“Who owns what?”

“What do you do? What do I need to do?”

“Why are we consistently missing these considerations?”

I hear this a lot when working with teams.

I’ve found this particularly true where the individuals involved have differing areas of professional expertise, but are all joined in the shared ambition of supporting a team to succeed.

In this context, I’ve found that the old paradigm of roles and responsibilities can sometimes fall short of reflecting the realities of leading effective cross-functional teams (with all the “grey-ness” and blurring lines that often entails).

So here’s what I’m making up:

• We all have our specialisms and expertise i.e. the specialised skills we’re hired for and are fairly specific and clear (generally speaking).
• In the pursuit of shared team ambitions, it’s more than likely that our focus and energy will spread across a range of concerns (not “just” our “day job”).
• As individuals (with our own interests, motivations and passions) we are instinctively drawn to certain areas of concern— some of which may be beyond “the box” our roles and responsibilities might initially articulate.

Given these maxims, I can totally empathise with why we might struggle to define black-and-white role boundaries in our “real-life” team relationships…

We’re seeking clarity and clean edges where there might not be any.

So for me, it’s less about “this is mine” and “this is yours”, and more about acknowledging that we all prioritise what we choose to invest our talent and expertise into thinking about — it’s human.

So with that assumption in mind, it’s feasible (and likely) that multiple people on the same team are often “playing in similar areas” and thinking about the same things.

This can be both helpful and challenging, so the trick of it is to know which scenario it is for us as a team.

With this new lens, we might ask different questions:

“Who’s thinking about what?”

“How might we prioritise our time and efforts better to support one another?”

“Are we balanced? What are we not thinking about that we could/should in pursuit of our goals?”

A former colleague of mine, Jeff Lindsey created a really useful framework to help illuminate new ways of looking at this challenge.

He created a set of exercises to explore “Roles as Questions” which I’ve since adopted and iterated into what I refer to as “Share of mind mapping”.

How it works

The narrative…

What do you spend your time thinking about?
Ask the team to reflect and list responses to the following question: “What typical questions are you asking yourself day to day as you go about your work?”

Think about a typical month: What do you spend your time thinking about?

We’re looking for mid-tier fidelity here:

More like: “What’s the best way to continually engage our stakeholders?”

Less like: “How do I work with Bob on X initiative?”

Tip: I’d recommend this is done individually.

Let’s collate
Collate the questions together and do a bit of assimilation, resulting in a single collated list.

You can either do this separately as a facilitator or do this with the team. Work with the team to sense-make through discussion. Seek to cluster themes and create overarching questions to form a single collated list of questions to consider.

How much share of mind do you invest around this?
Ask each of the team to plot a frequency that resonates with them against each of the questions on the list…

1 — Never / 2 — Rarely / 3 — Occasionally / 4 — A moderate amount / 5 — A great deal

Tip: I’d recommend this is done individually.

Let’s collate
Bring the responses together into a single heat-map view

Tip: Individual’s responses should be identifiable on the map to aid discussion.

Let’s reflect, discuss and discover

• What do we observe from this map?
• Are there gaps where no one is thinking about X Y Z?
• Are we all investing in the same area? If so, how aligned are we?
• How might we use this knowledge to help us collaborate in the future?

So what next?
Where do you want to go with this?

Why I think it might be helpful…

• The facilitated discussion helps to unearth the team’s inner thinking patterns to one another and in doing so, builds empathy.
• It confronts similarities, differences and patterns as well as the breadth and depth of areas of concern within a team.
• When combined with the frequency / proportion of an individual’s share of mind, the heat map reveals the level of balance within a team and opportunities to improve.

Final thoughts

By visualising the heat-map we provide a prop to enable teams to discuss. They can use this discussion to ascertain if their collective share of mind is in service to their shared ambitions or not. And if not, where might they seek to rebalance or improve their situation?

If you choose to embark on this journey with your teams, enjoy! I hope you get as much value out of it as we have to date. I’m sure I’ll keep iterating, reflecting and improving as we go, but I’d love to hear how you get on, so feel free to reach out!