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Best practices for getting the most out of KYT
Best practices for getting the most out of KYT

Here's what we've noticed other managers implementing in their own teams.

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Written by Support
Updated over a week ago

Here are some tried 'n true best practices to get the most out of Know Your Team...

  1. 👋 Introduce Know Your Team in-person or over video - The clients we’ve worked with that have had the most success have made a personal announcement to their team that this is something they’d like to do, as an effort to be a better leader. This shows you’re committed to creating a positive work environment – and it’s not just all talk :-) You can get tips for rolling out KYT here.

  2. 🗣 Talk up KYT - To ensure things continue to start off on the right foot, one thing you might want to do is to talk up the importance of getting to know each other and sharing honest feedback – and embed that into your weekly + monthly practices. For example, many managers we work with will carve out 10 - 15 minutes during their weekly staff meeting to highlight that week's KYT Social Question and Culture Question. They'll thank people for participating – saying, "Lisa's answer was hilarious!" or "I really appreciated Mark's suggestion here" – and emphasize how much they want to hear what's on people's minds. This helps show your team that they're listening.

  3. 🌟 Use Know Your Team to schedule and prepare for your next one-on-one meeting - One-on-one meetings are possibly your most crucial tool as a manager. In Know Your Team, we help you make the most of them by giving you 50+ questions and 4 agenda templates (not to mention a way to co-write agendas with your team members).

  4. ✏️ Customize + write your own questions - The more specific the Culture and Social Questions are to your team, the more likely you’ll get quality feedback. CEOs tend to learn the most when they write questions that are timely and specific to their own company. For example, Richard Banfield, the CEO of Fresh Tilled Soil, recently asked his design agency, "Do you know why our clients choose us over our competitors?"

  5. 😉 Make sure you participate in KYT, yourself! - You want to personally set an example for how you want KYT to be interacted with. Make sure you yourself are participating and answering the KYT questions when it's relevant. Leadership is a unit of modeling. You'll want to make sure you're modeling the behavior you want to be true in your team.

  6. 🎳 Enable your other managers to use KYT - To have your other managers benefit from a framework for running 1:1s, building trust, and more, have them use KYT as well. You can do this with our "Teams" feature. You can create a new team and add them as a "Manager" of that team, so they can use the Icebreaker, Social Questions, and One-on-Ones Tool with their own direct reports.

  7. 💪 Knock out small wins - When you see a suggestion that bubbles up from Know Your Team worth implementing, it speaks volumes to make a change right away, no matter how small it is. For example, Paul Bellous, the co-CEO of Yellow Pencil, learned that his company needed a new phone service. He made that change promptly...and noticed an immediate shift in the team's morale. That one small change made a huge impact on his team, simply because he acted quickly.

  8. 📚 Dive into our Guides, and encourage your team to do so, too – We offer 50+ chapters in our written guides on topics like Giving Feedback, Building Trust, One-on-One Meetings and more. And it’s all based on data from 15,000+ people. Each of your team members gets an “employee version” of the guide too. Reading these guides, together, is a great primer for everyone to get on the same page about key team issues.

  9. 💡 Watch a Workshop Live! session – As a KYT subscriber, you get exclusive access to all these Workshop Live! recordings. These 60-minute masterclass session on a specific leadership topic are excellent deep-dives as you develop and refine your skills as a manager. You can revisit them or even share the recording with your team (and other managers who you've added in KYT) at any time. For example, we have sessions on "How to Coach an Underperforming Employee" and "How to Give Honest Feedback"

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