How to get the best out of team Workshops

Workshop Facilitation – the way to reset your strategy and set your team up for success

Your team has been dispersed and mostly working from home for almost 18 months. Some people may have popped into the office, but you’ve not managed to get your team together for some high-quality thinking for ages. Zoom and MS Teams are better than nothing but being able to get everyone in a room together and chew through some meaty (or vegan!) strategic questions and think richly about the future opportunities or challenges together has been missing, right?

We have recently seen an uptick in requests to facilitate strategic planning workshops, campaign development workshops and senior leadership team meetings in person. Some at (almost deserted) offices, others at very pleasant but equally quiet hotels and conferences venues.

These facilitated workshops have acted as strategic resets, new business development launches and team bonding experiences.

What can a professional facilitator bring to your workshop or meeting?

  • Independence: good facilitators are agnostic – they don’t get involved in the content but manage the people and the process to get to the desired outcome. No waffling. No bias. Just high-quality conversations.
  • Leveraging all the brains in the room: the workshop facilitator has permission from the group to facilitate. Sounds obvious but we use that permission in ways someone on the inside cannot. We do not defer to the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion), we are able to cut off unhelpful conversations, steer people away from rabbit holes and bring in quieter members of the group in ways that they find suitable. We also ensure people work during brief backs – no zoning out!
  • Managing the emotions: Skilfully and gently helping people reconnect after a difficult and lengthy period apart, where we’ve all had to deal with some big stuff and that needs to be recognised and managed carefully.
  • Managing the energy in the room: keeping people engaged by taking breaks (sometimes unorthodox ones) when people need them and enabling them to work hard during the sessions.
  • Sticking to time: we start and end when we say we will. No overrunning.
  • Delivering the outcome: before the workshop we work with the problem owner to clearly define the questions to be answered and the desired outcome from the workshop or meeting. Then we deliver it.
  • Flexing and adapting: as the military say ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’. The same holds true for a workshop’s agenda. Expert workshop facilitators know what’s essential to achieve and flexes the methods to suit. We have probably encountered the situation before and know what to do about it. We check in with the problem owner so that changes in direction are conscious, deliberate and for good reason. No flip flopping. No aimless meandering.

Workshop facilitation is a capability that every organisation needs. If you don’t have it, then ask us – we can help either to facilitate your workshops and meetings or to train key internal people to become facilitators.

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It’s about team success, not team location

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Hybrid Working – the business case for reducing business miles