Helping your team to focus is one of the most effective ways for overcoming the destructive walls of opinions, positions, and political turf so common in today’s workplace. In this series we’re concentrating on focusing tools and methods that result in:
- building team unity
- generating momentum
- teasing out creative energy within your team
In today’s post we’ll briefly explore Grove’s Context Map as a way to help your team work together to create a comprehensive snapshot of all the external and internal environmental factors affecting an organization. If you haven’t had a chance to read the first post in this series you can find it now by clicking here.
Let’s start with a quick overview of the thinking behind this method.
WHY THE CONTEXT MAP?
The environment in which organization’s exist is constantly changing. The forces that make up this environment include things such as the current economic climate, political trends, customer needs, demographical trends, and technology trends just to name a few. The organization can either react to trends dominant trends once they are strongly felt, or proactively anticipate and respond to these trends before their effect is strongly felt.The most successful companies do the latter.
The purpose of the Context Map is to provide a framework for identifying, discussing, and recording the most impactful trends affecting the organization. It results in a high-level view of all the factors to consider when planning or strategizing about an organization’s future. You can view an example of the Gorve Context Map by clicking here.
Completing the map as a team helps them build an appreciation for one another as each individual team member adds trends and factors from their own perspective that come naturally because of their unique personality, position in the organization, and personal interests. This is an important point to bring to the team’s attention somewhere in this exercise usually as part of the summary at the end. In short, using the context map not only provides valuable data but also helps the team to build trust, the foundation of high-performing teams in any organization.
USING THE CONTEXT MAP
I’ve found the Context Map to be a very useful tool not only for building a strategic vision, but also in building a cohesive and functional team. See my post, “Context Maps: The Key To Getting To Why” for a detailed discussion about how to use them with your team. Please take a few minutes to read the post now as it will walk you through the process of building a Context Map.
In the next post in this series we’ll build on the work we have done in creating a Context Map and focus the team by building a Trend Matrix.
This is a great article. For leadership, team building, and personal development, I have found the best way to get things started is to perform a neurological based assessment of left brain-right brain preferences. When you see the results from that, everything sort of falls into place.