Author: Suzanne Hawkes

I'm an organizational effectiveness consultant, facilitator, coach and leadership trainer based out of Vancouver, Canada, and working across Canada and the USA

Virtual Meetings for Humans

From my facilitator whiteboard to yours, here are a few principles and tips for making your virtual gatherings more effective, engaging and life-giving.  I’ve been obsessing over this for a few weeks, so have also developed a 12-page article with alot more detail; if you’re hungry for more, read on for the link.

dogs sitting in a circle, looking up at the camera.
High angle view of French bulldog and one Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy sitting in a circle, looking up at the camera on a white background.

Hello friends, it’s been a while!  After my last trips to Alabama and Toronto in March 2020,  I shoved my travelling-facilitator suitcase to the back of the closet, as COVID-19 swept the world. Since then, like many of you, I’ve found myself developing “Resting Zoom Face” after facilitating or attending literally hours of back-to-back virtual meetings. All this collective screen time can nourish collaboration and connectivity – or it can suck a person’s life force. In my quest for more of the former, I’ve been gathering tips and tricks and am excited to share them. From my facilitator whiteboard to yours, here are 10 principles and tips for making virtual gatherings more effective, engaging and life-giving.  If you’re hungry for more detailed tips, strategies and sample activities, click here for the full 12-page article.

Top 10 Principles and Tips for Virtual Meetings

  1. Make the meeting count: don’t meet if you don’t have to
  2. Keep it short: Maximum 2 hours max, with breaks
  3. Less is more – shift one-way “content” to pre-reading/pre-watching where possible
  4. Basic facilitation skills still apply: active listening, reflection, excellent questions, tracking threads, ensuring shared airtime
  5. Make it super-interactive: use breakouts, chats, polls, hands, virtual brainstorms
  6. Invite the whole person: encourage physical movement, presence, feelings, story-telling and visualizations
  7. Start strong: acknowledge locations and context, handle introductions with care, and bring participant voices in early
  8. Share documentation: consider collective online note-taking
  9. Don’t do it alone; work with a team
  10. Communicate clearly in advance and again at the start, including the link, password, time, instructions, purpose and outcomes of the meeting and the agenda

 

Online course: Building Collaborative Teams for High Impact

Building Collaborative Teams_TWHow do you build a collaborative team that can work across difference, adapt to change and unleash their creative potential? I’m thrilled to be teaching “Building Collaborative Teams” as part of Simon Fraser University’s Executive Leadership program, part of Continuing Studies. In addition to the face-to-face offering each Fall, we’re now offering it as an online course starting March 11, 2019, and running for six weeks. Learn with other senior leaders from diverse sectors and organizations.  There are still a few spaces left!  Register soon to save your spot: http://at.sfu.ca/NxSWZK

Coaching for Power Intelligence

header-web-homeOnce again, Anima Leadership in Toronto is offering an outstanding line-up of trainings this Fall.  Given my own focus on power, I’m really excited about participating in one of them next month: a 3-day seminar on “Coaching for Power Intelligence”, centered on developing the effective use of power by leaders using the new Diamond Power Index, developed by Dr. Julie Diamond.  As the Anima team describes it, “this is an essential assessment tool for anybody wanting to correct  leader’s unconscious use of power including: pulling rank, gossiping, bragging, taking credit, fostering unhealthy competition, not taking responsibility, etc. This is the Myers-Briggs of our generation.”   One option is to participate in the first 1.5 days of the seminar.  The entire three-day training covers the background and research underlying the instrument, how to administer the test, how to interpret scores and reports, how to coach and train leaders and leadership teams, as well as marketing support for using it in organizations. Successful completion of the seminar will result in certification for using the assessment

7 agreements for productive conversations during difficult times

Here’s some timely advice on working across difference. Sometimes the hardest cuts to bear are from the very people we view as being ‘on the same side’; non-profit blogger Vu Le offers some powerful medicine for prevention and healing. Source: 7 agreements for productive conversations during difficult times

Focusing: Cutting through the clutter to get more done with greater ease

autumn_trees_in_dresdenFor me, Fall always feels like a new beginning. I run faster, breath deeper, and my energy rises with the cooler air and changing colours, even as urgent client demands and exciting new work and learning opportunities start to crowd my inbox. So this is also the time of year when ideas from books and articles on productivity, personal ecology, focusing and habit formation feel especially useful.  Rick Hansen’s wonderful blog was particularly timely today. With ease and simplicity, he describes three ways to focus one’s life energy from week to week and day to day on what matters most: know your purpose; clarify your priorities; and take care of yourself. So simple! Here’s a summary, but read the whole thing, it’s worth it:

Know your purpose in life. Actually write it down. Make sure it’s short, simple, and focused on what you’re for, not what you’re against. Recommit to it daily, even moment to momen – and it can become a source of both energy and discernment.  This is a core piece of the work we also teach at the Rockwood Leadership Institute.

Clarify your priorities. Identify the big goals in your life.  They might relate to the “buckets” or categories of life you’ve identified on a coaching wheel (eg. community service; high performance at work; joyful parenting). Figure out what matters most, then rank each in order of priority. Like your purpose, a short, visible list of your key life priorities can serve as guides for continual discernment and course correction as you navigate what can feel like an avalanche of demands and interests every day.

Take care of yourself.  At Rockwood this connects well to much of our work around Personal Ecology.  Ensure you have the right nourishment – emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually – to support staying clear, focused and centered on what really matters to  you. Then you can truly be of service, and present, to others.

“Hire Slow, Fire Fast…”

“Hire slow, fire fast” may be a well-used management cliche, but it deserves repetition. Vu Le’s excellent post today lays out why many managers avoid or delay firing under-performing staff – and why it’s almost never worth it.

Leadership Essentials: Choudhury’s Deep Diversity -Overcoming Us Vs. Them

DeDeep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them is hands-down the most useful, accessible book I’ve read on strategies for achieving deep, enduring racial equity at the personal, organizational and community level. Shakil Choudhury writes with the friendly ease and accessibility of Malcolm Gladwell, mixing compelling stories with cutting edge research, ranging from neuroscience to political theory.

It is simply not possible to be an effective leader without not only emotional intelligence, but what Julie Diamond refers to as “Power Intelligence“. Choudhury sets out a clear map for getting there, and welcomes us all to take the journey.  He sets out a four-part framework (emotions; implicit bias; tribes; and power) for understanding and overcoming the devastating effects of racism and marginalization, bolstered by abundant research and his own decades of work as an international leadership trainer, teacher and consultant.

Once we have the awareness of how both unconscious bias and racism play out within ourselves and in the world (yes, racism exists, and it is everywhere; yes, all human brains are hard-wired to both see and respond to difference in ways that are unconscious and instantaneous; and yes, our emotions – not our heads – drive our actual behavior), coupled with the intention to change, Choudhury offers a set of 7 inner skills for shifting our own habits of thinking and becoming potentially powerful change-makers:

  1. Self-awareness – become aware of our own blind spots, unconscious bias, emotions, body language and body signals
  2. Mindfulness – through practice, developing our ability to witness and interrupt unhelpful habits of thinking and replace them with new habits
  3. Self-regulation – develop the inner power and skillfulness to master our own emotional responses, to return from a state of being reactive and brittle (or ‘triggered’) to one of emotional resilience
  4. Empathy – tapping into the human power of empathy to build bridges of understanding, kindness to enlarge the ‘circle of we’
  5. Self-education – actively seeking out stories, data and facts directly, blasting out of well-worn assumptions or reliance on ‘conventional wisdom’ from the dominant culture
  6. Relationship – actively enlarging that circle, personally and professionally
  7. Conflict skills – developing our skills, comfort and ease with conflict – an inevitable by-product of working across difference – so that we can lean in rather than contract or withdraw

Master these skills – and be a brilliant, compassionate and effective leader in any field – a leader that can help unleash the massive collective power and wisdom of diverse teams, organizations and communities.

‘Deep Diversity” is available at most bookstores, through the publisher, or via Amazon.

Facilitating an organizational vision: Guided Visualizations

Asian woman dreaming iStock_000015298832XSmallMany visioning processes begin with a guided visualization, where participants close their eyes and listen as they are guided by a facilitator through a series of images and questions. The key is to imagine we have arrived at a specified, fabulous point in the future – where all of our dreams have been realized. It is exactly the way we want it. It is about what we are for – not what we are against. And for most of us, our experience of being in this desired future reality is vivid and visceral. (Note: a few of us experience “visualizations” slightly differently – some of us don’t see pictures in our minds at all. Instead, we see words, or experience a set of sensations.) The experience of imagining that we have arrived at a point in the future – that we are there, right now – can unleash a whole new set of innovative, creative ideas. Click here for a list of 14 questions or elements to weave into your visualization script.

20 Questions for scoping new facilitation gigs

Facilitating a planning session for a first-time client? Avoid blindsides! Here’s a list of key questions that can help you walk in well-prepared and armed with knowledge about the real purpose, the group, the cuture, the context, and the space itself.

So you’ve been hired to facilitate a strategic planning session for a new client group or team. You want to offer maximum value, and you definitely do NOT want to get blindsided by unexpected eruptions from the Board or staff, or by your own ignorance of their culture, context or decision-making protocols. How do you best begin scoping the project?

As with all facilitation, investing in solid preparation pays off in the form of a richer, better use of precious face-to-face time. I was recently doing a little technical coaching for another facilitator, as she got ready to shepherd a campaign strategy session with a first-time client. It got me thinking about the sorts of questions I typically ask at the beginning of a new project. Some of these questions would also be useful when doing a fuller assessment at the beginning of an organizational change initiative, although that would require more robust preparation. Meanwhile, here’s a list of things to consider even for facilitating a one-off meeting.

Big Picture

  • Purpose: Why now? What is the overarching purpose of this session?
  • Outcomes: What would “wild success” look like for this session, specifically? What specific outcomes might the team be hoping for?

Process Context

  • Timing: Where does this session fit contextually – is it part of a larger planning process? At the tail end of one? Are folks exhausted from planning? Excited and eager?
  • Experience: What planning frameworks and processes has this group done in the past? What about the styles and approaches of past facilitators?
  • Attitudes: What are the attitudes folks have toward planning in general? (Flakey? Waste of time? Exciting? Overdue?)
  • Energy: How much bandwidth do folks have for this process?
  • Conflict: How is conflict handled by the group, traditionally?

Decision-Making

  • Norms: How are decisions made in this group (Consensus? Majority voting? One decision-maker?) And who makes them – Board only? Executive and Management Team only? Everyone? Is it different for certain kinds of decisions?
  • Decision-makers: Does anyone NOT in the room need to be consulted before decisions are final? This is almost always the case for coalition meetings, for example.

Participation

Scoping out the participants can be tricky, but the more I can know about who’s going to be in the room – and who isn’t – the more I can tailor the agenda design to the group’s real needs. So I might ask:

  • Participants: Who’s going to be in the room in terms of:
    • rank and power
    • institutional knowledge/history
    • relationships and influence
    • skills, including strategic ability and experience
    • Is the Board included in the session? Staff? What about key consultants or partners? What about founding directors? Why or why not?
    • What about participants’ primary leadership styles? Do they tend to be focused on details? Great at generating ideas/innovative? Tend to highlight risks/downsides? Tend to highlight possible benefits/upsides? Comfortable or even drawn to conflict? Conflict-averse?
  • Influencers: And here’s a key one: who’s NOT going to be in the room that has influence on the dynamics or the outcome from the outside?

Preparation

  • Pre-work: How much pre-work can we do in terms of sharing information through prepared briefing notes or other materials? Examples might include:
    • Having group members prepare advance briefing notes to bring everyone up to speed on key topics in advance
    • Conducting interviews and/or on-line surveys
    • Conducting pre-session scoping meetings or focus groups with smaller numbers of the team?
    • Any other research or data-gathering that I or someone on the team might need to do to make the best use of our face to face time together
  • Orientation: What do I need to know about the group’s culture and ‘language’? For example, I once needed to develop a glossary of acronyms before being able to effectively work with one science-based land use coalition, in order to keep up with flipcharting and the direction of the content. With other groups I’ve needed to memorize the spelling and pronunciation of traditional First Nation names. With some, I’ve needed to avoid terms like “energy” (“atmosphere” might be OK) or business planning concepts like “BHAG” (Big Hairy Audacious Goal).

Logistics

  • Documentation: How will decisions be documented? This is key. If no one takes notes, or if the group relies only on my short-hand flipchart notes, there’s a risk that key decisions and ideas won’t be carried forward – rendering the whole exercise a waste of time. And note-taking is a critical skill – it requires being able to listen, type and sort for key ideas at the same time; it is a powerful role, not at all a ‘junior’ one as some mistakenly assume
  • Venue: What kind of physical space will we have? Natural light? Access to outdoors? Easy access to breakout spaces? Room to stand and spread out? Ample space for posting flipcharts?
  • Room set-up: What kind of restrictions might we have in terms of room set-up? For example, seating arrangements need to account for some participants joining in as ‘disembodied beings’ by speakerphone, skype, or videoconference. Seats might also need to be adjusted if everyone needs to be able to face a single wall to view a visual presentation.
  • Location: What about the location – is it easy to access by transit or bike? Is there access to outdoors with the option of doing any work outside?
  • Food and drinks: What about food and refreshments? I strongly advise having beverages (at least tea/coffee, herbal tea and plenty of water) at the outset of the session, and for every break – that way participants can refresh themselves throughout the day. I also advise that all break snacks include healthy, high fibre finger foods: nuts, fresh fruit, raw veggies, possibly cheese or yoghurt – with the addition of carby, sugary wheat-based things like muffins as an option. Usually it’s the other way around: all starch and sugar, which pretty well guarantees a group-wide sugar crash at about 2 pm
  • Timing: Are there fixed times for lunch or breaks? I generally try to schedule breaks every 90 minutes; is that an option? Do we need extra time prior to the meeting to set up the room or will that be done by the facility? Do we need to push the start time back due to any participants commuting in that morning?
  • Equipment: What kind of equipment will be provided? Typical equipment includes: at least one flipchart pad and stand; odor-free markers (some participants are sensitive); masking tape; various sizes and colours of Post-it notes; sticky dots for “dotmocracy” exercises; an LCD projector, table, and 3-pronged extension cords, along with various Mac laptop adapters for the projector. I always have my own portable equipment for local work, but often rely on clients to provide these items when I’m working out of town.

Do you have other questions you typically ask? War stories to share about the impact of NOT asking certain questions? I’d love to hear them!

Facilitating an organizational vision: Collage

ImageSometimes words are not enough. Creative approaches such as collage can be incredibly powerful for developing compelling visions – starting with images. The words can follow. Leadership coach and facilitator Olive Dempsey offers a beautiful workshop on visioning using collage, or what she calls “visioning boards”. Sharon Livingstone, a brilliant focus group moderator based in New Hampshire, first taught me to use collage as a creative-association technique when I briefly studied with her several years ago.

The basic idea is this: provide stacks of different kinds of magazines, glue stick, scissors, and some sort of cardboard backing. Invite participants to thumb through and pick out any images that speak to them about an aspirational, fabulous future life – personal or professional or both. They may pick out words, or letters to make up words. You might add coloured pencils, watercolours, anything else to facilitate capturing a collection of images that convey a feeling AND specific outcomes or states of being. For organizational visions, this is fantastic to do in small groups or teams.

The trick to making this really work lies in the debrief afterward. Have each group present their completed collage. Ask: Why did those specific images speak to you? What’s surprising and new? What are the key themes or threads that may draw it all together? What do others see, outside of the group? What’s most resonant here for all of us?

Here’s a lovely example of several simple vision boards; these are focused on personal visions, but of course could equally apply to organizational visions.