Steven M. Smith & Associates, LLC » Workshops

Organizing the Team

Steven M. Smith — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:25:39 +0000

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 to achieve it?

A school of thought is epitomized by Michael Winner, a British film director, who says, “A team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.” Despite my negative reaction to this quote, Mr. Winner’s approach to teamwork has produced successful films.

Another school of thought is epitomized in the Agile Manifesto, “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” This school of thought sings to me. And I have seen it produce remarkable results in the context of software development.

Would a self-organizing team produce better films than Michael Winner and his team? I don’t know. That’s the kind of question we will explore during this workshop. Join me to learn more about context, teamwork and productivity so you can better organize your team.

Protecting the Team

Steven M. Smith — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:49:52 +0000

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 to anyone about exclusion and you will hear a personal story about a time when that person wasn’t allowed to participate in an activity that they cherished. For instance, I still remember the heartbreaking experience of being cut from my junior high school basketball team.

Intense feelings triggered by bad experiences may cause a person to form survival rules about exclusion. A typical rule is “I must never exclude anyone (because they will get hurt like I did).” If a member of a team operates with this rule, especially if that member is influential, the team will experience pain and anguish.

In this session, you will have the opportunity to be a member of a team. The team will work together to solve a series of problems. The solutions will cause each member to confront their survival rules for inclusion/exclusion. And this confrontation will provide us an opportunity to investigate these rules and work with people to transform them so they and their teams are more effective.

Seeing the Organization Anew

Steven M. Smith — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:10:26 +0000

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 the best of organizations, the relationships between people and groups are messy and complex.

We will use a four phase approach to create maps of the organization that provide not only more insight into relationships than the typical org chart, but also provide insight into the effects of organizational rules.

Our goal is to identify effective rules and relationships so they can be preserved. And identify ineffective rules and relationships so we can start transforming them.

Integrating Your Personal Board of Directors

Steven M. Smith — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 22:23:34 +0000

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, transforming and integrating their parts. With their parts no longer feuding, participants behaved more functionally.

We will use a variation of a Parts Party to convene a meeting of a participant’s personal board of directors. Each workshop participant will have a role in the process. Our goal is to reveal the state of the interactions of today’s board members and transform them to be more functional and effective.

Join me to learn how to integrate your board of directors so they add more value to your personal and professional life.

Managing Yourself, Managing Meetings

Steven M. Smith — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:49:06 +0000

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, your team and your organization.

Without shepherding, discussion may diverge rather than converge. Groups that have consistently effective discussions have a common characteristic — participants step up when needed to help lead the discussion. It’s not a single participant, such as the facilitator, who is the “leader” but rather many leaders who participate in shepherding the discussion to success.

Discussions that plunge participants into rat holes abound in meetings big and small. I’ve seen discussions go awry on trivial issues, such as what picture will hang in the lunch room and who will receive the largest amount of a minuscule bonus pool.

Join this workshop to learn about solutions to these examples and more. Whether you are a manager or an individual contributor, learn how to lead from the front or the back of the meeting room.

Change: Knowing When, Knowing How

Steven M. Smith — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 20:34:54 +0000

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 that are helpful during each stage as well as interventions that are harmful during each stage

We will go beyond an intellectual understanding of the model. You will climb inside it and experience how people feel, think, and perform during each of its stages. You will examine factors that impact the orderliness and predictability of the model. You will explore constructive interventions to nurture the change process.

Satir believed that improvement is always possible, but change is difficult. Our goal is to help you take the next step to effectively applying this change model to create better transformations for you, your team, and your organization.

This workshop will be equally valuable to managers or individual contributors, especially to those who are leaders of change efforts.

After being a participant, David Carlton posted an excellent article about his workshop experience.

Obie Fernandez’s Experience

Steven M. Smith — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:11:16 +0000

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 is a first-class thinker and executive and the people at Hashrocket are thoughtful, dedicated professionals who craft high-quality products for their customers.

I highly recommend Obie and Hashrocket.

Why Experiential Workshops?

Steven M. Smith — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:17:17 +0000

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 to have the same experiences as six months in a project. The shorter duration enables you to see your experience—what you did externally and what was happening internally. You can process your experiences and choose whether to continue making the same choices.

A thorough debrief of what happened during each workshop is part of its design. During the debrief, you will learn from me, the other participants, and—most of all—from yourself.

Zeroing In on the Right Problem

Steven M. Smith — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:34:57 +0000

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 will need to help them work together effectively.

Learn how to use a three-step method for helping stakeholders to zero-in on the problems that must be solved rather than all the problem that should or could be solved.

This workshop will be valuable to managers, project managers, software testers, and anyone interested in product development and process improvement.

Selling Your Ideas to Management

Steven M. Smith — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:22:06 +0000

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 difficult problems: They don’t clearly define the problem; they don’t state the impact of the problem in business terms; they don’t provide actionable recommendations for fixing the problem; and they don’t explain why fixing a problem is more important than fixing other problems.

Transform how you propose ideas to management so they hear your proposal and act on it rather than hear complaints.

Objectives

Simulate communication between employee and management
Hear participants’ experiences proposing ideas to management
Discover patterns for effective interaction between employee and management
Simulate making a proposal to management
Receive feedback about your proposal and resimulate making the proposal