Definition:

The activity or process of expressing ideas and feelings or of giving people information.

Importance in context:

The way we communicate in both our professional and personal life is crucial for the outcomes we pursue. Both the way, the frequency and with what intentions we communicate can have very different results. As businesses often revolve around people, good communication is key for a healthy organization.

Common issues:

• Violent communication; Violent communication is communication that limits liberty, denies recognition of needs, diminishes the worth of a person, and/or blocks compassionate. – What is Violent Communication? When neglected it can easily cause disengaged employees.
• No (or little) communication; A trap many people fall into is to limit communication. There are many causes for this. The outcome however is always similar: people are less aware of how the people around us are doing and what they are doing.
• Digital first; Many will recognize that people tend to prefer sending an email over picking up the phone. Whether this be because of ‘safety’ or something else, the result is typically worse because of the long(er) feedback cycle.

Good practices:

• Transparency; Make it transparent with the people you work with what kind of behaviour you wish to have amongst each other regarding communication. Sometimes that can be as simple as a sentence such as: “Within our team we prefer communication in order of: Face-to-face > Video > Call > Email > App”. A shared understanding will help in discussing it in the future.
• (Acting) Sessions; Sit down with your colleague(s) and discuss and practice certain communication. By doing it in a practice setting, you will find it easier to recognize and call upon it in the real setting with your colleagues.

Definition:

The act of communicating with somebody, especially while you work, play or spend time with them.

Importance in context:

Very closely related to Communication yet different. Interaction is the actual act of communicating itself. In this you can have many or little interactions on the workfloor for example.

Common issues:

• Frequency; A manager never interacting with his developers, and likewise the other way around, a developer never interacting with his manager. Both will likely result in being unaware of the factual situation. And a colleague that interacts with you too frequently for example will eventually disturb focus.
• Duration; Having a discussion for hours is, with some exceptions, a waste of time. Especially if in the end there is no gained knowledge, no new insights and no decisions or results.
  Similarly an interaction in which you’re telling someone he/she will be fired; is not an interaction to be done respectfully in 5 minutes.
• Setting; Deciding to finally tell your colleague that his work is below your quality expectations is great when done right and for the right purpose, however doing in a large group with external investors is a horrible setting.
• One-directional; Recognize this sentence: “my door is always open”? Interactions are a two-way street. Make sure to actively engage in having interactions, do not wait for people to interact with you alone. This is a sure way to lose out on overall growth (both personal and business).

Good practices:

• Transparency; Make it transparent with the people you work with what kind of behaviour you wish to have amongst each other regarding interactions.
• Revisit; Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where taking a step back and revisit the interaction later after gaining more insights is wise. This is never a failure!
• Minimal; Allow yourself to ‘minimally’ interact with a certain individual every [x] period. Even telling each other: “nothing new” could be an opening for “except for…” that you might have missed out on due to the feeling of too little time or pressure.
• Close the door; Feel free to create a situation in which you can actively refuse interactions for a certain timeframe. Focus is important, and very often (if not always) interactions can wait at least a day.

Definition:

Individual: A person considered separately rather than as part of a group.
Ego: Your sense of your own value and importance.

Importance in context:

Regardless of being in a team or a group of people (organization), people are always also an individual. And who and how they are as an individual is an incredibly important aspect. In this included ‘Ego’ to address how self worth and importance should be considered an important part of the individual and not merely as the expression “he/she has a big ego”.

Common issues:

• Neglect: Saying “There is no I in team” and then expecting everyone to have the same situation, knowledge, life experiences, goals, etc. Teamwork, important as it is, should not overshadow the fact that a team exists of multiple individuals with different needs and expectations.
• Overshadow: Most people will be able to picture that person that finds it important to put him/herself in the middle in every situation. Absolutely overshadowing each individual with his/her ego.
• Underlit: When a professional prefers to stay at the back, not catch any attention, doesn’t give any input; it’s a sign of trouble. Not everyone HAS to contribute, however the fact that one of your professionals is not, means you might be missing out on several occasions.

Good practices:

• Talk and show interest; Yes, just talk with each other. Honestly it’s the best way to learn about one another which (in a healthy environment) creates trust, more motivated individuals, better outcome, etc.
• Team canvas; Having a session setting up your ‘Team Canvas’ (read more here: theteamcanvas.com) can help opening the conversation about the different set of individuals inside your team.
• Dare; This admittingly is quite difficult, but in the situation of an overshadowing Ego discuss it at that moment while keeping it close to yourself. Nobody wins if Ego overshadows reason.
• Personal (learning) goals: While this is a part of the Team Canvas mentioned above, it’s extremely strong to have the personal goals aside from the team. An individual should not stop learning, and setting goals is a nice way to make transparent there’s a focus to learn.

Definition:

A strong feeling such as love, fear or anger; the part of a person’s character that consists of feelings.

Importance in context:

Having emotions sometimes seems to be a taboo in a professional (and perhaps even personal) context. Yet it’s one of the most basic things that we very often absolutely can not control; and will drive people to do either amazing or terrible things. Which means they are a very important part of your professional context.

Common issues:

• Enforced taboo: Hopefully not too many people will recognize this: “Scary? Ridiculous. I expect you to behave professionally and give that presentation”.
• Obstructive belief: You are at the table with the entire management to tell them they are wrong. Their approach will not have the desired result. Your heart is racing, you are sweating and you keep thinking of how dry your mouth is now that you have to speak up. You convinced yourself that “being nervous is a sign of weakness”.
• Burnouts; It (often) occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.

Good practices:

• Mentorship: A mentor, an experienced and trusted adviser, can help by sharing his or her career path experiences regarding emotions. Appointing mentors to new employees could drastically help them to land in the new environment quicker and learn that it is ok to show their human side while still expecting them to perform well.
• Check-in: Make it a habit to “check-in”: How is everyone feeling? Is there anything we need to discuss before we begin this meeting? Is anyone expecting any phone calls? Etc. By checking in you make it a standard to talk about emotional states.

Definition:

A group of people who work together at a particular job.

Importance in context:

Teamwork makes up for a large portion in organizations. This subject described here will not even scratch the surface of how complex and complicated it is to do “Teams” well, however it is definitely one of the Basics in Basics First.

Common issues:

• Soup: Grabbing people and putting them together does not make a team. This can not be stressed enough.
• Divided: David, the analist, is part of team Yellow on monday, team Green on tuesday and thursday and on the other days he assists the project manager. According to management he’s a real teamplayer for being in multiple teams. From a Basics First perspective we argue that he is NOT a part of a team, at least not effectively.
• Size: A team with more than 9 people will, of course depending on the goal and the context, often cause issues.
• Change: A team that changes every week, month or quarter will never truly flourish in complex situations.

Good practices:

• Volunteering: You are working with professionals. Once the goal of your endeavour is clear, ask people how they would form a team and why. Have them volunteer to be part of a certain team. Not only will this create ownership, also you will more often have motivated people working towards that goal.
• Coaching: Being an individual is already complicated, imagine putting 6 of them together. The concept coaching from within or outside the team will allow learning as time passes. Your team will change, both positive and negative over time. With the right coaching you will be able to keep the changes beneficial.
• Agreements: No, not set in stone. Yes, written down. Having agreements within your team will make it easier for team members to know what behaviour is expected. A (minimally) documented “Way of Working” that evolves over time is a beautiful thing!
• Challenge: Changes within the team always mean something. Make sure to challenge the situation. Ask the question often: “Will this change benefit the work in the long term?”. By doing so actively you will be able to reflect and learn which changes are harmful and should be avoided.

Definition:

Talent: A natural ability to do something well.
Quality: A thing that is part of a person’s character, especially something good.

Importance in context:

We are all born as a ‘blank slate’ (a person or thing that has the potential to be developed or changed in many different ways) so to speak. From there on we develop our qualities, and certain qualities are easier for us than others. And in this development Talent plays a huge role. Having employees work on qualities their talents complement will often have a desired effect on both quality and outcome as the employee engagement.

Common issues:

• Focus on Talent alone; Talent can be highly overrated too. A commonly used quote: “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”. Make sure to adequately challenge your most talented people to ensure growth. Also, just because Dave is the most talented in performing that certain task, does not mean he will function well in the team that does such tasks.
• Not your job; “We hired you to do [x]” while it might be factual true, sometimes having a motivated individual do something because they like doing it (liking a task is often linked to a certain talent for it, not always) could bring new discoveries in your value process.
• Maybe later; This can be a very valid argument in many cases. Make sure to however recognize when it’s not! Too often motivated people are (subconsciously) held back while they’re actively telling their manager for example they want to develop, do more, perform better, etc. Making the employee accountable for his choices and challenge when needed.

Good practices:

• Clarity; Make sure the goal people are working towards is clear. With clear goals people will often try to get closer to the goal using their foremost qualities and talents.
• Discover; Working with multiple people? Everyone has qualities and talents. By sharing them (even the not-work related) within your team a culture of interest and learning is possibly enabled.
• Support; As an organization, ‘Talent management’ is quite a hot topic. Knowing your people well, and focusing on training the proper talents, will ensure more overall business successes compared to not knowing them.
• Invest; A somewhat famous saying: “What if I invest in my people and they leave? – What if you don’t and they stay”. An organization is nothing without people, the workforce is your greatest asset. Investments in your workforce mean investments in the success of your organization.

Definition:

Responsibility: A duty to deal with or take care of somebody/something, so that you may be blamed if something goes wrong.
Accountability: ​The fact of being responsible for your decisions or actions and expected to explain them when you are asked.

Importance in context:

When groups of people work together, having different responsibilities and accountabilities can be extremely useful. What makes Responsibility and Accountability important is mostly with how they are perceived and “used” inside your organization. Having a healthy understanding and way they are invoked can help your organization flourish.

Even in different dictionaries the terms are somehow interchangeably explained making it hard to know what one means in both situations. Two definitions that may make it more clear are:

• The accountable person is the individual who is ultimately answerable for the activity or decision.
• The responsible person is the individual(s) who actually complete the task.
  

Common issues:

• Assigned; When people are ‘assigned’ responsibility or accountability, they often do not feel the ownership for it. “Dave gave me this responsibility, so technically he’s responsible for the fact that I wasn’t able to meet the expectations”. Silly as this is, perhaps you will recognize this.
• Blame-culture; “They didn’t…”, “Wait that wasn’t my responsibility, perhaps you should ask…”.  Even when technically correct this kind of behaviour is incredibly destructive.
• Unclear; “Again we failed to meet our quota, wait who should actually be doing this?!”. Make clear who is currently holding the responsibilities/ accountabilities.
• Overly shared; Technically accountability works best if a task, process, service, etc. lies with one individual. When more people are accountable, there is a high risk people will think ‘the other person will take charge’, making nobody taking the accountability.

Good practices:

• Volunteering; For example in a retrospective it can be very powerful to have someone volunteer on an improvement item. Volunteering enables a higher sense of ownership, making us more invested in a better end result. Stimulate volunteering in the context of responsibility and accountability.
• We-culture; When we stop caring about ‘who’s’ fault things are but share the responsibility of success we can work on any situation with a “how can we improve on this?”
• Bring-to-attention; Having responsibility does not automatically mean you are accountable for the outcome. You might however always be responsible for making clear what the current situation might entail to avoid an unwanted outcome.
• Accountability games; As a team try to create insight in who is accountable for what part of the process. An example can be found here for scrum, but you can do this for any processes you have in your organization: Scrum Accountability Game.

Definition:

The information, understanding and skills that you gain through education or experience.

Importance in context:

Working in complex situations is bound to increase one’s knowledge. The people working in your organization for a longer time will have a vast amount of knowledge on both processes, tooling, domain specific information, etc. By making sure this knowledge is available throughout your organization you can create a situation in which it becomes ‘Collective Knowledge’. Allowing your organization to put effort into obtaining new understanding and skills, hence improving your organization.

Common issues:

• Know-it-all; That one person in your organization everybody goes to when they need to know something. While this seems like a superpower for this individual, he/she has actually become the bottleneck of your organization.
• Lost-And-Lost; Knowledge management systems can be a very powerful thing, destroying your organization, if not done correctly. Recognize this: “Yes it should be on our intranet, however the idea of having to look for it is making me want take an early vacation”? We lose knowledge when not properly stored.
• Versioning; Document version 2.0, 2.1, 2.12, etc. If all versions can be found and used, chances are, people will be working with outdated versions.

Good practices:

• Share; Have frequent knowledge sharing sessions!
• Document; When you are discussing new functionalities of a system, have someone document it right away. This will both improve the efficiency of future meetings, and it will allow you to reflect on the written down information during the meeting. Listening is difficult, reading is easier! Documenting doesn’t always mean writing, drawing is one of the most powerful ways to document in many situations!
• Actively manage; When you have team collecting knowledge over time, make it part of your work to maintain your ‘knowledge base’. Every two weeks you could do a ‘cleaning’, making your life so much easier on the long term. When knowledge has become absolute or irrelevant, remove it.
• Location; Centralize your knowledge, create 1 truth. There is plenty of tooling that will make your life easier. (Avoid allowing people to use ‘local folders’ to share their knowledge)
• Educate; Making sure everyone knows how to share their knowledge properly will help!

Definition:

Psychological: Connected with a person’s mind and the way in which it works.
Safety: The state of being safe and protected from danger or harm.

Importance in context:

Humiliation, blame, criticism and bullying create workplaces where employees are filled with fear. Workers are too busy watching their own backs and frightened of putting a foot wrong to make suggestions and help each other out. They dare not share ideas for fear of being shut down. This will not allow your people nor your organization to flourish over time.

Common issues:

• Enforced; Telling people to “YOU CAN FEEL SAFE!” doesn’t lead to actual safety. You can not enforce safety, it needs to be earned. As the saying goes (translated from Dutch as it’s both funny and striking): “Trust comes on foot but leaves on horseback” (Hard to gain but easy to lose). 
• Facade; “We always have meetings in which any topic can be discussed. Dave talked about almost losing his child and Linda shares how she experienced being bullied as a teenager.” While Dave and Linda may have an easy time to share intimate parts of their life, this does not mean the group is actually comfortable in sharing what’s relevant.
• Negativity; Being negative is very easy and very human. Be careful with negativity as it is extremely contagious. Negativity for the sake of it will prevent psychological safety as it’s both destructive as energy consuming.
• Gossip; In your group everything seems fine, but on the hallway a lot of gossiping might occur.

Good practices:

• Anonymous; In situations where you might doubt the psychological safety within the group, you could start by gathering information anonymously first with an invitation to answer “What is it that needs to stop to deepen or enrich interactions in  our group?” . A Liberating Structure that could help in doing so in larger crowds is: 25/10 Crowd Sourcing. After which you can do a discussion about the suggestions you have gathered as a group. Very often people are not even aware of the issues other people consider.
• Blame-free; Try to encourage a blame-free environment. Instead of “What happened and why?” (becoming aware of your ‘why’ questions is key!) ask “How can we improve on it next time? Notice the focus on the collaborative language: How can we.
• Compliment-Friday; This probably doesn’t have to be a weekly thing, but try it out once and see the effects. Have the group pick a name from a hat so to speak, and instruct them to during the day do 1 nice thing for them.
• Friction; A saying in Dutch: “No shine without friction”. Especially in new or difficult teams, you will encounter plenty of friction. You’ll have to bite the bullet and expose the situation.

Definition:

The process in people, animals or plants of growing physically, mentally or emotionally.

Importance in context:

Personal growth is the ongoing process of understanding and developing oneself in order to achieve one’s fullest potential. Personal development is a vital part in a person’s growth, maturity, success and happiness. It is the foundation of emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual health.

Common issues:

• Good enough; It is easy to stop growing when you feel it has been enough. People come up with reasons why they do not have to invest in their growth anymore.
• Comparing; Some people learn new things very quickly while others do not. Making the first the expectation will eventually discourage people from growth as it is never good enough.
• Panic; Some organizations are in a constant state of ‘panic’. This is a sure way to avoid people from obtaining personal growth as it creates the illusion there is never time to improve.

Good practices:

• Patience; Personal growth takes time and nourishing. Be patient.
• Goals and a plan; Having goals and a plan to obtain them will help increase focus.
• Routine; Working on personal growth once a week, every monday for 1 hour, for example, will help embed the process.

Definition:

The fact of being more important, powerful or easy to notice than somebody/something else.

Importance in context:

Dominant behaviour in itself is not a bad thing, certain groups even prefer a dominance-oriented leader over a prestige-oriented one for example. Where Dominance involves using power, coercion and intimidation and Prestige involves demonstrating valuable knowledge and skills and earning respect. Balancing these can be the difference between a dictator and a fantastic leader!

Common issues:

• False truths; What would happen here is the difference between “people telling you you’re right versus being right”.
• Lack-of-input; Knowing there will be a whole scene if you disagree or try to make your point known, people might not even bother anymore. Missing potentially valuable input.
• Burning bridges; Relations are built over time, by constantly being in a (political) power play eventually you will burn your bridges. Especially when the “winning side” is often less invested in the situation than the “losing side”.
• Not enough; Not enough dominance in a group can lead to being indecisive. Though the word ‘Courage’ is preferred over ‘Dominance’ here.

Good practices:

• Common goals; Even having different positions (responsibilities/accountabilities) everyone is working towards the organizational goals. Make this explicitly known when discussing decisions.
• Facilitation; Try to facilitate any meeting in a way in which it’s possible for every individual to give input without being overshadowed by dominance.

Definition:

The effect that somebody/something has on the way a person thinks or behaves or on the way that something works or develops.

Importance in context:

Common issues:

• Calimero;
• Victim;
• Indifferent;

Good practices:

• Proactive;
• Always a choice;

Definition:

The quality of something, such as a situation or an argument, that makes it easy to understand.

Importance in context:

Common issues:

• None; No transparency can easily become an issue. Nobody knowing what is going on, not knowing what your colleagues are working on, etc.
• Misunderstanding; Having a progress poster on the wall that is open to many different interpretations. While trying to be transparent, misunderstanding the truth can be harmful.

Good practices:

Definition:

The state of relying on somebody/something for something, especially when this is not normal or necessary.

Importance in context:

Common issues:

• Decisions; difficult to make decisions when everyone feels dependant on another person.
• Bending truths; Favoring a lie because you’ll please another person might seem easier than telling the truth.
• Destructive expectations; Surely my manager expects me to do [x], so no way I’m starting this amazing idea I had.

Good practices: