From the category archives:

Workshops

Organizing the Team

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
When you are a member of team, what hopes do you have for productivity? My hope is for synergy, by which I mean team productivity that is clearly superior to what the sum of the individual members’ productivity might have been working separately.
Productive teamwork — that’s the desire. But how do you organize the team [...]

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Protecting the Team

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
A vital task for a successful team is to extend membership to the right people and deny membership to the wrong people. If you add or persist with the wrong people, the team will fail at some level.
Feelings about who is excluded cut deep. Talk [...]

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Seeing the Organization Anew

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
Does your organization want help analyzing its intergroup dynamics?
Does your team want help diagnosing its own intepersonal dynamics?
Do you want help interpreting the state of your relationships with other members of the organization?
The typical org chart belies the state of the organization. It shows a hierarchical structure that appears neat and simple. But even in [...]

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Integrating Your Personal Board of Directors

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
Each person has their own personal board of directors. The board members are the parts of ourselves that are constantly interacting inside our head. If your board members constantly bicker and fight, these inner conflicts manifest themselves as dysfunctional behavior.
Pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir used a process, a Parts Party, to aid people in accepting, [...]

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Managing Yourself, Managing Meetings

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
Is your time being wasted in meetings?
For example, you join a problem solving meeting attended by the right six people. But the discussion wanders aimlessly and contributes little to the solution. You feel your time was squandered and wish you would have invested your time doing something that would have made a difference for yourself, [...]

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Change: Knowing When, Knowing How

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
Kurt Lewin said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” A gift from pioneering family therapist Virginia Satir is a good theory about how people process change.
The Satir Change Model describes the: five major stages of a change; transition between stages; effects each stage has on feelings, thinking, performance, and physiology; and interventions [...]

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Obie Fernandez’s Experience

by Steven M. Smith

Check out the blog post, What does Quality mean to you?, Obie Fernandez, CEO of Hashrocket, wrote after participating in a workshop I led for his organization.
The workshop was full of energy and fun. I hope to show portions of the video they shot of the event.
Working with Obie and Hashrocket was pure delight. Obie [...]

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Why Experiential Workshops?

by Steven M. Smith

I lead experiential workshops. Why? You will learn more from an experience than a lecture. And the learning will stick.
Experiential means you participate in simulations rather than sit in a dark room watching a slide show and listening to a lecture. A simulation speeds up time: Six minutes participating in a simulation may trigger you [...]

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Zeroing In on the Right Problem

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
If a project team is working on the wrong problem, the best solution in the world won’t help them satisfy their customer.
How can you help a project team zero in on the right problem? You cannot do it by yourself. You will need help. You will need to gather the right people. In addition, you [...]

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Selling Your Ideas to Management

by Steven M. Smith

Workshop
Do you wish you could break through and communicate better with management? You aren’t alone.
Employees do their best to share their ideas with busy managers. But they rarely receive feedback about the interaction. In this workshop, we will simulate interactions with management and provide feedback about the interaction.
Behind closed doors,managers complain that employees whine about [...]

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