Team meetings are the lifeblood of an organization. Productive meetings act as a forum for sharing the best ideas, conversations, and feedback. 

For many organizations, meaningful meetings are hard to come by. As most meetings lack direction and purpose, the results can be disastrous. Statistics show that 71% of team meetings are unproductive, costing organizations upwards of $37 billion a year.

The key to making the most of your meetings is to meet with intention. In this article, we explore the art of meaningful meetings through the following topics: 

• The Meaning of Meetings
• The Arc of a Meeting
• Making a Magical Meeting
• A Model for Magical Meetings

The Meaning of Meetings

Meetings serve as a significant method of communication for any organization. While meetings are part of company culture, many meetings result in confusion, distraction, and wasted time. Shift your meeting culture by investing in the meaning behind meetings. 

Meetings serve two main purposes:

1. A meeting should define a team or unit. The essential members of an organization should be involved in most meetings as a positive meeting culture benefits the whole group rather than one individual. In the most effective meetings, participants reaffirm their identity through their dialogue, decisions, and overall course of action throughout the meeting. 

2. Meetings serve as a setting for an organization to revise, edit, update, and add to its communal knowledge. Participants create and reaffirm a shared pool of knowledge, judgment, experience, and folklore through meetings. 

The best meetings underscore what each participant knows as a group rather than the knowledge of any single person. With a group of participants on the same page, all members are able to do their job in the most knowledgeable way. 

Meeting on Purpose

Intentionality is the secret behind meetings that matter. By meeting on purpose and creating gatherings as intentionally as possible, leaders are able to facilitate an exchange of information that speaks to all parties involved.

Neurology reveals that there is indeed magic to making meetings meaningful. Science shows us that we are all wired uniquely in neurologically-different ways. A meeting of the minds shows us that no two minds are the same, so our assumptions, perspectives, and perceptions differ greatly from others. Acknowledging these neurological differences allows us to design meetings that meet the unique needs of each attendee. 

In your efforts to create meaningful meetings that speak to all participants, it’s essential to lead each session with clear direction. While many facilitators use an agenda to communicate their purpose and vision, meaningful meetings must go beyond simply having an agenda. Experts like Elise Keith reveal that an effective meeting is possible even without a clear-cut agenda. 

The truth is that facilitators must tap into the clarity of a meaningful meeting, agenda or not. Harness this idea of clarity by identifying and understanding the purpose ahead of any meeting. 

The Arc of a Meeting

Going beyond the idea of an agenda allows facilitators to focus on creating the arc of a meeting. Using an arc rather than an agenda transforms team meetings into a journey. In each session, facilitators lead attendees through a process of conversation and storytelling. 

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Letting go of an agenda ahead of meaningful team meetings gives facilitators that chance to use a template for an unrestricted approach to facilitation. Templates are easy tools that give facilitators a chance to insert the most appropriate content for each session. Opting for a template allows meeting attendees and facilitators to follow the “flow” and see how it guides and shapes their path going forward. 

Facilitating with templates gives leaders the opportunity to design meaningful and intentional meetings with any purpose they have in mind. With the right template, you’ll set the rules of the game and give your attendees a chance to win. 

Making a Magical Meeting

The most magical team meetings start with the same ingredients. Modeling your sessions after a tried-and-true recipe for meeting success gives you the chance to hold the most successful meetings again and again. 

Consider the following method for the most effective meetings:

1. Create Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is a key component for designing successful meetings in an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be their authentic selves. Psychological safety allows for trust amongst all meeting members. Create a psychologically safe environment by reducing fear and anxiety in the workplace. 

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Making a habit of offering open discussion gives all participants a chance to be heard. Moreover, starting a meeting with icebreakers and team activities allows participants to break down any perceived differences and create camaraderie with one another.  

2. Be Inclusive

Feeling included allows people to perform at their best. Collaboration is an important way to promote inclusion in team meetings. It’s human nature to need to belong, and facilitators can tap into this brain science and meet these needs in the way they design meetings. 

Make your team members feel included by offering them opportunities for team development, skill-building, and bonding. Additionally, creating the chance for everyone to contribute and articulate in each meeting is an essential way to increase inclusion among your team members. 

3. Avoid Information Overload

Too much information can lead to cognitive overload. The best meetings are those that don’t deliver massive amounts of information. Instead, the most successful meetings artfully serve attendees small amounts of information that are appropriate for the context. Reiterate this information with a hands-on activity that encourages attendees to forge personal connections and create an engaging learning experience. 

4. Increase Productivity

Increase productivity by decreasing pre-meeting prep. Pre-meeting prep has the tendency to distract team members from the mission of the meeting. Moreover, if they schedule time for the initial meeting, preparation time puts additional stress on their schedule. Experts suggest holding additional study hall sessions prior to team meetings if preparation time is an absolute necessity. 

A Model for Magical Meetings

Successful meetings start with the right intention, ideas, and arc. As you work to transform your team meetings, consider the following models for magical meetings:

1. A Daily Standup (10 Min Each)

Start this daily meeting  by asking questions such as:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Are you stuck on anything?

2. Iteration Planning Meeting (60 min each)

This planning meeting serves to align all team members and check on any backlog from the previous week. 

Facilitators can ask questions like:

• What will we do this week?
• Does everyone have an understanding of this week’s requirements?
• Are we all in alignment? 

3. Friday Afternoon Meeting (60 min each)

In Friday afternoon team meetings, participants have a chance to be reflective and share their challenges and critiques from the week.

These feedback meetings allow team members to learn from each experience and are the most effective when a project wraps. Use retrospective meetings to gather your team members and invite them to discuss what worked, what didn’t work, and what can be changed for future projects. 

4. Onboarding Meetings

Onboarding meetings are ideal for all new hires. These sessions give new team members the chance to receive training, understand the company’s structure, learn about new projects, and discuss their role in the team. 

5. Brainstorming Meetings

Innovation is at the heart of brainstorming team meetings. Facilitators use these meetings to generate ideas in a shorter period of time. These meetings are critical when problem-solving.

6. Kickoff Meetings

Kickoff meetings are ideal when working on a new initiative or project. Use kickoff meetings to get your team on board with new initiatives. These meetings effectively communicate the long-term goals and encourage them to align themselves with future projects. Moreover, these meetings help solidify each person’s role in the organization and get their buy-in. 

7. Financial and Budget Meetings

Financial and budget team meetings focus on resolving communication issues regarding money. These financial meetings help ease any tension around your budget, raises, and other financial issues. 

Team meetings are the beating heart of any organization. Need help transforming your meeting culture? At Voltage Control, we help leaders and teams change the way meetings affect their company culture! Contact us to learn more about making your meetings magical. 

The post Intentional Meetings Matter: Transforming Team Meetings appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Lorraine Margherita is a speaker, organization consultant, and co-designer of collective dynamics for governance and performance. I spoke with Lorraine about the Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance, the reason behind it, and her proudest moments from the meeting. 

Creating Representation

Lorraine’s Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance began as a way to promote remote facilitation to company leaders as they analyze what it means to empower governance in an organization. This meeting introduced Lorraine’s colleagues to the concept of meeting virtually and the online tools that make remote sessions possible.

In this particular meeting, Lorraine and her co-facilitator designed a three-hour session for six participants from various organizations. The Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance began as a pilot meeting that would be the first of several subsequent sessions. During this meeting, Lorraine invited team members to create a conversation, practice the meeting framework, and explore the concept of empowering governance. 

Let’s take a closer look at Lorraine’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance, the facilitator discusses empowering governance with C-suite members and other stakeholders as they discover more about meeting remotely.

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Location: 

• Online

Length:

• 3 hours

Participants: 

• A facilitator
• A co-facilitator or consultant
• Six participants 

Tools:

• Microsoft Teams
• Mural

Activities

• Drawing a company as a human body

Deliverables:

• A framework for remote meetings
• A sketch 
• Insights for improvement

The Meeting

This particular meeting was attended by leaders, managers of large teams, and some members of the HR department. 

Plan the Workshop:

Before the session begins, the facilitator should prepare the following:

• The Mural Whiteboard
• The diagram for the sketch

Agenda:

• The First Section
  • Introduction 
  • Inclusion
  • Sketch 
• Break 
• The Second Section
  • Feedback

Preparation:

The facilitators can begin preparation by holding meetings with each other to organize the agenda, allocate time for activities, and curate participant interactions. 

Before beginning the Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance, Lorraine and her consultant met several times to plan for the session. Lorraine used Mural to complete much of the preparation for the upcoming Pilot Circle session, which included:

• Setting the objective
• Identifying the target audience
• Designing each section
• Time the activities

Lorraine believed investing time and energy in the planning process was instrumental in helping the meeting members feel comfortable with remote sessions:

“That’s probably the most important thing that made the meeting possible, to see that it is possible to work online if you give a certain amount of time and preparation to the meeting.”

Lorraine then selected the meeting participants by contacting leaders in local companies to ask them to join the pilot session.

The First Section

Introduction 

The facilitators start the first section of the Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance with a 10-minute introduction to welcome everyone. At this time, facilitators introduce Mural and Microsoft Teams and ask participants introductory questions. 

The facilitators then explain the intention of the meeting, what they’re doing, and what they hope to achieve in the Pilot Circle meeting.   

Inclusion

The inclusion portion of the Pilot Circle focuses on setting the tone for the meeting. Facilitators should shape the way participants feel, how they interact, and their experience using online tools. 

Then the facilitators spend five minutes sharing the rules of meeting remotely and working on Mural. The next 20 minutes are spent discussing empowering governance. 

In her meeting, Lorraine asked participants to express how they felt about empowering governance. After explaining the concept, team members discussed if they were comfortable, not comfortable, enthusiastic, or doubting everything that leads to empowerment. 

Sketch

During this part of a Pilot Circle session, the facilitators introduce the activity: sketching the company as a human body. Participants will break out in pairs, using Mural to draw their company as a human body. 

In this activity, participants sketch out the body and include their interactions, roles, and responsibilities within the company as part of the human body.

In Lorraine’s meeting, she and her co-facilitator created the human body whiteboard during the preparation portion. Once each pair completed their drawing, they presented them to the group and discussed others’ reactions and perceptions of the work:

“They shared a few questions on what it was saying about their company, what it was saying about themselves, what it was saying about other companies, so that was pretty interesting.”

Break 

Facilitators and team members take a ten-minute break before the second section begins. 

The Second Section

Feedback

The second section of the meeting is about feedback. The facilitators start the session by discussing different ways to handle feedback. Participants then pair up and spend the next 15 minutes practicing how to handle feedback. 

In the end, the group comes together to discuss their experience. The facilitators close the Pilot Circle by giving everyone the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. 

Lorraine’s team used Teams’ breakout rooms to answer questions and share feedback on their interaction and behavior from the first half of the workshop.

During the final moments of the meeting, team members came back together to discuss the flow, pain points, and areas that each person could protect or improve. 

Empowering Interactions

Lorraine’s Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance exists as a standalone meeting. Though the Pilot Circle was initially designed to be a series of meetings, it ultimately resulted in a singular session:

“The concept was good, but the collaboration was unbalanced…There was a lack of balance between what I was providing and what my peer was providing… It’s sad to say that it was a unique meeting in the sense that it was unique, it happened only one time.”

Despite the fact that the Pilot Circle didn’t expand any further, Lorraine considers it a success. Both facilitators set out to demonstrate the effectiveness of online meetings and Lorraine’s Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance did just that. 

“The goal that we had was actually achieved. The people left the meeting, thinking, ‘I didn’t know it was possible to have such a great meeting online,’ and they realized it was possible, and they also realized how much work it is.”

When asked about the potential pitfalls of the meeting, Lorraine discussed the challenges of transitioning to a remote meeting infrastructure. Most of her clients and colleagues in local companies weren’t familiar with tools such as virtual whiteboards like Mural. For this reason, she believed that ample preparation time is essential to ensure that all participants feel comfortable navigating the world of remote facilitation. 

I asked Lorraine what meeting moment made her the proudest and she shared one of the session’s highlights:

“The people we invited had never been part of such a meeting. They had no idea that you could spend three hours being productive online. They had no idea what you could do with a whiteboard, how far you could go, or how you could translate visual tools into a virtual meeting. They had no idea how well you can listen to one another when you’re not in the same space and connected only via a computer and a camera.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Pilot Circle About Empowering Governance appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive.

Alena Alasdar is a facilitator, trainer, and technical services professional from Decatur Georgia with a focus on developing streamlined processes.

I spoke with Alena about the Daily Check-In meeting, the reason behind it, and her proudest moments from the meeting.

Streamlining Processes

The Daily Check-In is a meeting designed to facilitate the process of streamlining workflows.

While this Daily Check-In meeting changes with each day, the focus is to align all team members and refine logical processes.

The initial Daily Check-In began as a way to answer the questions of Alena’s junior team members. Now, the Check-In occurs regularly, allowing her team members the opportunity to check in with one another and improve collaborations on all projects going forward.

Let’s take a closer look at Alena’s process to learn what made the meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Daily Check-In meeting, the facilitator works to bring all participants on to the same page, answer challenging questions, and ensure all team members have the resources they need to complete their job. 

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Location:

• Online

Length:

• 30 Minutes

Participants:

• Facilitator
• Four to eight team members

Tools:

• Slack
• WebX
• OneNote

Deliverables:

• Streamlined ideation
• A new workflow

The Meeting

The Daily Check-In is usually attended by four to eight team members.

Plan the Workshop:

Before the session begins, the facilitator will prepare with the following steps:

• Draft the process
• Identify workflow steps
• Determine which team members should attend the meeting

Agenda:

• Process Ideation
• Documentation
• Consensus

Preparation:

Before the meeting, the facilitator will ensure the session runs as efficiently as possible by preparing a draft of the process and workflow steps. This way, the team can kick off the meeting immediately with ideation and problem-solving.

Alena prepared for this Daily Check-In by designing a skeleton of the deliverables and collecting all the questions in OneNote for the team to address during the meeting. Before the session, Alena asked participants to use the green “checkmark” emoji or red “x” emoji to determine if the team needed to meet.

Process Ideation:

The facilitator will begin the Daily Check-In with process ideation. The facilitator will start the session by calling on others for their input. This allows team members to focus on “quick hits and quick wins” as they brainstorm, learn about new tools, and pool resources.

In a Daily Check-In meeting, Alena aims to avoid the back and forth that occurs in typical team meetings. In this particular session, Alena streamlined what might’ve been a week-long process to a half-hour meeting, preventing the fruitless conversations and hours lost to unproductivity that come with meaningless meetings.  

As she explained the origin of the Daily Check-In, Alena shared the power of designing a meeting that encouraged communication and collaboration:

“We had a lot of open issues, and we found that there were two senior members of the team and there were three new kids… every time we tried to do something, they’d hit us with questions.

So we said, “Wait a minute, let’s do this. Let’s put the questions in our OneNote. And then we’ll meet every morning. We’ll go over all your questions will together. We’ll come up with strategies for addressing things.”

Documentation

Documentation is the next phase in a Daily Check-In meeting. During this part of the meeting, team members will begin to refine and document the processes they are designing. As the participants’ roles rotate in every Daily Check-In meeting, this phase ensures everyone is on the same page and that all opinions and ideas get recorded.

During this Daily Check-In session, Alena used Slack to develop and document the workflow. This way, all participants could participate in real-time. With WebX, remote team members from across the country and India were able to work on the process together.

“We’re all equals in that meeting, and that’s one of the things that makes it work. Everybody has got a say, everybody’s got a voice, and it really works well.”

Consensus

As the Daily Check-In comes to a close, the facilitator will ensure that all team members reach a consensus and agree on the best next steps. Then, the facilitator identifies team members that may need extra support and schedules a one-on-one session to meet with them.

In Alena’s meeting, the team discussion occurs by order of seniority: the boss goes first, the team lead goes second, and the rest of the team goes in alphabetical order. This methodical approach ensures that everyone’s voice is heard.

As the role of team members changes with each meeting. Every participant gets the chance to share their opinions:

“We’re able to say what we mean and mean what we say and bring issues forward without worrying about any politics.”

As Alena closed the session, she identified which team members needed additional training and planned to meet with them separately. This way, all team members could end the meeting as efficiently and productively as possible while ensuring that those in need received support outside of the main meeting.

Reimagining Workflow

The most magical meetings make engagement a top priority by allowing team members to connect. In the Daily Check-In meetings, Alena can keep her team on the same page at all times. With her successful check-in system, she constantly refines a workflow that best meets the needs of her team.

When asked about the potential pitfalls of the meeting, she shared that at times, some of her team members require additional training. Instead of taking the time to handle the training during the meeting, Alena takes the discussion offline. This way, she ensures the Daily Check-In doesn’t exceed 30 minutes while taking time to address potential pitfalls before they become major problems.

As Alena considered the power of an efficient workflow, I asked her what she would change if she was really bold. Before designing the Daily Check-In in its current form, Alena used to hold the meeting every day. Alena realized that the team would get on the call every morning, even when they didn’t need to meet.

By making the bold decision to check in first and ask if a meeting was needed, Alena refined the Daily Check-In to what it is today: an efficient, 30-minute streamlining session.

I asked Alena what meeting moment made her the proudest and she spoke about the efficiency of the meeting design:

“I love how we were able to say we may not need this every day, and let’s put some workflow in place so that nobody has to go, “Do you need a meeting?”… The workflow fires off, we’re reminded, and then we just do a quick answer…I love the way things get done.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post The Daily Check-In appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Fabrizio Faraco is a facilitator and project manager from Rome, Italy. I spoke with Fabrizio about the From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions meeting, the reason behind it, and his proudest moments from the meeting. 

Leveraging Solutions

Fabrizio’s meeting is called From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions. The meeting is a series of exercises in the style of a design sprint. Fabrizio designed this meeting for clients that need a portion of a design sprint facilitated in a comprehensive and accelerated format. 

In this particular meeting, Fabrizio’s client hired him to quickly align their team and identify actionable solutions to the critical problem. Let’s take a closer look at Fabrizio’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions meeting, the facilitator works to unify the team and to problem solve. 

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Location: 

•  In-person or online

Length:

• The meeting should not exceed three hours

Participants: 

• Facilitator
• Decider
• Six – eight participants

Tools:

• RosterBot
• DASYLab
• Mural or Miro

Activities:

• Affinity Diagram

Deliverables:

• Align a team
• Identify the critical obstacle
• Determine the sequence of milestones
• Develop actionable solutions

The Meeting

This particular meeting was attended by six to eight team members that were critical to the meeting’s success. 

Plan the Workshop:

Before the session begins, the facilitator will prepare with the following:

• Identify the client’s goal
• Share RosterBot data

Agenda:

• Icebreaker 
• Ideation 
• Decision
• Validation

Preparation:

The facilitator defines the goal of the client ahead of the meeting. As they prepare, they’ll discuss the RosterBot interviews with participants. 

Ahead of the meeting, Fabrizio refines the client’s goal to ensure all team members know the purpose of the meeting. Fabrizio then shared the RosterBot results as a way to align the team members based on their roles. The software helped identify team members’ strengths and areas of expertise. 

Ice Breaker

The facilitator will send an icebreaker on Mural or Miro to ensure all participants are familiar with the software and to help kickstart collaboration.

Ideation

The facilitator will begin the meeting by encouraging ideation. Since From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions is a quick and dirty design sprint, this phase also involves organizing ideas with the help of an affinity diagram.

Fabrizio used an affinity diagram to organize the team’s ideas from their brainstorming session. This diagram helped team members find relationships between information and ideas to help solve the problem. 

Fabrizio noted the collaborative benefit of an accelerated sprint:

“So everybody contributes. You have a bigger range of potential solutions. It’s not important who has the best idea, because at the end you get the most useful idea that belongs to everybody.” 

Decision

The facilitator then uses DASYLab to set a series of milestones and initiate the decision phase. These milestones help the team identify how to achieve the desired state and meet the client’s deliverables. 

Fabrizio used DASYLab to create a precise series of milestones. This intentionality made it easier for team members to identify the best potential solutions. In the meeting, each person had five posts on DASYLab, starting with future milestones as they worked backwards. 

“It’s quite complex. If you have three [milestones], you have 15 posted. If you have 10 people, we have 50 posted. So it becomes pretty detailed, and during the construction of the timeline, there is again, alignment which is the real thing that matters in order to find the desired state.”

Validation 

The facilitator closes the From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions meeting by encouraging team members to identify and validate actionable solutions using both RosterBot and DASYLab. Once team members develop solutions, they either vote for the best solution or create a three-step plan to make it actionable. 

Facilitators can use this three-step approach:

• Identify three steps to implement the idea 
• Place X, Y, Z statement: If 30% of these people do this, it means that it works

With the help of DASYLab and RosterBot, Fabrizio encouraged team members to approach this design sprint in a round-robin fashion. This structure allowed team members to find a solution, critique it, refine it, then find the final solution that in turn resolved any issues from the critique. The team then chose to either vote on the solution or create a three-step plan to implement it later. 

Purpose to Practice 

As an accelerated design sprint, 

From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions is a quick and dirty way to align a team and design actionable solutions. I asked Fabrizio what moment from this meeting made him the proudest and he spoke about the innovative power of quick ideation:

“I’m proud that in very few days, I can give value to my client and I can have a quick and dirty workshop that allows me to get enough information and solutions for my client.”

As he reflected on the From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions meeting, Fabrizio also noted room for future improvements for the session. Fabrizio likes to begin each meeting by unifying the team on their “why”. By identifying the client’s objective early on, he can employ elements of the purpose to practice Liberating Structures system during his meetings. Fabrizio realized throughout the session that some team members still needed clarity regarding the basics.

In the past, Fabrizio used the purpose to practice system before using DASYLab, but noted the team didn’t fully understand the collective “why”:

“Finding the why for a company, it’s a good exercise to have at least intent and purpose quite clear.” 

With increased clarity of one’s purpose comes a clear idea of solutions that work. By clarifying the why and putting purpose into practice, Fabrizio enjoys the most success in the From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions sessions: 

“This meeting made [it] possible to actually focus and find and align a team toward different solutions and allow everybody into the team to present a solution. So there is a power of the fact that each participant has to take responsibility and have his voice or his idea on the table before the discussion happens… It quickly allows the people to have something that they can start putting in place at the end of the meeting.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post From Starters to Solutions and From Solutions to Actions appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Katharine Halpin is a facilitator, coach and author of Alignment for Success: Bringing out the Best in Yourself, Your Teams, and Your Company and Respond, Not React Playbook. I spoke with Katharine about the Introduction and Alignment Meeting, the reason behind it, and her proudest moments from the meeting. 

Responsive Engagement

Katharine is a facilitator of processes and typically designs 90-day processes to meet a client’s objectives with their timeframe and budget. In a standard Introduction and Alignment meeting, Katharine’s main objective is to engage her client’s team and encourage innovation.

In this particular meeting, Katharine’s client hired her to get to know the team, identify their strengths, weaknesses, and potential for growth, while realigning the team with the company’s values. In this session, Katherine focused on creating an environment of psychological and emotional safety while participants shifted to a more responsive way of engaging with one another.

Let’s take a closer look at Katharine’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In an Introduction and Alignment meeting, the facilitator works with the team to shift from reactive reactions to more responsive ones, in turn creating a safe space for accountability and authenticity. In this process, team members are encouraged to take 100% accountability for their thoughts and actions. 

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Location: 

•  An offsite or online location

Length:

• Sessions range from half a day to a full day

Participants: 

• All team members

Tools:

• Zoom

Materials:

• Alignment for Success
• Respond, Not React Playbook

Activities

• Core Values Index assessment
• Nine Habits review
• Catch Yourself and Coach Yourself tool

Deliverables:

• Identifying each team members’ strengths and opportunities for growth

The Meeting

This particular meeting was attended by 10 people, most of whom specialized in data. 

Plan the Workshop:

Before the session begins, the facilitator will prepare with the following:

• Interviews
• Core Values Index assessment
• Providing reading materials

Agenda:

• Acknowledgements of Success
• Core Values Index Review
• Nine Habits Review
• Catch Yourself and Coach Yourself 
• End 

Preparation:

The facilitator will prepare for the Introduction and Alignment meeting by conducting interviews, conducting the Core Values Index assessment, and providing the required reading materials. 

Interviews:

The facilitator will interview the client extensively, as well as each participant. These interviews help the facilitator determine realistic milestones and define the client’s objectives.

Ahead of this Introduction and Alignment session, Katherine met with her client to understand their objectives and determine realistic milestones. Katharine identified the themes and patterns from multiple interviews and shared them with the client to further fine-tune the agenda.

This way, Katherine learned “where the bodies were buried” and highlighted what issues needed to be addressed in the session. 

Core Values Index Assessment

After the interviews, the facilitator will ask participants to take the Core Values Index assessment to identify their strengths. 

Ahead of the meeting, Katharine used the CVI to determine each participant’s strengths:

“I want people to know who else is in the room with them and how they can throw them the ball in a way they can catch it.”

Katharine then asked the team to read her ebooks Alignment for Success and Respond and Not React Playbook. 

Acknowledgements of Success 

The facilitator begins the Introduction and Alignment meeting by acknowledging the accomplishments of team members for 20 – 40 minutes. The goal is to get everyone on the same page and develop a working process that the facilitator can follow in each subsequent meeting. 

During Katharine’s introduction, team members were encouraged to take more initiative and ownership as they received authentic acknowledgements from their peers. 

“If you do an acknowledgement based on the facts…how what they’ve done has made a difference either for you or for your team or the company or the customer. When adding those two important components…it tends to cause people to sit up straighter and it tends to make them internalize it and own it.”

Core Values Index Review 

The facilitator will review the 10-minute Core Values Index assessment with participants and share the results with the rest of the team.

The Core Value Index assesses growth, opportunities, and strength. The CVI is made up of four quadrants of metrics:

•  the people person 
• the visionary
•  the innovator 
• the data person

This test is instrumental in assigning specific projects to individuals with those strengths. Moreover, the assessment provides conflict resolution and team building information to help inform the rest of the session.

Nine Habits Review

The facilitator will follow the CVI review with a review of the nine habits from the Respond, Not React Playbook. This helps participants shift into a proactive and strategic mode and mindset.

In the Respond, Not React Playbook, Katharine shares nine time management habits:

• Habits 1 – 4 create white space on the calendar

• Habit 5 – 6 involve moving projects forward during normal business hours with structure and discipline

• Habits 7 – 9 introduce “strategic think time” to help one delegate more effectively

Catch Yourself and Coach Yourself 

The facilitator introduces the Catch Yourself and Coach Yourself tool to identify red flags and connect the dots of the team’s inner variables. 

Katharine’s Catch Yourself and Coach Yourself methodology uses three circles:

• The right circle includes aligned results
• The middle circle shares strategies and actions
• The left circle asks: 
  • “Who are you being?”
  • “What are you doing?”
  • “What’s your mindset?”
  • “What’s your attitude?”

End

The facilitator ends the meeting by asking participants where they found value in the session.

Katharine closed the session by asking her team what they found most valuable about the meeting. Participants responded with a renewed sense of energy or realignment with their roles. 

Strategic Creative Tension

The concept of creative tension is a running theme throughout Katharine’s sessions. Coined by Peter Senge, creative tension is “the gap between where we are, our current reality, and where we want to be.” Katharine points out that the only way to shift one’s current reality is to reflect on that gap regularly and take steps to close it. Katharine keeps creative tension top of mind as she works to facilitate accountability and create psychologically safe environments for her team members. 

When asked about potential pitfalls of the meeting, Katherine discussed the situation where someone she hasn’t interviewed causes dissension in a meeting:

“There’s always that somebody that I have not interviewed, and therefore I have not had an opportunity to build rapport, earn their trust, there’s always a pitfall or risk that they can be a heckler in the room.” 

For this reason, Katharine’s agenda allows for countless opportunities to build trust, break down preconceived ideas, and hold everyone accountable. This way, participants can get to the heart of the issue as they work to move forward as a unit. 

I asked Katharine what meeting moment made her the proudest and she spoke about the power of giving and receiving acknowledgements: 

“What I’m most proud about is the acknowledgements, because…”It’s a basic human need, right above food and children’s safety to feel valued and to feel appreciated, and to feel like you’re part of something bigger than yourself.” 

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Introduction and Alignment Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Sara Huang is the founder of Bureau Tw!st and is a human-centered facilitator based in The Netherlands. I spoke with Sara about the Teambuilding Account Managers meeting, the reason behind it, and her proudest moments from the meeting. 

Team Building 101

In a Teambuilding Account Managers meeting, Sara’s main objective is to facilitate learning by doing. In this particular meeting, Sara’s client hired her to facilitate the sessions while acting as the team coach. In each session, Sara focused on improving the team’s communication and collaborative efforts while highlighting any problems that may be affecting the team. 

As a facilitator, Sara focuses on building agility and resilience with and through people. Working alongside her clients, Sara aims to shift the focus of leadership from ‘power over’ to ‘power within’ and ‘power to’.

In this particular meeting, Sara’s main goal was to facilitate real connection and engagement for a disconnected team. With the Teambuilding Account Managers meeting, Sara hoped to encourage reflection and stimulate serious learning.

Let’s take a closer look at Sara’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Teambuilding Account Managers meeting, the facilitator works with the team to uncover learning by doing via gameplay. 

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Length:

• Three two-hour sessions

Participants: 

• 8 account managers

Tools:

• Microsoft Teams

Deliverables:

• Questioning power dynamics
• Disrupting patterns of interaction

The Meeting

This particular meeting was attended by eight account managers and was the final session of three.

Plan the Workshop

Agenda:

• Welcome
• Chat Check-In
• Small-Group Interactions
• Serious Game Part 1
• Intervention Round 1
• Serious Game Part 2 
• Intervention Round 2
• Bio Break 
• Solo Reflection
• Plenary Sharing 
• Check-Out

Preparation:

Ahead of the meeting, participants are sent materials such as different pieces of the puzzle for the game.

To add a bit of mystery to the meeting, Sara sent out invitations to participants with just enough information to pique their curiosity without giving too much away. Sara’s preparation also included making a Spotify playlist of the team members’ favorite songs to play during the welcome, transition times, or breaks.

Welcome 

The facilitator welcomes participants with a playlist of their choosing and explains the concept of serious gameplay. 

This meeting was Sara’s third and final team-building session that she designed and facilitated for this team in six months. Sara began the session by playing the Spotify playlist. 

Chat Check-In

In the initial chat check-in, the facilitator will ask participants to rate their energy level on a scale from 1 to 10. 

Small-Group Interactions

The facilitator leads the small group interactions with the following prompts:

• What is your dream achievement for this team? 
• How are you contributing to that ambition? 

In Sara’s meeting, the account managers self-organized into smaller groups. Sara then asked the team member with the nearest birthday to go first. 

Serious Game Part 1

The facilitator introduces the serious game.

In the first serious game, each member of Sara’s team held a piece of the puzzle. The objective of the game was for the team members to solve the puzzle without showing anyone their piece of information. The team had 20 minutes to solve the challenge while Sara muted herself to observe their interactions. 

Serious games are unique in that they highlight the need for willingness and cooperation in teams. Through gameplay, the client’s account managers experienced collaborative learning leading to increased communication, improved motivation, and more refined collaboration skills.

Intervention Round 1

The facilitator asks participants the following questions:

• How is it going?
• What’s going well?
• What is not going well?
• How can you improve as a team, considering how things are going? 

Sara notes that this gameplay highlighted the dynamics and pattern of interaction among the team members:

“Interestingly, the informal leader took the lead while the former leader took the back seat. This dynamic was already implicit in the meetings but made explicit during the teambuilding.”

Serious Game Part 2

The facilitator introduces the second game and observes for the next 20 minutes. 

Intervention Round 2

The facilitator asks the final round of follow-up questions:

• How is it going?
• Who has what tasks?
• Discuss the influence of perception and paradigm 

For Sara’s team, the results of the games were clear:

“The team members shared at the end of the session how frustrated they felt while playing the game and how frustrated they were working as a team. It was the first time they opened up to each other, instead of complaining to each other.”

Bio Break 

There is a 10-minute break ahead of the solo reflection prompts.

Solo Reflection

The facilitator asks team members to reflect on the following prompts:

• How have you experienced the game? 
• When did you feel energized? 
• When did you feel drained? 
• What games do you recognize in everyday working life?

Plenary Sharing

The facilitator encourages discussion for 15 minutes as team members reflect on the exercises. During this phase, team members should share their findings.

Check-Out

The facilitator brings the session to a close by asking participants to rate their energy level at the end of the meeting on a scale of 1 to 10. 

Creative Reflection

For Sara, serious gameplay is about stimulating experiential learning. With creativity comes cohesive facilitation, something Sara strives to champion in all her sessions. I asked Sara how she would change her meetings if she was bold, and her answer was to add more ingenuity to the process.

“If I were really bold …I would have sent them materials via post mail and asked them to get even more creatively reflective. Maybe send them lego materials and ask them to build a 3D model which represents their personal goals within the team and criteria to hold them accountable if those personal goals are met.”

The element of gameplay transforms an otherwise standard meeting into a session full of engaging, challenging, and thought-provoking problem-solving. With a dedicated team of quick thinkers, Sara’s serious games were as effective as intended. She notes that without proper facilitation, this type of meeting runs the risk of encouraging finger-pointing or prioritizing the game over the learning experience.

I asked Sara what meeting moment made her the proudest and she shared how happy she was in challenging her task-and-result-oriented team to make a shift. With her efforts, she successfully encouraged her team to use their reflective thinking muscles to approach the unconventional challenge, which dramatically improved their communication and collaboration efforts in the process.

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Teambuilding Account Managers Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Today’s story is with Eric Keck, a leadership development expert and the Vice President of Customer Success at Resource Exploration (ResourceX).

I spoke with Eric about the Program Insights meeting, the reason behind it, and his proudest moments from the meeting.

Small Changes, Bigger Impact

Eric designed his Program Insights meeting to help the local government in Canada change how they provide their services. In his work as the VP of customer success at ResourceX, Eric works to encourage the education, local government, and healthcare industries to adopt Priority Based Budgeting (PBB). With their software, ResourceX helps their clients put PBB data to use, reallocate funds for their organizations and communities, and free up resources.

True to its name, a Program Insights meeting happens after the client generates a certain set of data. The purpose of this insights workshop is to gather the different data points and determine what the information is saying. Team members are allowed to analyze the data and determine what next steps to take to improve their programs or services and how best to go about it. 

In this magical Program Insights meeting, Eric focused his efforts on tackling his client’s challenges such as budget gaps, expenses that exceeded their revenues, a lack of equity on services and programs, and accessibility to the community residents. 

Eric’s goals in this particular Program Insights meeting included:

• Focusing on small changes 
• Aligning with big picture goals 
• Identifying ways to save more money 
• Reallocating these funds to different services or programs

Let’s take a closer look at Eric’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Program Insights meeting, the main deliverable is to identify actionable steps after reviewing key insights.

Guidelines:

• Be present and participate
• Innovate the current services or products

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Length:

• Three two-hour sessions

Participants: 

• Employees and staff
• Guides for breakout rooms

Tools:

• Mural
• Session Lab
• Budgeting Software

Deliverables:

• Gain insights and identify solutions to financial challenges
• Select actionable next steps 

The Meeting

This particular meeting was attended by 40 participants from various departments of the City of East Moline. All attendees were department directors and managers.

Plan the Workshop

Agenda:

• Beginning
• Breakout Groups
• Takeaways and Next Steps

Preparation: Design the meeting in session lab

Beginning

In a Program Insights meeting, the goal is to innovate, break down barriers between departments, and create actionable steps for the future. The facilitator works with their team to articulate the number of services they provide, cost the programs, analyze the data, and score them against pre-established criteria. 

Eric began the meeting with a question, “How could you make a change to a program or service that’s going to be beneficial in the long run?”

To answer this question, Eric prioritized collaboration in his meetings to stimulate cross-departmental communication. Eric then launched into the breakout session of the meeting to encourage diverse engagement and to discourage groupthink.

Breakout Groups

Facilitators will divide participants into breakout groups. 

Eric began this phase of the meeting by employing components of design methodology to the breakout session.  Breaking into groups helped to ensure that every voice was heard and to promote psychological safety in the meetings. By grouping the participants randomly and applying a user-centric, human-first approach to the process, Eric increased ideation and encouraged curiosity amongst participants. 

Takeaways and Next Steps

In the final phase of the meeting, facilitators will identify actionable next steps and review the participants’ takeaways. 

Eric noted how the Program Insights’ meeting structure provided a space for team members to be heard. In a space that promotes human-centered thinking, these sessions zero in on the thoughts and feelings of the individual in addition to the changes that need to be made. 

As the final Program Insights session came to a close, Eric noted an incredible response from a long-standing employee:

“I’ve been working for this organization for 26 years and this is the first time that I’ve really felt valued in the organization and I really felt like I was heard. And I had an opportunity to participate in the direction of the organization.” 

An Epiphany of Empathy

Throughout our discussion, Eric noted how the facilitation training with Voltage Control impacted him. Learning how to better engage participants, ideate effectively, and seamlessly facilitate design thinking sessions resulted in a new facilitation prowess that makes each Program Insights meeting possible. 

With these skills, Eric now makes it a point to prioritize empathy in every environment as he works to drive engagement throughout each session. In his final East Moline session, he shares a story of the most powerful moment in the meeting, in which the city manager experienced an epiphany:

“He said, ‘I’m sorry. I now have learned a lesson to engage people more broadly and listen more clearly.’ 

And for me, that couldn’t have happened if I wouldn’t have designed this meeting from principles that I learned from Voltage Control. And so, that was a very, very powerful moment.”

Working with data provides facilitators like Eric with empirical proof of impact. As Eric shared his final thoughts on the meeting, he pointed out how this people-first mentality allows others to have their voices heard, allowing them to speak up.  

“I’m proud that I was able to…allow for an opportunity for people to…have the option to speak up and have their voices heard, and participate in a hands-on fashion with programs and service changes that are going to be impacting not only their departments but their end-users as well.” 

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Program Insights Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Today’s story is with Erica Wood, a leadership and performance consultant from New York, New York. I spoke with Erica about the Recalibration Session, the reason behind it, and what risks she encountered.

Back to Basics

Erica designed the Recalibration Session to help companies identify and align with their mission statement, vision statement, and core values. As I talked to Erica about her meeting, she recalled one client with whom the Recalibration Session was a resounding success. 

In this Recalibration Session, Erica set out to help her clients redefine their main objectives and reinvigorate their company culture. The company hit a plateau and realized they were far from the initial ideas and values they used to found the company. What’s more, the company faced challenges like poor morale, behavioral issues, and a lack of accountability in the workplace, making recalibration a pressing need for continued growth. 

With a focus on driving engagement, redefining the company’s identity, and getting back to basics, Erica launched a series of Recalibration Sessions with her client and soon experienced incredible results. 

Let’s take a closer look at Erica’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Recalibration Session, the facilitator encourages their client to take an honest look at their company’s pitfalls and identify where they can improve. 

Guidelines:

• The leadership team and steering committee must rewrite and agree on a new vision statement 

In this meeting, the facilitator will select the following:

Length:

• Three-hour sessions

Participants: 

• Facilitator
• One assistant
• The C-Suite
• Employees

Tools:

• Powerpoint

Deliverables:

• Identify the mission statement, vision statement, and core values
• Unify the employee base
• Adopt a people-focused approach to leadership

In this particular meeting, Erica invited members of the C-Suite, steering committee, and all employees to two different iterations of the same meeting.

Plan the Workshop

Activities:

• Answer questions about core values
• Rate the importance of core values

Agenda:

• C-Suite Recalibration Session
• Company Recalibration Session

• Breakout Session
• Break
• Reconvening & Recalibrating

C-Suite Recalibration Session

Before the company-wide Recalibration Session begins, the facilitator will host a needs analysis/exploratory session with the leadership team.

In Erica’s meeting, the initial Recalibration Session included the executive team, the C-Suite, and the steering committee. Throughout the session, Erica encouraged total engagement and involvement by asking probing questions about the company’s performance and culture.

Using the newly identified mission statement, vision statement, and core values, Erica began the C-Suite session with the following aims:

• Identify the behavioral indicators of the core values
• Determine how the company aligns with those statements

Erica cites Dr. Amy Edmondson’s research on the importance of psychological safety and Google’s Project Aristotle in her approach to her C-Suite meetings. Without the leadership team and the executive team fully on board, this style of meeting puts employees at risk for retribution. Erica was able to mitigate this risk by encouraging radical honesty in all her Recalibration Sessions– with both the members of the C-Suite and all 135 employees.

Company Recalibration Session

After the C-Suite Realibration Session, the facilitator holds the same meeting with the rest of the company. The purpose of these subsequent sessions is to gather employees’ opinions and determine what changes need to be made in the company.

Erica facilitated several three-hour workshops to accommodate her client’s large employee base. The C-Suite kicked the meeting off by disclosing the purpose of the session and expressing current challenges in the company. During this phase, honesty and participation from the executive team were key in encouraging engagement and vulnerability from employees.

To gain better insight into the company culture, Erica split the session into breakout groups of four-five people.  

Breakout Session

During this phase, the facilitator encourages honest discourse by prioritizing employees’ opinions, experiences, and suggestions.

In Erica’s sessions, one person per group acted as the transcriber to take detailed notes throughout the session and another as the spokesperson for the group. Then, Erica introduced the new mission statement, vision statement, and core values, asking all groups to answer the following questions about the company:

• What’s working already?
• Where do we see these values are vital?
• Where do we honor/dishonor these values?
• What concerns do you have about this particular value? 
•  What are the barriers to implementation and acceptance?

Groups then score the core values on a scale of 1 – 10 to better gauge each value’s importance.

Break

With a break in the sessions, the facilitator can take time to gather and analyze the information gathered in the previous phases.

The break allowed Erica enough time to gather results for the final phase. While tallying each person’s score was tedious, score participants’ results with the help of a colleague. 

Reconvening & Recalibrating

The goal of the final phase of the Recalibration Session is to bring all problems to the forefront to discuss them openly. Ultimately, the aim is to identify how to recalibrate going forward. 

During this phase, Erica set the stage for radical truth-telling as each group’s spokesperson shared what values they deemed important. Employees were allowed to challenge the status quo and advocate for themselves by identifying scenarios in which the corporate culture failed to reflect the company’s core values. 

In this phase, tapping into participants’ vulnerability was key to generating engagement and encouraging honesty:

“There were maybe some pieces that they included on those sheets…that they handed to me at the end of the session, that I was able to capture and talk to the executive team about privately…

As a result, the leadership team began making some tough calls, both in beginning to hold people accountable, have tough conversations, or write people up for people who were demonstrating that they weren’t a fit for the culture that they were attempting to cultivate.” 

Radical Honesty

A meeting like Erica’s Recalibration Session is designed to break barriers and shift culture, regardless of one’s role or status in a company. In such a meeting, the bolder one is, the better the results. As such, Erica muses that if she dares to be bolder in her future meetings, she’ll encourage members of the C-Suite to publicly share an area where they aren’t currently demonstrating their company values or vision. While this level of vulnerability is uncommon in an executive team, it’s exactly why this type of meeting works.

One of the most resounding wins from Erica’s Recalibration Session came by way of the CFO. While the client’s CFO kept to himself to give his employees more autonomy, it made him appear unapproachable to the rest of the staff. Noting the results of the Recalibration Session, the CFO made more of an effort to engage with his staff, resulting in newly forged relationships and increased receptivity from his team. 

I asked Erica about the most notable deliverables from her Recalibration Session and she shared that her client’s profits increased by 10% within a year. In addition to this remarkable growth, Erica discussed the power of putting people first and aligning one’s actions to their values:

“One of the most enriching parts was seeing people come together and brainstorm and talk through… where are we currently damaging these values?”

“By the end of each of the sessions, they each came up with promises, declarations, of things they were going to stop doing. Things that were already working that they don’t want to lose, that they want to continue doing, and things that they weren’t doing that they wanted to propose and start doing…So some really great, very actionable items came from the session.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post Recalibration Session appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive.

Today’s story is with Tricia Conyers, founder of Island Inspirations Ltd., remote work facilitator, and learning experience designer out of Trinidad and Tobago.

I spoke with Tricia about her Learning meeting, the reason behind it, and how she imagines her meeting changing in the future.

An Emergent Learning Space

Tricia first started this particular meeting several years ago as a monthly session designed for people moving to Trinidad from different countries. Dubbing her sessions the “Learning” meeting, she designs these gatherings to help businesses shift to a more human-centered mindset in the workplace. Tricia’s goal for her monthly meetings is to help her clients and their team learn from a diverse group of people and different perspectives.

Each month, Tricia makes an effort to further shape her client’s company culture by bringing people together to discuss and ideate around the year’s overarching arc as well as a singular monthly question. Though the meeting originally began as a day-long session, during COVID-19, the meetings transitioned to online-only with hour-long sessions each month. 

In Tricia’s efforts to encourage discourse and increase flexibility in her meetings, she relies on platforms that spark creativity to help explore the main questions. In addition to prioritizing experiential learning, Tricia aims to increase connectivity among her team members in these Learning sessions. 

Let’s take a closer look at Tricia’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Learning meeting, the main goal is to strengthen trust among team members and encourage an open-minded approach to learning.

Preparation

To set the tone for an effective learning experience, Tricia spends a significant amount of time on preparation. With the help of a small design team, Tricia shapes the year’s curriculum and the breakdown for the following months.

To prepare for a learning meeting, the facilitator will select the question by month and determine how participants will explore the monthly question throughout each meeting. 

In a Learning meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: Held virtually on Zoom

• Participants:
  • 14 – 20 attendees
  • Facilitator
  • Tech host

Tools:

• Mural 
• Zoom
• Google Maps
• Jam Board
• Drawing apps

Deliverables:

• A stronger connection with team members
• An answer to the monthly question

As Tricia holds this meeting on a monthly basis, the participants change month to month. Typically, 15 – 20 people are part of this monthly meeting.

Plan the Workshop

• Length of time: One hour

Activities:

• Storyboarding
• Drawing

Agenda:

• Beginning
  • Introduce the concept
• Middle
  • Form breakout groups, pairs, or triads
• End
  • Reinforce the culture of connectedness
  • Identify next steps

Before the Meeting

Preparation

As the Learning meeting is a recurring, monthly session, the preparation begins with preparing a curriculum for the entire year. This curriculum centers around an overarching question that drives the process of learning and growth in an organization.

Tricia likes to split the preparation into short-, medium-, and long-term preparation. In the preparation for this particular meeting, Tricia focused on designing a structure or flow of the meeting that allows for constant discourse throughout the year. Based on the overarching question, Tricia breaks the rest of the meeting’s curriculum into various monthly topics that will further the overarching aims and encourage increased engagement amongst participants.

Tricia then works with her design team and tech host to make sure the Zoom meeting flows seamlessly with the apps and other software used.

Beginning

The facilitator begins the Learning meeting by asking everyone to embrace the space and to share their experiences. To encourage the free-flowing exchange of ideas, the facilitator asks participants to bring their best selves into the meeting and to see what emerges. 

At the beginning of each monthly session of a Learning meeting, Tricia sets the tone by considering questions such as:

• What is the cultural impact that we want to have? 
• How do we want to shape this? 
• What is it that we want to do for people? 
• What values of the organization does this reinforce?
•  How can we make sure that we bring that in?

In this Learning meeting, Tricia worked with team members from across North America with connection and learning as the main deliverables for the session. Though the preparation process is quite heavy-handed, Tricia likes to approach her meetings with a loose structure. This way, she can allow for more of the unexpected as she creates a culture of connectedness through open discussion and ideation.

While the Learning sessions differ from the structured setting of a traditional meeting, the main aim is to free participants from the confinements and expectations that come with following strict guidelines. 

“There’s a lot of flexibility in adapting and seeing where the group wants to go with this in terms of exploring and learning… Being able to respond to that has left the people who want more structure…feeling a bit uncomfortable… And I think they’ve had to learn to try and embrace that over the years.”

With the flexibility in the structure of the meeting comes growth and the ability to improve connection, communication, and understanding amongst team members.

Middle

The middle of the session opens the space even more to encourage increased ideation, more connectedness, and greater flexibility. The facilitator works to create an emergent learning space by forming breakout groups of two, three, or more people to encourage discussion and collaborative problem-solving. 

In this phase of the meeting, Tricia uses technology to support the free form ideation process. She encourages participants to focus on the cultural impact of their ideas as they work together. Using Software like Jam Board and drawing apps, she encourages participants to storyboard their thoughts and ideas. During this phase, Trica splits team members into groups of two, three, or more to encourage further discussion, foster deeper relationships, and center connections in the company culture.

While the monthly nature of this meeting is beneficial to strengthening connectedness, Tricia points out that it presents a potential risk that facilitators should keep in mind: 

“As new people join the business throughout the year, they come into these sessions without having some of the experience of what’s happened before…It means you have to think about…how do you constantly create an environment where they can feel welcomed into a conversation that in essence has already started.”

End

As the meeting comes to a close, the facilitator should assess if the deliverables are achieved. Facilitators can prepare participants for the next month’s discussion.   

Towards the end of the session, Tricia makes an effort to improve the meeting for the following months. With the overarching topic in mind, it’s important that she continues the same rhythm of creativity and innovation in the next sessions. Tricia points out that having a recurring session with the same participants throughout the year gives her the opportunity to refine her approach to facilitation:

“In a monthly meeting like this…there are 12 opportunities to make changes and to get it right…Or to keep changing things and to try and make it better each time.”

Shifting the Culture

Essentially, this Learning meeting is designed to create a culture of openness and connection among organizations on a regular basis. Going forward, Tricia may take the Learning meetings in an even more emergent direction. Instead of focusing on a learning session, Tricia hopes to create a learning council. Meeting participants will bring a challenge to the council that they explore as a group with a more human-centered problem-solving session as the main deliverable.

With the idea of fostering more emergent sessions in mind, Tricia shared what is successful about her current Learning meeting model. 

“The risk of the session is that you leave people feeling frustrated about the unexpected “emergent space” of the meeting… but things change and we actually allow for that immersion.”

“When we take time to think about how we want this meeting to help shape the culture of the organization, when we take time to frame it through that lens, and through that question, we can make really great things happen.
Meetings are when we bring people together, they’re when stories emerge and that’s when we help to shape the culture that people feel in the organization.”

Do you have your own Magical Meeting Story to tell?

We’d love to hear your wizardry! Share how you are creating magical moments in your work below.

The post The Learning Meeting appeared first on Voltage Control.

Welcome to Magical Meetings Stories, a series where I chat with professional facilitators, meeting practitioners, leaders, and CEOs across industries about their meeting culture. We dive deep into a specific magical meeting they’ve run, including their approach to facilitation design, and their tips and tricks for running meetings where people thrive. 

Today’s story is with Moe Ali, a facilitator, service designer, and creative human enabler based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

I spoke with Moe about the Balcony Bunch meeting, the reason behind it, and what risks he encountered. 

A Meeting in Motion

Moe started the Balcony Bunch as a meeting designed to connect otherwise disconnected creatives in Dubai. The idea for this meeting is that it starts as a guided walk through the streets and parks, ending where attendees sit at a balcony for the rest of the meeting. 

Moe was inspired by The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker to create a meeting that would establish deeper roots with his fellow creatives. The Art of Gathering teaches facilitators how to create high-powered gatherings that move beyond the mundane to meetings that matter. 

Moe created the Balcony Bunch for creatives living in Dubai for longer than ten years as a way to grow deeper relationships. In Dubai, building relationships that span months or years is incredibly challenging due to the city’s transitory nature. Moe discovered that many creatives were no longer incentivized to meet new people so he designed the Balcony Bunch as an opportunity to soften hearts and awaken minds to true community. 

Let’s take a closer look at Moe’s process to learn what made this meeting magical.

The Meeting

In a Balcony Bunch meeting, the main goal is to generate trust and build real connections and genuine relationships by breaking the superficial barriers of roles and titles by asking participants “How do you do?” rather than “What do you do?”

Preparation Guidelines

• No phone calls, no data 
• Understand the prompts beforehand
• Wear comfortable walking shoes

In this meeting, the facilitator will choose the following:

• Location: Held outdoors 

• Participants: Eight people hoping to deepen their relationships
• Supplies: Food and drinks for the balcony

Tools:

• Google docs
• Text messages
• Google Maps

Deliverables:

• Deeper relationships between like-minded people
• Shared empathy amongst participants

In this particular meeting, Moe invited eight like-minded creatives that had been living in Dubai for 10 years or more.

Plan the Workshop

• Length of time: Approximately two hours

Activities:

• Finding the location
• Meditation and visualization
• Following the guided path
• Popcorn style discussion

Agenda:

• The Location
  • Meditation and visualization
    
• The First Prompt (Past)
  • Walking conversation 
  • Debriefing
    
• Reconvening
  • Debriefing

• The Second Prompt (Future)
• Debriefing

Before the Meeting

The facilitator may contact the participants ahead of time to set the tone for the meeting. Moe asked questions such as:

• Who would you like to attend? 
• What would you like them to walk away with? 
• What would make you happy? 

These prompts help attendees keep in mind that they’re participating in someone else’s happiness and helping them walk away with something of value.

The Location

Location plays a large role in the Balcony Bunch. Having the location be part of the meeting gives the attendees a sense of purpose and curiosity.

In Moe’s session, he sends participants a location via Google Maps where they all gather to meet. Before starting the meeting, he asks participants to sit in silence as they meditate by a fountain. At this time, a breathing exercise serves as a meditative and mindful practice while the others arrived. 

Once all participants arrived, Moe asked them to visualize everything they had experienced in the past year. After the brief visualization, Moe paired everyone up to begin the walking phase of the meeting.  

The First Prompt

Participants begin their walking conversations as they answer the first prompt, discussing what they experienced in the past year. The guided path serves as a way for participants to focus completely on their partner’s answers. As the facilitator leads the way, participants discuss the prompt from the first phase and recount the experiences from the last year.

In the walking conversation, Moe encouraged participants to move beyond discussing roles. 

“I always feel that the worst way to get people to talk to each other is by introducing work, or labels related to the work that people do because people always end up talking about the things that excite them if given the chance.”

By having participants share their experiences from the past year, they were able to “widen the net” and have a truly human experience.

Reconvening

In a secluded area like a balcony or a garden, the facilitator brings the pairs back together to reconvene and find patterns in their experiences over food and drinks.

In Moe’s meeting, he walked his group to a secluded garden area, near a reflecting pool. Moe used water throughout his meeting as a point of inflection and reflection as he asked participants what they noticed on their walk.

Participants shared what they discussed in a popcorn-style conversation while Moe weaved each person’s responses into other attendees’ answers. Moe noted who would perk up and show empathy in their body language and facial expressions as patterns emerged within each person’s story.

The Second Prompt

The second prompt acts as a way to bond two people in their shared vulnerability. After the first conversation closes, the facilitator introduces the second prompt with questions like:

• What are you looking forward to creating over the coming year?
• What do you want to invite?
• What are you moving towards that you would like to bring into being this year?

After sharing these questions with the group, Moe paired partners that showed the most empathy to each other’s stories. The goal of this pairing was to allow each person in the conversation to feel heard and seen. 

As each partner showed some level of empathy for the other, answering questions about their hopes and goals for the future was an effective way to create an incredible bond in just a few hours. As Moe shares, “The ties that bind were fairly thin. However, they got thicker by the end of the evening. And I think what was unique about this. Strangers coming together and within that hour and a half, they were relating to each other in a way that they hadn’t before.”

Lighting a Cerebral Fire 

The Balcony Bunch serves as an unconventional meeting that taps into the magic of human emotion and shared experiences. Having a meeting in motion allows for a certain physicality that helps participants get out of their heads and into the moment. 

Likewise, by negating the roles and work responsibilities of each person, attendees can see the humanity in one another, allowing for a level of vulnerability usually not seen in the workplace.

When asked about the potential pitfalls of this meeting style, Moe pointed out that running this type of session may be too risky for a typical work environment. To truly create this type of meeting with the potential pitfalls in mind, it’s important to find the space between the high risk, high reward setting of a retreat and the laid-back familiar environment of a post-work mixer. 

By finding the space in between, facilitators can create an intentional environment that encourages authentic connection. Though this space is hard to navigate, Moe believes it’s worth the risk:

“Now, keep in mind, I’ve only done this a few times. I haven’t done it in a way that I’ve been able to track any sort of metrics. The only metric I have is the sentiment from the people. If I were to ask them now three years later about this meeting, they’d be like, “Oh yeah, I remember the Balcony Bunch. Yeah, that was great.”

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