4-minute read
Happy New Year. This installment is the first of the 12th year of these articles. Whether you’re a new reader or have been reading since the beginning, thanks for coming along for the ride.
Lately, I’ve been talking with clients and reading smart single contributors and big-dog pundits, looking for predictive markers of leadership trends for the year ahead. As market and societal uncertainty lingers, leaders are looking to control what they can by creating as much workplace stability as possible.
Leaders are thinking a lot about how they want to show up for their team. Team stability and AI adoption, two forces sometimes at odds, are at the forefront of many leaders’ thinking. Building team community through deeper connections, improving personal communication and clarity of expectations, and mitigating personal fatigue by managing disagreements more effectively came up repeatedly.
Each topic is meaty on its own. This month, we’ll focus on a hands-on tool for collaborative problem-solving that invites greater team cohesion and creates community.
Looking ahead, communication clarity will be discussed in February and mitigating fatigue in March.
Building team community by prioritizing contribution
For most people, one of the biggest career motivators is being a valuable contributor (and being compensated fairly). As many conversations about operationalizing goals take place in the first quarter, this creates a natural opportunity for collaborative contribution.
One of the best tools I’ve found for promoting team contribution is Stanford’s Design Thinking Framework. I encourage you to read the linked article, which goes into more detail than this space allows.
This five-step people-centered framework is a double win; first, it invites conversation and creativity among internal teams, while connecting work with purpose through an audience-centric lens. Here is a condensed summary of the five steps:
STEP 1: Empathize – creating an understanding of how the end-user feels about the challenge or opportunity. Here are some defining questions to ask:
What is important to our audience? Why?
What else have we noticed?
What is our audience doing now?
STEP 2: Define – with the audience defined, outline the unmet human need
What is the audience’s need?
Is there energy for change?
Is the change already happening somewhere else?
STEP 3: Ideate – invite controlled creativity to develop and vet ideas, solutions, and likely audience reaction. Open-ended questions and collaborative conversations keep this phase on track.
What is currently working?
What is currently not working?
Does this idea support progress?
Does this idea inhibit progress?
What did we miss?
What are the wildcards?
Which ideas will have the greatest impact and ease of execution?
Note: Before completing the ideation phase, make sure your team knows who the final decision-makers are.
STEP 4: Prototype – working with a list of prioritized ideas, build tactics and processes.
What do we have that we can use or reconfigure?
What do we need to realize the idea?
How do we know if it’s working?
Can this idea scale?
Can we exit gracefully if needed?
Note: Before rolling out the prototype, make sure each team member knows their responsibilities, tasks, and success markers, as well as how these new workflows integrate into their existing workload.
STEP 5: Test – the final phase is a public test that asks for feedback to learn, tweak, and improve the prototype. Balance the feedback you get against your assumptions:
Did we define the problem correctly?
Which feedback can/should we incorporate?
What have we overlooked?
Given our resources/time, what can we do now, and what is for later?
The beauty of the model is that tactics and solutions aren’t discussed until the end of step three. Steps one and two focus on the audience and ideas.
The collective nature of the process allows individuals to understand their assumptions in the context of audience needs and to create a shared understanding of need and opportunity. The inclusive nature of the framework shifts the emphasis from finding the ‘winning strategy’ to building long-term client benefit.
Three reasons why design thinking works:
1) Audience-focused: The ‘emphasize’ and ‘define’ steps uncover assumptions about audience need and unify the team around the opportunity/challenges being solved for.
2) Problem framing: In a world driven by a bigger, faster, cheaper mindset, the WHY often gets glossed over in favor of the HOW. If you’ve ever been in a conversation that quickly defaults to tactics rather than strategy, you’ve seen this in action. This model’s starting point focuses on the audience’s needs before solutions. Using open-ended questioning is an effective way to focus the team on client need before inviting ideas.
Here’s an example:
Declarative statement: We need more clients.
Framing question: How can we create a better experience to attract more clients?
3) Collective ideation: Guidelines and clarifying questions keep the team focused on the audience and the issues, while making room for ideas to flow. Ranking each idea by its client impact and ease of organizational execution before the ‘prototype’ phase ensures the team focuses on tactics that benefit the audience and are achievable for the organization.
Further, ideation allows for organic, inter-departmental work groups to form for building a prototype. Finally, the team can be brought back together in the ‘test’ phase to hear initial feedback and discuss improvements.
If team cohesion is a priority for you in 2026, consider socializing Stanford’s design thinking framework as a tool for inviting collaboration and ideas.
Thank you for reading.
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