section 5 of the Workbook/Planner:
Quarterly To Dos – Use this to capture key to-dos in each of the 4 quarters of the year. Some professionals will use this as a warehouse over the course of the year.
Quarterly reflections: Use the chart to capture:

• Projects
• Achievements
• Learning
• Opportunities

Quarterly Planner Sheet: Use the one page to identify your top 5 goals for that period, identifying projects, also highlight key task on each month (5 weeks outline per month)
Finally, join Jennifer for a live or on-demand quarterly planning session where she provides you with a step-by-step series of questions to think about for your quarterly plan.

Download a one-page copy of this week's 52 Weeks of Plan, Do and Track here.

Best wishes, 
Jennifer

Read and download the initial weeks of the 52 weeks of Plan, Do and Track

​Jennifer Britton - Potentials Realized
Author of PlanDoTrack (2019),  Coaching Business Builder (2018), Effective Virtual Conversations (2017) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013). Pick up a copy of any of her books at Amazon
Book Jennifer for a coaching session to explore productivity, teamwork and business issues.
Contact her by phone at (416)996-8326
Check out the new 19 Productivity Tips on-demand program. Explore this video based program at  your own pace, and join Jennifer for bi-weekly calls as part of your course.
Follow the #90DaysPlanDoTrack series on Instagram

​What do you do each month to capture your learning and what you’ve achieved? One of the favorite things I have enjoyed doing since launching the Coaching Business Builder Workbook and Planner last summer was holding virtual month end planning sessions. These are a short paid program, which takes you through a series of reflective prompts and opportunities for capturing your learning over the last few months, and what you are planning for the month ahead.
 
While one hour might seem hard to find in your schedule, the benefit of having a focus for the next month is invaluable. Connect this with capturing learning (what worked well and what didn’t) from earlier months, makes it a very powerful process. 
 
Month end planning sessions are usually held on the last working day of each month from 6-7 am ET. Yes, it’s early, AND have you read the literature on what successful people do before breakfast? I’ve moved into my 2nd year of starting work at 5 am ET. I am not sure how much of the creative projects which fuel me, I would be able to achieve without this time.

If you are not an early bird, the good news is that this month's Month End Planning session will be held on Friday March 29th from 3 - 4 pm Eastern/New York on zoom. Those joining me for this paid one-hour one-off program will benefit from getting a chance to do a Quarterly Review as well. More info and registration at the top of this page.

We are going to be exploring questions related to your achievements, learning and plans for the next month and quarter.

If this is a topic of interest to you, be sure to check out the Facebook Live I did earlier today which is now posted at the PlanDoTrack Facebook Page, as well as this article "Create a Pause for Clients via Quarterly Reviews or Retreats, I wrote for the Coaching Tools. You can read that article here at their site.

Hope that you will join me for the month end planning session later this month! You can sign up here.

Best wishes,
​Jennifer

​Has spring sprung in your part of the world? We are just around the corner from Q2 and I thought it would be useful to focus this week’s blog post on 10 Questions to ask in setting your Q2 goals.

1. How am I on target with my 2019 goals?
2. What were my major accomplishments during Q1? (Think about yourself and your team?)
3. What systems helped? What systems need attention?
4. Where is revenue/sales/impact coming from?
5. What activities are giving me/us results?
6. What can I do to magnify these?
7. Where do I need to become more efficient in my work? More effective?
8. What needs attention?
9. What am I doing to build relationships?
10. What are the items and conversations which are important to note and carry forward?

When did I last revisit my SWOT?  (A key strategic planning tool is the SWOT – if you are not familiar with this, be sure to check out the exercise in description of Section 4 of the PlanDoTrack Workbook and Planner)

What is going to provide you with efficiency and effectiveness for Spring?
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Best wishes,
Jennifer