Don’t be fooled that one great team session will mean you will nail your strategy

As the old saying goes: “One swallow does not a summer make”.

In a similar way: one great workshop, team meeting, company town hall or training session does not really move the dial on your strategic problem… it doesn’t matter how well run or how engaging it is, you need so much more.

I should know; my whole business is about facilitating teams to get the best out of them. My team are a bunch of Superfacilitators.

Every week, me and my team run countless sessions for companies big and small like Amazon, Heineken, Tesco, Anglo American, Kearney, EY, and numerous start-ups and charities.

We run strategy workshops, design sprints, problem solving sessions, war games, pre-mortems, away days, town halls, team kick offs, soft skills training, sheep dips and more.

You name it; if it involves getting people to think sharper, collaborate sharper and focus sharper, we deliver it … sometimes even in a lift and sometimes even when ill.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an in-person or virtual session; at the heart of each is the aim to make a fundamental change to the participants we work with to increase the chance of them achieving their strategy.

It doesn’t matter if they need to improve their sales, lower their costs, increase customer engagement, kick-start productivity, overcome new challenges, embrace new Technology, work better together or something else; our sessions are tasked with moving the dial on these goals.

I Love the work but I hear far too often the immortal line from bosses:

“Great, one session should do it” 🤦🏻‍♂️

Similarly, I hear participants at the end of a session say a variant of: “Yep, we’ll be different now.”

I’d genuinely love to believe them but my experience has taught me that this is a combination of wishful thinking and the Dunning-Kruger effect coming into play.

It is easy to misjudge how hard it is to implement true change and lots of leaders mistake a high feedback score as a prediction of whether the participants will actually change their behaviour — I should know as we regularly score maximum marks for our workshops but we constantly push ourselves to achieve way more than this.

What makes a difference?

Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather have a high feedback score than a low one for any session that I run but considering 95% of new knowledge is forgotten within 48 hours, more is needed than this.

Similarly, we don’t keep getting asked back simply because of our excellent feedback —it’s because we guarantee to make a difference to their strategic problem and we always achieve it (but to do that we have to work with a team for more than just one session).

That said, we do start to identify which teams are more likely to achieve things and that comes from looking out for a range of indicators.

A bit like trying to ascertain if your social media post actually makes an impact, it’s not easy to measure this.

From the hundreds of workshops I have run, here is my playbook of what actually gives me confidence that there will be different outcomes; I keep count of when:

1. Participants make notes on what we are talking about
2. Participants ask questions
3. Participants practise whatever they have absorbed immediately
4. Participants reflect on what they have just absorbed
5. Participants don’t over complicate and reframe things in their own words
6. Participants set themselves clear next steps around what they have absorbed
7. Participants attempt to use the new knowledge within a maximum of 2 weeks of the session
8. Participants regroup with peers not long after to discuss the new topic, what they have tried, what has worked and what hasn’t
9. Participants look for Experts to ask for advice/learn from
10. Participants do not try to change too many behaviours in one go

The more we see of the list above, the more we know the participants will be successful.

How do we make it happen?

It’s not easy to get all the of above that’s why we ensure the following for any session we run:

• trying not to overload the session — less is definitely more and spacing things out is best
• making a great first impression — taking the time to check in, connect and credentialise is vital
• getting the balance right — we constantly keep The Presenter’s Trilemma in mind, maintaining the balance between content, Relationships and process
• linking everything back to their current world — fake case studies do not help, people learn from their own experiences best
• introducing high levels of interactivity — it makes more impact when they are not just being talked at; this involves creating the space for them to ask anything and creating shared experiences through speedbumps and lightning rods
• using inspiring stories for maximum impact — these don’t just have to come from you
• making things personal and fun — this creates positive reinforcement
• restricting one person from dominating the meeting — a sense of inclusion and equality is vital, as well as factoring in all the cultural differences that may exist
• creating the space to reflect — debriefs and check-ins are vital; you need the detail of what they think and feel
• mixing things up — cover more bases to accommodate different motivation levers
• making it more memorable — keep the new knowledge from fading so quickly
• getting participants to share their knowledge — the person at the front of the room is never the sole source of knowledge
• creating strong team bonds — this makes peer groups more likely to form
• getting participants’ managers and leaders involved — not only does this add to the inspiration and access to knowledge, it adds importance, transparency and accountability
• making participants commit to one action — what one specific thing will you do differently in the next week when you walk out this door
• limiting the Coaching — we rather change processes, incentives or introduce gamification to introduce new simple, habits that then become enshrined once the powerful impact is felt

If your goal is important then you should give it every chance and that’s why the above is vital, even it involves tough conversations.

Quite simply: stop chasing the wrong metric, look for the real indicators of change and create the environment for these to grow and you may just be surprised by the success your team can achieve.

If you need help with any of the above (especially if you are trying to facilitate your own strategy), then drop me a line (don’t be the hummus in the jar)😊

Faris

Faris is the CEO and Founder of Shiageto Consulting, an innovative consultancy that helps firms and individuals sharpen their effectiveness. Connect with him here

Success = IQ x EQ x FQ

Want to assess your levels of IQ, EQ and FQ? click here

Originally Published on https://farisaranki.medium.com/

Faris Aranki Strategy & Emotional Intelligence

Having spent over 20 years delivering strategic change for the corporate and non-corporate worlds, Faris has experienced first-hand the fine differences between strategic success and failure.
His work has spanned numerous companies (from global behemoths to small start-ups), in numerous countries, across a range of sectors, supporting them all to unlock strategic success.

He came to realize that often what hinders institutions from achieving their goals goes beyond the quality of their strategy; it is their ability to engage effectively with others at all levels and remove barriers in their way. This has led to his passion for improving strategic effectiveness within all businesses and individuals and the foundation of Shiageto Consulting.

Over time, Faris has worked to distill his knowledge of how to solve complex problems in a structured manner combined with his skill on engaging effectively with others and his ability to quickly determine the barriers to a strategy's success. This knowledge has formed the foundation of Shiageto’s workshops, courses and methodologies. Faris believes that any firm or team can adopt these improvements; all it requires is a little of the right support -something Shiageto provides!

On top of leading our business, Faris is now an accomplished speaker and contributor for a variety of outlets.