THE SCOUTING REPORT.
Bring your team together by sharing a guide on how you work best.
(1) Strong teams build strong businesses. And building a strong team starts with building a foundation of trust.
(2) To fast-track the trust-building process, we work with our ELT members to write and share guides to working with them: Personal Scouting Reports.
(3) The Scouting Report exercise can be done in just a few hours for most teams and is the perfect tool to use in your next offsite, team meeting, or when onboarding a new team member.
WHAT THE HECK IS A SCOUTING REPORT?
Operations team member Principal Paul Stansik explains what the Scouting Report is, why we use it, and how you can bring this powerful tool to your team using the resources on this page.
DOES YOUR TEAM KNOW HOW TO GET THE BEST OUT OF YOU?
The ParkerGale team spends a lot of our time working with our portfolio executives to create organizational clarity using questions like “Why do we exist?”, “What do we do?”, and “What is most important, right now?”
The ensuing dialogue helps us bring focus, alignment, and certainty to the unavoidable chaos that comes with growing any small company. But we don’t stop there. We also work with our executives to create a different, more personal kind of clarity:
Clarity on what they’re actually like to work with.
That’s where the Scouting Report comes in.
… SO WHAT IS IT?
The scouting report is a simple one-page document that allows leaders to share “what they’re like” at work.
The left side of the document summarizes what you’re like “at your best”: The strengths you lean on and what your team can do to get the most of out of you.
The right side captures your “dark side”: The tendencies that might be overusing and the behaviors that tend to trigger you at work.
WHY SHOULD I DO THIS WITH MY TEAM?
SPEED: Sure, you’ll eventually learn what makes each person on your team tick. But without a structured approach, identifying each others’ strengths, triggers, and blind spots takes time. Working remotely only elongates the process. Creating and sharing a scouting report on your working style accelerates your ability to learn about each of your teammates, shortening the time required to build team cohesion and start working as a single, cohesive unit.
CERTAINTY: When you don’t understand your boss, agonizing over how to bring something up can be just as exhausting as doing your actual work. In his book 12 Rules for Life, author Jordan Peterson lays out the cost of this workplace guessing game: “When you don’t know what to do, you must be prepared to do anything and everything in case it becomes necessary…The physical demands of emergency preparedness will wear you down in every way.” A Scouting Report cuts through this ambiguity, providing clear guardrails and freeing your team to solve the problem instead of worrying about how their message will land with you.
SAFETY: High-performing teams are different. They make it safe to speak up, ask questions, and offer dissenting opinions. Sharing what makes you tick (including what you’re like “at your worst”) is a great way to build a trusting team environment and create a working environment where it’s safe to take risks and surface important information.
Are you interested in doing the Scouting Report exercise with your team? There’s a facilitator guide for that.
No serious athlete steps on the field without a scouting report. No serious professional should lead without one either. In this episode of the Funcast's Leadership Series, Paul and Jim discuss a simple document that can help you clarify working styles and create a high-performing team.