Delivery Matters

Stories behind workshop plans,
sticky notes and markers.

Author: James Smart - page 5

12 leadership roles for effective, dynamic leaders

While leaders might appear to occupy a single position, the reality is that leaders often need to be fluid and shift leadership roles in order to effectively manage and empower their team. Sometimes, leaders take the role of a coach and help team members find opportunities to grow. On other occasions, they need to be a decision maker on an important matter or sometimes hold space for the rest of the team in the role of a facilitator. Understanding these roles, when to deploy them and how they can impact your team can help you be a more engaging and effective team leader. In this guide, we’ll explore the different leadership…

14 effective feedback techniques and methods for giving better feedback

Effective feedback is a gift. When we use feedback techniques to share how we feel, what changes we'd like to see and give appreciation or constructive criticism, we create opportunities for growth and change. But for too many teams, feedback is a loaded word that can create a fear of judgement and negativity. Use proven techniques for giving and receiving feedback to help your team feel heard, show appreciation and be honest about what needs to change. These methods below are great for holding a productive feedback session while also building the skills necessary for a continuous feedback culture. Let's dive in! Techniques for group feedback Finding space to give…

How to build a strong team culture in eight steps

Building a team culture that helps everyone in your organization feel valued and empowered to do their best work should be a priority for every organization. Without a healthy company culture, you can see toxic behavior, reduced productivity, and even lose members of the team! But how can you and your team co-create an organizational culture you can be proud of and that makes your team want to come into work every day? In this article, we’ll explore why team culture is important and discuss eight ways you can start to improve your culture today. Let's dig in! What is team culture? Team culture is a collection of values, behaviors,…

How to write a meeting agenda (and run better meetings!)

Learning how to write a meeting agenda that sets the stage for an effective and engaging gathering is an important leadership skill. Not only will it help you be organized and on time, but it will also help you and your team make the most of your time together. In this guide, we’ll explore what makes a meeting productive and guide you through the process of designing a great meeting agenda. You'll also learn practical tips you can use to improve your next meeting and get every team member engaged and involved. Ready to leave behind boring, unproductive meetings? Let's dive in! Going into a meeting without a purpose or…

33 virtual team building games (free and easy to use!)

Being remotely distributed doesn’t mean your team should be disconnected. It often falls to a facilitator or team leader to help virtual teams stay aligned and connected. Virtual team building games and online activities you can play on Zoom are a great place to start! In this list of completely free online team building games, you can engage and excite your team with ease! We've picked our favourite team building games you can run online without a need for complex set-up or buying additional software. Creating and nurturing high-performing teams in an online environment can be challenging. Not all team activities are suitable for virtual meetings and creating engaging activities…

A complete guide to co-facilitation

One facilitator can make a workshop great. Bringing a co-facilitator can lead to even better engagement, providing participants and facilitators with additional space and focus to reach their desired outcomes.But how can you make co-facilitation a valuable and effective process that justifies the additional cost? How can you be a better co-facilitator? In this guide, we’ll explore the different styles of co-facilitation, how to work with a co-facilitator effectively, and how to pitch co-facilitation to clients too! Workshops, events and training sessions are often complex to design and exhausting to run. Facilitation is a workplace super skill, and while a single facilitator can make all the difference, sometimes they need…

Stay on time while running your sessions with Time Tracker

However well you’ve planned your workshop, all facilitators know that plans can change in the moment. Activities overrun. Great topics emerge and you have to choose what to cut. All while trying to stay on schedule and finish on time. There’s a lot for facilitators to keep track of! We heard time and time again that facilitators like you wanted a simple way to stay on time while delivering their workshops. Now, you can use SessionLab to keep track of time and make changes when running your sessions! With Time Tracker, you can start tracking time in your sessions with a single click. See exactly where you are in your…

A guide to virtual facilitation (with tips for being a great virtual facilitator!)

In a world of remote working and online meetings, there has never been a greater need for effective virtual facilitation. Studies show that remote workers are happier and more productive than their office working counterparts and the benefits for companies moving to distributed workforces are great too. But what does it take to run effective online gatherings and be a great virtual facilitator? Learn how you can create engaging sessions that deliver results and connection, wherever your team is located in this guide to virtual facilitation! As teams and organizations have transitioned to working online, the need for well-designed and effectively facilitated remote sessions has risen. Unstructured or poorly run…

How to have a more productive team meeting (that staff and managers will love)

The team meeting. A necessary evil, an exercise in wasting time, or your organization’s secret weapon? At it’s best, a team meeting is a way to ensure your staff and management teams are aligned, that no obstacles stand in the way of company progress, and to create an open forum for dialogue and discussion. At their worst, team meetings can frustrate and cause more problems than they solve with many employees facing meeting overload. Can you afford to have bad meetings that could lose clients or cause friction with internal stakeholders when there is a solution? As organizations develop more dynamic ways to communicate, the tried and tested team meeting…

How to improve the learning experience with workshop transitions

Most learning experiences guide participants through different blocks of content to help achieve the desired outcome. But how can you ensure that no one gets lost along the way? Workshop transitions are a method of seamlessly and purposefully moving between content blocks and engaging learners, but how do they work? For this post, we talked to Anja Svetina Nabergoj - Lecturer at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University - about creating a more effective and engaging learning process by using purposeful transitions between workshop exercises. You'll learn what workshop transitions are and how to use them in your designs too! All workshops and courses are an opportunity for…

Asking better questions: an interview with Michael Ambjorn and Martin Gilbraith

Good facilitation can so often come down to asking the right questions at the right time. Great questions and strong communication are part of what enables a group to truly explore a problem, go deeper, and make progress. By asking the right questions and empowering others to do the same, you can help a group find the right answers. But how can we create an environment where it is safe to ask tough questions? How do we know the questions we're asking are the right ones? What are some of the methods and approaches we can use as facilitators to create a better culture of communication? To celebrate the launch…

Creating profound change: an interview with Malin Morén and Trevor Durnford

No team wants to create meaningless change. We want the changes we make to our teams and organizations to be radical and impactful. What's more, we want to collaborate effectively and ensure everyone in the group can contribute to making changes they believe in. But how can we best motivate teams who might be resistant to change? How can we help leaders and their teams come together to self-organize change and how might co-facilitation bring something special to the table? To celebrate the launch of The Power of Facilitation - a new book about how groups can use facilitation to create great results - we're speaking to the contributors to…

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