Team Days: How To Facilitate Them So They Aren’t An Expensive Waste Of Time.
As we’ve been lifting restrictions, going back to the office, and keeping on with our businesses, I’ve seen an uptake in company offsites.
Team days to connect, and you know, finally meet in person after interviewing, onboarding, and working remotely.
Strategy days to create that vision for the future and plan how to make it real.
What I consistently see from leaders is a desire to not only gather in-person to future relationships but to leave with something practical and actionable.
To end the day feeling that it was time well spent.
And to ensure that everyone, even the initiator, gets to be a participant, smart leaders hire facilitators.
A great facilitator helps you create a memorable, productive experience that gets high levels of participation, and leaves everyone ready to take action.
That’s why facilitation is an extension of coaching in my mind. Focus on what the client wants, then “reverse engineer” back from that to figure out what actions are needed to create that outcome.
I think it’s this philosophy that has people choose me, instead of the traditional option.
So how do you do great facilitation of team days?
Clients always want to know what goes into facilitation, beyond turning up on the day and making magic happen with the group. It might look like we just turn up, ask some questions and “do some energisers”.
There’s a whole creative process behind it (that I absolutely love). I’ve summarised it into 5 key steps.
So here’s a little behind the scenes #bts.
1. Outcomes Outcomes Outcomes
Building on my years in project management, we always start with the deliverables. What outcomes do you want you and your team to leave your strategy/team day with?
e.g. shared values and behaviours, things to implement as a result of all the talking, living mission statement
Not forgetting: how do you want people to feel? e.g. connected, spent our time on something worthwhile, sense of clarity and purpose
2. Creative Experience Design
For the facilitation day, I’m doing in May, Dennis and I used #miro for the creative process i.e. brainstorm activities that can create those outcomes. We draw from our combined experience, and create new stuff up on the spot. ‘cos who wants the same old same old?
Then we play around with sequencing to create that all-important flow to the day
3. Timeline
What are we doing, when, and how. Now we get to the details of timing etc.
4. Keep our saboteurs at bay, on the regular, so that we can keep our heads straight, and not give in to the inevitable self-doubt that we call feel about “is this good enough?”
5. Deliver the magic
Create magic with a group of strangers at the appointed date and time.
So what does that create? Here are a couple of stories:
I mean, if you’re going to spend the money to bring everyone together, fly them in, pay for accommodation, hire the venue, etc then you want to make sure that you get the outcome you wanted.
Originally published at https://www.amberrahimcoaching.com on May 17, 2022.
