Agenda

How to Lead Engaging and Productive Meetings (Part 2)

..with purpose, clarity and confidence so that Agile will work for you and your team.

In part 1 of this series, I gave you scenarios on what successful facilitation looks like, and what common mistakes people make when first facilitating.

Agile ceremonies seem simple enough, but leading them w/o any training in facilitation can get you into deep water with a team.

The team will start to distrust you or more likely, the agile processes. Which ultimately leads to resistance of ‘agile’.

Therefore, I’d like to take you through a 3 step process to lead engaging and productive meetings.

How to Lead with Purpose, Clarity and Confidence

1 The Mindset and Practice of Being Neutral

Maintaining neutrality is 1 of 5 cornerstones of our agile facilitation stance that we cover in our programs.

2. The Key Steps of Planning and Designing

Collaborative meetings start before you ever get in the room – in person or remote! Learn the invaluable first two steps of our five step Facilitation process, so you can be more intentional and deliberate about your meeting design.

3. Decide How to Decide

It’s just what it sounds like. In the room, be transparent about the decision process.

Don’t Participate, Facilitate!

Let’s start with one of the most common mistakes I see facilitators make. Participating rather than facilitating!

Facilitation is both an art and a science. Yes, you need a process to help guide you in planning and design. And tools in your back pocket to help you navigate different stages of collaboration.

But most importantly you need first to work on your own mindset and beliefs about leadership and leading others.

In our complete Facilitation course, we start with the mindset and beliefs about leading and facilitating, because if you can identify where your mindset might be getting in your way of your work with groups, then that’s the first thing to work on.

We call this the Facilitation Stance – the mindset and beliefs of agile team facilitators.

Interested in Reading and Learning More About Facilitation?

In “The Art & Science of Facilitation”, I dive deep into all 5 cornerstones of facilitation.

The cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance include:

Click the links of each cornerstone to learn more and visit the book’s website!

1 The Cornerstone of Maintain Neutrality

The most common mistake I see is that people read these cornerstones and intellectually think – “I get this”! The challenge is that the nuances of implementing this are much more difficult. Some of these cornerstones are so nuanced in the moment, that they don’t feel like that big of a deal, when in reality these small choices you are making in the moment can be derailing your whole collaboration experience.

How To Practice Neutrality

Focus on the process not the content
- Facilitate don’t Participate!

As the facilitator you own the process – the agenda, the room setup or virtual space configuration, how you’re going to get the group from point A to point B. That’s plenty to be focused on! Stay out of the content. Let the team own the work and what’s getting generated. No one wants to be invited to a meeting and asked for their opinion only to be told they got it all wrong or it’s not what you wanted.

Define the role of facilitation up front with the team.

Not everyone knows what it means to facilitate. AND how the job of the facilitator is to help the group achieve the desired outcomes. Not contribute to creating the outcomes.

Explain the value of being neutral and holding process authority while the team will hold content authority
Ask permission from the team to facilitate – I’m going to try something different today. As long as we reach our desired outcome, are you willing to try this? By asking for permission, the power of facilitation is granted to you from the team.

Facilitators Need To Stay Out of Content

As a general guideline you need to stay out of content! I always say, if this is something that you know about and you believe you have a perspective that might help the group right now, and continuing to remain silent feels inauthentic, then you may step aside from your facilitation role for a moment and contribute content or offer your perspective.

Find a way to do so that is clear to both you and your team. You might say “I’m going to step out of facilitation for a minute” say what you need to say, then get back into the role. Do not ‘hang out there’ for the rest of the meeting.

Here’s why clarity on the role is so important. Trust is needed within the team and between the facilitator and the team. They need to trust that when you say you’re going to help THEM get those objectives accomplished that you mean it. Not that you’ll help them until you believe you have a better way at which point you will shut them down, offer your own opinion, and then ask them if they agree with you.

2 Get Input During Planning

Your stance is one component of skillful facilitation. But what do you do when you find yourself facing resistance to even coming to a meeting or participating?

There can be lots of reasons why people resist meetings, but here is one of the first places I look when people tell me that they are getting resistance to attending an agile meeting – Stand-up, Retrospective or any of the planning meetings.

Don’t make These Mistakes During Planning

Not having a clearly designed purpose and agenda before the meeting starts.
Cutting short the planning and design phase or not planning at all before the meeting.

These mistakes result in meetings that people don’t know why they are there, or how they are supposed to contribute. The conversation goes in circles, one or two people dominate the conversation. The meeting ends without a clear decision or action item and overall participants feel like it was a waste of time.

We are all stingy with our time. Many of us spend more than half our time in meetings each week.

Look at this data:

We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries:

65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work.
71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.
62%said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.

~ HBR August 2017 ‘Stop the Meeting Madness’

That’s incredible! Meetings are expensive and worth it – if done well. But look at the impact if they are not done well.

What Participants Want From Meetings

They want meetings to be…

Relevant
Valuable
Purpose driven
Outcome oriented
Timeboxed
Clear on roles
Engaging
Collaborative

How do you solve this problem then? You start working on all those characteristics before you get in the room.

If you wait until you’re in the room to start, you’re too late!

If your team finds Retrospectives a waste of time and does not want to participate, then find out why. There is likely a really good reason. Engage them in the planning and design for the meeting and Listen to what they have to say.

At TeamCatapult, we use a five phase model for Facilitation called The Facilitation Process.

Two of the most important, yet often skipped or minimized steps in this process is Planning and Design. Planning and Designing happen before the meeting starts, Conduct is what happens in the room. Then Document and Evaluate and Adapt take place after the meeting.

Within Planning there are several very important scope and boundary activities going on but the one I want to highlight today is Identify the Participants and Involve the Participants!

Just like you would not build a custom home for someone without talking to them first. Don’t design a custom meeting without knowing first what people hope to get out of the meeting.

3 Deciding How To Decide

Do you remember the movie with Bill Murray called Ground Hog Day, where he kept waking up each day and having the same day all over again?

If you make decisions in your meetings only to revisit them the next you get together, that’s a clear sign that your decision making process is missing it’s “stickiness” and your decisions are not durable, meaning they don’t last much beyond the meeting

Another sign is lack of energy or follow-through on implementing the decision.

This will be that action item or decision that was made and somehow the progress on it just drags out and you might be perplexed about why it’s taking so long.

A third sign of lack of durability is watching how engaged or not participants are in the decision making process itself. When people use language like ‘It’s fine’ or “yes, let’s just move on’ or ‘just tell me what you want me to do’. These are signs that something might be missing.

Decide BEFORE the Meeting!

Meeting with your meeting sponsor during planning and talk with this person about these three questions:

What is in the team’s scope of authority?
How complex is this decision?
What are you seeking? Consensu, Agreement or Majority Rules?

The greater the complexity the greater the need for consensus. In the room with the team – be transparent about the decision process.

How Will You Grow Your Facilitation and Team Coaching Skills?

Will you keep ‘winging it’ or make a deeper commitment to yourself? What do you want to be known for? How will you make a lasting difference in your team? One that outlasts your time with them? One that lives on with them regardless if you are there or not? Which way will you choose?

You can spend a bunch of time attending free meetups, webinars and watching others as part of self -study. You might find a mentor who can give you some feedback.

All of which can be good strategies. But done alone don’t always provide you the solid foundation for really mastering the craft of facilitation.

Join us for a workshop or our 9 month cohort program.

We need leaders, scrum masters, agile coaches who know how to skillfully connect others and lead collaboration!

If you’re charged with leading change in your organization – at any level – I want to leave you with this thought. Patrick Lencioni, in his book The Advantage said “There is no greater way to have a fundamental impact on an organization than by changing the way it does meetings.”

I believe that we can change cultures by starting to change the way people meet. You don’t have to change your team, or your boss, or your HR department. You just need to shift your mindset and change the way you lead your meetings.

Be the one who leads meetings that people will cancel other meetings in order to attend yours.

That’s how we start to change cultures.

How to Facilitate Meetings Like A Pro – and Get Results (Part 1)

Are you ready to lay the foundation for leading engaging and productive meetings with purpose, clarity and confidence so that you can support agility within your teams?

The skills of facilitation and coaching are needed in our world. Over the past year and a half, we have adapted and found ways to be separate but connected.

In this two-part series, I want to share some strategies for facilitation that 100% still apply even if you are leading virtually.

As facilitators, we convene and host. Our primary focus is to identify the desired outcomes and then create a space that fosters connection, authenticity, trust, and sharing. We can do this remotely, just like we do in the room. I’ll be sharing principles for how to do just that!

Improving How You Facilitate: What That Looks Like

Whether you are a scrum master, agile coach, project manager or team lead, if you are charged with launching a new agile team or helping an existing team move toward higher performance, chances are you would like to improve the way you meet in some way.

Maybe…

You’re wanting to lead meetings that are valuable, that get people engaged, are productive, outcome oriented and are seen as a good use of people’s time
You know the agile practices really well but you are struggling with the effectiveness of your meetings
You want your meetings to be engaging and productive, and not a waste of time where people don’t want to participate
You are looking for a structured process for planning and designing your facilitated meetings, something that helps you add order to your planning rather than just ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ when you’re leading a meeting.
You want to lead highly effective, collaborative meetings with ease and confidence, which is something we teach in all of our programs at TeamCatapult

Mistakes You Might Be Making as You Facilitate

One of the challenges to facilitation is that when it’s done well you hardly know it’s happening and if the facilitator is really good you might not even notice them much at all. As a participant, you will likely be caught in the topic of conversation with the other participants.

This type of scenario can create one of the greatest mistakes in facilitation…

1 Believing that you can just do facilitation after having seen others make it look so easy.

Facilitation is a professional discipline and it’s both art and science. Good facilitators make it look easy, like all you need to do is grab a marker and head to a flip chart. Or open up a Zoom line and invite people to start collaborating. In reality there is ALOT going on for a facilitator. It takes formal training and practice! Just like playing the piano or flying a plane.

2 Are you participating rather than facilitating?

These are two different roles and depending on what’s at stake for you or your team, it’s SUPER easy to blur these lines. We’re going to talk today about ways to become more aware of this.

3 Not having a clearly designed purpose and agenda before the meeting starts.

You need to define these before you get to the meeting. Cutting short the planning and design phase or not doing any planning at all. Typically, a skilled facilitator will spend 2.5 times the meeting time just planning and designing a session. (And if you’re facilitating virtually or hybrid it’s more!)

Do you treat every decision in a collaborative meeting the same way? Or seek ‘agreement’ from the group on the decision? This is another common mistake!

4 Lack of clarity, for yourself and your team, about the role of a facilitator.

Believing that your role in the meeting is helping the group reach a decision that has already been made.

You’ve learned the agile practices, but a few months into implementation the excitement is wearing off and you are not seeing the results you had hoped for. Understanding the agile practices is not enough, agile is first and foremost about communication, collaboration, trust, and learning to see and navigate the human systems.

Mistakes I Made When I First Started Facilitating

Can I be frank? I made mistakes when I first started facilitating. Here are a few of my mistakes.

I overly controlled the meetings. I would ask a question of the group and then ask them to write their answers on a sticky note. I was very careful to let people speak, but only when I called on them. I never would ask an open ended question to the group. I was AFRAID that I would either get crickets or that the group would go completely off topic and I would look like I could not control the meeting. I’m sure some of those participants in my early meetings might tell you that they felt ‘overly managed’ during the meetings.

I drove my own agenda. I was ensuring that people just went through the motions of what they were asked to do. But we left all sorts of other topics on the table that were never really addressed.

I only got input from the leader or meeting sponsor – not the team on what the meeting should be about. That led to multiple sessions where I got blindsided by issues that were surfaced during a meeting and I really had no idea how to handle them or what to do when they were surfaced. I was a consultant and feared looking stupid or not being seen as valuable if I had to get a group to come up with a solution. I needed to prove my value in some way.

Facilitation Done Right!

It wasn’t until many years later that I learned how to

really connect a group
have greater awareness of my own beliefs about the group and understand what a profound impact my beliefs had on my ability to work with a group
to let go of control, to turn it over to the group,
to really listen to what people needed or were trying to say.

These were profound shifts in my mindset which allowed me to move from just instructing people to write on sticky notes but never really get at the heart of the real issue, to leading meetings that really got at the heart of what was blocking the team, not just to support the team in continuing their same patterns.

You can learn this advanced facilitation process as well.

In the meantime, read Part 2 of this series:

‘How to Lead Engaging and Productive Meetings’ and download this free Facilitation Planning Toolkit!

How and Why Holding the Group’s Agenda is Paramount in Facilitation

As a facilitator, holding the group’s agenda is one of five guiding principles to keep the meeting moving forward.

When a group is resisting the decision they are narrowing in toward or responding with reluctance toward every attempt to move the meeting forward, you are likely encountering the tension between two unspoken but competing agendas in the room.

The principle we are looking at today, ‘holding the group’s agenda, is about continually asking “How can I best serve this group?”. It’s about wondering “ What does this group really need right now?” It’s letting your agenda take the backseat so that you can help a group tackle emergent dynamics. It’s about uncovering what’s really going on in the group so that they can move forward as a team.

The Three Group Agendas To Hold When Facilitating

The first step when it comes to holding the group’s agenda is to understand that there are three different levels of agendas that a group can have:

The Presenting Agenda
The Emergent Agenda
The Developmental Agenda

Let’s look at each of these separately

The Presenting Agenda

This agenda, the presenting agenda encompasses the meeting’s purpose, desired outcomes, and plan. It’s why this group has come together, and it includes the facilitation design anticipated to help the group achieve what it hopes to achieve.

The Emergent Agenda

The emergent agenda is what emergentes live in the room as conversations happen, new perspectives are voiced, and ideas are generated.

New thinking is often behind the emergence of this level of group agenda.

The Developmental Agenda

The developmental agenda is a deeper agenda that focuses on how the group works together. It’s about group behavior and dynamics. Facilitators working with agile teams are not just trying to help a group achieve an outcome for a meeting, they are often helping a team develop.

Hold the Group’s Agenda, Not Your Own!

When you, the group facilitator, work with a group, it’s helpful to know where they want to go. Knowing their presenting agenda enables your to hold their desired outcome – what they hope to achieve from working together – and more fully comprehend what else is happening in the room.

Because along their journey, groups can get in their own way, and it can get especially complicated as a facilitator when what the group thinks they need and what they actually need are two different things.

When you hold the group’s agenda – presenting, emergent, or developmental – you are choosing to be of service to the group over yourself, your position, and your perception of our own worth.

This is about them, not you!

The principle of holding the group’s agenda is about being aware of what the group wants and how they also might be getting in their own way. It’s about being able to really listen to what’s emerging in the team – hearing what the team needs – while remaining aware of what your own agenda might be and not letting it take over.

Go Slow To Go Fast

The slippery slope with agendas is that when your own agenda feels so right to you, you risk missing the group’s agenda. And if you are facilitating a team in which you are a member of the team, discerning your agenda from the team’s agenda becomes even more difficult.

In my book ‘The Art & Science of Facilitation’ I go deeper into these agendas and show what holding the group’s agenda looks like in practice!

“You owe it to yourself and the team to challenge the notion of certain agendas”

Holding the Group’s Agenda is Big Work!

The way to change meetings is to help teams and groups move the meeting from a surface-level conversation where they may as well be rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic to a place where it’s okay and even expected to have real conversations.

Most groups need guidance and help getting to this place, and the organization’s culture and team dynamics will have a big impact on how easy the process is.

There is work to do. Without it, you’re wasting time – yours and everyone else’s.

Don’t shy away from emergent and developmental agendas,, even when it’s tough. This work lays the track for agile teams to become agile, and each meeting is a meaningful step toward more systemic change within the team or organizational culture.

The Five Cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance

The cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance include:

Honoring the wisdom of the group
Maintaining Neutrality
Upholding the Agile Mindset and Practices
Standing in the Storm
Holding the Group’s Agenda

Learn more about each stance by clicking the links!

Group Dynamics: How to Honor the Wisdom of the Group

When groups convene, they have the power to create something together that would not be possible from the thinking of just one or two people. Groups can see problems in new ways and craft solutions that weren’t apparent before, leveraging the dynamics of leadership and group dynamics.

But, there is a caveat. The creation of new thinking relies on a group’s ability to access their collective intelligence and navigate the intricacies of leadership group dynamics.

Everyone on the Team Has Wisdom to Gain, Wisdom to Share in leadership and group dynamics.

In theory, honoring the wisdom of the group in leadership and group dynamics is really easy. Often, both leaders and group members agree: of course the group has wisdom.

Then real life happens. Decisions need to be made. Directions need to be set.

It’s often easier to honor the wisdom of the group in principle than it is in the moment. In high-pressure moments, leaders, in particular, might be challenged by the concept of honoring the group’s wisdom in leadership in group dynamics. They would rather just make a decision on their own and tell the group what to do.

Putting Honoring the Wisdom of the Group in Leadership and Group Dynamics into Practice

Honoring the wisdom of the group in leadership and group dynamics means placing your full attention on what the group needs rather than focusing on your own needs. It starts with being deliberate about why you are meeting and how you can help invite full participation by creating and sustaining a space that will support it, taking into account the dynamics of group structure.

Here are four lessons on how to plan and design a collaborative meeting to set the group up for success.

1 Help the Sponsor Get Clear on the Level of Collaboration Needed

Factors to determine the degree of collaboration.

One way we honor wisdom in groups is by not wasting their time. Being intentional and deliberate about when collaborative decision-making is an appropriate process to meet the needs of the moment – and when someone just needs to make a decision and move forward.

Not every topic, problem, or decision needs to be collaborative. Higher complexity in decisions means a greater degree of collaboration will be important.

When you interview the sponsor and evaluate the complexity of a decision to be made, think about the scope:

Urgency
Risk
Impact
Durability
Buy-in

2 Decide How to Decide

Not every decision lends itself to consensus and it’s okay. It often depends on the type and complexity of the decision being made.

Help the sponsor and other stakeholders agree to both the decision-making process and the boundaries of the decision prior to the meeting. Here are the types of decisions to choose from:

Leader decides
The leader holds veto power
Consensus Building
Majority Rule

Caution: Teams often decide to “majority rules” likely because reaching consensus can take more time and some teams or leaders become frustrated with the process. If you use “majority rules” as your primary way of making decisions, you might be missing an opportunity to uncover more insight and wisdom, which could improve the shared vision, increase understanding, and change the nature of the conversation and outcomes more positively over time.

3 Design Group Processes That Invite All Voices

The objective is to design a way for all voices to be heard in the room. Factors to consider in your design include:

What is the purpose of the meeting?
What is the desired outcome?
How many people are participating?
Will others be observing?
How will you be meeting?
How long do you have?

The primary question across the design process is: What is the highest and best use of our time together?

4 Invite Opposition – and Separate Yourself From The Process

Opposition is needed in a group in order to have an effective dialogue and, therefore, to access the wisdom of the group. Inviting opposition builds on the practices of ‘Standing in the Storm’.

There are two fundamental principles of inviting opposition:

If opposition is not coming into the conversation organically, ask for someone who sees the topic differently.
When opposition does emerge, don’t shut it down!

As the facilitator, it’s important for you to find ways to invite the opposition in the conversation. But as you develop your skills in relation to opposition, it’s also important to recognize when to separate yourself from the process.

Remember: you are not the process and the process is not you!

Honoring the Wisdom of the Group

Sometimes we can be really good at creating a vision for what we want: teamwork, collaboration, agility. But in execution, we can be really good at getting in our own way.

One of the greatest gifts you can bring to the group is to hold the belief that the team has the wisdom it needs, even when it feels difficult.

Even if the road is bumpy and it feels like you took a wrong exit, holding firm in this stance is one of the most empowering things you can do for a team.

Are you a facilitator in need of more wisdom?

Learn more about The Art & Science of Facilitation by visiting our website!

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.