In every relationship — personal and professional — our behavior is guided by a set of rules, or social norms: Say “please” and “thank you;” don’t interrupt; make eye contact. The list goes on. In a professional environment, these norms are generally understood and accepted. For the most part, they go unspoken.

On a team, however, when multiple people work together to solve problems and make decisions, it’s important to discuss and agree upon team norms.

What Are Team Norms?

Team norms are a set of rules or operating principles that shape team members’ interactions. Team norms establish clear, agreed-upon behavior, how the work will get done, and what team members can expect of each other. This is a key way to build trust, which is critical for team success.

While establishing clear, agreed-upon norms for behavior is a good thing to do, setting team norms can feel like a joke in many organizations. Even if team members are well-intentioned, their day-to-day challenges can easily override norms that are unrealistic.

If you are a team leader or project manager, consider the team norms that matter to you and to the work. Understanding your own perspective will help you think about your own behavior and effective ways to guide the team. To do this, think of a time when you were part of a work team that accomplished something truly exceptional and consider these questions:

• What did leadership do to contribute to this success?
• What did fellow team members do?
• What did you do?
• How could you and your team recreate more of these positive aspects today?

Now you’re ready to hold a more formal conversation around team norms.

You’ll want to get the group talking about team norms as early as possible. Instead of scheduling an official “Team Norms Meeting,” you may want to bring up the idea organically during one of your team’s first gatherings. For example, it may make sense to discuss in tandem with creating your team charter.

10 Steps for Establishing Team Norms

Tips to Facilitate a Productive Group Conversation

Here’s an activity we share with participants in our team development programs. Following these 10 steps, you can facilitate a productive discussion with your team and agree on a set of best practices and team norms.

Step 1. Ask each member to think of the worst team they’ve served on. Any group counts — a work team, a volunteer group, a sports team —  as long as the members were dependent on each other to produce results.

Step 2. Have each team member spend 2 minutes writing down what made that experience so terrible. Direct them to be as specific as possible about their reasons.

Step 3. Ask team members to share their experiences with the whole group.

Step 4. Ask each member to think of their best team experience. As with the negative experience, each team member should spend 2 minutes writing down what made the experience so good.

Step 5. As before, encourage team members to share their experiences with the whole team.

Step 6. With these comments in mind, discuss as a group what makes for a good team experience and what makes for a bad one.

Step 7. Ask team members to suggest behaviors and team norms that would contribute to the current team’s success. Pay attention to the most relevant issues or actions that could affect the team’s biggest challenges. Be sure to keep track of suggestions on a screen or large sheet of paper that all team members can view.

Step 8. Discuss the suggestions as a group and decide as a group which ones the team can support and adhere to.

As part of this step, flag any concerns or challenges that the team thinks they may struggle with. Even if you can’t identify a solid solution, doing this keeps reality in the forefront.

For example, at CCL, most of us are on multiple research, writing, or planning teams in addition to our client work. With full days and even full weeks booked well in advance, we often struggle with the simple task of getting 5 or 6 team members together on a conference call. Simply setting team norms of “participating in team meetings” doesn’t help us overcome our scheduling issues. But in flagging this as a challenge, a team can be direct — and possibly more creative — about how its members communicate, accomplish the work, make decisions, and move forward.

Step 9. Discuss how to respond to a team member who doesn’t follow the norms. What is the mechanism for dealing with this situation? Ideally, the team members will take ownership of team norms, calling out inconsistencies and violations rather than expecting the team leader to police the process.

Step 10. Transfer the team’s list of “must-do” behaviors into a document so all team members have access to it. Your team may choose to post the list of team norms electronically or in its regular meeting room for quick reference.

Finally, as new members join your team, bring them up to speed and get their input on team norms. Make it a point to discuss what is working and what isn’t. Keep the agreed-upon team norms front-and-center, revisit them to update and add additional ones, and encourage meetings to address both the “what” and “how” of functioning as a team.

A Closing Word on Setting Team Norms

Setting team norms shouldn’t be skipped over, nor a one-time activity — in reality, it’s just a way to start talking about how the team gets the job done. It’s one of several ways to improve team performance and build a shared collective mindset, which is a key part of our team effectiveness framework for building high-performing teams to ensure productive group collaboration.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

We can partner with you to craft team development that gives team leaders the skills they need to create team norms, build rapport, overcome group challenges, maximize team performance, and achieve results.

The post 10 Steps for Establishing Team Norms appeared first on CCL.

Have you ever been assigned to a team only to find it was a waste of your time? Or been named “team leader” but had no idea where to start? Or found yourself on a team that’s floundering or falling apart, unable to work together?

If so, it’s time to get back to basics.

For teams to be successful, they need to have a basic understanding of why they exist, where they fit, and how they’ll accomplish their objectives. Here’s what a team charter is and how to create a team charter.

What Is a Team Charter?

A team charter is a document that defines how your team is going to work together, what roles each team member will play, and more. It’s one of the first activities for teams to do together when they’re formed or starting a new project, and is all about setting shared expectations for the team. By aligning early, teams can avoid issues stemming from miscommunications and misunderstandings, and quickly align on shared processes to move forward.

What Are the Components in a Team Charter?

A team charter consists of the following elements: purpose, context, goals, roles, processes, decision-making, and norms. The team can establish these components by collaborating on the questions listed below.

Team Purpose

The team purpose is the group’s mission, calling, or guiding purpose, distilled into a single sentence. Agree on 3–4 values that define your group. To help determine the team purpose, ask yourselves:

• What kind of team is this exactly? (A work team, project team, management team, coordination team?)
• Why does the team exist? What’s the team responsible for accomplishing?
• What “work” does the team do?
• What topics belong “in” this team, and what’s “out”?
• What shared values define our group?

Team Context

The team context is how the team fits into the bigger picture. Ask the following questions to determine the team context:

• Who’s the team accountable to?
• With what other groups / teams do we connect? What do they want / need from us?
• What are our differentiators? What defines and sets apart our group?
• What links exist between our group and others? How solid are those ties? How will our team interact with other groups?

Team Goals

Clarify the group’s output, tasks, or concrete contributions. Consider:

• What specific results do we expect from our team’s efforts?
• What outcomes do we want? (This may be in terms of cost, quality, speed, service, quantity, coordination, innovation, etc.)
• How can we measure those outcomes?

Team Roles

Decide on team boundaries with the following questions:

• Who’s on the team? What perspective and skills does each member bring?
• Are there special roles (e.g., leader, facilitator, etc.) on the team?
• Are there key sub-groups within the team? What do the subgroups do or require?

Team Work Processes

Nail down workflows and expectations. Determine how the team will share information, deliberate, and decide things with the following prompts:

• What processes will we use to do the team’s work? (List them out, step by step.)
• What expectations do we have around how we work and what we do?
• How often will we meet?
• Who determines and manages our agenda?
• How will we connect with our stakeholders and other sponsors of our work?

Team Decision-Making

Determine how your team makes decisions by asking these questions:

• What decisions are made within this team?
• What’s out of bounds?
• What level of decision-making responsibility do we have?
• What decision process will we use?
• How will we communicate with one another and connect to others within the organization? (Learn some communication tools your team can try out to help people become teamwork activators, rather than blockers.)

Team Norms

Outline team norms and expectations by considering:

• What do we expect of one another?
• How do we agree to handle conflict?
• What are our team norms and / or operating principles? (For help, see 10 steps for establishing team norms.)

How to Create a Team Charter

Tip 1: Hold a Meeting to Establish Your Team Charter

Ideally, you could hold an off-site retreat for your team and set aside some time for team-building and some time to establish your team charter. (This is a technique recommended in our white paper on boundary spanning leadership practices.) To try the team charter off-site, everyone on the team should head to a place out of the office and spend half the time away doing a non-work activity together (hiking, eating, etc.), and the rest of your time constructing a team charter. At the end of the day, capture the team’s identity in a fun and memorable way. Create a short video that tells your team’s story or a touchstone that represents what the group is all about.

If scheduling a team retreat is unrealistic, it’s still important to set aside a large block of time for the team to work together on creating your team charter.

Tip 2: Ensure Collaboration

During your planning session, you or another team leader should walk members through key questions, visually capturing responses on a flip chart (if you’re meeting in person) or via a shared online collaboration tool (if you’re meeting virtually).

Another way to facilitate collaboration is to rotate  note-taking roles as team members discuss the team charter components.

Tip 3: Maintain and Review the Charter

A team charter should be regularly reviewed to ensure it’s still accurate and effective. Teams change and organizations evolve, so revisiting the charter annually can keep processes, goals, and roles up-to-date.

Frequently Asked Questions About a Team Charter

What should go into a team charter?

During the initial “chartering” session, there are several important elements that should be discussed — including why the team exists; its purpose, context, roles, procedures, workflows, and norms; and how the team members will accomplish their objectives. Once all of these pieces are defined and captured, they should be translated into a shared, written document, or official team charter.

How long should a team charter be?

Team charters are typically 1–4 pages. They need to be detailed and cover the components listed above, but also not too long so that the team can read and refer to them easily.

What are the benefits of creating a team charter?

Creating a team charter has many benefits, including clear roles and responsibilities, shared purpose and goals, improved communication, and greater accountability.

How do I make a team charter?

Team charters are usually created in a group setting, with the team members involved in the creation process. During the session, team leaders facilitate discussions and pose key questions that help define several critical elements about the team. This initial “chartering” discussion or brainstorm should be recorded; then, a designated team member or subgroup can work to adapt and combine your team’s agreements on the above questions into a single, formal document. Once completed, the team charter should be shared with team members and displayed in appropriate areas for future reference — such as in a shared physical workspace, as well as posted electronically for easy access.

What is the goal of a team charter?

The goal of a team charter, or work charter, is to define and document your team’s overall objectives, resources, and constraints. It can be a helpful tool when establishing a new team, but it can also be leveraged to re-launch or reinvigorate an existing team that’s been operating for awhile.

Once the team charter has been created, you can periodically refer back to the document to help ensure your team is meeting your agreed-upon objectives. As a group, revisit it from time to time and consider the following questions:

• Does our work reflect our stated purpose? Have we gotten distracted, or are we staying true to our purpose?
• Are we meeting the needs of our team? Are we meeting stakeholders’ expectations? Are we coordinating well with others who rely on our work?
• Are our roles clearly defined and executed? Are we making good use of a variety of perspectives?
• Are our work processes effective? Are we sticking to what we agreed to in our charter? Why not? What new processes might help us be more effective?
• Are decisions being made efficiently and effectively? Are we including the right amount of input? What surprises or frustrations have we encountered? How might we do it differently?
• How well is our communication plan working? Are we sticking to it? What methods are working particularly well? What are we not doing so well?
• Are we living within the norms we created? Are they helping us achieve our objectives? What norms do we want to add? Delete? How can we be better in the future?
• As we reach our intended goals, do the measured results of our work demonstrate that? Is anything getting in the way of us being successful?

Always update your team charter if team members come to an agreement about necessary modifications or new additions. That way, the team charter will continue to serve as a resource for you, your team, and your organization in the weeks, months, and years to come.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Equip your team leaders with what they need to know, including how to create a team charter, so they’re able to lead co-located, hybrid, and remote teams more effectively. Partner with us for team development to foster greater team collaboration, rapport, and innovation.

The post How to Create a Team Charter appeared first on CCL.

Every team member has an official role tied to task and expertise. It’s why you’re on the team. But you also play informal roles that either block or propel the team.

Whether you’re a team leader or a contributor, it’s important to understand how your behavior can help or hurt team effectiveness.

Are You a Teamwork Blocker?

A “blocker” team member tends to have a negative impact on the entire team, weighing everybody down and standing in the way of productivity. Use the checklist below to help you think through the negative roles a teamwork blocker might be playing on your team:

• The “aggressor” takes issue with people and perspectives, bulldozes, and can be overly critical.
• The “recognition seeker” uses the group to boost their ego.
• The “self-confessor” unloads personal woes and uses the group for sympathy.
• The “fun seeker” is uninvolved in the task and creates tempting distractions.
• The “manipulator” uses relationships to guide the group in a direction.
• The “disengager” tends to check out of meetings, especially during conflict.
• The “bouncer” moves the group in alternative directions by continually raising issues.
• The “interrupter” disrupts others when they are making a point.
• The “filibuster-er” stops others from participating by taking up the conversational space.
• The “pack mule” shoulders their work and everyone else’s.
• The “agree-er” goes along with the team to avoid conflict or tension.

If you’ve checked several blocker boxes, or have one of these blockers on your team, don’t panic. Being a teamwork blocker isn’t a permanent situation.

Perhaps the blocker is halting progress on one team, but playing a number of positive roles on other teams. If so, take a closer look at what is going on. Is it the assignment? A specific person? Prior history? What’s going on and what could you change?

Maybe you realize that you routinely play a blocker role. Chances are, it’s a role that worked for you in some way before, but is causing problems now. Think about how being the “fun seeker” or the “pack mule,” for example, might be limiting you and limiting your team.

Or maybe you are a teamwork blocker because of circumstances. Maybe another project is demanding too much of your time and attention. If you are otherwise overloaded, you may be slowing down team progress by disengaging or agreeing with everything just to make life easy in the short term. Take a step back and see if you can try another approach.

If you’re leading a team with a teamwork blocker, have a conversation with that person. Use the Situation – Behavior – Impact (SBI) model to share some feedback with the team member, a proven way to reduce the anxiety of delivering feedback and also reduce the defensiveness of the recipient. The SBI feedback model is simple and direct: You capture and clarify the Situation, describe the specific Behaviors observed, and explain the Impact that the person’s behavior had on you.

For example, “Erika, during your presentation this morning, you spoke clearly and shared important information. I felt informed, and the team was able to develop a plan based on the information.”

SBI is a way to give positive and negative feedback, both of which are needed for teams to function well. Learn more about using the SBI model to inquire about intent.

Or Are You a Teamwork Activator?

An “activator” team member moves the team in a positive direction. You activate, steer, energize, and keep team processes on track. What positive activator roles do you play on your team? Who else is a teamwork activator?

• The “observer” keeps an eye on the group dynamics and reports to the group at the end.
• The “cheerleader” leads the team with support and appreciation discussions.
• The “strategist” helps to create a road map for the team to achieve its goals.
• The “brainstormer” facilitates the generation of ideas.
• The “taskmaster” makes sure the deliverables are achieved.
• The “timekeeper” watches the clock.
• The “facilitator” leads the group through discussions.
• The “conflict resolver” facilitates disagreements and ensures all are heard.
• The “devil’s advocate” pushes the group to consider alternative approaches.
• The “truth-teller” speaks their mind even when unpopular.
• The “dreamer” pulls members back to the dream in times of uncertainty or crisis.

Choose the Role You Want to Play on Your Team

Being aware of your habitual behaviors allows you to choose the way you interact with your team. Pull back on your teamwork blocker roles and take on more positive ones.

While understanding your own patterns and behaviors is a starting point, team effectiveness hinges on everyone developing activator skills and limiting blocker behavior.

Participants in our team development programs are encouraged to bring up the blocker/activator discussion with their teams. We suggest handing the list out to each member in a team meeting and inviting everyone to identify the activator and blocker roles they typically play.

This process usually leads to a rich discussion about team members’ strengths and challenges. It may be an intense conversation, or it could take a more lighthearted tone. Regardless, identifying these roles will open the door for team members to gently confront one another when their blocker roles emerge.

And if you’re looking for ways to improve team communication and stop blocks to teamwork, we have some suggestions in addition to using the SBI feedback model.

Communications Tools to Stop Teamwork Blockers

If everyone is clear on the team norms and you’ve already created a team charter, then you may just need some new communications tools in your teamwork toolkit. Here are 2 of our favorite tools to help stop teamwork blockers and move things forward.

Try “Fist to 5” for Group Decision-Making

Fist to 5 is a quick and very effective way to check in for understanding, evaluate effectiveness, and gauge the climate. It’s a voting tool, a visual check-in, often used for decision-making. It allows everybody to weigh in, voice smaller objections, and reach consensus. It’s helpful anytime you need to get quick feedback or to help your team keep moving.

Here’s how it works for decision-making:

The person with a proposal clarifies the decision the group needs to make and asks everyone to show their level of support. For example: Do we agree on the idea of hiring a consultant to help us with this problem?

Give everyone a half-minute to reflect; then ask them to vote using their fingers on a scale of 0–5, on a count of 3. A no vote — a fist — is a way to signal 0 and block consensus, while a full, open hand with 5 fingers suggests total support:

• Fist: I need to talk more on the proposal and require changes for it to pass.
• 1 Finger: I still need to discuss certain issues and suggest changes that should be made.
• 2 Fingers: I am more comfortable with the proposal but would like to discuss some minor issues.
• 3 Fingers: I’m not in total agreement but feel comfortable to let this decision or proposal pass without further discussion.
• 4 Fingers: I think it’s a good idea/decision and will work for it.
• 5 Fingers: It’s a great idea, and I will be one of the leaders in implementing it.

Everyone can take a turn to express their thinking. If anyone holds up fewer than 3 fingers, they’re asked to state their objections or misgivings, and the team should address their concerns.

Teams continue the Fist to 5 process until they achieve consensus (a minimum of 3 fingers or higher) or determine they will come back to the issue.

For Better Team Conversations, “Zoom Out”

When your team is stuck in an unproductive conversation, facilitate a perspective shift.

Team members should stop the conversation and move away from the immediate topic. “Zoom out” to a broader context and individually reflect on the following questions:

• How am I feeling right now? What’s the mood of the group?
• What’s going right, right now?
• What’s the elephant in the room that is not being acknowledged?
• What needs to happen differently to move forward?

After a bit of time, invite team members to talk about their reflections. The discussion will bring out new ways to move ahead constructively.

This reflection process is a simple, practical, and useful way to help solve the problem of the dreaded team meeting that goes nowhere, and it helps people become activators, rather than teamwork blockers.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

We can help team leaders, intact teams, and senior leadership teams maximize performance, manage teamwork blockers, and achieve results with our team development offerings. We can partner with you to create custom team development solutions.

The post Teamwork: How to Be an Activator, Not a Blocker appeared first on CCL.

The term “mediated dialogue” is probably not in your vocabulary — much less in your toolkit for leading change. But if you’re struggling to become a successful change leader and the same old change management tactics are falling short, read on.

Most ordinary conversations — and typical organizational change management practices — are driven by explicit or implicit advocacy for a particular point of view, with very little questioning or reflection.

Dialogue is a kind of conversation that shifts the balance to inquiry. Rather than driving an opinion, dialogue involves collaborative inquiry into opinions and underlying assumptions. In this way, the group gains deeper understanding, greater clarity, more options, and multiple right answers.

At CCL, we’ve been facilitating dialogue in various ways for several decades, refining our approach and creating new tools to make conversations — especially difficult ones — more useful, authentic, and, often, developmental.

We believe that better culture starts with better conversations, and mediated dialogue is one unusual and effective approach we developed to help facilitate better dialogue.

Mediated dialogue uses interesting, tangible images or objects to spark reflective, insightful conversation. It’s the process of “putting something in the middle” — specifically something visual, like pictures, postcards, photos, even small mementos — and allowing them to lead with pictures and enabling conversations to shift from familiar and predictable to revealing and powerful.

Mediated dialogue helps people identify opportunities and obstacles, address unspoken realities, surface concerns, and create a shared understanding that will guide the path forward. The use of visuals and images can enhance and focus (“mediate”) otherwise difficult conversations — and change the way we talk about change.

This may seem theoretical, vague, or touchy-feely, but we’ve seen the process work (almost without fail) with people across industries, cultures, ages, and experience. Even the most linear, logical, and pragmatic personalities (think military generals, engineers, scientists, and Type-A professionals) appreciate mediated dialogue as a way to cut to the heart of issues and uncover multiple right answers to daunting questions.

In the context of leading change, mediated dialogue proves particularly valuable in what we call the “Discovery” stage of leading complex change, in building an understanding of the context. Mediated dialogue allows people to ask and answer questions such as:

• What’s the need for change?
• Will it be evolutionary or revolutionary in nature?
• What’s the scope? What’s the urgency?
• What communities, stakeholder groups, and change agents need to be considered?
• Who’s leading the change?
• What’s the change strategy?
• What’s the level of alignment and commitment?
• How do I deal with change?
• What is my role as a change leader?

Why Mediated Dialogue Works

4 Reasons to Lead With Pictures

Getting at these collective and individual questions isn’t easy or automatic for most people. But mediated dialogue promotes honest discussion, generates buy-in, and enables creative, productive conversations. The reason it works hinges on several factors, including:

1. Mediated dialogue reduces anxiety and defensiveness.

Mediated dialogue can help lower personal defenses (such as avoiding embarrassment or fear of exposure). It also helps counter the organizational-level defenses (i.e., maintain the status quo, don’t question the hierarchy, etc.) and promote psychological safety. By engaging a group with “something in the middle,” the undiscussable can become more discussable.

2. Mediated dialogue overcomes the awkwardness of “empty space.”

People are given a focal point and a process that jump-starts conversation. The typical approach to facilitating dialogue involves creating “empty space” for conversation. But in practice, that can easily become intimidating: People struggle to come up with the “right” thing to say, or the most vocal or authoritative person fills the void and directs the discussion.

3. Mediated dialogue is user-friendly.

Conducting a mediated dialogue session is fairly simple. For those participating in the conversation, the process is easy to grasp, and going through the process comes naturally. Almost everyone becomes engaged when they realize the images are the means to an insightful conversation about a topic that matters to them.

4. Mediated dialogue initiates collaboration.

Images in the middle help people collaborate across all kinds of boundaries, including differences in spoken language and national culture. It helps people connect across organizations and societal stakeholders, hierarchies and functions, expertise and experience, silos, and partnerships in order to initiate collaborative, interdependent work processes across the value chain.

Ready to try it at your organization? To get started using mediated dialogue, introduce an issue or question to the group, and allow group members time to jot down their initial thoughts and reactions. Then, without speaking, have everyone browse through the images you provide and choose the one that depicts the problem or issue for them.

Instruct everyone to pick a card for each question. The discussion begins with group members taking turns sharing what they see in their image and why they chose it. The conversation then shifts to finding commonalities and differences, sharing insights, and offering ideas. Then, turn those ideas into creative conversations.

Read our white paper to learn more about how to use mediated dialogue to facilitate conversations at your organization.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Want to try mediated dialogue to facilitate more powerful, productive conversations about change at your organization? Check out our Visual Explorer® cards — a set of more than 200 photographs and art prints.

The post Talking Change? Try “Mediated Dialogue” & Put Pictures in the Middle appeared first on CCL.

What do military generals, engineers, scientists, and Type-A professionals all have in common? A reputation for being serious-minded, taking a no-nonsense approach to their work, and an affinity for visual thinking.

Visual thinking uses pictures and images to evoke ideas, thoughts, and feelings, and to foster powerful conversations.

At CCL, we are firm believers in visual thinking processes, and we use them often with our faculty, facilitators, and clients.

But we’ve found that in a typical workplace, the most verbal people, or the person “in charge,” often dominates discussions.

Using pictures can help change the conversation, shifting typical patterns, diffusing tension, and engaging everyone — because getting people to talk isn’t hard, but getting people to talk in-depth with reflection, honesty, and clarity can be. There must be an environment of psychological safety for truly candid conversations.

If you’re facilitating a group discussion, workshop, or leadership training, and want to help move the discussion from the current challenge to a better future, our practice of “putting something in the middle” can be helpful. Also called mediated dialogue, it’s an effective way of leading people through change and facilitating important, typically difficult conversations in a way that’s safe, creative, and very effective.

When we first started with this practice, we were concerned that using pictures to facilitate conversations might be viewed as frivolous or a waste of time by highly analytical or no-nonsense people.

But after using pictures to facilitate leadership discussions with people from all walks of life and around the world, we’ve actually found the opposite: this practice is generally understood by even the most linear, logical, and pragmatic personalities as an effective way to cut to the heart of an issue and uncover multiple solutions. It can be the starting point for talking about complex or difficult things, enabling understanding from a variety of perspectives.

How can you jump-start visual thinking in your own team or group? Here’s how to use pictures to lead effective conversations in group discussions or at leadership trainings or workshops.

How to Facilitate Effective Leadership Conversations Using Pictures

A Step-by-Step Guide

First, you’ll need a selection of images.

Focus less on having the “right” images, and more on having a wide range of choices. You can use our Visual Explorer® card set if you like — a pack of diverse and interesting images and a guide for how to use them as a facilitation tool — or simply postcards, photos, clippings from magazines, or images from other sources.

When facilitating a discussion in person, the leadership pictures should be arranged around a room, on tables, or in decks of “cards” to sort through. For virtual discussions, you can send out a link to a shared set of images that people can scroll through.

Then, ask a “framing” question.

Decide in advance how to frame the discussion. Think about the challenge, situation, or complex idea you need to address in your team or organization, and consider the context of the session. You’ll want to frame the topic for participants in terms of a question, or a pair of questions, such as:

• What are our strengths? What are our weaknesses?
• What do you see as our biggest challenge? What will it look like to solve this challenge?
• What does leadership look like now in our organization? What will leadership need to look like for greater success?
• What behaviors will help drive the business strategy?
• What’s getting in our way?
• What stands out in the data we just reviewed?
• What are the possibilities we see in this situation?
• How do you feel about this at a gut level?
• What are we missing, neglecting, or underestimating?
• Where have we been? Where are we going? To what do we aspire?
• What problem are we trying to solve? What will our organization look like if we solve it?
• What if one of our key assumptions is wrong, or backward?
• How would we do this if we had unlimited resources? If we had no resources?

Next, write about it.

Ask participants to take a few minutes to think about the question. Invite them to reflect on their perspective on the issue or challenge. They can jot down some initial thoughts and reactions — bullet points, journaling, or whatever works.

Then, turn to the images.

Without speaking (though some background music can be nice), have everyone browse through the available images and choose the one that depicts the problem or issue for them. Ask people to choose a picture that reflects or relates to what they’re thinking and feeling about the question or challenge. If you’re doing a comparison or paired question, instruct everyone to pick a leadership picture for each question.

You may want to offer a guideline like, “Pick as many cards as you like, and as few as you need.” Let them know they don’t need to overthink it; if they’re drawn to an image and aren’t sure why, that’s okay. They should just go with it.

Tell them to look closely.

Once they’ve selected an image, ask them to pay close attention to the details. What’s there? Ask them to write down as much as they can to describe the leadership picture and connect it to the framing question.

Talk about it.

The discussion begins with group members taking turns sharing what they see in their picture and why they chose it. People can do this in pairs with a partner, or with the larger team or group. Ask someone to describe the image they selected. First, they should explain what they see, then talk about why they chose that picture. At first, the others need simply to listen. After a few minutes, ask others what they see in the picture. Each person will then repeat the process.

Consider: So What? and What If?

The conversation then shifts to finding commonalities and differences, sharing insights, and offering ideas. The group can discuss questions like:

• What did you learn from the images and the process of talking about them?
• How was it helpful?
• What was surprising?
• What was commonly shared?
• What were the key differences?
• What if you used these insights as you addressed the problem or challenge?
• What will you do now?

We expect you’ll find this process of using pictures in trainings or workshops to give people tools to show effective leadership and hold more candid conversations very helpful. We’ve used this facilitation method with CEOs and senior leadership teams, generals and State Department officials, nonprofit leaders and entrepreneurs, young people and educators, and consistently find that the practice of “putting something in the middle” is a way of facilitating important, typically difficult conversations in a way that’s safe, creative, and very effective.

Ready to Take the Next Step?

Want to try using leadership training pictures to facilitate more powerful, productive conversations at your organization? Check out our world-class Facilitation Tools, including our widely used Visual Explorer® — a set of more than 200 photographs and art prints.

The post Can You Lead With Pictures? Facilitating Creative Conversations appeared first on CCL.

Women’s Professional Forum (WPF) of Guilford County, NC, is a membership organization providing support to professional women. In 1984 a foundation was created by WPF members to fund scholarships to help women and girls achieve their leadership and professional dreams. The Women’s Professional Forum Foundation (WPFF) helps women and girls through philanthropy and other important development initiatives available through community nonprofits.

After more than 2 decades of successful grant-making, the Women’s Professional Forum Foundation decided to explore innovative ways to broaden its impact. What if the organizations in our community currently serving girls and young women had a professionally designed curriculum and toolkit they could use free of charge? After dozens of interviews with community nonprofits, the Forum decided to create a new leadership learning curriculum that would teach fundamental leadership skills to girls and elevate the already important work being done to serve girls community-wide.

Solution & Results

After a thorough competitive analysis, WPF members chose us as their partner in the design of the new curriculum. “They determined we had the rigor, the research, and the commitment they were looking for,” said Janet Carlson, Products & Tools Developer.

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We also had significant experience in creating leadership solutions for young girls. Our associates had designed and integrated leadership content into the social justice curriculum at Mount Mary University in Wisconsin, a summer Leadership Development Institute for girls in North Carolina, and multiple leadership and debate clubs for young women in Ethiopia.

We collaborated with the Forum and with a consortium of local nonprofits to create Girls Leadership Edge — an evidence-based leadership skills development curriculum for girls ages 13 to 15.

The program includes 5, 2-hour training modules that focus on self-awareness, defining purpose, communicating effectively, appreciating differences, and resolving conflict. A facilitator’s toolkit, student workbook, innovative CCL Visual Explorer® card decks, and experiential activities bring the program to life — helping young girls develop courage, compassion, and confidence.

Within a year of the program’s launch, we had trained 18 facilitators from community nonprofits, who then delivered Girls Leadership Edge to nearly 130 girls. And feedback indicates the program is making a significant impact.

Facilitators unanimously praise the program and the role it’s playing in helping young girls become more self-assured. The girls themselves echo that theme in their description of what Girls Leadership Edge has taught them.

A few examples:

• Anyone can be a leader, and I am smart.
• I am more confident.
• I learned you should be a constant learner.
• I learned to stop putting myself down.
• I learned to let things go that aren’t so important and to hold onto things that are very important.
• I learned how to work better and solve a conflict in a mature way.
• I learned that I can be a leader by being me.
• I learned the true definition of empathy and different ways to show empathy and compassion.

Participants Say

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