Facilitate Proceedings » Building Effective Teams

4 ways to own your meeting experience

Danuta McCall — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:22:47 +0000

Says Reid Hastie: “I USED to be the disengaged participant — one who had good ideas about how to solve a problem or conduct a meeting, but didn’t contribute. I now take a more active role, aiming to make meetings more effective.”

To at least some degree, we own our experience in meetings and we play a role in making them either a waste or a good use of our time. That leads me to think about four things that we can and should take ownership of to improve our own meeting experience.

Kick off the New Year by creating a facilitator culture

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:20:35 +0000

Up until a few years ago, those of us who are professional facilitators were considered to be a breed apart. People turned to us for special ways of extracting the best ideas from a group, weaving together a stimulating conversation (even when people had wildly different perspectives), or helping people reach consensus on difficult decisions. Fortunately for us, our clients still value our ability to plan and guide productive conversations when the outcomes matter most.
And yet—I see more and more employees and managers recognizing the need to act as facilitators themselves, especially among geographically dispersed groups. Why?

Make Virtual Meetings Worth Your Time – Join Us!

Danuta McCall — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:13:08 +0000

Over the past year we have been offering a free webinar series entitled “Designing Interactive Virtual Meetings and Webinars that Keep Participants Engaged”. Every webinar has been unique, as each group molds its session from the participants’ collective experience, creative thinking and interests. Two upcoming events cause us to reflect on how our thinking has evolved from running these dynamic, highly participatory open sessions. The first event is our next webinar, scheduled for next week on Thursday September 23 at 8 am PDT, 11am EDT, 3 PM UTC (register). This webinar is a warm-up for Julia Young’s interactive session “Getting Great Results from Virtual Meetings” at the upcoming OD Network Conference in New Orleans

We know that every successful meeting relies on a well-thought out objective, outcomes and agenda. And, good facilitation that engages participants in open, thoughtful thinking and learning But there are some especially gnarly challenges associated with meeting and collaborating remotely. We’ve created a conceptual structure to frame them for discussion called The Six Critical Success Factors.

Come join the evolving conversation! You will experience an interactive virtual event and help build solutions to one of the biggest challenges facing virtual teams today. Register here.

Time for a Virtual Work Fitness Workout

Julia Young — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:16:55 +0000

After 18 years as a telecommuter, I would characterize myself as a good virtual worker. But a recent article on the benefits of telework to both the employer and the employee made me realize it might be time to challenge myself to think about how I might work more productively.

Working from home can lead to poor work habits. Here are some useful questions to help assess the way we work and come up with our personal virtual work fitness regimen. Counting wasted calories, having a fitness goal, weighing in and reaping the rewards applies to working too!

Why BP and Virtual Teams Need Clear Operating Principles

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:46:09 +0000

We may never know what sequence of events set off the greatest environmental catastrophe of our time. What we do know is that there seemed to be a difference of opinion among decision-makers when it came to making a crucial trade-off between safety and profit. Add to that, it seemed unclear as to who, precisely, had the authority to make the decision to stop the drilling when a concerned staffer alerted management of the impending danger.

Having agreed-upon operating principles up front might have helped the drilling team avert this unnecessary disaster, just as they can help any kind of team make well-informed decisions quickly.

Anatomy of a Great Virtual Collaborator

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:05:54 +0000

Most people I know love working remotely. They say they get more done, prize their freedom and flexibility and have better work/life balance. But there are others who really miss being with people and feel isolated and lonely much of the time. People often ask me what qualities are the most important predictors of a successful virtual collaborator. Here are seven that come to mind.

Social butterflies tend to thrive.
May seem ironic, but sociable people crave contact with others and are motivated to maintain connections, either virtually – through phone, email or social networking tools—or face-to-face, when they can. Introverts who find it painful to stop and chat with an officemate may find it harder to cultivate social connections in a virtual world. For someone who’s introverted, social bonds are almost impossible to create and keep up when working from afar.

Tips To Jumpstart Your New Virtual Team

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:58:03 +0000

One of my clients was just anointed as the project lead for a new virtual team of a very visible project. She confessed that she has very little experience as a manager of virtual teams, though she does know what it’s like being part of a poorly run team, and she does not want to replicate this experience for her new team members.

Here are a few tips I shared with her to help her get her new team off to a fast start:

1. Choose the right people.

When you can choose your team members, look for people with diverse perspectives with a blending of skills, knowledge and experience. Important competencies include tolerance for ambiguity; sensitivity to cultural differences; willingness to work independently; ability and openness to communicate using a variety of methods; and keen listening skills.

How Do Collaborative Meeting Systems Affect The Bottom Line?

Donna McAlister Kizzier — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:36:33 +0000

As technology advances and the global economy strains to stabilize, what is a leader who is increasingly pressed to produce bottom line results to do? Based on research being conducted at Morehead State University, part of the answer may be to run more effective global meetings using collaborative systems. This research indicates that collaborative systems can save time and travel-related expense while enhancing the quality of meeting outcomes.
For the past seven years, I have been conducting a long-term comprehensive study on the effectiveness of several meeting venues on scientifically validated group effectiveness factors. The ultimate goal of this project is to design meeting models that work effectively across time, space, and diverse cultures.

Research Briefs Reveal Gold Nuggets For Facilitators and Team Leaders

Danuta McCall — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:02:46 +0000

There is exciting research going on at universities across the globe focused on understanding the basic constructs that affect team productivity and well-being. It’s pretty clear why we should be interested in what this research is turning up. We work in a global and unstable economy where the rules are constantly changing. Our workforce is culturally diverse and often separated by barriers of time and distance. We have an overabundance of technologies to help us collaborate that work well when used appropriately.

In order to succeed in this challenging environment, managers and team leaders must understand the fundamentals of how groups communicate, innovate, and make decisions. Then we can create the right environment, norms and processes to help groups function optimally. If we don’t understand the core forces behind team effectiveness, we might make unfortunate choices in our communication systems (both technological and human) and management systems.

Here at Facilitate Proceedings, we’d like to help make the connection between this academic research and the community of practitioners who could benefit from it. So we have added a new category to our blog called Research Briefs.

Bridging Cultural Boundaries in Global Teams

Nancy Settle-Murphy — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:11:45 +0000

In a recent post, I talked about the importance of helping your cross cultural teams develop cultural literacy, by which I mean an understanding of and sensitivity to values and beliefs that lie beneath the surface differences of language, cuisine and style.

Whether members of a cross-cultural team work in the same location or a couple of time zones away, everyone needs to learn how to navigate cultural differences successfully. In the absence of visual cues, these differences become much more challenging to interpret and address.

Here are some things to think about when you plan for team communication.