We coach, develop and work alongside leaders and teams to shift ideas on leadership and provide the skills and tools needed to grow teams.
“I know, I know; running Meetings is such boring stuff… not sexy at all. But….
I have on numerous occasions taught facilitation skills and there was always real interest in tricks and techniques for handling [difficult] people. “
“When someone in your team wants to discuss something at a team meeting, do you start the discussion and then eventually try to figure out why you are having this discussion?
I suspect this is a common experience.”
When facilitating team workshops or meetings we typically see at least one or two team members who don’t seem to contribute much.
What do we mean by ‘a big ugly elephant in the room?’. We mean those things that teams tend to avoid speaking openly about. You know, things like…
Teams often do two things that get in the way of good and efficient decision making:
#1 They talk for too long without being clear of the point of the discussion
#2 They rely heavily on the leader of the team to make most of the calls.
Teams often miss the opportunity to genuinely collaborate because they enter into discussions without clarity of what the discussion is for and how the discussion should proceed to get the most from the time together.
Like most of us, you will be really busy just coping with your daily mountain of work.Of course, when you hear an idea that can help you improve how you tackle that work, you take notice and maybe get inspired.
Here are a few techniques and tips to help your group work remotely but together.
As early as possible, agree the protocols or ground rules for your team calls or chats (I’ll call these ‘collabs’ from here on). For example, do you need to see each other the entire time or is audio-only fine? …
Time and again we hear of meetings where groups of people walk away feeling frustrated that their time has been wasted. Discussions seem to go on too long and meander out of control. Often, people complain that they weren’t even sure what the discussion was meant to achieve.
So, we developed a simple tool that we teach teams to adopt during their meetings which seems to have made a big difference. We call it BOOST.
One of the reasons collaboration is highly desired is because as our world gets increasingly complex, there is significant benefit in bringing diverse thoughts and perspectives to difficult issues. But here is the problem…