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    Team Consulting

     

    I make extensive use of the Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Model in my consulting work. I use it as a model, a map, and a lexicon for teamwork. I have found that teams that make good use of this model are able to move to high performance faster and sustain it longer than those who don't use it. I am a strong believer in Action Science, Action Research and Reflective Practice. The values and principles that underlie these methodologies make team miracles possible.

    I offer teams a unique opportunity to discover what they must do to achieve high performance. Often this means taking the time to plan an off-site that is focused on both the tasks of the team and the way the team members work together to accomplish their goals.

    Before doing any of this type of work, I contract with both the team leader and all the team members. These critical meetings are vital to choosing to move to high performance. Everyone must be included, and every team member must say yes to the intervention. Choosing to have a deep team dialogue is the first step to achieving higher levels of team performance.

    After contracting, the team takes the Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Inventory,  a seventy two item instrument that identifies choice points for improvement on each of the seven stages of team development. We use the resulting team report as a jumping off point for engaging in a robust, facilitated discussion which creates a clear picture of the current reality.

    The process usually takes between one and a half to two days. Each Stage is covered thoroughly and as action and solutions are proposed and discovered, they are noted. Following this work, the team creates an Action Plan and identifies how they will monitor themselves. The team identifies a timeline, milestones, and who is responsible for each action identified.

    The good news is that I have never seen this process fail. When a team decides together what they have to do, decides how they will do it together, and how they will monitor and celebrate their progress, extraordinary performance becomes possible. There is great joy in this work and its the reason I love being a part of it all.

     

    LIFO Style Feedback


    I find it highly useful to facilitate a style feedback session with many teams. Besides being fun, highly engaging, and insightful, these sessions open up feedback across a group in a magical way. Of all the ways to do this, I find LIFO - LIFE Orientations to be the most useful for most teams. LIFOs main premise is restating the golden rule. From a LIFO perspective, “Do unto others the way they want to be done unto!” People get that statement.
    LIFO is based on the work of Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Eric Erickson. These humanistic psychologists emphasize human potential, choice, peer consulting, and looking for ways to receive rich feedback from others.
    Like other style inventories LIFO postulates four styles:

    • Supporting - Giving
    • Controlling - Taking
    • Conserving - Holding
    • Adapting Dealing

    A major difference between LIFO and other inventories and instruments is that LIFO postulates that the styles are behavioral choices and not fixed aspects of one’s personality. In essence they are  strength-based preferences. We simply play to our strengths. Understanding this leads to another brilliant aspect of LIFO. Since we continually play to our strengths, we may also over use them. Finally, LIFO suggests that our styles change under stress. All of this comes together in a powerful report based on 18 questions that clients can answer on-line. I find the report is spot on accurate. The best part is that clients respond so positively to a report based on strengths!

    I ask my clients to print their own report and bring it with them to the session. People with Supporting - Giving styles always have theirs. Those high in Conserving - Holding bring along a copy. Some times High Controlling - Taking  folks tell me to print theirs, and the High Adapting - Dealing players can charm me into printing theirs. And, just like that we can have fun sharing our styles, illustrating how we apply them at work, and describing how over-using them can get us into trouble. The others on the team have permission to say, “Yeah, I have seen you do that.


    I like to combine LIFO with the Jo-hari Window and illustrate how a little disclosure and feedback go a long way in opening up communication across a team and allowing all of us to cut each other a bit of slack!

     

    Faciltated Meetings

     

    I facilitate meetings. This has been my core business and my competitive advantage since the beginning of my consulting practice. I design every meeting I facilitate. I partner with you to make sure every attendee’s experience is unique, valuable, and memorable. I do this my designing in ways for each and everyone to make a personal contribution throughout your meeting.


    I specialize in full participation, high engagement meetings. I believe strongly in the “Wisdom of Teams” and in the “potential of group process.” I have seen over and over again throughout my career how difficult it is to beat a well designed and executed group process. I call myself a “reflective practitioner,” learning by doing , modifying, redoing, and evaluating. I also teach others how do do this work. It’s one of the fundamental skills that enable teams to achieve high performance. I call this work  Action Research Facilitation, and when I apply these techniques with you to your meeting we create enormous potential for achieving extraordinary results.


    I have found over the years that everyone wants to participate at your meeting. I work at creating new and innovative ways to help people connect, share ideas, prioritize work, and surface difficult issues in meetings. I have a number of tools and techniques at my disposal. In facilitating meetings, a big part of my job is to let the group do its own research, arrive at its own conclusions, and plan for how it moves to higher levels of performance. The biggest compliment that my clients can give is when they say, “You didn’t seem like you did all that much.” From my perspective, facilitation is all about “minimum effort for maximum effect.” If I find that I am working harder than my client, all bets are off.


    If any of this sounds appealing you, fill in the request sheet in the right hand column. When we talk, I can show you directly some of the tools and techniques we might employ together after I hear what you are planning. If you’d like a list of some of my clients, I will be happy to send you their contact information. They will be happy to share their experiences in working with me.

     

    The Action Research Facilitation Workshop

     

    Overview

    Learning how to facilitate Action Research Designs dramatically will dramatically improve your ability to aid teams in discovering how they can take actions that will move them to higher levels of performance. This workshop combines Facilitation Skills Training with a solid Action Research Foundation. It’s based on learning 12 Classic Action Research Designs for collecting, publishing, understanding, and taking action.  I guarantee that participating fully in this workshop will take your facilitation skills to a whole new level.

    Real skill Development

    The skills of collecting group data, publishing it, comprehending it and acting on it are all systematically covered in this unique workshop. Each Action Design builds on the one before it, creating a natural progression of Action Research allowing time for practice, reflection, and feedback. Participants are immersed in this work from the moment they enter the workshop. Working in pairs, participants are responsible for facilitating the classic Action Research Design from those provided in the materials. They learn the “concept of design” as it applies to teams and meetings. They also learn to read group dynamics and how to design effective interventions based on their observations. As participants become more comfortable facilitating the designs, opportunities to “design on the spot,” are available for those who want to further test their skill development. Throughout the session strong norms of support, risk taking, and honest feedback are built by the participants leading to a supportive learning laboratory. Each participant experiments with moving out of their comfort zone to and experiencing the exhilaration of learning new skills in a supportive environment.

    Team Development

    The Drexler Sibbet Team Performance Model underlies this work. As the participants practice these new skills, they progress individually, in sub teams, and as a whole team. They learn to use the Team Performance Model as a basis for future team consulting and as a backdrop for creating new, innovative Action Research Designs. An entire book of practices, based on years of conducting the High Performing Teams workshop is given to each participant. These practices, time tested, visually appealing, and proven effective make applying the skills learned at the workshop easy when the consultant returns home. Small learning sub teams contract with each other to follow-up the real application of these skills after the workshop. Often strong friendships are forged during this work. It is not uncommon for me to hear reports of work being done in local communities by the same sub-teams years after they worked together in this workshop.

    References

    Our best spokespersons for this course are those who have taken it and applied these skills in their career. Over twenty years I have worked with many remarkable people who in the application of these skills have made a real difference in their lives and those whom they serve. I have learned tremendously from teaching them and working with them some times on different occasions. If you’d like an opportunity to talk with someone who has taken this workshop and willing to share the benefits they received. Please fill in the request form on the right. I am sure you will enjoy hearing them share their stories.

     

     

    Audience Response Facilitation Workshop


    The Audience Response Facilitation Workshop is an introduction to using two powerful interactive tools: The Hive and Turning Technologies Clickers, The workshop will provide you with a working knowledge of how to use each of these tools in meetings, training workshops, and town halls. It includes a set of practical interactive exercises that will enable you to collect instant and anonymous feedback from participants and process this data in the moment. You will be able to create your own designs for collecting information within a PowerPoint presentation or using the Internet suite of tools contained in The Hive. By gaining a detailed understanding of how you operate and troubleshoot each of these unique tools, you will gain the confidence you need to facilitate audience response sessions immediately following the workshop.
    The aim of this course is to maximize your ability to apply this learning to your facilitation and training work. The workshop contains three core elements:


        Principles – for creating and applying audience response sessions for your work.
        
        Theory – a simple framework for understanding the best practices in applying Audience Response solutions in your work.
        
        Practice – experiences to help you align your thinking, understanding, and actions.
    The Audience Response Facilitation Workshop provides the awareness, the basic tools, and the practical experience to help you achieve success in building Audience Response seamlessly into your own meetings, workshops, and training sessions. Audience Response solutions can be used to address numerous organizational issues including strategy alignment, teamwork, leadership, conflict resolution, career planning, and customer service.

    Outcomes
    As a result of the workshop, participants will be able to:
    •    Design Audience Response sessions into meetings of all sizes
    •    Understand the best uses for Audience Response solutions
    •    Set up the technology easily and quickly
    •    Trouble shoot technology issues in the moment
    •    Collect data instantly and anonymously
    •    Publish group data and help the audience to understand it

    And participants report they are more:
    •    confident in applying Audience Response Solutions
    •    able to engage participants as active learners
    •    able to measure workshop results
    •    willing to experiment further with Audience Response in the moment


    Who Is It For?
    The Audience Response Facilitation Workshop is for Trainers, Facilitators, and HR leaders who want to create highly interactive sessions and workshops for employees and customers.
    Completion of this workshop includes shadow consulting from our team to insure your first solo flight into Audience Response is a successful one.


    The workshop is three days in length, followed by a remote clinic (scheduled separately) where participants share their learning and experience from actually facilitating their first Audience Response meetings.
    The Hive is an internet based suite of tools used for brainstorming, surveys, creating electronic agendas, prioritizing work, project management, sharing documents, and more. It can be used for face–to–face meetings, remote meetings, town halls, etc. The Hive is a hosted solution licensed by the client.
    Turning Technologies Clickers are instant polling devices most often used within PowerPoint Presentations for enabling instant feedback from participants.


    Each of the above solutions can stand-alone or be used together. Together they provide a unique and powerful turnkey solution to creating interactive and engaging audience response sessions.


    We are happy to answer any questions about this workshop and run a short demonstration for you of these powerful technologies. Please call Robert McNeil at (610) 469-3130 or email – rob@robertmcneil.com