Facilitation

How to Create Purposeful, Intentional Space for Effective Team Collaboration

In ‘3 Actionable Tips To Plan and Prepare For Your Next Team Meeting’ we touched on what it takes to plan and prepare for team meetings, whether these meetings are in-person, hybrid or virtual.

Leading and facilitating team meetings takes planning and preparation: check out these 3 tips here.

Today’s topic touches on what it takes to create purposeful, intentional space for effective team collaboration, especially as it pertains to hybrid meetings.

Challenges with Hybrid Meetings for Participants

For those team members who attend in-person, they:

Cannot see and/or hear everyone who is virtual
Get caught up in the conversation and forget to acknowledge those who are virtual
Are unaware of a separate conversation that emerges in the chat channel
Hold back, not wanting to have a better experience than virtual attendees

For those team members who attend virtually, they:

Do not feel included, seen, or heard in the conversation. This is the biggest challenge to a hybrid format because many behaviours can create the feeling of separation for those online like:
- Multiple conversations that happen in the room
- It being unclear who is speaking
- The conversation in the room becomes animated but doesn’t online
- Flip charts are being used and are difficult to see
- Contributions have to be made through someone in the room, rather than directly from the person
- Something funny happens in the room but online participants do not see it
Create a nested conversation using chat functions, and risk depriving the full group of the contributions and insights
Cannot see and/or hear who is speaking, what is being said, or what is written on the walls

Challenges with Hybrid Meetings for Facilitators

For facilitators there is:

Complexity. It’s a complex scenario to design and create space for multiple people who will have different experiences that they can see and/or hear, making collaboration difficult, if not impossible.
High Cognitive Load. Facilitating in-person meetings already comes with a high degree of complexity and many things to pay attention to. Fully virtual adds a layer of technology and helps people move around the virtual space. Hybrid brings the complexity of both the physical space and virtual space.

5 Key Principles for Hybrid Planning and Meeting Design

Here are the 5 principles needed to plan and design a successful hybrid meeting.

1. Establish ground rules specifically for hybrid meetings

As the facilitator, you will have some specific requests for participants in order to make the session the most effective. Be sure to share these, along with other logistics and joining information, with participants ahead of time

One camera, one mic, one mouse per person
Be on camera
Be off mute
Be prepared to be called on

2. Level the playing field

Those in the room will have more power than those online. Your design should find ways to level the playing field so that everyone can be seen, heard and can contribute equally.

Establish your ground rules
Assume that remote participants are not seeing and hearing what is being said and shown in the room and check in on their experience.
Use small groups with a trained facilitator to increase the quality of the conversations and help the group stay focused and on task.
An alternative to each participant being on a laptop, remote participants could join via tablet and have a buddy in the room.

NOTE: While hybrid experiences may be necessary and it’s important to make them as great as possible for everyone, consider making everyone remote as the ultimate way to level the playing field.

3 Allow for extra planning and design time

Planning a hybrid meeting will require more time.

General planning and design time guidance is as follow:

In-Person – 2 x the length of the meeting
Virtual – 2.5 x times the length of the meeting
Hybrid – 2.5 – 3 x times the length of the meeting.

Factors to include – technology setup, designing pre-work, envisioning transitions, ensure EVERYONE can see and hear the same thing. If you are bringing in more facilitators to lead smaller groups, you will need to do some pre-work with them as well.

4 Prioritize the collective conversation

The collective, sense-making conversation is the most important part of any collaborative meeting. Facilitation tools and methods are doorways to different kinds of conversation.They are not meant to be the activity in order to reach a decision; they are meant to give people new and different insights or ways of thinking.

In any meeting, but especially in hybrid, prioritize the collective conversation over the gathering of data or ideas. Use pre-work or design asynchronous work for the session to gather data or do detailed work that is better suited to one or two people (i.e. wordsmithing a mission statement, estimating the workload, researching facts or data).

Do not waste people’s time. Think about the purpose and desired outcome for the meeting and the type of interaction desired. Prioritize conversations and minimize detailed work in a large group.

Carefully consider the conversations needed and think about ways to accomplish them asynchronously prior to the meeting rather than during the meeting.
One of the pros of meeting online is that you can design breaks and space for individual work and then bring the group back together at a later time.

5 Change the frame

Create your design so that you vary the frame being used (individual, small group, large group, written, verbal, drawing, etc.). If you start in a large group then move to a small-group activity and then back to a large group. This shifts the energy in the group and will help people stay engaged. It also helps to level the playing field and give people different ways to get their voice in.

Use small groups to give people time to connect with others and deepen the conversation. Think about how you will divide people up to create varied perspectives in the breakouts. It will be technically easier to pair people in the room with others who are also in the room, and vice-versa for online. But mixing in-person and online in small groups can also be a great way to break down barriers of ‘us vs them’ between participants.

High-tech idea: Use a meeting platform like Zoom and have everyone join using their own device. Use the breakout room features.
High-tech idea: Have an iPad for each Virtual participant and assign them a ‘buddy’ in the room. The buddy will be responsible for bringing them along to small group breakouts happening in the room. (Be sure to rotate the ’buddy’ role to new people so one person does not become stuck in that role.)
Low-tech idea: Ask participants to exchange phone numbers and call one other having a voice only conversation. Agree on where and how the outcomes of the conversation will be captured and shared with the group.

10 Key Principles for Hybrid Conduct

Last but not least, we want to leave you with 10 key principles for hybrid conduct.

Help participants ‘see each other
1. High-tech idea: Send out a circle ahead of the meeting with everyone’s name and picture.
2. Low—tech idea: At the start of the meeting ask everyone to take a sheet of paper and build their own virtual circle at the start.
Connections before Content
1. Building connection is one component to fostering trust and creating a space where people feel like they can fully bring their voice into a conversation.
2. Start with a check-in that allows people to share something personal about themselves.
Call on People
1. Ask a question: What ideas do you have for the future?
2. Say someone’s name: Cindy, would you like to share?
3. Repeat the question: Cindy, what ideas do you have for the future?
“Nomination” or “Pass the Mic”
1. In this adaptation, prompt the group for who would like to speak first. Then ask the group to pick the next speaker.
2. Share with the group the technique of saying someone’s name and then repeating the question.
Have Two Co-Facilitators
Have a Remote Liaison
1. This person‘s role is threefold:
  1. to make sure that technology does not impede collaboration
  2. support the facilitators and participants
  3. navigate technology to ensure that everyone can see and hear the same things and contribute equally to what’s being created.
Ask Participants to be Facilitators
1. If you are using small group breakouts, ask for one person in each group to step into the role of facilitator.
2. Ask them to be mindful of hearing all voices and not overly driving the conversation. This person should also take responsibility for bringing the themes and summary of the small group conversation back into the large group.
Hear and Be Heard. See and Be Seen
1. Design a working agreement with the group and ask them if at any point they do not feel like this is happening, to say so. This includes asking questions if they are not sure what they are supposed to be doing or seeing at the moment.
2. As the facilitator you will need to rely on the group to speak up if something does not seem right.
Be Clear and Direct with your Instruction
1. Chunk up your instructions, don’t tell them everything all at once
2. Be specific with what the task is
3. Be clear about where and how they should be contributing
4. Adjust your instructions for multiple experiences (this will be the challenging part)
5. It will be easy for people to become lost, or confused because they are looking at something different than you are. Always ask “Is there anyone who is not with me?” or “Is there anyone who is seeing something different?”
Use Virtual Collaboration Whiteboards
1. Use a virtual whiteboard or collaboration tool (i.e. Lucidspark, Miro, Mural, etc) that allows for everyone to see and contribute to the work being created.

What comes next?

Once you’ve planned for a team meeting and have taken all the steps necessary to create a space for effective team collaboration, you need to ‘read the room’.

Interested in learning more about facilitation?

Read ‘The Art and Science of Facilitation’

TeamCatapult offers several workshops:

Agile Team Facilitation

Advanced Facilitation

Virtual Facilitation Masterclass

We invite you to reach out to us via concierge@teamcatapult.com if you have any questions about our workshops!

How Daring to Dialogue Improves Performance and Create a Culture of Agility

How Daring to Dialogue Improves Performance and Creates a Culture of Agility

A keynote presented at AGILE AND SCRUM 2021 Online Conference #agilecon2021

Enjoy!

~Marsha

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’

How To Take Your Agile Team Coaching Skills To The Next Level

If you are a team facilitator, and you are looking to grow your leadership skills, this is the place to be! In “7 Tips To Improve Your Team facilitation Skills” we learn that team facilitation starts with developing the right mindset and meeting preparation process.

It’s informed by the things you believe as a facilitator, such as believing the group has the collective wisdom to solve the challenge at hand. Being aware of your bias means understanding how you can intentionally or unintentionally influence the group process.

No matter the kind of meeting you walk into, your job is to help the group get over the hurdles of face-to-face communication. We’ve put together a checklist of what ‘Basic Agile Facilitation’ feels and looks like.

Step 1: Basic Agile Facilitation

Purpose: Lead the process of a meeting

Personal:

Process for tasks and outcomes
Focus is on making meeting run better and more collaboratively

Symptoms: Team needs help with meetings

Sounds like: “Help us get better at running our release planning meetings”

Leadership: Active leadership from the facilitator who takes the process lead and designs a process to help the group achieve their desired outcomes.
Outcomes: Achievement of a specific goal or deliverable (i.i team charter, decision on work priorities, release plan etc.)

As well as:

What are you doing?

Creating a clear meeting purpose, agenda, working agreement and a process that engages the whole group.
Helping the team learn the agile practices – stand-up, team chartering, iteration planning, release planning, retrospective.

How might you be using Structural Dynamics with the team?

Notice the four action stances and how to bring or call for another action in the moment.

How are difficult problems handled?

Mostly off-line or 1:1 with feedback about impact.

What level of self-mastery might be needed here?

Awareness of your own behavioral profile and how it might impact how you work teams.

Leveling Up Your Facilitation Skills

Once you have these skills and understand this framework, you will be able to move on to Advanced Team Facilitation.

The five cornerstones of the Agile Team Facilitation Stance include:

Read the following checklist about what Advanced Team Facilitation feels and looks like.

Step 2: Advanced Team Facilitation

Purpose: Empower the team to facilitate themselves

Personal:

How the group is working.
Focus is on improving interactions, communications and decision-making skills of the team.

Symptoms: Challenges with behavior or interpersonal relationships

Sounds like: ”Help us improve how we work so we can facilitate our own work.”

Leadership:

Active leadership from the facilitator that happens more from the back than the front.
The emphasis is on the team’s capability to be more self-facilitating and self-organizing.

Outcomes: Improvement in awareness, skills and effectiveness as a team.

As well as:

What are you doing?

Naming structural patterns so the group can become more aware of their helpful vs unhelpful patterns.
Designing group processes to help change the patterns you see in the team.

How might you be using Structural Dynamics with the team?

Diagnose a stuck pattern in a team.

How are difficult problems handled?

Name challenging patterns in the group, help them navigate the challenges or develop working agreements to prevent them.

What level of self-mastery might be needed here?

Increasing awareness and able to see patterns in the moment – yours and others.
Expanding your tolerance for difference.
Becoming “multi-lingual” and able to change your vocal range when needed.

Leadership Journey to Agile Team Coach

Growing leadership competency is a cornerstone of creating organizational change

Increased performance outcomes are the direct result of the fact that the competencies of individual coaching, team coaching, mentoring, training, and facilitation help leaders build their range of leadership.

At TeamCatapult, we call this “leadership range.” It refers to the ability of individuals to lead from the front and set a clear direction. It also refers to their ability to lead from behind, empowering others to make the move and understanding how to support ideas and create space for all voices to be heard.

Look at the following checklist to see if you are already at the next step!

Step 3: Agile Team Coaching

Purpose: Empower the team to lead and tackle more systemic challenges.

Personal:

How the system is working.
Focus is on the system as a whole and how it’s working or not working.

Symptoms: Systemic challenges and stuck patterns that are keeping the team from their full potential.

Sounds like: “Help us develop as a team so that we reach high performance.”

Leadership:

Active leadership is happening within the team.
The team is doing their real work either in a meeting, work session or at their desks.
The coach is observing and intervening when appropriate or needed.

Outcomes:

Positive changes in individual and team performance.
Individual and groups shift in mindset, deepended awareness and intentionality about working together effectively.

As well as:

What are you doing? Live and “in the moment” coaching opportunities within the team to neutrally name what is happening so the team can see it and take their own actions.

How might you be using Structural Dynamics with the team?

Diagnosing a stuck patterns in a team and revealing it to the team so they can see it, too.
Changing theme “in the moment” so that they are able to change the nature of their conversation for more productive outcomes.

How are difficult problems handled?

Problems are seen as systemic issues rather than 1:1 conversations and are with the system in the room.
“Bring the conversation in the room” becomes a guiding principle.

What level of self-mastery might be needed here?

Changing your behavior in order to help the team change their pattern and get different results.

Next Step: Coaching Agility From Within Cohort!

Where in this journey to masterful agile team coaching are you?

Once you’ve mastered basic agile facilitation, advanced team facilitation and you’ve become an agile team coach, what’s next is an exciting journey! We invite you to learn more about “A Cohort Journey to Masterful Agile Team Coaching”

This 9-month TeamCatapult cohort starts on 10/25/21. We are accepting applications now. Click here to apply. We also invite you to learn more about this program by reading what those who’ve completed the program are saying.