Perspective

SWOT yourself as a friend

So the green track adventure this week is to apply SWOT to something you may never have considered before – your role in a specific relationship. It can be a friend, a colleague, a family member, but pick someone specific – this will help you avoid drifting to generalities.

Download the 8 minute SWOT template, (you can find the link in the Pack section). Open it, and then open a second window and switch it to reading view. This will focus you on two minutes per section. Then work through the template:

• Strengths – what about you particularly adds value to the relationship and help makes it strong?
• Weaknesses – what about you and your behaviour means the relationship is not as strong as it could be?
• Opportunities – what possibilities and ideas do you have for adding new value to the relationship?
• Threats – what risks undermining the relationship and how it is working currently?

That is it. Our hope is that it may have exposed you to a new insight. And the insight is all you need, once we have that we can usually work out the rest for ourselves.

SWOT something your team is working on

The real value in using SWOT participatively with your team is that it generates and shares hidden insights, and builds collective ownership for them. Furthermore, doing it at pace helps to raise team energy and inspire insightful (even creative) leaps. And the fact that it only takes 8 minutes means that it can be used as a healthy, engaging introduction to virtually any topic.

So the blue track is to try this out. It can be on virtually any topic:

• Aspects of the team’s relationships (intra- and inter-team), its creativity, culture, capabilities, learning
• Aspects of its work – a current project, routine tasks, ad-hoc projects, reporting, reviewing
• Or its readiness to tackle new things, in new ways

Or simply, whatever issue is foremost in your (its) mind at the moment. SWOT can help put it in context.

As with the green track, download the the 8 minute SWOT template, (You can find the link in the Pack section). Open it, and then open a second window and switch it to reading view. You can then either screen share the reading view window, or better still integrate it into your webcam.

Building a pattern of SWOT

As the rate of change builds, people and teams will do one of two things.

They will either become submerged under it, feeling increasingly overwhelmed, driven to a series of short-term responses, too busy to look ahead or see new possibilities. They risk not only the joy of work, but their health and their potential also.

Or they will rise above it, disciplining themselves to maintain a balance between the operational and the strategic, able to see the overall direction and add value within that. They will see the adventure, and come to develop new skills and insights.

SWOT provides a means of introducing a regular cadence of lifting the team out of the detail and looking around and ahead from a more systemic meta-perspective. It can help your team develop their balance, and build skills of meta-thinking, life-long learning and growth mindset.

So the red-track this week is to set up a schedule of 8 minute SWOTs for your team, looking at different aspects of their work and situation, and providing them with a perspective from which they can better choose the right path.