Archives for June 2020

How To Lead with Virtual Team Facilitation

During a recent two-day Virtual Team Facilitation workshop, one of our attendees Lisa created several visuals that demonstrate the activities we present during this 2-day workshop.

Find out what TeamCatapult shared in this Virtual Team Facilitation workshop on Day 1 of this Virtual Facilitation Workshop, here.

The Use of Slack Channels During Virtual Team Facilitation!

Slack is a useful tool for all remote teams. As a facilitator of virtual meetings, Slack can be your go-to tool to get conversations going and to keep them going.

Use a Slack channel for checking in
Lean in to listen
Hear every voice
Check in after breaks

The Mental Model and Decision Funnel!

When asking questions during a remote meeting, here are some things to keep in mind.

Know in advance what type of decision the team is aiming for:

Consensus?
Majority?
Other?

Once a decision is made, it can be tempting to revisit it. You might need to remind the team of how and why they reached a decision. This is a good time to consider that the decision-making process needs to be reviewed and revised as well.

Evaluation vs Decision Making in Virtual Team Facilitation

Distinguish between evaluation and decision making.

Tools to Evaluate

Dot voting
Announce evaluation
Use affinity mapping before dot voting

Do not rush through evaluation and remember that silence does not mean agreement! As the facilitator, you are there for support and to help the team reach agreement, ask questions like:

Would anyone like to push back on…?
What would you advocate for?
Who would follow?
Is there another move you’d like to make?

Decide

In Mural, evaluate by color coding sticky notes against the criteria of the topic’s issues
Consider using a grid sorting template
Use gradients of agreement

These tools can help uncover what is holding people back and if necessary, generate a revised proposal that addresses concerns.

Virtual Team Facilitation Tips for Leaders

Here are three additional practical tips for leaders new to virtual team facilitation.

1 Transparency

Be transparent when something isn’t working as it should. Calmly accept and adapt and tell the attendees what is going on.

2 Ask WHO

Do not ask ‘Does anyone’ but instead ask

WHO… needs more time?
WHO… can push back?

3 Facilitator Assistant

Have one facilitator watching for participants who might get disconnected. Offer help in Slack or via email, text or whatever alternative means you’ve chosen to communicate.

More Virtual Team Facilitation Help is Available!

We are grateful for Lisa’s willingness to share these visuals with you, our audience, to provide you with a glimpse into the world of Virtual Team Facilitation

Whether it is you, your leadership team, or your company that needs help with Virtual Team Facilitation, TeamCatapult is able to lend a hand.

Please contact us today for more information for both private and public Virtual Facilitation Masterclass workshops.

How To Best Guide Your Team With Virtual Team Facilitation

Leaders, is your team scattered across the nation, or the globe? Are you struggling to keep your team focussed, cohesive and productive? Whether your team is virtual due to the recent coronavirus pandemic or had been a virtual team by-design, facilitating a team remotely is easy in concept, but more challenging in reality.

Fortunately, TeamCatapult has been in the remote work and remote team facilitation space for a long time! We have experience in this space and have been conducting Virtual Team Facilitation workshops for years.

While attending a recent workshop, attendee Lisa from Get The Picture created this incredible resource for virtual team leaders. This is what was discussed and learned on Day1. At first blush, it’s probably hard to land on a starting point. We’ve outlined some salient points that touch on the flow of the workshop.

Getting Started With Virtual Team Facilitation

The first thing to do when facilitating a virtual team meeting is to reduce distractions. We recommend that attendees do one or all of these:

Silence their phone
Shut the door
Close their email tab

While your team members take care of these things on their end, you as the facilitator should take care of some business as well!

Tips for the Virtual Team Facilitator

1 Display a Welcome Screen

This assures everyone has come to the right place. This also makes everyone feel welcome.

2 Use a Slack channel for Parking Lot

Be sure to clear it out by the end of the day! If you are unfamiliar with this term, the ‘Parking Lot’ is where you post follow up questions and discussions that might lead you on a path away from what you are teaching at the moment.

Noting the responses and answers about any of the items and ‘clearing’ them at the end of the day validates the importance of questions without cutting into the formal workshop time.

3 Use a Virtual Circle in Mural to Open

You can use photos of attendees, and invite people to ‘sit next to someone’. Once everyone is seated in the circle (virtual) take time for everyone to introduce themselves. Again, this helps new attendees feel welcome and wanted.

4 Use Breakout Rooms in Zoom

Ask people to reach you in Slack if you are needed during the breakout session. Zoom breakout rooms are a great way to have small group discussions among attendees. We use these rooms so teams can work on simulations while capturing notes in Mural.

Timezones, Technology and Ground Rules

There are things that can go wrong when using technology, from the challenge of varying time zones, to not being able to connect, to having unstable Wifi. Expect these issues, but be sure to set ground rules!

Set and Scribe Ground Rules

Be in a quiet place
Be off mute
Be on video
Be on time
Pay attention

Ask: ‘What do you need of me?’ and ‘What do you need of each other?’

Include ways to handle collisions. For example – be clear how you will handle two people speaking at once. It does happen so have a plan in place from the beginning.

Low Stakes Virtual Team Facilitation

Often times meetings can get into a “high-stakes” atmosphere, where there are, simply put, conflicts within the team on an issue. The question for a facilitator is how will you slow things down and make it feel low stakes and safe to continue on with the conflict?

Here are three solutions:

Narrate
Chunk instructions
Normalize

Use Question Prompts to Incite Curiosity

Get people outside of their normal ways of thinking about their work! Using question prompts gets attendees to open up and participate and move beyond what’s may have them stuck on how to talk about and resolve a topic.

Virtual Team Facilitation Design Tips!

Here are 3 design tips that might help you organize your next virtual meeting.

Resist the urge to jump to tools
Test… is a meeting actually needed?
Use offline time to do work!

Learn More About Virtual Team Facilitation!

To find out more about Virtual Team Facilitation, check out what Lisa learned on Day 2 of the Virtual Team Facilitation Workshop!

We are grateful for Lisa’s willingness to share these visuals with you, our audience, to provide you with a glimpse into the world of Virtual Team Facilitation

Whether it is you, your leadership team, or your company that needs help with Virtual Team Facilitation, TeamCatapult is able to lend a hand.

Please contact us today for more information for both private and public Virtual Facilitation Masterclass workshops.

Why We hold Check-in and Check-out as a Sacred Space

The Practice of Check-In: How Voicing and Listening Create Opportunities for Deeper Engagement

by Kari McLeod and Marsha Acker

Check-In Time!

What did you learn yesterday?

What is something you’re committing to the team today?

What do you need from the team today?

These are versions of the questions we ask during the Check-in for the second day of our TeamCatapult Agile Facilitation class and our Agile Facilitation and Coaching Intensive.

We asked it this Tuesday at the start of a Virtual Intensive we are leading for an organization. We met on Zoom and we used a virtual circle to visually connect our participants, our learners.

It was the most moving Check-in I have ever witnessed.

The first participant who checked in bottom-lined her key take-away from the day before. She then committed to being as present as possible for the day. She told us that the events of the previous evening were weighing heavily on her. She said that it was difficult to imagine being at her computer, in training for most of the day. She is concerned for the nation. She then asked for grace and patience from the rest of the class because she was bound to be distracted.

Her openness, her rawness set the tone for the Check-in.

Making Space

How do we as facilitators, coaches, and trainers make space for what is happening in our world while helping participants get as present as possible?

We at TeamCatapult hold the Check-in and Check-out as a sacred space.

It is the way we invite our learners to be present.
It is one of the ways that we create a strong container for our participants to connect and build trust.
It is one of the ways we create safety for them to learn, share, fail, and learn more.

We have been holding these opening spaces at every meeting and for every class since we started our work. And we have felt that these spaces have been even more important in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Considering the protests, riots, and the resulting law enforcement and political reactions and responses following George Floyd’s death, it’s clearly even more critical to be attuned to the need for that space.

Opportunities for Deeper Engagement

Going back to the Check-in on Tuesday, our participants held our opening circle, our Check-in, as a sacred space. They were vulnerable. They were as present as they could be. I had tears in my eyes. After everyone had checked in, one of my colleagues paused and acknowledged all of the emotion that was in the space. And then we introduced the agenda.

Bringing Our Whole Selves To Work

In the remote, working environment, we are breaking through the old narratives that there is a “work self” and a “home self.” We now bring our whole selves to work.

Everything that we are watching in our society today, and the personal impact it has on us, comes with us into the workplace. Pretending that it doesn’t or creating artificial barriers prohibits collective intelligence and authentic engagement. It drains people rather than engaging them.

Facilitating a Check-In

Purpose: The concept of Check-In comes from dialogue. Its purpose is to allow everyone a chance to speak. It’s also an opportunity to listen deeply to what others are saying and it allows everyone a period of transition from what they were doing before to connecting to one another and getting present to the work ahead.

The prompt:

Have a question or a prompt for Check-in like:

What’s your state of mind?
How are you feeling?
What do you want to say to become more present?
What do you want to let go of?

You can also make the Check-in about the topic of the meeting:

What are you hoping to take away from today?
What are your thoughts about ____.

The process:

People share, but in no particular order and no need to call on each other.
Speak when you are ready.
Really listen to what’s said and not said.
Allow for uninterrupted Check-ins. (Ask the group to allow everyone to speak without comments or cross talk until you’ve heard from everyone.)

When you’ve heard from everyone then open up the conversation to questions and comments.

This process that we hold as a sacred space is a practice that you can implement right now, at your next meeting. By doing so, you’ll find that the practice of Check-In honors everyone’s voice and develops the skill of listening…both create opportunities for deeper engagement.