Team Talk: Building Excellence with Solution Focused Skills

The new world of work requires new ways of working together. The secret sauce for this is Team Talk. The way teams talk to each other matters more now than ever. Team members need to be able to speak from the heart and build trusting relationships on a peer-to-peer level, while at the same time producing excellent outcomes. Both can be achieved by applying Solution Focused skills.Solution Focused skills have been perfected over decades by a global community of thousands of practitioners – therapists, managers, social workers, teachers, coaches, and many more. These skills are eminently transferable and will help you in any setting, from your work in the team to the C-suite to family life. The focus of this book is on their usefulness for teams in organisations, particularly self-organised or agile teams. Excellent teams are at the heart of excellent organizations. The authors have explored why some organisations deviate from the norm in a dramatically positive way. They have come up with the recognition - proven by science - that excellent organisations are places where individuals and teams can do what they are best at every day. Team members can experience psychological safety, autonomy, mastery and purpose, often even flow, in their work lives. Solution Focused skills help create these conditions. This booklet should give you a good grounding for Solution Focused mastery. It is highly practical and will help you understand and apply the most important Solution Focused skills straight away. The authors have given the skills names and faces to make them more visual and memorable. The figures will speak to you directly and help you unravel the miracles created through Solution Focused conversations. You will meet the following members of the Solution Focused Skills Team:Solution-Focused Questions help you formulate more powerful questions.The Best Hopes Question gives a clear direction from the start.The Preferred Future describes concretely where you are heading.The Miracle Question surmounts problem focus as if by magic. The Tomorrow Question sheds more light on your preferred future.The Scales help spot your assets and progress. The Best Self prepares you for challenging events. Appreciative Observations strengthen you and your relationships. The Experimental Task helps you get on with things easily. The Exception finds out when the problem is on holiday. The Previous Solution enjoys unearthing what has worked before. The Break makes work life less stressful and more productive. The List accounts for resources. Constructive Listening reliably directs conversations towards solutions. Positive Assumptions always gets things off to the best possible start.This booklet gives you loads of examples, tasks and exercises to practice – because practice makes perfect! This makes it a useful manual for seminars or team workshops with its tips for trainers and coaches and the many team tasks it contains. It is also connected to a website so readers can take advantage of additional Team Talk offerings.