I'm excited to introduce an exclusive cohort-based course on Facilitative Leadership. This course aims to bolster emerging leaders in their quest to deepen and broaden their capacity to effect change in chaotic environments.
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Active listening is a super power, and while I don't think Marvel offers us a cinematic experience to properly honor this super power, it's application is central to supporting your team in overcoming the monumental challenges your teams and organizations are facing down. By taking time to practice this skill, leaders build trust, foster collaboration, and encourage open communication among team members, thus more effectively stewarding their teams to drive real results.
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DE&I are not just outcomes to achieve, but the process to follow for effective collaboration in this hyper connected and chaotic world.
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Let's face it, we can't go back to a time when black swans were rare birds, but we can evolve our leadership models to be more effective, nimble, and distributed in the face of increasing flux. By becoming a facilitative leader, you can help your organization thrive in these dynamic times, while creating a positive and engaging work environment.
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When people's heart rhythms are in sync, it can lead to increased feelings of empathy, compassion, and cooperation. We can use music to sync up our collective heart beats.
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Nasal breathing has many benefits for our overall health and well-being, including improved oxygenation, strengthened immune system, reduced stress, improved sleep, and better performance. Whether we are aspiring athletes, seasoned professionals or stressed out worker-bees, by incorporating nasal breathing into our daily routine (individually or collectively), we can improve our physical and mental health. With increased wellness we become more resilient, alert, insightful, creative and authentic.
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By starting meetings with breathwork, we build rapport, reduce stress and anxiety, improve focus and concentration, and promote a sense of calm.
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Research has shown that heart coherence is associated with a wide range of physical and psychological benefits, such as lower blood pressure, bolstered immune systems, and improved cognitive performance. Additionally, heart coherence has been linked to increased feelings of empathy, compassion, and cooperation, all of which are beneficial in personal and professional settings; with self and with others.
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The future is unclear. The present is challenging. To build whatever comes next after the chaos we’ve endured, we need to not only pursue generative practices, we must engage in regenerative practices. In the year ahead, I will be sharing more on the micro and macro practices that regenerate energy and efforts. I am excited to bring some of these powerful practices into my work, leading and sharing these techniques with my clients.
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We have lift off! Amazon just released the paperback edition of Generating Group Genius: Co-Creating Cultures Of Creativity, Trust & Performance!
Thank you for your support along this journey - your feedback and input has been invaluable. The paperback is available below, and the eBook version should be ready later this week.
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In the following, we explore characteristics that great facilitators embody to support groups collaborative effectively, efficiently and equitably.
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Food from different cultures tastes and looks dramatically different, yet they all tend to incorporate similar elements: fire, salt, fat, and acid. Your group convenings should be the same, using the above ingredients creatively to concoct a rich experience. A meeting in a start-up environment is going to look and feel dramatically different than a meeting of a well established environmental organization. In either case, by incorporating the basic ingredients outlined in this chapter, you can begin to ensure your organizations meeting rituals are creating the conditions by which engagement can flourish and consistent productivity be practiced.
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During the pandemic, the number of meetings increased dramatically, some estimates put the increase at over 200 percent. The result was less time for work. This may have been necessary during the transition to Work From Home (WFH) as increased coordination and communication was needed during this tectonic shift. More meetings meant less time for work, and all the changes that COVID/WFH brought meant increased workloads. Wait a minute, more meetings, less time to do the work and more work to do? No wonder so much burnout and stress occurred, resulting in the great talent migration of 2020 and beyond—where across all sectors we saw talent turnover of around 40 percent.
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Leaders who are intentional about why, how & when groups are convened hold powerful levers to shape the cultures they want to see in practice.
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If we change the structure of meetings, we can create spaces where most of these habits do not have the chance to rear their ugly heads. By closing down the space for these habits to fester in the 15% of time an organization meets, we can begin changing habits and patterns of the 85% of the time spent doing the work..
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Our time is precious, and meetings - scheduling, preparing, conducting take an enormous amount of time, energy and money. By meeting too often, for too unimportant reasons, the ritual of meetings loses power, and ends up being a practice in disengagement. Consider this:
There are over 25 Million Meetings daily in the US.
15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings.
Executives say 67% of meetings are failures.
Meetings are group rituals, and rituals inform group members what is valued, accepted, rewarded and expected of them through the symbolism, sequence and subtleties of the rituals. Thus, in professional settings, culture is often most visible in how the group convenes their meetings. By intentionally changing the rituals of our meetings, we begin to influence the trajectory of our cultural evolution.
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In professional settings, meetings tend to be held in the spaces and places where patterns of being together are modeled, reinforced, and begin to reverberate. These patterns ripple out and become embedded in the group culture. Thus, meetings can be a powerful lever for shifting how work gets done at the micro and macro levels. Meetings are where we see organizations walking their talk - animating their values through their actions. While “culture” tends to be fairly intangible, often described as “the water we are swimming in,” it is In meetings one sees an organization’s actual culture most clearly.
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Generating Group Genius is for emerging leaders in new industries, and in sectors at a crossroads. Emerging industries like Web 3, where equity-driving innovations take place at light speed, yet whose impact is inhibited by the incongruence between values and practices. Sectors such as education and ecology, where major changes are needed to address growing gaps, yet whose antiquated processes inhibit the intended impact. This book provides an entry point for leaders in traditional and emerging sectors who want to foster a healthy, nimble, thriving culture that drives and sustains world-changing work.
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Supporting groups in generating genius greater than the sum of their parts is not rocket science, it’s human science - a science far more mysterious than landing a ship on Mars. The art and science of fostering co-creative spaces for your people to collaborate authentically, and be better together, requires us to think differently about how we spend our time thinking and working in groups and organizations.
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