Step 10 – Design a Right-Minded, Team-Building Workshop: 12 Steps to Create a Team That Works as One

10. Achieve First Team Building Workshop Outcomes

In Step 10 of our 12-step course in how to design a Right-Minded Team Building Workshop, you’ll learn how to:

1. Prepare yourself to facilitate first team building workshop outcomes
2. Decide how to properly close the workshop

Preparing to Facilitate Team Workshop

Do these tasks and you’ll be an effective facilitator:

• Welcome everyone when they arrive and create a positive atmosphere.
• Memorize the outcomes; make sure you understand the agenda and ground rules.
• PCA—Present, Clarify and gain Agreement on the outcomes.
• Know the agenda—by now you should almost have it memorized!
• Know how to present clear instructions for the exercises.
• Decide how to interact with all teammates, especially difficult ones.
• Before the workshop, reaffirm preventions and interventions with the leader.
• Set down the PCA ground rules, which should include a decision-making agreement.

For more about facilitation prep, look in the Resouces section of your book for 14 Characteristics of a Successful Team Building Facilitator.

A Word about Decision-Making

I strongly recommend that, at the beginning of the workshop, you explain and facilitate a short discussion and agreement about decision-making.

Here’s what you might say.

Our discussions today will result in creating work agreementsA Work Agreement is a collective teammate promise to transform non-productive, adversarial behavior into collaborative teamwork behavior. More. Ideally, you want to achieve consensus, which means that everyone will actively support your new work agreements. But if you simply can’t come to consensus, your fall-back method will be for the team leader to decide.

To summarize, the decision-making agreement is this: you will go for consensus, with your leader as the fall-back decider. Will everyone support this agreement?

Properly Close Workshop

Don’t forget to allocate enough time to properly close the workshop.

A thorough closing takes at least 30 minutes.

Your closing will go something like this:

• Review all work agreements to ensure clarity and commitment to live them.
• Agree on how the team will track progress, such as using the team performance survey.
• Discuss and agree on the next 90 day’s goals and actions.
• Agree that over the short term, the full team will review work agreements every week.
• For the remaining Punch List items, agree when the team will address them.
• List workshop positives and things to do differently in the next workshop.
• Finally, ask teammates to share any appreciations they have for others.
• And then, the leader has the last word and adjourns the workshop.

And finally, it’s not unusual for the team leader, at the end of the workshop you just facilitated to thank you for your positive contribution to their team’s success.  In the Resouces section of your book, read the article called Maria’s Effective Workshop Close and how she praised her facilitator.

In the next lesson, Step 11, we will discuss how to track team progress. You just might, as the facilitator, have some design responsibility.

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Can’t Wait? Links to All 12 Lessons

Over 2 Hours of Audio Instruction from Dan Hogan, Certified Master Facilitator.

These lessons will continue to arrive in your email.

Introduction – How to Design a Right-Minded Team Building Workshop

Step 1 – Start with the End in Mind. Leader Defines Purpose

Step 2 – Leader Meets Facilitator. Shares Purpose & Outcomes

Step 3 – What the Leader Wants May Not Be What the Team Needs. Facilitator Uncovers Root Causes

Step 4 – Facilitator Presents First Draft Team Building Plan to the Leader

Step 5 – Leader Announces Workshop and Prepares Teammates

Step 6 – Facilitator Conducts 9 or 20 Question Right-Minded Teamwork Survey

Step 7 – Facilitator Interviews All Teammates

Step 8 – Facilitator Presents Second Draft Plan to Leader

Step 9 – Leader & Facilitator Finalize Agenda and Workshop Plan

Step 10 – Achieve Workshop Outcomes

Step 11 – Track & Report Progress for the Next 90 Days

Step 12 – Leader & Facilitator Begin Designing the Second Workshop

Did you get here from a friend? This is the sixth lesson of our 12-step course, How to Design a Right-Minded Team Building Workshop.  These steps are key characteristics of effective team building. Buy your copy today. Click here.