This will be a simple expansion of some ideas for how a supervisor might hold an involving and engaging meeting with their workers, one designed to improve ideas for workplace improvement and one designed to discuss issues and opportunities.
Dan Stones and I are reaching some final stages of our “Square Wheels Stupidly Simple Facilitation Course” for improving the facilitation and engagement skills of supervisors and team leaders. The formal name for this LMS is The Square Wheels Project and we hope to be fully live within a few days. You can see the overview video now at the new website.
As we work to simplify our structural elegance, a whole bunch of questions come up as to what to say and how much detail is enough and how many ideas make for too many ideas. How do we get the main ideas and tips across without “going all expansive” as we sometimes can (and might ought to do)? I sure wish there were a simple answer.
We say things like, “be sure to have enough seats” when we really ought to say to have the participants be able to write on the handouts and to be able to discuss their ideas with 4 to 5 other people, that large groups will not be creative in discussing issues and ideas. Small groups will involve and engage even the introverted people while large groups tend to hear only from the most extroverted (shouldn’t that word really be EXTRA-verted in some cases?) or those with some particular agenda they personally feel is critically important.
To develop a sense of ownership and teamwork, small group discussions are simply so much better than a classroom or auditorium kind of setting.
And the supervisor, having their regular Monday Morning Meeting (geeze, do they still DO that these days with all the pressures of time and costs and all that?) has a different set of frameworks to deal with than the professional facilitator sitting down with a group of 40 people for the first time ever.
The latter might want walk-in music and tabletop schlock (the creative little fuzzballs or pop-toys or tabletop name tents with names on them, etc.) while the former might want to have things appear to be normal (or not). Do the tables have water or is there coffee available? If the supervisor meetings do not normally have coffee, do they bring doughnuts and have a coffee urn running?
In actuality, setting up a room for a powerful facilitation program is probably a whole course in itself, not simply a few paragraphs on a page.
Paul Collins (Jordan-Webb) is an old friend of mine and involved with the Midwest Facilitators Network for dozens of years. I actually sent him a note yesterday and have not talked with him in years. But when I just googled “facilitator room setup ideas” and up popped a pdf file complete with diagrams for various options and ideas and all that which Paul copyrighted in 2004. Small world, for sure, but it simply shows that the information available about these kinds of things is very deep. So, How do Dan and I keep our ideas “elegantly simple?”
Maybe we have to do it with hot links to deeper information, and put those ideas on my blog or deeper into our LMS. I don’t know.
What I DO know is that we want The Square Wheels Project to be an absolutely effective and powerful tool for people to learn how to facilitate workplace engagement and how they can use our simple powerful Square Wheels® approach to better involve people in innovative workplace ideas.
Stay tuned!
For the FUN of It!
Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of team building games and organization improvement tools. Managing Partner of Performance Management Company since 1984, he is an experienced presenter and consultant.
Connect with Scott on Google+ – you can reach Scott at scott@squarewheels.com
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Scott’s blog on themes of People and Performance is here.
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