The thing is, if you do your best to deal with the common issues in instructional design (interactivity, goal clarity, adaptation, action orientation, etc…), there is often still a big gap in effective recall and use of things being taught. The problem is stickiness. How do you give people the best fighting chance of being able to profit from the things you help them learn 18 months after the workshop you hosted?

As with so many things we’ve learned over the years, the answer to that question lies in play.

The Retention Problem

Though participants have always been very kind in their feedback about our leadership training, there was one change we made quite early on that had a huge impact on the long-term value of the program.

We’d started by offering workshops on 5 key leadership topics. Once a month, we’d host one of those sessions, providing a bunch of tools sprinkled with a smattering of useful theory and finishing with a short Q&A to address any specifics. Participants would leave those sessions with very clear intent to experiment with the tools and apply the frameworks. 6 months later, we’d check in on their progress and find that participants had often fallen out of the habit of using many of them.

At first, we thought we must simply have shared the wrong things or perhaps shared them in an ineffective way. However, when we reminded people of the details of the tools and their value, they started using them again.

The problem wasn’t the material, it was that the original learning didn’t penetrate deep enough to cement these new ideas in people’s minds.

Activate, Debate, Iterate

Humans need to play with ideas to really ‘get’ them. This is why a good workshop, in addition to having lots of in-session opportunities to experiment, will often finish with some sort of call-to-action question like “what is one thing you want to try from this workshop?” That’s a basic activation question.

Let’s assume participants identify a handful of things they want to play with. Then what? How do we give people an incentive to try those things? How can we help them reflect on and adapt to what they’ve learned as a team or an organization? How can we help them build a stronger community of practice around their challenges? That’s where roundtables finally enter the picture.

Two weeks after a workshop, we convene a roundtable with the same group of people. During that roundtable, we use a Lean Coffee structure and few bespoke tools to drive a conversation about what worked, what didn’t, what people have learned, what is interesting about these tools in the context of their particular environment, and so on.

The more provocative and challenging the conversation, the more participants develop a deep sense of which tools and techniques they will adopt long-term and why they will be valuable. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, one of our favorite moments in a roundtable is when a participant ‘calls bullshit’ on something we’ve shared, explaining that they tried it and it didn’t work at all for them. This inevitably leads to a deep and useful group conversation around the idiosyncrasies of their environment and how a tool might be adapted to make it a better fit.

As soon as we adopted this workshop-then-roundtable structure, we saw the retention and application problems evaporate. 18 months after we work with a group, they can still quote many of the models back to us and are often keen to tell us about some adaptation they’ve made to a tool to make it even better for their team. This is what deliberately putting ideas under pressure actually does to memory and uptake.

Give It a Try

If you need groups to learn better, adapt faster, and make that adaptation more sticky, try introducing roundtables into your learning programs.

If you’d like more structural detail or inspiration, take a look at our Leadership Program.

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• Plan the work, then work the plan

• No plan survives contact with the enemy

If you were hovering over our shoulders when we were running a workshop, you would see screens filled with prompts, questions, snippets of useful topics, detailed timings, breakout room planning tools and on and on. We prepare like backpackers expecting to found a civilisation from scratch when they get to their destination.

So what happens when Zoom has a hiccup, or the group turns out to have far less experience than previously suggested, or something incredibly distracting just happened that morning at the participants’ company?

In our formative years, we fell into the common trap of assuming that preparation meant constructing a model railway - beautifully laid out tracks with precise paths running in neat little loops. Fantastic if it comes off without a hitch. But mostly broken, if interrupted.

Over time, we learned that good preparation is actually about building a climbing wall - an unshakeably solid foundation with lots of useful handholds and lots of potential paths to the top.

When a plan starts to unravel, it’s so tempting to try and paper over the cracks rather than actually sitting with the discomfort and allowing it to inform how you should adapt. This is what Brené Brown means when she talks about ‘rumbling with vulnerability’; trusting the foundations of your preparation and the honesty of the group to guide you to the next step.

This is an active process. You’re not merely a ‘chill host’ (as Priya Parker would put it), letting the unravelling take you wherever it may. You are helping the group to confront the challenge and work together to pick a new path.

Put simply, the best solutions are often already in the room. Our job is to stay present enough to find them. In that spirit, here are a few things we learned to do when a plan started to unravel…

Four Moves For Your Facilitator Backpack

🫠 The Human Heatmap

This one is useful when energy is low or the room feels divided.

Pause the agenda. Ask everyone to stand. One side of the room is “Strongly Agree,” the other is “Strongly Disagree.” Ask a pointed question about the project goals and watch what happens. You stop guessing how people feel and start seeing it. The group dynamic is physically mapped out on the floor in front of you. Just be ready with a sense of how to handle the outcome.

📢 The Silent Rumble

This one is useful when you have someone dominating the dialogue.

Move to silent ideation. Everyone gets three minutes and a stack of Post-its to respond to a “How Might We” question. This works well both digitally and in person. It levels the playing field in a way that open discussion rarely does. The quieter people in the room get to contribute without having to fight for airtime first.

🗺️ The Jettison

A great strategy for when the planned exercise has become irrelevant.

Be honest about it. Say: “We had something planned here, but I think this conversation is where the real value is right now.” Then ask the group directly: “If we spend the next 20 minutes on this instead of the agenda, what do we need to walk away with to make it worthwhile?” You’re not abandoning the goal, you’re simply letting the group help you protect it.

🎤 The Unplugged Session

Handy for when the tech goes belly-up in a physical room.

Don’t wait for IT. Bring the chairs into a circle and lose the stage. What you lose in polish you more than make up for in presence. A circle of chairs creates an intimacy that a slide deck never could. It’s also a good reminder, mostly for yourself, that the expertise was never in the deck.

Even when you’re working remotely, just forget the slide share if it’s getting in the way and revert to basic video-conferencing.

The Mindset Underneath It All

The facilitators who handle the hard moments well aren’t the ones with the best contingency plans. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with the fact that something will often go sideways, and they’ve decided in advance that when it does, they’ll be curious about it rather than thrown by it.

In other words, the backpack stays packed but the window stays open 🎒.

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Much of our facilitation advice can be found in our Fix Your Meetings workshop since the majority of our clients are facilitating in that context. We also support L&D professionals through our 1-on-1 coaching service where we’ll help you work through both conceptual and practical challenges to build your confidence.

What if we stopped treating manager development like a set of disjoint projects and started thinking about it like a product?

The Product Mindset

Applying a product mindset is useful here. We can understand a manager’s core goals through the lens of their three key ‘customers’. Each customer has unique needs and expectations, and a successful manager development program must serve all three.

🏢 Customer 1: The Organization (“Are we there yet?”)

This customer loves to see things getting done that have a positive impact on the company’s mission. The organization needs managers who can prioritize effectively, make sound decisions, and drive results.

L&D Focus: Core management skills. Introduce frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to help managers balance immediate needs with long-term value. Similarly, expose them to tools like Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis when navigating complex decisions. These tools help managers make good decisions quickly and, more importantly, empower their teams to do the same, fostering organizational scalability.

🙋🏼Customer 2: The Team (“Will we make it?”)

This customer wants to flourish while they pursue the goals of the team. They look to the manager to provide services that accelerate that flourishing. The team needs a manager who fosters a positive, productive environment, provides coaching and support, and helps them reach their full potential.

L&D Focus: Building a strong, supportive team environment. Equip managers with coaching skills, including active listening and effective question construction techniques. Creating a culture of open communication and psychological safety is crucial. Offer resources on how to foster trust and open dialogue, empowering managers to build a cohesive and productive team.

🧑🏼‍💼 Customer 3: The Manager Themselves (“What about the future?”)

This customer is the voice inside the manager that craves growth, development, and self-actualization. This manager needs strategies and tools to become more efficient, adapt to change, and learn continuously.

L&D Focus: Instilling a growth mindset. Encourage managers to embrace challenges as opportunities for development. Instead of a generic training plan, work with them to co-create a customized development plan that aligns with both their career goals and their team's specific needs. Leadership development opportunities like shadowing senior leaders or participating in peer mentorship programs can all contribute to a manager's long-term growth.

Tune And Measure

Investing wisely in managers is a direct investment in the future of your organization because of their potential to force-multiply everyone around them. But it's not enough to simply provide training; we need to evolve our L&D approach from simply delivering content to partnering with managers to drive strategic impact.

This means we must focus on two key areas…

• Customization and Partnership: Move beyond a one-size-fits-all training catalog. Partner with managers to understand their specific challenges and create learning paths that are truly relevant. This might mean targeted micro-workshops or curated resource libraries where managers choose their own learning path. Active participation drives both buy-in and results.

• Measuring What Matters: To prove the value of your programs, it's crucial to connect development to tangible outcomes. Instead of just tracking attendance, measure the impact on key metrics. For example, are team engagement scores improving? Is turnover on those teams decreasing? Equip managers with the tools to track their own progress through 360-degree feedback or by tying their development goals directly to their team's performance metrics. This not only validates the program but also gives managers concrete evidence of their growth.

Iterate And Accelerate

The biggest revolution in product management in the last couple of decades was the normalizing shift from waterfall-style development to rapid iteration. High performing teams configure themselves to try things quickly, measure what works, learn from what doesn’t, and try again.

When this concept is applied to professional growth, we get the familiar ‘1% continuous improvement’ mindset. We go incrementally faster as our gains compound upon each other.

But what could be more iterative about your suite of ‘learning products’?...

• How many experiments are conducted each year around the best ways to help people grow?

• How are individual learners encouraged to ‘play’ with their own learning programs to unlock new gains?

• What hasn’t been tried yet?

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We often find ourselves helping teams explore these questions and, in doing so, discover unexpected value hiding in plain sight. Drop us a line if you’d like to kick around some ideas.

Facilitation is both an art and a discipline - one where even seasoned professionals can stumble. In our decade-plus running workshops with teams from startups to Fortune 500s, we've learned that mastery comes not from perfect agendas but from navigating the messy human elements with grace.

Remember the last time you led a session that went off the rails? You're not alone. We've compiled our hard-won lessons to help you transform those facilitation face-plants into moments of genuine connection and progress.

Four Pillars of Human-Centered Facilitation

1. Create Intentional Closure for Every Discussion 🔒

The Challenge: Early in our careers, we facilitated a leadership offsite where team members opened up about their struggles with a recent reorganization. The session ran long, and we rushed to wrap up without properly addressing the emotional weight of what was shared. For a while afterward, 1 or 2 team members reported feeling less heard than they’d hoped to feel.

The Practice: Closure isn't optional - it's essential. When participants share vulnerabilities or difficult perspectives, they need resolution.

Try This:

• Build ‘closure buffers’ into your agenda - 10-15 minutes where you can ask: "What are we taking away from this conversation?" or "What support do we need moving forward?"

• When time runs short, acknowledge it explicitly: "We've touched on something important here that deserves more attention. Let's capture where we are now and commit to revisiting this on Thursday with the time it deserves."

• Document unresolved items visibly with clear ownership and timelines: "Alex will schedule a follow-up session by next Friday to continue our discussion about communication challenges."

2. Dance With Emergent Group Energy 🕺

The Challenge: During a strategic planning workshop with a tech team, we noticed participants kept circling back to an underlying trust issue between departments that wasn't on our agenda. When we initially tried to redirect to our planned exercises, the energy in the room flatlined. Once we pivoted to address the trust issue, the group came alive with engagement.

The Practice: Your agenda is a map, not a prison. The most valuable discussions often emerge unexpectedly.

Try This:

• Check in frequently with the group's energy: "I'm noticing we keep surfacing the customer feedback process. Should we make space to explore that more deeply?"

• Create visual "parking lots" for emerging topics, but be willing to pivot when something clearly matters more than your planned agenda.

• Develop comfort with the phrase: "I'm sensing this needs more attention than we planned. How important is it that we address this now versus continuing with our agenda?"

The best facilitators read the room and follow genuine energy, not just their plans.

3. Balance Tools With Human Connection ⚖️

The Challenge: At a cross-functional collaboration workshop with limited time, we deployed back-to-back structured activities - silent brainstorming, dot voting, and impact mapping. Despite good execution, participants later reported feeling like "cogs in a process" rather than collaborators. The techniques overshadowed this particular group's need for human connection.

The Practice: Facilitation tools should support connection, not replace it.

Try This:

• For every structured activity, pair it with a moment of human reflection: "Before we move to voting, what's surprising or energizing you about what we've generated?"

• Notice when technique overload is happening: "I'm feeling like we might benefit from stepping back from frameworks for a moment. Let's just talk - what's really going on here?"

• Create space for storytelling alongside structured thinking: "Before we problem-solve, can someone share an example of when this challenge showed up in your work?"

The most powerful facilitation happens when tools enhance rather than replace authentic conversation. Side note: be honest with yourself about the time needed.

4. Guide Without Controlling Outcomes 👐

The Challenge: When we were less experienced facilitators, in a contentious decision-making session, we caught ourselves subtly steering a team toward the solution we thought was best for the group. The result? Surface-level buy-in but minimal follow-through because the team never truly owned the decision.

The Practice: Your job is to design the container, not fill it with your preferences.

Try This:

• Practice radical neutrality about outcomes while being fiercely committed to process integrity.

• Replace directive statements with powerful questions: Instead of "Have you considered approach X?" try "What possibilities haven't we explored yet?"

• When you notice yourself wanting a specific outcome, name it transparently: "I notice I'm feeling pulled toward one approach here, but I want to ensure we're exploring all options."

True facilitation empowers groups to reach their own best answers, not yours.

Beyond Techniques

The art of facilitation transcends techniques. It's about developing a way of being that balances structure with spontaneity, planning with presence. The most effective facilitators we've observed share a quality - they balance confident structure with genuine curiosity about what's emerging in the room.

When you find yourself caught between sticking to the plan and responding to the moment, remember: your highest purpose isn't completing the agenda. It's creating conditions where meaningful collaboration can flourish.

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Looking to level up your facilitation practice? We offer personalized coaching for emerging and experienced facilitators. We'll help you navigate the complexities of group dynamics with confidence and authenticity.

Explore More Facilitation Resources:

• Group Dynamics

• Fishbowl

• Listening Skills Assessment

• Levels of Agreement

Enjoyed this? Give it a ❤️ or a share so we know you’re listening!

Before we continue, here are some quick definitions for anyone who hasn’t come across these terms before:

• Neurodiversity recognizes that neurological differences are natural variations in how human brains function.

• Neurodivergent describes individuals whose brain functions differ from societal norms and averages. It’s a spectrum that encompasses conditions like autism and ADHD.

• Neurotypical refers to individuals whose brain functions most closely align with what society considers typical.

The Approaches

The experience of navigating work while neurodivergent often involves challenges with social norms, sensory processing, and communication styles that aren't obvious to neurotypical colleagues. Consider these real-world examples and some possible ways to address them…

🎧 Sensory-Friendly Work Environments

Challenge: Open office environments with constant noise, movement, and interruptions can be pretty debilitating for employees with ADHD or sensory processing differences.

Solution: Implement remote work or hybrid work schedules where possible, normalize the use of noise-canceling headphones, and establish "do not disturb" protocols. These accommodations can transform "distractibility" into hyperfocus and significantly boost productivity.

💪 Strengths-Based Role Alignment

Challenge: Many neurodivergent employees excel in specific areas but struggle when forced into roles requiring their weaker skill sets.

Solution: Focus on job crafting—restructuring roles to leverage natural strengths. For example, an autistic employee with pattern recognition skills might excel in data analysis rather than client-facing roles. This supports neurodivergent folks but it’s really just a smart way to leverage everyone’s talents.

👋 Social Interaction Flexibility

Challenge: Large group social activities can be overwhelming for some neurodivergent team members, particularly those with autism who may struggle with simultaneous social processing and sensory input.

Solution: Offer flexible socialization options. Instead of defaulting to large group gatherings, provide alternatives options like one-on-one virtual coffees before building up to smaller group interactions. Most importantly, ask team members how they prefer to connect with the team.

📝 Structured Communication Formats

Challenge: Fast-paced meetings can leave employees with processing differences (like dyslexia) unable to contribute effectively, as they may still be processing earlier information when the discussion has moved forward.

Solution: Use visual collaboration tools like Mural and Miro for pre-meeting idea sharing. Even a Google doc is better than nothing. This allows everyone to process information at their own pace and contribute meaningfully based on their strengths.

📋 Clear Communication Expectations

Challenge: Vague or ambiguous communication can create unnecessary anxiety and confusion for all of us and particularly for autistic employees who may struggle with implied meaning.

Solution: Encourage team leads to develop clear communication templates for emails and messages that specify:

• Purpose (feedback, update, or request)

• Whether action is needed

• Clear deadlines or timeframes

📅 More Predictable Meeting Structures

Challenge: Unpredictable meeting formats and agenda shifts can create anxiety and reduce effective participation.

Solution: Distribute detailed agendas in advance, stick to scheduled time frames, and use consistent meeting formats. Consider adding visual timers and clear transition signals between topics. If you do want to shake things up, give the team a heads up about what to expect so anyone with group collaboration anxiety can take their own mitigation strategies.

🗺️ Documentation and Process Maps

Challenge: Verbal-only instructions and implicit processes disadvantage those who process information differently.

Solution: Create visual process maps, documented procedures, and step-by-step guides for common tasks. This reduces cognitive load and benefits everyone, particularly during onboarding or role transitions.

🧘 Recovery Spaces

Challenge: Sensory overload and social exhaustion can build up throughout the workday.

Solution: Designate quiet rooms or spaces where employees can decompress without judgment. These "low-stim" environments provide crucial reset opportunities before overwhelm leads to shutdown. Again - this isn’t just a box ticking exercise for your neurodivergent support badge, it’s valuable for any team member who may need to disconnect.

Fun fact: Riot Games had a specific meditation room on their LA campus with Calm.com streaming on a TV. It cost very little to set up and when it was needed, it made a really big difference.

📲 Technology Accommodations

Challenge: Standard workplace technology isn't always accessible to all neurotypes.

Solution: Offer text-to-speech software, screen readers, organization apps, and specialized tools that support executive functioning. Allow personalized digital workspaces that match individual processing styles.

Making the Shift

The most successful workplace accommodations share key characteristics:

• They're developed collaboratively with their team members and a particular attention to neurodivergent folks.

• They focus on clear structure and expectations.

• They offer flexibility while maintaining clarity.

• They benefit all team members, not just neurodivergent ones.

Implementing these changes doesn't require a complete workplace overhaul. Small adjustments in communication, environment, and social expectations can transform the experience of neurodivergent employees while enhancing overall workplace efficiency and harmony.

By recognizing that all brains work differently—and adapting accordingly—organizations can unlock the full potential of their whole talent pool and create a more inclusive, innovative workplace for everyone.

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If you found this useful, give it a like or a share or both! It really helps other folks find our stuff.

Further Reading

• The Neurodiverse Workplace by Victoria Honeybourne – a practical guide for managers

• NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman – history and context on autism and neurodiversity

• ADHD 2.0 by Edward Hallowell and John Ratey – modern strategies for ADHD

We’re sharing a few activities we’ve used that worked with teams we were a part of or indeed hosted some of these during virtual retreats.

🎤 1. Slide Karaoke: Improv Meets Presentations

Time: 30-45 minutes

Group Size: Any (presenters volunteer in advance)

Tools Needed: Shared presentation software (Google Slides, PowerPoint), timer

This activity involves team members presenting slides they've never seen before. Create a deck of random, unrelated slides and have volunteers present them without preparation. The spontaneity and humor that emerges when people have to think on their feet creates memorable moments and helps everyone feel more comfortable with public speaking in a low-stakes environment.

Pro Tip: Create themed slide decks (e.g., "Mysterious Stock Photos," "90s Marketing," "Science Gone Wrong") to add an extra layer of fun. Or give the presenter a random question or topic to present on using the un-seen slides.

🧺 2. Scavenger Hunt Meets Show & Tell

Time: 30 minutes

Group Size: Up to 20

Tools Needed: Video conferencing platform, timer, scavenger hunt list

Transform the familiar childhood activity into an engaging virtual experience. Give team members prompts to find specific items in their home workspace and show them on camera with a bit of narrative.

Sample Hunt Items:

• Something that makes you laugh

• Your favorite mug

• The oldest thing in your house

• Something that represents your hobby

• A souvenir from travels

👯 3. Small Group Huddles

Time: 20-30 minutes

Group Size: Up to 30 (split into teams of 2-3)

Tools Needed: Zoom/Teams breakout rooms, shared document with questions

Break free from the awkward chats of large group settings by dividing team members into smaller breakout rooms. Armed with thoughtful icebreaker questions, these intimate groups create space for meaningful conversations and connections that might not happen naturally in a virtual environment. Experiment with duration - we like to keep them short so people don’t feel too much pressure but your team should give feedback on what feels good for them.

Example Questions:

• "What's one of the best pieces of advice you've ever received?"

• "If you could master any skill overnight, what would it be?"

• "What's your most-used emoji and why?"

🤔 4. Team Trivia

Time: 45-60 minutes

Group Size: 10-30 (split into teams of 4-5)

Tools Needed: Kahoot or custom trivia platform, shared scoreboard

A classic for good reason, virtual trivia brings out everyone's competitive spirit while encouraging collaboration. Consider creating custom categories that relate to your company culture or industry for an extra personal touch.

👨‍🍳 5. Guess That Fridge

Time: 30 minutes

Group Size: 10-20

Tools Needed: Photo submission platform (or someone to collate), shared presentation for reveals

This unique twist on show and tell has team members submit photos of the inside of their refrigerators for others to guess the owner. Create a presentation with the photos and have teams submit their guesses for each fridge. Award points for correct guesses and bonus points for explaining why they made each guess.

Variation: Extend this to "Guess That Workspace" or "Guess That Bookshelf" for different insights into colleagues' lives.

🌴 6. Collaborative Dream Vacation Planning

Time: 45 minutes

Group Size: 3-4 per planning group

Tools Needed: Miro/Mural/Google Slides, vacation planning template

Break into small groups to design the ultimate vacation together. Provide a template that includes:

• Destination

• Must-see attractions

• Accommodation style

• Group activities

• Local cuisine to try

• Transportation methods

• Budget allocation

Teams present their dream trips to the larger group, explaining their choices and sharing what they learned about each other's travel preferences.

🤓 7. Nerd Nite Lite

Time: 60 minutes (15 minutes per presenter)

Group Size: Whole team

Tools Needed: Presentation software, optional props

Tap into your team's passion projects with mini-presentations on topics they love. Similar to the popular Nerd Nite events, this daytime version gives colleagues a platform to share their expertise and interests beyond their day-to-day work.

Presentation Guidelines:

• 10-minute presentation

• 5 minutes for Q&A

• Must include visuals

• Should be accessible to a general audience

• Can be any topic except work-related subjects

🔮 8. Future Forward Brainstorming

Time: 90 minutes

Group Size: 5-6 per breakout group

Tools Needed: Miro/Mural, voting mechanism

Engage your team's innovative thinking with blue-sky brainstorming sessions about your company's future. A very basic structure for the session might be as shown below but you can certainly build upon this and get creative with more structure, constraints etc.

1. Individual ideation (10 minutes)

2. Small group discussion (30 minutes)

3. Idea refinement (20 minutes)

4. Presentation preparation (15 minutes)

5. Group presentations (15 minutes)

🎧 9. Morning DJ Sessions

Time: 15-20 minutes

Group Size: Whole team

Tools Needed: Spotify or shared playlist platform

Start your day with team members taking turns as virtual DJs, sharing their favorite music and setting the mood for productive work sessions.

Format:

• DJ introduces their playlist theme

• Shares 3-4 songs

• Explains why they chose each song

General Tips

💻 Technical Setup

• Test all tools before the activity

• Have a backup plan for technical issues

• Provide clear tool usage instructions for participants

• Consider bandwidth / latency limitations when choosing tools / activities

• Consider recording sessions for team members in different time zones if appropriate [not at the expense of the enjoyment of those who are there live]

📅 Scheduling

• Rotate activity times to accommodate global teams

• Block calendar time in advance

• Send calendar invites with all necessary links

• Schedule regular but not-too-frequent sessions (1-2 per month)

• Build in time for technical troubleshooting

🥳 Engagement Strategies

• Create clear guidelines for participation

• Invite activity champions to lead each event

• Create a feedback channel for activity suggestions

• Make activities optional

• Celebrate participation and memorable moments

• Document best practices for future reference

Remember, the outcome of virtual team building isn't just completing the activity itself, but the genuine connections and conversations it facilitates. These activities provide the structure, but it's your team's participation and enthusiasm that brings them to life.

Start with one or two activities that best match your team's culture and gradually expand your social calendar based on feedback and participation.

Our audience is growing everyday with people like you who are looking to make the workplace more joyful. Please share details in the comments about any activities you’ve tried and think other distributed teams might enjoy 💜

Semantics

We were recently working with a client (a mid-size, well-established tech SaaS) where some of the leaders were dissatisfied with the use of the word ‘manager’ in some job titles. They felt that ‘manager’ should mean ‘ultimately accountable for hiring, growing and (if needed) firing other people’. In other words, a People Manager. Obviously this caused some bemusement with ICs whose job title included the word ‘manager’ (Project Managers etc).

Similarly, earlier in Andre’s career, he worked at a video games studio. Because they needed people who were experts in building entertainment experiences, their recruiting pipeline was full of people from TV and film studios. One day, there was a meeting where someone said, confidently, ‘a director is a manager of managers’ … almost immediately followed by one of the people from a film studio background saying ‘well, to me, a director is a person getting a film set to do the right things in the right order’. This then led to a conversation about the title of Producer. Needless to say they went around the houses a lot because the organization had not established any common definition of these words.

Commonality

Of course it would be obtuse to suggest that the various kinds of manager / director in the examples have nothing in common. If we squint, we see that they are all ‘people who are accountable for driving the results of something involving other people’.

Indeed, there have been many attempts to standardize levels of seniority and definitions of disciplines. The Radford database is a commonly used tool to establish job and compensation ladders, for example.

The problem with standardization, however, is that it’s an attempt to create a model of reality. While it might be useful a lot of the time, it can’t hope to address all the unique activities and roles in any given organization. As George Box put it, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. More specifically, one of Box’s key points was that the value of a model lies in its ability to help us make decisions about the real world.

The Real World

In thinking about how real teams operate, roles are usually a lot more fluid than titles. Imagine that…

1. This week I’ll be mostly thinking about what the customer wants.

2. Next week I’ll be working with my engineering colleagues to sketch out the tech we’ll be using to deliver it.

3. The week after that, as the other technologists get started on the implementation, I’ll be mapping out a way to manage all the delivery deadlines.

In the above sequence, my role goes from Product Lead to Tech Lead to Project Lead. My title might be something like ‘Engineering Manager’ but that would most likely be because that’s the sort of title we’ve come to associate with someone who can generally do all of these things (at least to an acceptable standard).

Reclaiming The Word ‘Manager’

All of which brings us to our suggestions about where / when to use the word manager. Our guidance is as follows…

• Manager should be a word used in labelling someone’s career choices and experience. If they’ve focused their energy on keeping projects running and effective, their expertise and experience make them a career ‘Project Manager’.

• When someone is actually leading a specific thing, call them an ‘X Lead for Y’ where…

  • X is the domain: Project, Engineering, Product, Quality, etc.

  • Y is the scope: ‘our website’, ‘our ecommerce systems’, ‘all sales channels’, etc.

Additionally, neither a Manager nor a Lead should have to manage other people in order to gain such labels. That practice confuses people-leadership with general leadership.

More general confusion arises because, a lot of the time, our example person occupying the Project Lead role will happen to be a career Project Manager (that’s their craft). The key insight is that this isn’t always true.

Labels containing the word ‘Lead’ describe ‘what I’m accountable for right now’. Labels containing the word ‘Manager’ describe ‘what I’ve been hired to be nominally accountable for’ or ‘what I’ve built my career around doing’. These two framings overlap so often that job titles and roles frequently get conflated in organizations.

That said, by applying the principles above, you can drive your team towards a more modular, agile way of organizing work and collaboration.

What About…?

If you transition successfully to using role-centered language to describe peoples’ positions in the organization, one thorny problem remains. What are they supposed to put on their resume / LinkedIn page so that the rest of the world understands their focus and seniority?

The answer to this conundrum is to maintain a loose mapping of roles to titles. This isn’t too hard if you take a look at the bulk of someone’s work and accountability and ask yourself, “What job title would the rest of the world give that person?”

To take the video games example from above, there would be at least two such mappings…

• Engineering Lead for The Platform Team (involving managing other managers)

  • => Director Of Engineering

• Creative Lead for The Film Unit

  • => Director

Next Steps

Think about places in your organization where job titles are preventing people from making good decisions about ownership and collaboration patterns. Consider the following questions…

• What are the most important ideas/questions that need someone to care for them in this team?

  • Examples: ‘What’s the definition of value?’, ‘How do we coordinate work?’

• Can we group those questions into buckets where each bucket feels like a coherent area of accountability?

  • Examples: product-related, process-related

• Can we identify the person who’s wearing the accountable hat for each area (noting that it’s OK for one person to wear multiple hats)?

  • Examples: Product Lead, Process Lead

Then assign those roles to people regardless of job title by assessing who’s best equipped to occupy them based on experience, fit and availability. This approach aligns well with the idea of an internal job marketplace.

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If you’d like to dive deeper into the implications of applying this kind of organizational thinking to your team, add a question/comment here or set up a time to talk 🙌

This edition of the newsletter is part of The Spark. We publish newsletters in three streams…

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However, given the investment, two critical questions often arise: Who should receive coaching?, and how do we measure its impact? 

We’re sharing guidance on both of those topics today but first, a case study from one of our clients to give you a sense of how these things play out in the real world.

⚡️ Case Study

We were asked to support Ralph, a head-of-product for a large software-as-a-service company. The company had enjoyed a surge of recent success and was expanding rapidly. Ralph was a talented product thinker and was a big part of the reason the product had been so successful. However, scale brings its own set of leadership, communication, strategy and execution challenges and the company recognized that they needed Ralph to grow at the same pace as the organization. As a high-impact individual who was about to build a large team, Ralph represented a good place to focus coaching support.

To establish metrics for the engagement, we worked with Ralph to predict the most prominent opportunities and potential failure cases ahead. As a result of that analysis, we identified three key signals to watch…

• The end-to-end throughput of product development across the organization should (at minimum) scale with the number of people in product management.

• The overall satisfaction and sentiments of customers should (at minimum) remain at around 85%.

• Retention indicators on his team should remain strong (“I understand my role”, “I feel invested in our mission”, “I would recommend working here to a friend”, etc.).

The first two metrics were already being measured by the company while the third required only a modest change to existing employee surveys. In this way, we were able to connect to the existing ‘plumbing’ for measuring success and so use real, meaningful data to help Ralph assess the ROI of the engagement.

After 9 months, meeting with his coach once each month, Ralph had…

• added 5 product managers to his team, all of whom were strongly positive on both the culture and the mission

• created a 2-year strategic plan that allowed individual teams to run highly autonomously and therefore quickly (end-to-end cycle time on average-sized features improved by 20%)

• led the team’s celebration of acquiring their thousandth customer, greatly helped by customer retention rates that were close to 95% over 1 year

Ralph characterized the coaching support during this period as being like a regular push to both think more holistically and to sweat some of the details he’d occasionally lose sight of. Most of all, when he traced the big wins back, they almost always started with a coaching conversation that set him on the right path.

🙋‍♀️ Who Should Be Eligible For Coaching?

When allocating coaching resources, the goal is to optimize your budget for the greatest impact. We've seen companies have the most success when they prioritize the following groups…

a) High-Impact Individuals:

• Senior leaders and executives who influence company direction.

• Middle managers responsible for implementing strategic initiatives.

• High-potential team members on accelerated career tracks / key individuals with specialized skills.

b) Transition Support:

• Newly promoted managers adapting to increased responsibilities.

• Team members taking on cross-functional roles or leading new initiatives.

• People returning from extended leave or navigating significant changes.

c) Performance Improvement:

• People with identified skill gaps but high potential.

• Team members struggling with specific aspects of their role.

• Individuals working to overcome performance plateaus.

📈 Measuring ROI On Coaching

Quantifying the return on investment for coaching is important for justifying and optimizing your program. It’s also important in enabling individuals to assess the value of the coaching they’re receiving. Measurement in learning and coaching activities is notoriously tricky but we’ve found that a blend of the following approaches helps to pull useful signals out of the noise…

a) Align With Existing Metrics:

• Performance Coaching: Link directly to performance review metrics.

• Leadership Coaching: Correlate with company engagement survey results, particularly questions about manager effectiveness.

• Communication Coaching: Track improvements in presentation feedback, client satisfaction scores, or internal collaboration ratings.

b) Leverage Business-Specific Metrics:

• Product / Engineering: Track improvements in cycle-time, defect rates, or user adoption.

• HR: Measure improvements in time-to-hire, employee satisfaction scores, or retention rates.

• Sales: Monitor changes in deal closure rates, average deal size, or customer retention.

c) Gather Qualitative Data:

• Encourage coaching recipients to identify small, measurable improvements between each session.

• Track frequency of desired behaviors or successful implementation of new strategies in a ‘success journal’.

• Conduct pre- and post-coaching 360-degree feedback reviews.

d) Track Meta-Metrics:

• Monitor promotion rates and career progression of coached team members.

• Track retention rates and satisfaction scores of coaching recipients.

• Assess improvements in team performance under coached managers.

Paying attention to all of these signals is a great way to create a coaching program that not only develops your talent but also demonstrates clear, measurable value to your organization. That said, if you have limited bandwidth, the most important ROI measurements are those that align closely with your organization's strategic goals and existing performance metrics (i.e. A and B).

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In many cases, what these teams need is both a fresh perspective and an injection of urgency in the search for a renewed sense of purpose. It may seem ironic, then, that one of our favorite exercises for fostering this kind of vitality is the ‘company obituary’.

The idea is simple enough. All things pass. Your company will too. When friends (and fans) raise a glass to its memory, what will they most remember it for?

What does the company obituary deliver?

When we run this exercise, we consistently see that it…

• Forces critical thinking: By imagining the company's demise, teams are compelled to evaluate its core strengths, weaknesses, and overall impact.

• Highlights core values: The organization’s fundamental beliefs are also laid bare when the discussion turns to ‘what we stood for’.

• Identifies potential threats: Looking at the company's end can uncover vulnerabilities that might otherwise be overlooked.

• Stimulates strategic planning: Considering the company's legacy sparks conversations about long-term goals and sustainability.

How to run a company obituary exercise

The Obituary Writing Process:

• Individual Reflection: Each team member writes their own obituary for the company. We usually suggest imagining it is somewhere between 20-50 years from now and the company is no more. In narrative style, we invite them to write 3-6 paragraphs that describe how the company will be remembered - considering its accomplishments, failures, and impact. Since we primarily work with distributed teams, we usually have each person do this in a Google Doc.

• Group Sharing: Then we share the Google Docs and have other people highlight, comment, annotate what they liked, what stood out, questions they have etc. The idea is to get the team talking about the themes, similarities, differences and to explore what they might mean. You can, of course, run this exercise in person using flipcharts, colored markers and stickies too. We’ve done this during company retreats and people enjoy both the visceral process as well as the philosophical discussions that arise.

• Identifying Core Values: The group collectively identifies the company's core values and mission based on the obituary insights. Following the discussion, you can either re-write the obituary together (using the pieces the group is aligned on) or simply focus on identifying the key points that came from the exercise. Often the ultimate goal of the session will inform your choice here. I.e. is the goal to produce an artifact or is that a bonus - and the actual goal is to realign and re-energize.

Facilitation Tips:

• Encourage honesty and vulnerability throughout. Teams often fear that they’ll discover significant misalignment amongst the group if they poke around in this manner. However, that kind of misalignment is a tiger hidden in the long grass. Knowing it’s there is almost incalculably better than hoping it isn’t.

• This works best with a group of under 10 people. If you have more than that, you’ll need to break into sub-groups and work out a share back process that makes sense. Video call breakout rooms work well for this.

• Timing can be tricky for this exercise as some people will need 10 mins, others 30 mins. We suggest using the longer time slot and having some additional self-led activities that people can do if they finish earlier than the allotted time. You can also consider having the individual writing done async and then gathering live for the sharing and discussion.

• Remember to state explicitly how the group will build on the insights gained to further develop a clear company mission and set of values as appropriate.

The great thing about this exercise is that you can run it for a company, a team, or a brand. In fact, the origins of this exercise come from the world of marketing where brand experts help budding orgs to develop memorable, impactful brands.

If you’re looking for an exercise for a retreat or pre-retreat, this could be a good choice and of course, if you’d like expert facilitation and guidance. We’re at your service.

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Successful virtual gatherings require more than just an invitee list and a video call link. As facilitators we’ve spent decades using tools that can really make a difference here. These tools are completely accessible to anyone who is planning to host any kind of gathering (whether it’s a work social, a team meeting, a retrospective, or a strategy session).

Check-ins

Check-ins encourage folks to show up authentically. A check-in gives everyone a chance to speak before getting to the heart of the gathering, helping them transition mentally and emotionally from their previous activity. It can also act as a primer for the level of engagement you'll want or need in the gathering.

Whether we are aware of it or not, and particularly at the start of relationships and events, we are all instinctively concerned with what others think of us. We ask unspoken questions like ‘Am I safe?’, ‘Am I included?’, and ‘Am I respected and valued?’.

A well designed check-in creates the psychological safety needed to have the best possible version of a conversation.

What should I ask?

There are tons of good questions that can help people make deeper connections with each other. You can use these questions as meeting-openers or make them part of a virtual coffee / lunch session. They are a great way to communicate to participants that their perspective matters.

Your choice of question will often contain some subtext - a somewhat hidden message to the group. For example, asking a question like ‘If you could give one piece of advice to our CEO, what would it be?’, might signal encouragement to dig into real issues that may not usually be discussed. 

Prior to the question, you might also offer a bridging phrase that puts your check-in in context. For example, ‘The focus of our meeting today is to explore our shared passion for video games, so I thought we’d start with a check-in relating to that.’

When you decide to use a check-in, it’s a great idea to have a visual reference so people can remember the question as they answer it (whether they do so in the main space or in breakout conversations). For example, consider writing the question in the text chat or displaying it on their screen in some other way.

Categories

Check-in questions fall roughly into  three categories...

1. Fun & Inconsequential (Favorite cereal?)

2. Personal & Connected (Which would you rather hear first, good news or bad news?)

3. Deep & Valuable (What kind of leadership qualities are most important to you?)

Choices

The right questions for the right people at the right time are at the heart of a healthy group process. DOROTHY STRACHAN

Here are some things to consider when choosing a check-in…

Group size: If it's a large group, you probably don't want to skew into personal questions unless the check-in will be done in breakout rooms. Sharing personal thoughts in a large meeting requires people to be more vulnerable than they would be in a smaller meeting.

Group familiarity: Is this a close knit team that works together day-to-day or a collection of folks who have only met once or twice? Are there any new people in the group? If familiarity is high, try some more challenging / provocative questions.

Duration: How long is the gathering scheduled for? Check-ins should generally be proportional to the duration of the gathering overall.

Purpose: How can the check-in connect with and support the central purpose of the gathering? What are you gathering for? Is it an important or contentious meeting? Is it a casual hang-out session? Think about the tone of the question(s) in connection with the meeting. Imagine you're having a meeting about an important legal matter. It would be pretty weird to use the breakfast cereal check-in here.

Question Bank

Here's a bank of questions in each conversation starter category for you to experiment with…

Fun & Inconsequential

1. What's your favorite afternoon snack?

2. Outside of work, what activity makes you lose track of time?

3. What's the last book or article you read that you really enjoyed?

4. What's your favorite kitchen tool or gadget?

5. If you could meet with anyone in the world - who would you choose and why?

6. Which song or musician are you listening to a lot right now?

7. If you had all the time and skills you needed to write a book, what would you write about?

8. What's one strange or amusing thing you used to believe as a child?

9. What's one TV show you think your whole team should watch? Why?

10. If your current mood was a song title, what would it be?

Personal & Connected

1. What recent team accomplishment brings you the most joy? Why?

2. How do you switch off at the end of the week?

3. What's one small moment of success you experienced recently?

4. Which meeting at work do you most enjoy and why?

5. What small things are you especially grateful for?

6. How do you handle changes to your daily routine?

7. Where do you find inspiration for your life and work?

8. What's something you've learned in the past month?

9. What's a part of your job you particularly enjoy?

10. What's your favorite charitable or non-profit organization? Why?

Deep & Valuable

1. How do you identify or notice the signals when you're stressed?

2. How do you like to receive feedback?

3. What would be helpful for your teammates to know about the way you communicate?

4. Is anything causing you stress right now - what is it?

5. Which leadership traits matter most to you?

6. What's a valuable piece of feedback you've received from a colleague?

7. What's one thing that most people don't know about you?

8. Think of a time when feedback felt like a gift. Why did it feel that way?

9. What's an area of your life in which you wish you were spending more time?

10. Describe a real-life situation where you stood up for someone or something

Note

You may consider adding the words ‘And why?’ to the end of a question to get a little bit more depth from your participants. Just be aware that this will naturally extend the time needed for the check-in.

In some situations you might decide to give two or three check-in questions and invite each person to choose the one they will answer. Our experience is that one question keeps the group more focused and connected. That said, one scenario in which you might offer such a choice is when you send the group into breakouts. Since you won’t be there to facilitate, having the choice gives them a little more flexibility and comfort.

Retros & Reflections

As a bonus, here are a few extra questions that work well with team retrospectives and reflection style sessions...

1. What was the last team decision that felt like it took too long? Why did it take so long?

2. How do you think our organization can be more adaptable to change?

3. What's something you find challenging about working in this team or company?

A Speedy Check-in Option: Traffic Light🚦

Ask each person to share whether they are feeling red, orange or green in the current moment. It’s easy to do in the text chat or verbally, wherever you’re gathering. It's a great way to prepare everyone for the conversation…

• Red means “I’m overwhelmed, stressed, upset or generally having a tough time.”

• Orange means “Things aren't ideal but I’m coping.”

• Green means “I’m feeling good about things.”

You can either simply have people share their color in the text chat or ask them for a sentence (verbally or otherwise) describing why they picked it. If you choose verbal sharing, as each person finishes, they should name the person who will go next.

It's important to recognize both that all feelings are valid and that this isn't a session to fix or address anyone's reds / oranges. That said, if someone signals red, it's a great idea to follow up with them afterwards to make sure they have the support they need.

Bringing awareness to team members' feelings in this way can help to neutralize negative feelings (by giving the feelings less power) and foster greater empathy amongst the team.

Check-outs

People disproportionately remember the last few minutes of a meeting so it’s a shame that so many meeting owners squander that focus with logistical comments about ‘the date for the next meeting’ and such like. Don’t fall into this trap. Instead, close with a little bit of ceremony, style and finesse by using a check-out.

Check-outs are a quick way of polling people for reflections on a session. They bring a sense of closure to the gathering and help people transition (mentally and emotionally) out of the conversation. A check-out might focus on what has occurred in the gathering or what is to come next for the group.

Virtual Campfire

Our favorite check-out, which has the bonus of being very quick, is the one-word check-out. To make it a bit more fun, we like to use a virtual campfire.

To prepare, each person opens a campfire on their screen…

• Where possible, participants are then invited to stand up.

• One-by-one, they each name something they are grateful for or one word that summarizes how they feel about the gathering. Just remember that the goal is closing versus opening up. You might say “‘Please share one word that captures how you are feeling/what you are thinking as we close for today.”

• At the same time they symbolically throw an imaginary log onto the fire.

• Each person who completes a turn names the next contributor until everyone has had the opportunity to participate.

Building connections and relationships in groups is not difficult but it does require some up front thought. Hopefully this article has given you the what, why and how. Now it’s time to put check-ins and check-outs into action. 🙌

If you'd like to go one step further and foster a greater sense of connection with your teams, we have a delightful and practical workshop called Create User Manuals. We'll help your team connect through play and structured conversation, delivering a tangible output.

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As workplace culture nerds, we often get asked to help teams with crafting their values. The first step in this process is to ask people what values (implicit or otherwise) they think they’ve been using up to that point. In most cases we are struck by a particular pattern that emerges…

When people say ‘these are our values’, they often mean ‘this set of values describes the identity we aspire to’.

In everyday life, identity and values are so closely intertwined that it seems trivially correct that a set of company values should describe ‘who we are’ above all else. This is a mistake.

When you develop products, you have a product strategy. When you’re hiring people, you have a recruiting strategy. When you develop a set of company values, you’re actually building a behavioral strategy.

A great ‘value’ is one that helps you to make a choice in a situation where that choice is difficult somehow. It is a mini-strategy all by itself.

So while it may be appealing to say “we are kind” or “we are inclusive”, such phrases will never rise beyond the level of a bumper sticker unless they describe which way you plan to lean when there are real tradeoffs to be made.

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Tradeoffs - Mark 1

The next step in building a set of group values is to frame the tradeoffs that are important. We might, for example, say that “we always give people the benefit of the doubt”. This phrase will mean different things to different people but let’s say we mean “if someone seems to have done something wrong, our bias will be to assume that they had good intent”.

This principle is useful in everyday life because it allows for the reality of being human. How do we translate this into a company value - one that’s useful in professional relationships? Whatever we choose needs to explicitly state a tradeoff. How about “we assume good intent, even when mistakes are costly”?

That now says that, if you think someone on your team made a mistake, it’s OK to show them grace and understanding even when the mistake costs time / money. This is a little better as a value because a whole range of situations can be viewed through that tradeoff’s lens.

However, there’s still a problem here. At many companies, if we offered that value for consideration, most people would react with “well yeah - obviously”. The value has a tradeoff in its language but that tradeoff feels like a no-brainer. We can do better.

Tradeoffs - Mark 2

Powerful values are ones that speak to a difficult balance - a tradeoff between two things that we genuinely value but sometimes are forced to choose between. Consider something like “we favor speed over inclusion”. Depending on what it means, such a value could be pretty divisive. After all, we want to go fast but at the cost of inclusion? Really?

Whether this particular value is right for your group depends on a common understanding of its terms (‘speed’ and ‘inclusion’), as well as playing out scenarios to understand its meaning in depth. The key takeaway here is that it’s a genuinely difficult tradeoff, depending on its meaning.

Inclusion is really important for moral as well as practical competitive reasons. Speed is critical for the viability of a business. Should we maximize inclusion by calling for a vote on every decision we take? Should we maximize speed by using more autocratic decision making?

When a group starts to worry about the implications of the tradeoff between two positive things, we know we’re getting close to a useful value statement.

Phrasing Is Key

For all of the above reasons, we typically recommend that values are framed using the construction popularized by the agile manifesto…

We favor X (even) over Y

By adopting this formula, a team can make sure it’s trying to encode the most important tradeoffs in its values (and other strategies). For example, we might favor…

• candor over diplomacy

• singular accountability over group responsibility

• experiments over detailed plans 

• a reliable service over new product features

Give It A Try

If you’d like to try deriving a set of values / principles using this approach, gather the relevant team together and then…

1. Use a check-in (described here for example) to get people’s brains pointed in the right direction. Start with something fun to make sure the concept is well understood. E.g. “when it comes to desserts, I prefer X even over Y”.

2. Have a 5-10 minute open discussion to draw out examples of challenging decisions from the last 6-12 months.

3. Use a solo brainstorming process to generate ideas for X-over-Y statements that would, in retrospect, have helped with some of the decisions discussed in [2].

4. Affinity-map the ideas to create a whole-group, de-duplicated list.

5. Whoever ultimately owns this list of values / principles needs to decide how to go from the list from [4] to a final, adopted list of no more than 5 things. This can be as simple as making a decision on the group's behalf, or employing dot-voting to establish the group’s preferences, or using a consent process to check for landmines.

Then have the group try to live the values / principles to the best of its ability for 1-3 months and reconvene for a retrospective to reflect on what has helped and what could be improved.

We support teams with values, principles and much more through a series of workshops inside our chartering program. Contact us to learn more.

1. Organizational Complexity:

Evaluate the complexity of your startup's structure. The more intricate the organization, the more crucial leadership training becomes. Focus on skills like change management, scalable communication, decision-making, and accountability.

2. Leadership Challenges:

If you identify challenges related to team motivation, communication, collaboration or creativity, these indicate a potential need for training in conflict management, negotiation and psychological safety.

3. Lack Of Strategic Goal Clarity:

Align manager training with your startup's ambitious goals for growth, expansion, or market penetration. Concentrate on skills such as vision setting, cascading goals, strategic planning, and prioritization to propel your team towards these objectives.

4. Performance Issues:

Address notable performance gaps by focusing on skills related to feedback and coaching. Closing these gaps organically may require additional training to enhance managerial capabilities.

5. Legal and Compliance Considerations: 

Depending on your location and industry, there might be specific managerial training you need . Topics like anti-harassment and interviewing/hiring come up frequently here. You’ll want to ensure that you are aware of and compliant with the regulations in your region.

Scaling

Recognizing that training is not a one-time fix (but, rather, an ongoing process to meet evolving needs) you might be wondering where to start. Let’s look at it from an organizational size perspective…

Early Focus: Communication-Related Skills

In the initial stages, prioritize core communication-related skills. Lay the foundations for a healthy culture through coaching, feedback, and growth-focused 1-on-1s. Neglecting these topics early on can lead to cultural debt in the long run.

Next Steps: Scalability Skills

Once communication skills are established, shift focus to skills that foster scalability. Personal scalability involves setting boundaries, prioritizing ruthlessly, and avoiding context switching. By contrast, organizational scalability is founded on clear ownership and the ability to make good, deliberate decisions quickly.

Challenges At 100-150: Relational Skills

As your team enters the 100-150 range, you’ll notice more challenges. This is the zone where your organization is approaching Dunbar’s number. At this scale, you’ll have people in the organization who may never meet each other. You’ll also have people who work together who may have never met physically. You’ll likely have teams who have only the most rudimentary understanding of each others’ work (i.e. little more than what they can glean from team names). These realities of scale can often create little conflicts here and there. At this point, a focus on building psychological safety is a smart choice to help ensure the teams continue to move quickly and creatively. You don’t want to lose the innovative spirit that got you started in the first place. You may also find that giving your leaders some conflict management training will help them to feel more confident in navigating the stormy waters associated with organizational scaling.

Beyond: Building A Learning Culture

It’s important to think of all development as a continuous program where you blend a little bit of proactive care with a healthy serving of real-time problem solving. In other words, you almost never want to wait until you have an obvious problem to give people the opportunity to grow and practice the skills they need to be the best version of themselves.

It’s also crucial to remember that learning can (and should) come from many different sources. Whilst we are very proud of our workshops and leadership program, we always encourage our clients to think about what they can achieve by treating our offerings as one component of a broader growth support strategy.

Was this post helpful in shaping your thoughts? If so, please share with your L&D/People Ops buddies…

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We love riffing on this topic so if you’d like to talk through your organization's journey, we’d be happy to offer our thoughts. Hit reply to set up a call.

We’ve produced and hosted quite a large number of these events over the past few years.

One of our co-founders was interviewed about a client’s full-company virtual retreat on the International Facilitation Association podcast. So, if you’ve got 13-ish mins to spare, you might pick up a few tips for your next retreat. However, if you’re short on time, we’ve included 3 fundamentals for you at the end of this newsletter.

More recently, we were thrilled to be invited to host a 2-day virtual leadership retreat for the managers of another client.

It was such a great experience to have so many people come together and focus on the craft of leadership; to really take the time to ask the question “what does it mean for me to the best leader I can?”.

You could learn more about our retreat service from our website but we imagine you’ll find just as much benefit in hearing from one of the participants who (unprompted by us) wrote this wonderful post about her experiences.

If you're working on your own company or leadership retreat, you might be tempted to start with where and when. However, focussing on those things too early will tend to make you pass over more fundamental concerns. With that in mind, here are some tips to get you off on the right foot...

1. Start with why: What's the overall purpose of the retreat? What do you hope will be true as a result of convening it? If it seems like its just ‘get everyone together’, try to help everyone dig a little deeper.

2. Develop your why into a set of aligned objectives: Aim to articulate 1-3 specific objectives for the retreat and build early alignment around them with senior leaders / stakeholders (the group of which should be fewer than 5 people).

3. Unify your vision and objectives with a strong theme: This might be a word or a phrase. It could be one of your existing cultural pillars or something from the company’s strategy. It’s the hook that gets everyone thinking in the same umbrella terms whenever they think about the retreat.

If you'd like the support of our experience team with your virtual retreat, we’d love to talk about your goals and aspirations. Grab a call - we’re excited to hear from you!

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For better or worse, there is one industry that is fantastically good at keeping people engaged: social media.

Each new social media platform brings with it a host of techniques that are exquisitely well tuned to capturing the attention of audiences. A lot of the time, as a species, we seem to have resigned ourselves to using these techniques merely to host dance-offs, karaoke competitions, cute babies and even cuter pets.

Great HR-tists Steal

Why not take all that tooling and knowledge and apply it internally to the things we care about in professional life? We want our teammates to focus on the things we believe will help them be successful. We want them to...

• Internalize the organization's recruiting brand and values

• Know how to request home working equipment

• Understand how to get their expenses sorted out smoothly

• Navigate their benefits effectively

• Learn about and contribute to upcoming company retreat plans

• Etc...

We also know that traditional approaches to training and information dissemination yield (at best) mediocre results. So let's pick a social media platform that's doing well and see what ideas we can borrow.

TikTok O'Clock

TikTok's rise has been meteoric and that much success doesn't happen without getting some key things right. If we care about creating engagement around valuable content, TikTok is a great place to look for inspiration on how to do it.

There are lots of pieces to the TikTok puzzle but it starts with the central concept that all of the videos are short. When you establish this as your fundamental starting point, it pushes hard on your creativity to pack sufficient value into a small space - to be clear - to be precise - to move quickly and with energy.

Here are 7 lessons we can learn from the way creators use TikTok to engage their audience...

1. Bitesize Is Good

Think about all of the recent advances in micro-learning. From the science of instructional design, we know that brains need space to take in concepts and let them breathe. People learn from nuggets of information far better than they do from waves. In particular, that type of learning is shown to be far more sticky. The goal here is to break up the content and make it episodic.

You want your teammates to know 5 key things about applying for benefits? How about breaking them into five ultra-short videos and delivering one to their inbox / feed each day.

2. Variety Keeps Us Engaged

Switching between ideas is usually a terrible idea for productivity but it turns out to be pretty useful when people are learning. The brain craves novelty so switching contexts can act as a palette cleanser and help reduce learning fatigue. Just don't combine context switching with the need to do deep work (that's a disaster every time).

You can create an energizing rhythm to your content simply by rotating the subject matter and keeping things time-boxed. For example, send out three, 30-second videos - one about how to write better emails (learning), one with a recipe for an energizing lunch (wellbeing) and one with today's company performance update (internal comms).

3. Structure For Easy Consumption

It's not unusual to find company info on wiki pages and shared drives. We're used to making information available for self-service access so that colleagues can get the information they need when it's most convenient. Often these help pages are long and full of links. However, the longer a piece of content is, the less 'effectively self-service' it is. People have to work harder to make time and mental space for it. Instead, think about how the structure and length of the content itself contributes to how easy it is to consume asynchronously.

Picture someone sitting in a meeting room waiting for the meeting to start. Or equivalently, imagine someone waiting for coffee to brew. What format would best serve their needs?

4. Video Is King

This can't be a surprising conclusion in 2021 and yet there is a huge, untapped opportunity to switch internal comms and learning content to include more short-form video content. If you believe equipment or training is a barrier, think about how effortless TikTok, YouTube and others make it to record a quick video.

A smartphone, a cheap tripod and some earphones with a built-in microphone are more than enough to get started with. Beyond that, the things we've been using throughout 2020 to improve video calls (such as ring lights) can all be helpful and inexpensive.

5. Be Scrappy

This is important not only because it allows you to move faster but also because it's a cultural marker of authenticity. Being yourself and offering content in an unpolished way is a signal that the content's value should speak for itself, without the benefit of slick production values. The two production quality things that really matter - audio and video quality - are basically non-problems with modern devices and software.

Being scrappy also allows you to be responsive. Imagine you were asked essentially the same question by 5 different people today, you could knock out a 30 second video answering that question and it'll only take you a couple of minutes. This kind of responsiveness is often missing when we are more ceremonious about the flow of information.

6. Keep Things Playful

TikTok-ers are always coming up with creative ways to invite comments and responses to their content. By introducing a quick game for watchers to play, you create an inviting, inclusive, creative atmosphere.

Try out a variation of the Getting To Know You song for new joiners. This could be a fun way for them to 'launch' themselves into the company.

7. Be Collaborative

TikTok's dueting feature allows users to create content by adding their own video to an original video, with both videos appearing side by side on screen in a square format. Similarly, its stitching feature allows users to compose original work by including other videos in their own video. Think about how one-way your learning / guidance content currently is. How much more engaging (and, perhaps relevant) might it be if teammates could endlessly remix it according to their needs, tastes and creative impulses?

Imagine you want to help everyone understand a new PTO policy that will give everyone an extra 5 days off. You could ask people to talk about what they would have done with an extra 5 days added to the end of their favorite vacation and encourage them to use props. Imagine the final videos that start with you saying "with an extra 5 days in..." and finish with a colleague saying "...Hawaii, I would have finally learned to paddleboard properly".

Next Steps

From here, it's all about diving in and trying something. Here are a few more video ideas to get your creativeness flowing...

• Recruiting: A Day In The Life Of An Engineer. Featuring short interviews about company values and culture.

• HR: How to Change Your Address or Key Concepts From Health Benefits.

• Product: How to Make A Basic Roadmap In Google Slides.

• Engineering: How To Use Our Company Code Repo.

• Learning: The Essentials of Feedback. A series of simple tips and demos.

If you get a chance to try any of these ideas out, we'd love to hear about how it went.

We offer consulting to teams who want to improve their employee experience and learning programs. Get in touch if you'd like to discuss it.

How To Play

Zip Zap Boing is a simple warm up game that works best when physically present and standing in a circle. You'll want at least 5 people and a max of around 16. If you're a large group, you can play it in multiple circles.

1. Warm-Up Clap:
   Start by having everyone stand in a circle. Pass a clap (make a clapping motion) from person to person around the circle. Once it's come back to you, reverse the direction and pass it around the other way.

2. Zip! (Passing in a circle) Now repeat the first step, but this time, each clap is accompanied by the person saying "Zip!". Please with this for 30 seconds or so.

3. Zap! (Sending across the circle) Next, we add "Zap!" This means passing a clap to anyone in the circle except for the people right next to you or the person who just sent you a clap. Imagine "zapping" the energy across the circle!

4. Choosing a new direction: If you receive a "zap" and want to "zip" next, pick a new direction (left or right) to send the clap. Play just Zip and Zap for a minute.

5. Boing! (Sending back) Finally, the trickiest move: "Boing!" This acts like a trampoline, sending the clap straight back where it came from. Instead of clapping, hold up your hands and make a wobbly "boing" noise when you receive one. Now the person who sent it your way gets to make a new choice!

Tips

• Make sure everyone is being deliberate about what they're saying and what they're doing with their hands. People often tend to think so much about the game that they put less energy into their actions and the facilitator can help a lot by nudging them to be louder and more demonstrative.

• Start slowly and pick up speed gradually. Try to find the sweet spot where everyone is right on the edge of messing-up and you'll find the energy generated by this game is very high.

Modifications

• For anyone who has mobility issues, you can play sitting down.

• For anyone who has hearing differences, you can play without modification (by watching the actions).

• For anyone who has vision challenges, you can play with a small modification where you say people's names when you send them a zip, zap or boing.

You might also be interested in our Retreats and Off-sites service, where we co-design and facilitate retreats and all-hands for a memorable, valuable experience.

A new wave of collaboration tools is challenging the traditional concept of meetings. These tools embrace asynchronous communication, allowing participants to contribute to discussions on their own time, using a mix of video, text, and voice messages.

For those of us passionate about improving meetings, this shift is exciting. We've long championed the benefits of asynchronous communication in fostering focused work and empowering individuals to contribute when they're most productive.

The Power of Asynchronous Collaboration:

Our golden rule for maximizing productivity? Carving out uninterrupted focus time. Constant interruptions, like traditional meetings, make this nearly impossible. Asynchronous tools allow team members to contribute meaningfully without disrupting each other's flow.

This approach flips the script on traditional meetings. Instead of forcing everyone to be "present" at a specific time, asynchronous tools allow discussions to unfold organically, respecting individual schedules and time zones.

Reimagining the Meeting Landscape:

However, embracing asynchronous communication also presents challenges. One concern is the potential for information overload. Tools like Slack have already shown us how easy it is for communication channels to become clogged.

Another challenge is the lack of "back pressure" inherent in synchronous meetings. When someone can't connect live, they're naturally limited in the number of discussions they can initiate. Async communication removes this barrier, potentially leading to an influx of topics and conversations that can overwhelm team members.

Building a Sustainable Async Culture:

For asynchronous communication to truly thrive, strong collaboration norms and culture are crucial. Tools can play a role by encouraging users to be selective when initiating "meetings."

Ultimately, the success of asynchronous communication hinges on a team's ability to ask key questions:

• What truly constitutes a "meeting"? How can this tool redefine our understanding of productive collaboration?

• How long should an asynchronous "meeting" last? Who decides when it's over?

• What happens when team members have different preferences for synchronous versus asynchronous communication styles?

These questions, along with a willingness to experiment and adapt, will pave the way for a more efficient and flexible way to collaborate in the modern workplace.

We invite you to consider these questions and explore the possibilities of asynchronous collaboration.

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You may also be interested in our most requested workshop - Mindful Productivity. Get in touch to learn more.

While the desire to find the perfect solution is understandable, it's crucial to prioritize clear communication and avoid unnecessary tool bloat. Many teams already possess tools that can effectively achieve their goals, as long as those tools facilitate clear communication with the target audience.

The key lies in focusing on outcomes, not just the tools themselves. Instead of asking "which tool should we use?" we should be asking "how can we achieve [desired outcome]?"

Turn your "which tool" questions into “what outcome” questions.
For inspiration, here are some great examples in that spirit from Ken Norton...

• “What tools do you recommend for roadmaps?”

  • becomes “How do you communicate what’s coming in the future to internal and external audiences?”

• “What tool do you use for product visions?”

  • becomes “How do you motivate your team around a shared future vision?”

• “What’s the best tool for tracking OKRs?”

  • becomes “How do you decide and communicate what’s important to the company and what’s not?”

• “Which do you recommend, Scrum or Kanban?”

  • becomes “How do you decide what to build and what not to build?”

• “Can you recommend a wireframing tool for sharing concepts?”

  • becomes “How do you communicate early product ideas?”

By adopting this "what outcome" approach, we can avoid getting lost in a "tooling rabbit hole" and ensure that the tools we use serve our specific needs.

We can help you improve your thinking in all kinds of ways. Reach out to learn more about coaching.

Forget the virtual escape rooms and the novelty animal cams – those activities might be fun occasionally, but they're not super-nourishing for genuine connection within your distributed team. The key lies not in ever-more-elaborate gimmicks, but in a return to basics: small focused roundtable discussions.

These group sessions should offer a unique space for connection in the remote world. Unlike company-wide happy hours or all-hands meetings, small groups usually guarantee a listening audience and the opportunity for meaningful conversation.

Think back to prehistoric times, huddled around campfires – fostering connection through shared stories and discussions is ingrained in our very nature. It just takes a digital twist in the modern era.

Sparking Authentic Conversations:

If you’re ready to unlock the power of small group discussions for your remote team, here are six tips to help you out:

1. Define The Purpose: Start by setting clear topics for the discussions. Have your team members submit topics and upvote them as themes. A few ideas to kick off are productivity in the age of dopamine hits, setting up home office space for success, memorable feedback conversations.

2. Craft Your Crew: Intentionally curate your groups. Consider mixing teams, seniority levels, and team member tenure. Aim for sizes between 3-5 members – large enough for diverse perspectives, but small enough for everyone to be seen and heard.

3. Tech Tune-Up: Before kick-off, ensure everyone is comfortable with the chosen platform and its features. And, in these intimate groups, ditch the mute button unless absolutely necessary. Unrestricted conversation flows more naturally when the mute button isn't a constant barrier.

4. Guide the Dialogue: Effective discussions thrive with boundaries. Establish ground rules to ensure a safe space (recording is a no-go!). Create a "parking lot" for off-topic ideas, with the understanding that they could be discussed in other group sessions or in a team meeting if appropriate. Remind participants that pauses and silence are valuable – talking isn't the only route to contribution.

5. Structure the Session: Clearly communicate the duration of the small group discussions and how the time could be divided up - for example, 5 minutes of framing and context. 5 minutes of generating related questions. 15 minutes of discussion. 5 minutes of wrap up with any takeaways and action items. This empowers participants to self-facilitate and share airtime effectively.

6. Choose Your Conversation Flow: There are two common structures:

   1. Sequential: Participants contribute in a specific order, aiming for everyone to have a voice.

   2. Popcorn: Anyone can jump in at any time, fostering a more organic flow.

By focusing on small discussion groups, you can move beyond the arms-race of gimmicky team-building activities and cultivate genuine connection within your remote workforce.

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If you’d like support in facilitating small group discussions or rolling them out in your organization, drop us a line.

As facilitators, we navigate a world of constant adaptation. Our engagements vary wildly, demanding both a well-stocked toolbox and the confidence to improvise. We start with eager optimism, searching for "team building activities" or "empathy exercises" online. The internet responds with a treasure trove... and a landfill. How do we sift through the noise and find activities that truly facilitate well?

The key lies in approaching workshop design with intention. Choose activities that serve the ultimate purpose of your session. Here's a powerful lens to help you make those selections: The Facilitation Trifecta.

This framework considers the trade-off between:

• Freshness injects excitement, combats routine, and opens minds.

  • Activities that are new and engaging, pushing participants outside their comfort zones and sparking creativity. Think "extreme ironing" for workshops!

• Reliability ensures a solid foundation, fostering trust and delivering consistent results.

  • Tried-and-true activities that consistently deliver results. These are your "old faithfuls" you can count on.

• Efficiency keeps the session flowing, maximizing time and engagement.

  • Activities that bridge traditional workshop phases, accomplishing multiple goals simultaneously. Imagine multi-tasking like a pro – eating pizza, taking a call, and riding a bike (all at once... maybe not literally).

Remember, the Facilitation Trifecta is your guide, not a rigid formula. Use it to curate the right blend of activities and create workshops that will resonate with your participants.

We offer facilitation coaching and consulting for your events. Get in touch to learn more.

Your Questions

How do you make quiet people feel safe to share? Those people who avoid talking and even if I ask them, they always say pass?

Jenna - Agile Scrum Master

There’s nothing quite as bad as ‘enforced participation’. Forcing quiet people to speak up against their will is something inexperienced facilitators sometimes do in a naive attempt to tick the ‘everyone contributed so I must be doing a good job’ checkbox.

When thinking about quiet people in meetings, it’s important to ask some fundamental questions…

• Are they getting value from the meeting simply by listening? I.e. who gets to define whether the meeting is valuable for them or not?

• If shyness / fear is an obstacle to contributing, what is the source of that fear?

• Are there tools missing that would allow them to feel safer in contributing (perhaps they need more thinking time or to have access to the meeting materials before the meeting)?

• Is a meeting the best medium to help them express their thinking? Would they be better off writing up their thoughts or making an audio / video recording?

• If brainstorming, is there a solo step that carves out space for individual creativity? Not everyone learns interactively.

Any simple tips to start changing old school meeting culture of large meetings and all decisions by committee?

Claire - VP of HR

What’s most interesting about this question is how the two ideas are related. An outbreak of ‘meeting bloat’ (where more and more people show up for more and more meetings) is often found in organizations that also suffer from decisions-by-committee.

When accountability is unclear (and the culture is instead one of collective responsibility), people feel like they need to understand and weigh in on every decision. Meeting ownership tends to be weak in these circumstances as conveners don’t feel accountable for (and therefore authorized to) dictate the scope, agenda and attendance of gatherings.

Transforming such a culture often involves very deep work with leaders to reset the culture back to one of clear accountability. That said, there are few simple things that can be done to help nudge things back in that direction…

• Characterize meetings of more than three people as broken if they don’t have an agenda published in advance. Broken meetings should be fixed or killed.

• Every meeting should have a meeting owner (facilitator) who keeps the meeting well-paced, on topic and ensures there is a written followup (even if they’re not the ones doing the writing). Everyone should work hard to support their role.

• If there are decisions to be made in a meeting, make it clear who’s ultimately accountable for that decision before discussion ensues. Timebox that discussion.

• Periodically ask for feedback as a meeting owner. Questions like “how might we replace this meeting with an email / doc?” are especially useful.

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If you’d like to learn more about good meeting culture and facilitation skills, check out our Fix Your Meetings program.