If you’ve read my previous articles on what collaboration strategy meetings are and how they can make your teams more effective, you might be curious about how to hold one in your own organization.
In this article, I’m going to share the most important factors to consider when planning collaboration strategy meetings. These are the things I wish leaders knew before reaching out to me, the things I’d encourage you to do if we were to work together because you know your company and your people best.
I’ll also give you some pointers and examples from my work with a number of different teams that can help you decide if collaboration strategy meetings are what your organization needs right now.
When people have a lot on their plate, the last thing they want is another meeting in their calendar or another framework that’s supposed to tell them how to do their job better. Taking even a couple of hours away from their regular tasks to talk about a soft topic like collaboration could seem like wasted time that they will have to make up for later.
The goal of collaboration strategy meetings is to get a clear picture of how people work together as a team, what issues hinder effective collaboration, and what improvements team members would like to see to be able to do their best work.
To achieve this goal, you need your people to be fully on board with the process and be willing to have conversations that could potentially feel uncomfortable at first. They also need to be able to take a step back from their daily roles and look at the state of things from a helicopter perspective.
If people are not used to doing this, it’s not an easy task. Before the meeting, your job as a leader is to help your team understand why these meetings are important and how the process will benefit them in the long run. Because if they show up to a collaboration strategy session thinking it will only be a waste of time, then they’re right – it will be a waste of time.
What not to do: Do not send out a full-day meeting invitation without any explanation and communication beforehand.
What to do: Communicate the purpose and the idea behind your collaboration strategy meeting, express your own enthusiasm, and involve your people in the creation of the agenda.
Even if a collaboration strategy session only takes half a day, I highly suggest you take your people somewhere other than the office, or if you’re working remotely and it’s not a big fuss to gather your team in one place, consider meeting in person for this one.
The space where you normally hold meetings inherently has a lot of visual cues for business-as-usual, and this makes it harder for people to switch to a different way of thinking. Being in the office also makes it more likely you’ll be disturbed when something seemingly urgent comes up, or people not involved in the meeting will ambush you all at once with their questions during a break.
These things are detrimental to working on the team because you can’t completely pause working in it. A change of scenery strengthens the intention of looking at things from a new perspective and making progress on issues that are holding back true collaboration.
Choosing your location carefully is especially important when you expect some sensitive topics to come up during the meeting, or when you would like to help people get into a certain mindset.
For example, if you know it’s fresh ideas you need, a co-working office with open spaces, big windows, and modern furniture could be a great choice to inspire creative thinking.
I recently held a collaboration strategy meeting for a team that’s been going through a very tumultuous period. They had many unanswered questions and had difficulties adjusting to the way things have changed for the whole team. For them to be able to move past this, they first needed to feel at ease, to put down the burdens of what’s happened, and feel connected to each other and the organization again. It was obvious this was not going to happen at the office. We met at a small, cozy apartment with a homey feel, and I’m convinced that this added to the effectiveness of the meeting.
What not to do: Don’t take the office space as granted or go to a soulless conference room.
What to do: Think about the environment and the experience you want to create for the team and choose the venue and the catering accordingly. If you have an external facilitator, ask for suggestions regarding the space.
This sounds obvious, I know, but hear me out.
Imagine there is someone on the team whose behavior has been putting everyone on edge lately, and you know you need to do something about it. You organize a meeting and spend a good amount of time talking about how to solve this issue… and the person in question isn’t there.
This happens more often than you think, and it’s ineffective because it stands in the way of a collaborative solution that could tackle the problem at its roots.
Around the end of last year a team invited me to facilitate just such a meeting for them. They originally thought to involve only those people who worked closely together, but the more we talked, the more it became clear who else needed to be invited. For example, they had managers on different levels of the organizational chart who were not involved in their day-to-day tasks, but set certain expectations the team needed to meet. If they wouldn’t have been there when the team defined their ways of working, it could have caused misalignment and a lot of tension in the future.
So if your product team keeps complaining about how difficult it is to work with the UX team, both of them absolutely need to be involved in finding a solution. I’m not suggesting you invite every single person to every single meeting, but make sure every perspective is always represented. For example, you could ask someone from the product team to conduct interviews with members of the UX team in advance.
And sometimes it’s not even team members, but stakeholders who need to be involved. Let’s say you have a long-standing client you are on close terms with, and you hire a new account manager. Who says you can’t ask the client to hop on a call with you to discuss how things are working out with the fresh recruit or talk about how to improve your relationship? I definitely think organizations would benefit from having collaboration-focused conversations on a regular basis, not only internally, but with their clients too.
When deciding who to involve in a collaboration strategy meeting, the key is to remember that collaboration is never a one-sided job.
What not to do: Don’t invite people without conscious planning.
What to do: Take a look at the goals of the collaboration strategy meeting and do a stakeholder mapping for the team. Pick the necessary invitees based on the above.
No two organizations or teams are the same, and even the same team will have different needs at different times in their lifecycle. Every collaboration strategy meeting should be carefully designed to take those needs into account.
Of course, there are certain elements that are always part of the process, like mapping out the issues standing in the way of smooth collaboration, or identifying external factors that are affecting the team. But the timing of when these elements come into play is crucial for success.
A remote team I worked with was at a stage where they didn’t fully understand where their challenges in collaboration were coming from, so their goal was to learn a new tool that would help them get to the root of the problem together. It was December and energies were running low, so they also wanted to celebrate all they had achieved in the past year. To honor this, we added a fun exercise to the beginning of the agenda, which included looking back at the year behind them and celebrating successes, cracking some inside jokes about the difficulties they overcame, and recognising the impact they created. If we had spent that time talking only about what wasn’t working, it would have just dragged their motivation down even further.
When deciding what to include and when in a process like this, you need to have a sense of where the team is on an emotional level. Are they in a comfortable enough place to be challenged on how they do things? Do they have the skills to give and receive such feedback? Or are they completely exhausted after a heavy blow or a period of overwork? Ask yourself what is going to support them best at the moment, and make a plan for each stage of taking them from where they are to where you want them to be.
What not to do: Don’t craft the agenda without a careful assessment of the team’s needs.
What to do: Think about the development stage of the team and people’s current feelings and needs, and define goals for the day accordingly. Work together with your facilitator in this, as your internal and their external viewpoint can complement each other nicely here.
This is related to my previous point of determining where the team is at emotionally. To see what needs to be included in a meeting, examine the behavioral patterns that come up for people when talking about certain issues.
Do you ask them one question and never-ending complaints start to flow like an open tap? Or do they close up and try to move past the topic as quickly as possible?
In the first scenario, when people’s tendency is to add yet another thing to an already enormous list of ideas or problems, the meeting needs to be designed in a way that helps the team get to a resting point and reach a conclusion. What are the top 3 issues you have to solve right now? What conversations need to happen to be able to move forward?
On the other hand, if a topic triggers a response where people lock themselves up in a narrow-minded perspective and they shut down every attempt of looking at things differently, a collaboration strategy meeting should help them to examine the reasoning behind their conclusions more deeply and open up the possibility of shifting into an alternative view of the situation. Why do they believe this is their reality? What are the external factors contributing to this belief? What are people doing that reinforce this situation? Where do they have more influence than they initially thought they did to change things?
A while ago I designed an issue mapping session as part of a series of collaboration strategy sessions with a team of founders. Even though they were together in the same room, many of the activities I asked them to do involved thinking and writing on post-its on their own. At first they didn’t understand the point: why work alone when they could be having conversations about these issues?
It wasn’t the first time I was asked this question. Taking topics that would bring about never ending conversations and putting them into a cohesive flow with a beginning and an end is an important part of being a facilitator. Sometimes techniques where we are working “together alone” can bring a much needed closure to a discussion. But this can feel uncomfortable for participants because we are so used to the inefficient ways in which we often run meetings.
So when you’re designing a session about what’s working and what’s not, try to identify which conversations will need opening up (where people’s tendency is to shut down) and where you will have to narrow down to be effective (where you never seem to get to a conclusion).
What not to do: Don’t organize a one-time teambuilding or collaboration day without any development strategy for the team.
What to do: Have a long-term team development strategy and use these collaboration days as milestones in achieving the high performance you’re aiming for.
This really depends on the kind of work your team does. Consider when it would be most beneficial for them to have conversations about how they work together, to check in to see how new frameworks are working out, or when you need to give them opportunities to figure out where collaboration is going sideways and what to do about it.
For instance, when a team starts working on a really long project, a conversation at the beginning about how they are going to flag issues, how information will flow, and how they are going to handle conflict could be super useful. After you come up with these things and kick off the project, schedule a check-in for about 3 months later to see where they could improve collaboration further. This will give the team an opportunity to stay focused not only on the project itself, but on how to make things run smoother, saving them time and resources that might have been wasted on communication issues.
Every team’s needs are unique, so it’s hard to say exactly how often you should hold collaboration strategy meetings. But in my experience, if every collaborating team would take half a day every quarter to have conversations about how they work together and see eye-to-eye on what needs to be improved, that would be immensely beneficial to the whole organization.
Collaboration strategy sessions are so effective in part because they give space for conversations that might never happen during a regular meeting, but which are critical for solving sensitive issues.
If you feel that such topics might come up for you when talking about collaboration, I highly recommend working with an experienced facilitator who is skilled in navigating difficult conversations so that they build bridges between people instead of destroying them.
Another thing you should be aware of is that for these conversations to be effective, people need to be open to having them and staying present in them even when things start to feel a bit uncomfortable. If participants get defensive, not even the best agenda in the world will help them move forward.
This is why I strongly suggest including some education on defensiveness in your first collaboration workshop. When people learn how to stay in a non-defensive, collaborative zone, they will be less likely to get unconsciously triggered and will be much more effective in problem solving. Knowing about the theory behind defensiveness and getting to know the signs of defensiveness of your team members can create a common understanding and a fertile ground for having conversations about difficult topics.
And in my opinion, once a team is able to discuss even the hard stuff, that’s when they become unstoppable.
I hope this article gave you an idea or two about what’s involved in planning effective collaboration strategy meetings and how to start thinking about facilitating one in your organization. If you would like to save time and make the design process a lot easier for yourself, don’t hesitate to reach out so we can explore together what your team needs right now!
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