Following is the description of a workshop I originally designed for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). I delivered the workshop over ten times to DIA top management teams as well as to teams of analysts. I am now making the workshop available to other organizations. If you are interested in reading a case study based on the work at DIA I will send it upon request or you can find it at "Truth to Power, The SOL Journal, Vol10, No.4
The Need
Organizations depend on the knowledge, ideas and observations of their employees for current and future performance. Yet there is evidence that employees too often choose silence over speaking up, leaving managers to face the difficult repercussions of a culture in which staff are reluctant to offer their ideas and thinking. Studies of work situations show that the reluctance to speak up is not a function of a person’s personality, courage, or professional discipline. It is also not a function of organizational level - the concern about speaking up is as prevalent for senior managers as it is for front line workers. Rather, the reluctance to speak up is related to the culture of the unit and to the dialogue skills of team members.
In this workshop, we teach team members how to speak up for the good of the team by focusing on their skills and concerns and we teach team leaders how to design and convene conversations that create the psychological safety, powerful focus, and openness that allow teams to tackle even the most difficult and sensitive issues.
Who Should Attend:
The workshop is designed for team members along with their team leader. Multiple teams can attend a given workshop.
- Teams who have recently been convened – as a way to start off right
- Teams who want to collaborate more effectively to accomplish their tasks
- Teams who function remotely and need to improve their joint effectiveness
Teams Will Learn To:
- Engage in productive conversations on tough issues
- Participate in team meetings in a way that creates psychological safety
- Deepen learning and strengthen relationships through a more authentic exchange of viewpoints
- Challenge ideas while preserving face for yourself and others and maintaining collaborative relationships
- Reframe a situation so that it opens creative options for action
- Provide feedback to other team members in a respectful and compelling manner.
Workshop Design:
This workshop is highly interactive. Team members become deeply immersed in the material through interactive simulations with one or two other people, providing a way for participants to test and validate concepts in an engaging, refreshing and sophisticated manner. The workshop also includes written exercises that apply key concepts to the participants’ own situations. Videotaping (on participants’ phones) in small groups is used to self-analyze the actual dialogue they produce. Brief lectures are used to present key concepts. Participants are asked to bring with them a short critical incident, unrelated to their current team, so they have authentic situations for practice, rather than role play.
Workshop Agenda - Building a Speaking Up Culture - 1
Day 1 – Learning and practicing the dialogue skills of Speaking Up
- Effectively supporting your view in team meetings
- Avoiding jumping to conclusions, your own and others’
- Asking questions about others’ positions based on genuine curiosity
- Reducing abstract language, that is easily misunderstood, by focusing on concrete examples
Day 2 – Practices for leading the culture of Speaking Up
- Building connections among members before turning to content
- Using a very different, and more effective, set of ground rules for meetings
- Designing a physical space that serves conversation
- Enabling all voices to be heard
- Encouraging differences preceding finding common ground
- Reflecting together on team effectiveness – conducting retrospects
Building a Speaking Up Culture - 2 (a follow-up workshop focused on current team issues)
- Two-day intensive workshop held 2-4 weeks after the first workshop to:
- Deepen individual skills based on critical incidences that have occurred within the team
- Practice dialogue skills and ground rules in group discussion focused on a work-based topic identified by the team
- Each participant is assigned a specific skill to practice between sessions, based on a need identified in the first workshop.
- Individual participant coaching between workshops, one hour per participant by phone. Plus 3 hours of team leader coaching and planning for the follow-up workshop by phone.
Please contact me at [email protected] to see if this workshop is a good fit for your team.