I often get asked – “Why the name Cloverleaf?” After all, there are a lot of clover-related company names – heck, we didn’t even get the dot com for this name.

It boils down to the simple concept and vision of what Cloverleaf would become in those early days. For those of you that have previously founded a company you understand that there is often a weird phase at the beginning where you just have an idea or concept but you don’t have a name or brand. It is as if you had a child and had to wait until he/she could walk before naming the child. 

When Cloverleaf was in that weird in-between stage we would often describe our idea by drawing a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles. 

These circles represented three important concepts of how we, as individuals, do work. Each circle represented what we believed were really important pieces to align to do our best work. Let’s look at each in a little more detail:

1. Proficiency – in the early days we called this skill but eventually settled on an alliteration that eventually became known as the 3 Ps. When we looked across the landscape of talent tools (from talent acquisition to performance management) we saw that most focused almost exclusively on skill. We felt skill was obviously important and is often the price of admission but rather than stopping there we knew there were real differentiators that weren’t used. Whether by choice or not, we felt like this was a real miss in the talent management space.

2. Personality – the set of behaviors that were either used to process information or how others perceived your actions. We debated whether we should use this word (remember the 3 Ps?) since what we really cared about was behaviors and personality often left people thinking about the “Which Star Wars character are you?” tests that have become the hallmark of social media. Even today we work hard to avoid using the word personality in our marketing and in our product. Regardless of the word, what we cared about was shedding light on our behaviors and how those would likely impact our performance with others.

3. Preference – again, we debated what word to use. Ultimately we wanted a measure that could shed light on culture. But culture is such a loaded word. Everyone has a different way of thinking about what constitutes culture. Ultimately we give organizations several ways to assess this for their teams or organizations. We offer values-based assessments and work style preference assessments to provide insight into culture.

Next, we believe there is an important intersection of these elements that come together not just for the individual but for collections of people that form teams and organizations. This acts as an almost three-dimensional model that can provide tremendous insight into now only how individuals can do their best work but how they can do their best work with the people they are working with.

Another way to think about how these three things work in conjunction to grow your potential is to think of behaviors (personality) as the outcome of your skills or knowledge (proficiency) that is influenced by your beliefs or values (preferences). You can get more knowledge or develop your skills and that will impact your behaviors and that is where much of corporate development dollars are spent. Values are less changing but are important factors in decision-making. And these can change over time but are less volatile over time. As an example, if you get married and have kids your values may shift and what motivates you changes, perhaps slowly at first but maybe more pronounced over time. 

So it is important to know all three aspects of the Cloverleaf to be able to effectively modify performance over time.

Now that you know the background on the three leaves of the Cloverleaf logo, you may be asking why not a fourth leaf, and to that I reply – the fourth leaf is luck and you don’t need to be lucky to do great work.

Have you ever sat next to someone in a gate at the airport without speaking … then a delay is announced with the possibility of cancellation and suddenly your whole section of the gate is navigating the trials of air travel together? You just had a shared experience. Crazy how the relationship leaps from the “Can I use the outlet next to you to charge my phone?”, to running through the airport together to get the next best flight.

Sharing experiences make people a team.

At Cloverleaf, we are all about taking a group of people and making them into a true team. While we do this through Automated Coaching™, we wholeheartedly believe that shared experiences are an amazing way to increase team effectiveness. 

4 Effective Ways To Create Shared Experiences With Your Teammates At Work

1 – Rush through the team development stages, (fancy way of saying: “you’ll have no choice but to get to know each other better”)

Part of the way teams can become more effective is  “rushing” the different stages of becoming a team. Tuckman’s Model of Team Development has four stages that teams go through:

Forming – Newly formed team, beginning to work through goals, expectations and the tasks at hand

Storming – When team members begin to voice their opinions, push boundaries and experience conflict as power is assigned

Norming – team members take responsibility and have a shared sense of ownership group goals

Performing – roles are clearly established and team is achieving their common goals by autonomous work

The quicker that working together and spending time together gets a team through these phases, the quicker a team is at their peak productivity levels in the “Performing” stage. *This is also a cycle that can be started over, but once again, the faster you can move through stages – the quicker you are back to a productive state.

2 – Create Memories Together

In this thesis, which talks about transactive memory, the more time you spend together, the more easily a pair or group of people is able to recognize each person’s unique abilities and natural strengths. While this process eventually happens when working with a team regardless, sharing experiences speeds up the process. As you are learning about each other’s uniqueness you are increasing your social and emotional intelligence as team, something that HBR has written on many times including this article.  

Aside from fancy science-y talk, shared memories simply gives a team a common experience to look back on and share together. There even becomes shared words and language that gets associated with the experience and memory. This can be especially helpful for remote organizations that typically only communicate online. Most articles on remote teams like this one, explain how it is best to get together in person periodically to help the team take shape and work best together.

3- Increase Trust To Make Feedback Easier

Jumping into giving and receiving feedback as a team is hard when you’ve only been in the “work” environment. Trust is something that takes time, and certainly a certain base level of a relationship. This HBR article discusses exactly that, along with other ways to build a feedback-rich culture.

4 – Sharing an experience means a better experience

It’s been proven that sharing an experience amplifies the emotions related to that experience. Why not elevate your senses AND associate an awesome experience with your co-workers with sharing positive experiences.  Don’t believe us? Here is a study that proves this very thing (Hint: They find that chocolate tastes better when tasting with others).