136. Lessons in Team Habits with Charlie Gilkey
Diving Into Charlie's Latest Book: Team Habits
Life is made up of little teams.
Sammie and I are a podcasting team. We live together and manage our household together. Separately, we have our own work teams that we spend time with during the week.
But I know I don’t think about how I can improve my team dynamics by improving the habits of our teams. I’ve generally been ignorant to my different team habits and have never considered changing them. However, our habits do affect our everyday lives. Recently, Sammie and I had to sit down to come up with a joint habit for cleaning the dishes because we found we weren’t on the same page.
Luckily,
joined us on Build A Wealthy Spirit this week to dive into the best ways to identify our team habits and turn them into good habits.Charlie has a new book called Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results. Sammie and I read Team Habits and Charlie does an amazing job of breaking down easy to implement frameworks that can help you improve the experience of being part of a team. Sammie and I have written down a number of ideas we want to implement to our podcast team, including doing an audit of our habits and celebrating more short term wins.
Charlie knows a lot about how teams work. Charlie is not only a former Army logistics officer, he has also advised hundreds of teams, from Fortune 100 companies to tiny nonprofits, through Productive Flourishing, the coaching and training company he founded.
We had a lovely chat with Charlie. Sammie and I asked about three themes from the book that resonated with the two of us. This included belonging, decision making and prioritization.
In this episode, Charlie explains why cultivating belonging is the bedrock to building team habits. If you’ve ever worked with a team you loved, you know how much easier it is to work towards a common goal when everyone feels like they are truly a part of the team.
When it comes to decision making, Charlie tells us about the benefits of changing the question, “who owns the decision” to “who owns the question.” Sammie and I are moving soon, and we plan to focus more assigning questions to each other. This will replace our current method which is carrying all the tasks in our head and stressing out about every detail.
Finally, we revisit a classic idea from Charlie, The Five Projects Rule. When I first read about this simple idea around limiting work and life projects to max five, it changed my life. I became more cognizant of what I was adding to my schedule and recognized I had a lot of things I wanted to do, but not enough time. This can be applied to teams as well. Many companies unfortunately think there’s nothing wrong with having 10 priorities at any given time. However, no person can do quality work on all projects if they are spread thin across too many.
Let us know your thoughts on this episode! Are you on a team with good or bad habits? Tell us about it.
We’re also giving away five copies of Team Habits to our listeners. Leave a comment or send us an email at buildawealthyspirit@gmail.com letting us know you want to claim a copy!
Show Notes:
Learn More about Charlie Gilkey:
Team Habits: How Small Actions Lead to Extraordinary Results by Charlie Gilkey
Start Finishing: How to Go from Idea to Done by Charlie Gilkey
Productive Flourishing Website
Other Books Referenced:
The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson