Suggestions
Angie Keister, PhD
Helping leaders build positive, productive workplaces where teams thrive
Angie Keister, PhD, is the Founder and President of Attune Collective, an organization focused on fostering positive and productive workplace environments where teams can thrive. She is passionate about developing both individuals and teams to enhance their performance and well-being in professional settings.12
Dr. Keister's work emphasizes effective communication and collaboration, aiming to improve the dynamics of meetings and projects within organizations.2 Her expertise is reflected in her commitment to helping leaders create supportive work cultures that enable their teams to succeed.
Highlights
How Did We Do?
If you are busy and have no time to devote to developing yourself or your team here is a practical way to improve performance quickly.
Make meetings, projects, individual interactions, and teams more effective by attending to the end.
Wrap up your most important interactions with curiosity. Use these questions to discover ways to become more efficient in your interactions.
❓Were expectations met for you and others? What should we keep doing for next time and not repeat in the future.
❓Did we actually team (whole greater than the sum of its parts) or did we just push around information and ideas at each other?
❓What concerns do you have about the way that we worked together today?
❓In what way was I helpful to the group/you to achieve the outcomes? What advice do you have for me to be even better next time?
Attending to the end of our work is just as important as setting the stage for the start. We often place a lot of emphasis on the task or content of the work, not as much attention on the way that we are getting the work done. Dick Axelrod and Emily Axelrod coined the phrase ‘Attend to the End’ in their book Let’s Stop Meeting Like This!
This is such an important concept. Save room for these questions in your next project team meeting… 5 minutes is all it takes.
I continue to be frustrated by the need to track productivity in mechanical ways, just because there is easy data to capture. We all know that movement doesn’t equate to productivity. This Fast Company article (link below) shows the costs that this monitoring is creating.
Productivity is not a fair measure for human work in the era of knowledge work. Employees want to thrive and do great work. Tracking people like machines kills intrinsic motivation.
Three questions you can ask to reignite intrinsic motivation and engagement:
What excites you about the work that you do or that the company does?
What is the best idea that you brought forward in the last month that you feel wasn’t understood or heard? How might we bring that idea, or a small part of it, to life in the next 3 months?
Is there anything that keeps you from participating fully in your work? What is one small change that would make a big difference?
Yes, engagement requires thoughtful effort.
If you are working in a human centered environment (hint: if people are present then you are) you must take a human centered approach.
