This past July I participated in Seth Godin’s altMBA. The altMBA is designed as an alternative business course for “high-performing individuals who want to level up and lead.” Seth Godin calls these individuals ruckus makers because they’re enrolling in the altMBA to learn how to instigate change within their companies and communities. When describing my experience to others, I often said, "It's like going to human school and learning a bit about business.

Each altMBA session brings together a class of 100+ leaders in a virtual workshop setting for four weeks. It is a 30-day sprint during which leaders complete three projects a week, give feedback to peers on their posted projects, and share reflection summaries in response to the feedback they received. It is 30 days during which smart minds from all over the world thoughtfully challenge their peers’ best ideas. Each week’s projects originate from prompts that encourage one to think, read, and write expansively – with humility, courage, generosity, and no judgment.

One prompt in particular, “Make Good Decisions,” was pivotal for me. It enabled me to open my mind to new, future possibilities by way of letting go of outdated or erroneous frameworks. These frameworks had anchored my decision-making and consequently inadvertently narrowed my vision. I learned to see that the truths informing my thoughts were actually influenced by emotional narratives. Once I saw them for what they were, I learned how to reframe narratives to reflect actual realities.

To do this I first had to understand a few core tenets:

• Outcomes
  • Good decisions don’t equal good outcomes.
  • A great way to make a good decision is to separate the emotional attachment to the outcome from the understanding of choices in front of you.
• Sunk Costs
  • Sunk costs are merely gifts from your old self to your new self; future decisions do not need to be made in their honor.
  • Identify sunk costs to illuminate what you think you are afraid of losing; then understand that is an emotional narrative, not a reality.
• Change Agents
  • It is important to identify agents of change because they sway the way decisions are made and change the way risks are considered.
  • To identify change agents ask, “What occurred that is making you choose to act now?”
• Framing
  • What got you here is part of your narrative, not part of your decision.
  • When emotions are involved, it is easy to make a reactionary decision in the absence of properly considering options. To ensure goals are leading decisions rather than emotions it is important to ask, “What are the reliable outcomes with consideration to my interests, my present frames, and my available resources?”

Learning the importance of reframing narratives, detaching my emotions from outcomes, and recognizing agents of change all help me make good decisions. When I say good I mean objective, rational, deliberate. This enables me to let go of constraints I didn’t know existed, tap resources I didn’t know I had, and see opportunities that I had overlooked. In letting go I gained the autonomy, creative license, and possibility I need for making a ruckus in our wild world.

With one quarter remaining in the year, it’s an opportune time to think about how to lead your team to the end of ”two-thousand-greateen” so that you achieve greatness.

These last three months can be a pivotal time of year. Vacations are finished. The press of work and the hustle for families has returned. It’s  easy to get lost in what is right in front of you instead of concentrating on your end-of-year goals. Don’t let that happen. Engaged teams emerge or vanish in opportunities like this. 

Team Engagement is the pinnacle of leadership. It’s the end result of a process that guides each person to their place on the team, so that they can find their personal fulfillment in the team’s success. This makes Team Engagement a completely different beast than Team Building. 

Team Building is discovering more about the members of your team; what they enjoy, their creativity, or their competitiveness. It comes through playing bubble soccer, and attending wine and cheese pairings, or even a team lunch. For a great place to find these kinds of events, check out Occasion Genius. And, while Team Building is valuable, it is not Team Engagement. Done well Team Building can create connections where true Team Engagement can begin to form. Done badly, it is a sugar pill for teams that creates the expected high and then the inevitable crash. Team Building answers the question: “Who are these people?”

Employee Engagement is about the individual and how that team member finds personal fulfillment at work. An engaged employee is more likely to be able to contribute to an engaged team which makes your focus on the employee important. To get to Employee Engagement a manager needs to spend one-on-one time with an employee to understand from where that personal fulfill can come. Employee Engagement answers the question: “What do these people need?”

Team Engagement answers the question: “How do these people find joy in the team?” Team Engagement is the lightning in a bottle that many of us have experienced on a sports team, theater group or hopefully somewhere in your work. Team Engagement (like so many things) is something you know when you see it, but there are signs.
​
There are three signs of Team Engagement:

1. Team members are putting team results ahead of their own
2. Team members offer help to others on your team as a way to drive the team forward, not as a way to assert a superior status
3. Team members express joy at being part of your team and seeing the goals of the team achieved

But if these are the signs, how to achieve them? We will focus the rest of this year’s newsletters on just that question. But for now, the first necessary step is totally with you, Awesome Leader. You need to embody the three signs of Team Engagement. As Roxanne has often said, for a team to change, the leader must change first. 

Your first assignment is to reflect on the level of truth for you Awesome Leader in each of the three signs of Team Engagement. Think about how that truth came to be. Think about how happy you are with situation. Think about where you would like that to be by the end of the year.