Author Alison Coward shares insights on Workshop Culture, as she introduces her five-pillar framework for building strong team culture. Hear how teams can infuse their everyday collaboration with the energy and effectiveness of workshops. By adopting a “workshop mindset,” teams can transform meetings, improve communication, and achieve stronger alignment around shared values, ultimately avoiding common pitfalls that lead to unproductive habits.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
02:25 … What is Workshop Culture?
03:19 … Alison’s Inspiration for Workshop Culture
05:28 … Factors Behind Workshop Culture
06:51 … A Workshop Mindset
08:20 … Capability, Capacity, Behavior Change
13:04 … The Five-Pillar Framework
14:11 … Align
14:27 … Cohesion
14:46 … Communication
15:03 … Design
15:30 … Continuous Improvement
16:13 … Aligning Values
18:25 … Team Values and Company Values
19:48 … Awareness of Working Styles
22:31 … Transform Your Meetings
24:37 … Ren Love’s Projects from the Past
27:00 … Resistance to Change
29:59 … Workshop Facilitation Skills
33:37 … Successful Workshop Culture Adoptees
36:36 … Facilitate Team Involvement
37:55 … Facilitation Mistakes
40:07 … A Remote or Hybrid Team Implementation
42:21 … The Workshop Culture Book
43:47 … Find Out More
44:37 … Closing
Intro
ALISON COWARD: It’s not just about changing the way that you meet. And it’s not just about implementing facilitation. It is a mindset. And one aspect of this is thinking about the way that you work together as an ongoing experiment. And it’s okay to try things and for them not to work because that’s learning. And you have a conversation around that. And then you think, okay, so how do we need to tweak this so that it can work?
WENDY GROUNDS: Hello, and welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers, and anyone else out there trying to keep their projects on track. We’re thrilled to have you with us today. Don’t forget you can earn free professional development units from PMI just by listening to this episode. If you’re tuning in from your morning commute, squeezing us in between meetings, or just here for some inspiration, we’ve got you covered.
What we’re doing today is we’re talking to Alison Coward. We’re so excited to welcome her. She is the founder of Bracket, which is a consultancy dedicated to helping organizations cultivate high-performing teams. She has over 20 years of experience working in and leading creative teams.
Alison is a seasoned workshop facilitator, consultant, and speaker whose expertise spans industries. She’s the author of “Workshop Culture: A Guide to Building Teams that Thrive.” She’s worked with organizations like Google, Meta, Wellcome; and she regularly shares her insights as a speaker at conferences across the UK, Europe, and the U.S.
BILL YATES: You know, Wendy, with so much experience and facilitation, Alison comes to us with just a wealth of information. It’s so good. And the thing that really resonates with me is just the premise of this. It’s like, I have been on the receiving side of excellent workshops before. And you walk out of that workshop, and you’re so energized, and you think, “Man, we could take on the world. You know, I feel so pumped about this.”
But then what do you do with it after that; right? So, the genius behind this is Alison says, “Okay, as teams we could embrace this workshop culture and really change how we all work together and what we get done.” So that same idea of the energy that we feel from a workshop or a retreat, bringing that into weekly life with a project team, that gets me excited. Can’t wait to hear what she has to say.
WENDY GROUNDS: Hi, Alison. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you for joining us.
ALISON COWARD: Thank you so much for having me.
What is Workshop Culture?
WENDY GROUNDS: We are excited to get into this topic. We’re talking about teams and team cultures and team building, and you talk about workshop culture. It’s something new. And for some of our audience who are not really sure what you mean by a workshop culture, can you explain it?
ALISON COWARD: Yes. So, the definition that I have for workshop culture is a team culture that uses the principles and practices of workshops and facilitation to build high-performing team cultures that have creativity, collaboration, and productivity. And so, breaking that down, it essentially means what is it that happens in a workshop, a collaborative workshop, well-facilitated workshop that makes them so effective, both from a facilitator point of view and both from what the participants are doing; and how can we benefit from that every single day, not just in these special one-off events that we run kind of workshops through.
Alison’s Inspiration for Workshop Culture
BILL YATES: That’s fantastic. I think many of our listeners have been to workshops in the past that have been inspiring, motivating. They walk out of it and go, “Oh my gosh, we got so much done so quickly. I felt like everybody was fully engaged. There was high energy in the room.” So, I think the idea of translating that, taking that and making that a part of our team culture is fantastic. So, what inspired you? How did you come about this?
ALISON COWARD: Exactly that. You know, it was literally, I had been facilitating a lot of workshops, and I love facilitation. I am passionate about collaboration, and I fell into facilitation. And almost for me it was like magic. It was like, what is this thing that is happening where these teams are working really great together; where, you know, they’re collaborative, they’re being more creative together, they’re really engaged, and as well as being very passionate about that format.
What was happening was I was getting to the end of those workshops, particularly when teams had brought me in as an external facilitator, getting to the end of those workshops, having that feeling. And then there was always two sides to that feeling for me. There was that, yes, this day has been brilliant, but what is going to happen tomorrow,
BILL YATES: Yeah, right.
ALISON COWARD: when they go back to their desks?
BILL YATES: Yes.
ALISON COWARD: And knowing that it’s, you know, it’s really, really difficult to keep that end-of-workshop feeling going, but that is actually what we need. We talk about the need for collaboration all the time in our modern organizations. We can’t get work done without collaborating. It is just the way that we work.
But yet we still really struggle with it. And so, for me it was almost seeing that disconnect between observing that it is possible for teams to work in that way, but yet seeing that it was very, very difficult for them to be able to do it in the day to day, and trying to find a way of continuing that end-of-workshop feeling.
And you know, it’s not about running workshops every single day. It’s not possible. We know how intense they can be, both for the participants and the facilitator. So, we can’t work like that day in, day out. But there are still things we can learn from that format.
Factors Behind Workshop Culture
WENDY GROUNDS: What are the things that make up that workshop culture? What are some of the factors to create that?
ALISON COWARD: All of those things, the collaboration, the energy, the team feeling connected, engaged, having great ideas. You know, we can talk about things like psychological safety, as well. What is it when we’re in a workshop that a facilitator does that enables people to feel like they can open up a little bit more and share more, they’re communicating more effectively, and they’re making progress?
You know, like you said, when the workshop is run well, when I’ve been a facilitator for teams, and they’ve got to the end of a workshop, and you know, I’ve heard more than once we got more done in that half-day workshop than we have done in the last six months of meetings. So, you know, you do make a lot of progress in those workshops. And these are the kinds of things that we’re seeing. So, it’s not about running workshops all the time.
But you know, one of the things that we do regularly as teams is we meet. We do have meetings. And there’s so much research out there to demonstrate how ineffective and unproductive and frustrating our current formats of meetings are, and how much we waste time and money. And that’s one very clear place I thought that we can learn from the workshop format. Again, it’s not to say that every meeting has to be a workshop, but there are definitely tools and techniques and tips that we can take from our workshops into how to run our meetings more effectively.
A Workshop Mindset
BILL YATES: Excellent. You sold me on the idea because, again, I can think of, you know, inspiring facilitators who have – they’re like experts. They’re like wizards who’ve led our team through a really effective workshop. And we’re all, again, we’re looking back on that going, “I cannot believe how much we got accomplished. This is so energizing.” So, you’ve sold me on that. How can leaders, especially project leaders, embed that workshop mindset into their team’s daily collaboration?
ALISON COWARD: To start off, I think teams need to be exposed to the workshop format. I think they need to experience it and see that it’s possible. I mean, I think probably in today’s world, when I first started out facilitating, which was probably more than 15 years ago, I’d often work with a team, and it would be the first time that they’d worked in that format. Now I think most of us have experienced some kind of workshop. So, I mean, if you do work with a team that hasn’t experienced that way of working, first of all, show them what’s possible.
And then, you know, before running the workshop, when you’re thinking about the design of the workshop, you’re also thinking, “Okay, what do I want to happen after this workshop?” And you’re designing the workshop in service of that. So, you’re already thinking about the after in the before stage. And so, you’ve got that follow-through. So, when your workshop is designed for action afterwards, you’re creating space in the workshop for the team to develop commitments together and discuss when they will implement them.
Capability, Capacity, Behavior Change
I think afterwards as well, after you’ve had that workshop, there’s the element of, “Okay, how do we stay accountable to this? How do we keep checking in?” You know, some of the tips that I give to teams is think about, at the end of the workshop, three things that could get in the way if you’ve been able to implement some of these ideas. Is it capacity, which is probably most teams? We’ve just got too much to do. And how are you going to work around that? Capability, is there actually something that we need to learn in order to implement these ideas more effectively?
And then think about, do these ideas require behavior change? And how do we facilitate that behavior change? So that’s the first thing.
So, from a workshop, the very first thing is, if you do run workshops, making sure that you’re thinking about that follow-through afterwards. And then, you know, it’s again all the stuff that I’ve mentioned, but how can you perhaps bring teams together at regular touch points, again in that workshop format, to have those conversations? It doesn’t have to be a full day; it doesn’t have to be half day. It could be an hour to follow up on some of the reactions that they’ve discussed, checking accountabilities, discussing the barriers that they encountered as they were trying to implement some of those ideas.
And it’s that kind of coaching, that sort of ongoing conversation, not just leaving all those ideas at the end of the day, but really trying to find ways to embed them, filter them through, and come back to them.
And it’s a way that they have those conversations, as well. You know, a big part of a workshop culture is this experimentation mindset. So, you know, again, those amazing workshops where everyone has really big ideas; they’re really inspired. We have to get back to one of the barriers to implementing them is the gap between ideas generation and implementation. There are so many barriers, as I mentioned to you before – capability, capacity, behavior change – and many more that may get in the way of those implementations.
So, kind of closing the gap between the big idea and the practical implementation on the day, and actually having conversations around this saying, you know, we have these ideas; but when they hit the real world, we may need to change them. We may need to shift them. So, are we having those kind of regular conversations about how these ideas might change what we’re learning as we’re trying to implement these ideas?
BILL YATES: Alison, this is so good. A big takeaway that I have already, which is, you know, I think about your years and years of experience as a facilitator, and all the pre-work that you had put in before that event. And I think as a project leader there are times when I get lazy. You know, it’s not like, okay, I don’t need to spend an hour preparing for a status meeting that takes place every week with my team. Probably not.
There may be a particular case where I need to. But I need to spend some time; right? I need to think, okay, what are my goals for this? To your point, kind of engineering or reverse engineering. At the end of this meeting or at the end of this event that we have or this demonstration that we have with the customer, what is it that I want to accomplish? What do I want my team and my customer to see and to feel? What are my takeaways?
And then, so good, those three Cs, the capacity, the capability, and then the change of behavior. You know, if I could put some forethought into that before I have this event, this meeting, similar to what we do with a workshop, you know, thinking through, okay, how is this going to land? And what are my expectations after? And are there things that I need to go ahead and do as a leader of the team kind of before this meeting? Again, great lessons learned from workshop.
And I know Wendy’s got some specific questions. We’re going to get into some pillars next. But I just think kind of from a high standpoint, a high view, there’s so much that you’re prompting me to think about as I prep for meetings for my team. So, I’m using their time wisely because they’re such valuable resources. Yeah.
ALISON COWARD: And you know, I think if there’s only one thing that I would love your listeners to take away from this podcast is that is all of the other things feel too overwhelming right now. Start with your meetings. Really design your meetings as if you were designing a workshop. And they don’t all have to be workshop-like. It’s not about, you know, every meeting having the Post-it notes out and the flip charts and the online whiteboard, but having that intention.
You know, one of the things a facilitator does is they’re designing a process in service of the interactions and the dynamics that might happen on the day so that they get the outcomes and the outputs that are needed in order to move that project or that initiative or that conversation forward. And if, you know, your listeners just do that with their meetings, I can guarantee they will see a massive impact.
The Five-Pillar Framework
WENDY GROUNDS: I want to just mention to our listeners, there is help out there. You wrote a book. It’s called the “Workshop Culture: A Guide to Building Teams That Thrive.” Now, in your book you also talk about your five-pillar framework and how it can be applied not just to workshops, but to building team culture. Can you just describe that framework for us?
ALISON COWARD: Yeah. So, the framework, before I talk about the pillars, I’ll talk about the concept. Essentially these five pillars are elements that I noticed in high-performing teams, that were present in high-performing teams. And what they are, are they are themes for conversations to have as a team. This is not things that a team has done to them. They are conversations that a team has in order to make sure that they’ve got these things in place.
And that’s where the facilitation comes in. Essentially, they’re facilitated conversations. And they can be workshops. But in order to address any one of these pillars, a leader and their team will need to have a set of conversations or some kind of co-creation session to problem-solve around them.
Align
So, the five pillars are Align: Are the team all pointing in the same direction? Are they clear and on the same page with the team goals and vision and purpose and also values, how they work together in order to achieve those goals?
Cohesion
Cohesion: How connected are the team to each other, and how connected is each individual to that bigger picture of the team, what the team is trying to achieve? And how do we use that information about individual team members to build empathy and understanding about different ways of working across the team?
Communication
Communication: What kind of information does the team need to talk about and share? And in what format does that take place, primarily through meetings? And therefore, how are those meetings designed? What is the rhythm of those meetings, as well? Probably get into meetings a little bit more.
Design
Design: What processes, routines, rituals, systems, and structures can a team design in order to make sure that they are setting themselves up in the best way to achieve the goals they set out for themselves? So, this may be, you know, meetings that they have. But there may be also other little kind of rituals or routines that they do that keep them connected or keep them checking in on their high performance or their goals.
Continuous Improvement
And then the final piece is around change and ensuring that the team has got this mindset of continuous improvement. This is not a “set it and forget it” exercise. This is not a one and done. It’s a conversation that teams need to have on an ongoing basis because our team cultures are constantly changing. I mean, just the conversations that I’ve had this year with teams, most of the teams that I’m speaking with are experiencing change at a level that they’ve never experienced it before.
And so that means that we need to think differently about how we form our teams and how we continue to keep our teams intact and performing highly. That means that we need to have these more regular conversations and zoom into our working processes.
Aligning Values
BILL YATES: These are excellent. Alison, I want to go back to the first one, the Align pillar. In that we talk about agreement on team values. Can you speak to that more? How have you seen teams sort of tease that out and get into it and really go deep so that there’s a clear understanding of what their team values are?
ALISON COWARD: Yeah, this is a really interesting question because I think that as teams, particularly in our current world, we are very focused on delivery and sort of getting things done. And we have got a bias towards, you know, ticking our tasks off, a bias towards being highly productive. And often teams can benefit a lot more from having conversations about how they need to be together, as well. And so, values are about that. You know, what comes first is what are we here to do as a team? What do we want to achieve? What does success look like?
And then often the missing conversation is, okay, if that’s what we want to achieve, how do we need to be as a team? What are some of the behaviors that we need to demonstrate? What are the actions that we need to do in order to make sure that we are aligning the way that we are with those goals that we’ve set for ourselves, especially if those goals are goals that they’ve never achieved before.
If it’s something new, they’re doing something new, they’re going to have to do something differently. They’re going to have to be different, whether that is, you know, just off the top of my head, if they have a goal to launch new products, then that means that they may need to be more innovative than they have been in the past, which means that they might need to be more curious. They might need to have more kind of creative sessions.
And so, your team values are always in service. You know, I think when people say the word “values,” they kind of have, again, a little bit of aversion towards them because they think of these words that are stuck up on the wall, and that everyone ignores and everyone kind of really forgets about what they mean.
And so often values like that are kind of created in isolation from the work that a team needs to do. You know, we all know that integrity or respect, they’re kind of the generic values. But when we create them in service of what a team needs to achieve, then a team can kind of really rally around them. They’re like, we understand why we have come up with these values together.
Team Values and Company Values
And so, I think there’s also just an interesting distinction to make between team values and company values. Often, if I’m working with a team, there will be company values already established. And it’s really important for the team to align with those values. But the translation of those values at the team level can also be discussed because every team kind of has its own subculture.
BILL YATES: Sure.
ALISON COWARD: Depending on you know, where they sit within the organization, who they interact with, their stakeholders, what they’re working on, and particularly if it’s an ad hoc project team, so that, you know, you’ve come together, particularly to deliver something that you’re going to disband afterwards. You’re going to have your own culture. So, you’re going to need to discuss what that is, not only what it is that we’re here to do, but how do we need to be together as we’re trying to deliver on those goals.
And so often, teams will instinctively know what those values are. And again, through workshop-like conversation, you’re enabling the team to articulate that. One of the exercises that I do, we sort of have conversations around the success factors of your team within a certain period. It might be, you know, for the next year, what do you want to achieve? Okay, let’s have a conversation about some of the behaviors, the characteristics that you need to display.
And then, you know, there’ll be themes there, there will already be themes, the team are often already working according to some of those values. But it’s good to articulate them so that then you can stay accountable, I mean, you can keep checking in on them.
Awareness of Working Styles
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah. And just having those values and being aligned on that helps with cohesion.
ALISON COWARD: Right.
WENDY GROUNDS: Which is one of your other points. Do you have any kind of tools or assessments that teams can use to become aware of their different working style?
ALISON COWARD: Yeah, you know, I love that idea of awareness that, you know, I think this awareness is on two levels. There’s a self-awareness. I listened to one of your previous podcasts with, I can’t remember the name, and it was a gentleman who had a previous experience in the prison sector. It was an amazing conversation.
BILL YATES: Yup.
ALISON COWARD: And he was talking about, are people really aware of the impact that they have on others? And that’s where you need to start; right? You kind of need to understand your own working styles and where your preferences are and, you know, your preferences for communication, how you best get work done. Then, everyone on the team needs to have those conversations, as well…
BILL YATES: Right.
ALISON COWARD: …because you’ll realize that there will be similarities in the way that you work. But there will also be differences. And when those differences aren’t transparent and clear, they will cause frustrations further down the line. They will cause tensions because they’re kind of invisible. And it’s not that we have different working styles. It’s oh, so-and-so isn’t fast enough, or so-and-so is too slow.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ALISON COWARD: You’re laughing because you know.
BILL YATES: He documents too much, or he doesn’t document anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ALISON COWARD: All right. And the reality is that you need all of those different working styles across the team. You need all of those different characteristics for a team or a project to work effectively. And that’s why we work in teams, because we need different people.
BILL YATES: Exactly.
ALISON COWARD: And so, we need to articulate that. We need to kind of make those different working styles transparent so that you can see those differences and have productive conversations about how you’re going to negotiate around those differences. And so, yes, that’s a long-winded way of saying that personality tests, some kind of personality assessments, they can be useful.
Anything, you know, one of the first that I did was Myers-Briggs. And I know that there’s some people who are apprehensive about using tools like Myers-Briggs, and Belbin is another one, and DISC. Any of those are a great entry point, particularly if you’ve never done this kind of reflection before.
And but I actually really like more reflective-type tools because I think our working patterns and how we interact with work can change over time. And what is very useful is if we cultivate that, that skill for self-awareness and being aware of what we need, how we’re showing up, how we’re interacting with others at any time based on what’s kind of happening around us.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, the podcast you mentioned was Desmond Lomax, “From ‘Me’ to ‘We.’” Yeah, he was a great guest. Yeah, yeah.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm.
ALISON COWARD: Yeah, loved that podcast.
Transform Your Meetings
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, he had a lot of really good advice. Let’s talk a little bit about communication. So how can we transform meetings that are time-consuming obligations? How can we transform that into a powerful tool for collaboration?
BILL YATES: This is such a tough question.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah.
BILL YATES: Because meet, yeah, we…
WENDY GROUNDS: We hate those meetings.
BILL YATES: I know. It’s like we – it’s one of the things that project managers do most frequently. And man, oh, man, yeah, we need advice in this area. I’ll just put it that way, Alison. So…
WENDY GROUNDS: How can we make our meetings better?
BILL YATES: Yeah, make them better. Make them better.
ALISON COWARD: So, the first thing that I would say is that not all meetings are equal. And I think we treat them as such. We think we need to get people together to speak. Let’s find a time, let’s put the date in the calendar, and let’s just get together, whether that’s online or that’s in person. And actually, our meetings will have different formats depending on the kinds of conversation that we need to have.
And, you know, we mentioned a status update meeting is don’t necessarily need to prepare for that. You might need to kind of gather your thoughts, but there’s not really much preparation to do for that. But a project planning session or a strategy session or a brainstorming session, they have a very different feeling.
So, the first thing that we need to do is get very clear on the purpose and the outcomes and actually what we need to produce as a result of that meeting. And then we need to design the format around that. Do we need 30 minutes? Does it even need to be a meeting? I mean, that’s the question that we should really be asking.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ALISON COWARD: And does it really need to be a meeting? Do we need half a day? Do we need a full day? Can it be an online meeting? Do we need to get together in a room at an offsite, and making sure that we’re asking ourselves those kinds of design questions. What you’ll find over time, particularly with teams, or teams that are going to be working together over a period of time, is that you might develop a rhythm to your meetings.
You might have some meetings that are required weekly because you need to check in on project status updates. And there may be something that happens at the start of a project and something that happens regularly, monthly, something that happens at the end. And this is a way of really helping to keep the team connected. Everyone knows, oh, that meeting is for that kind of discussion. I mean, it’s a way of sort of keeping people checking in with each other.
Ren Love’s Projects from the Past
REN LOVE: Ren Love here with a glimpse into Projects of the Past; where we take a look at historical projects through the modern lens. Today’s project was the first of its kind: the Thames Tunnel. The late 1700s ushered in the first industrial revolution, the heart of which was located in England, and specifically, London. Increased manufacturing, an uptick in tourism, and the building of new docks on either side of the River Thames in London revealed the need for a new way to cross the river.
The late 1700s and early 1800s saw many failed attempts to create tunnels that ran underneath the river Thames until Marc Brunel, and his son, came along with a novel approach in 1825. Brunel, developed an idea for a new tunnel-building machine inspired by his observations of a ship-worm tunneling through wood. This new machine was dubbed the ‘tunneling shield.’
The tunneling shield, a cast-iron framework designed to support the tunnel walls, allowed for safer and more effective excavation. There were significant structural failures along the way that led to flooding – the largest of which occurred in 1828 and resulted in the death of at least six people. The high-risk environment led to frequent accidents and fatalities. The unstable riverbank & delicate nature of the work meant that progress was slow, with the tunnel being declared complete in 1843 – 18 years after construction began.
In addition to an extended schedule, the budget for the Thames Tunnel ballooned from an estimated 500,000 pounds to approximately 1.5 million pounds – an equivalency of almost 200 million pounds in today’s spending power. The dramatic increase in cost was attributed to the numerous challenges, including the extensive flood damage, the need for more robust technology, and prolonged delays.
Despite the setbacks, the Thames Tunnel opened in 1843 to great fanfare. So, was this project a success? Absolutely. The tunnel is a remarkable example of early 19th-century engineering, and remains a testament to the vision and determination of its creators. It’s still in use today, as part of London’s Underground Rail Network, proving its enduring utility.
Thanks for joining me. I’m Ren Love, see ya next time!
Resistance to Change
BILL YATES: I wanted to jump to change real quickly.
WENDY GROUNDS: Okay, yeah.
BILL YATES: One of the pillars is about change. And I want to hear your advice, Alison. This is, again, the whole idea of embracing a workshop culture and injecting that into healthy project teams just makes so much sense. But I know people; I know myself. There’s a resistance to change. And I think sometimes I’m open-minded at the front, but then I’ll start to fall back into old patterns or almost like, you know, ruts in the road.
I guess a couple of questions I want to ask regarding that. For a leader, how do you watch for that? So, what are some signs that the team or you are falling back into old, maybe unhealthy patterns? And then, secondly, what should you do about it?
ALISON COWARD: Yeah. Back to sort of the point around the pillars is have conversations around it. You know, I think that we find change difficult because I think we instinctively know that it’s difficult. It doesn’t register how difficult it is sometimes when we have these great ideas. As I mentioned, you know, when you get to the end of the workshop, is it capacity? Is it capability? Is it behavior change? And even just identifying that something is going to require a behavior change and articulating that can go some way to, I guess, rationalizing around how that’s going to happen.
And then I think the second thing is really understanding that change is hard. It is hard for individuals, you know. But I’m sure there’s many of your listeners, myself included, that set resolutions at the beginning of this year for things that we were going to do, and they’re kind of long forgotten. And because we kind of set ourselves up for these goals, we kind of think, okay, yeah, I’m going to drink three liters of water every day, or I’m going to go for a run three times a week, and then life gets in the way.
We need to be having those same kinds of conversations as a team; right? You’ve got this big idea for a goal. What is going to get in the way? How can we break this down into something that’s achievable? How can we make this into something that’s bite-size, that almost feels so small that it feels like it doesn’t matter, but the goal is to try and do it consistently.
I mean, I’ve been working with a team recently, and we were talking about emails. And the team discussed how useful it would be in the email subjects to write what they required of that email. Was it for a response? Was it for information? Was it for feedback? And you know, that’s a tiny thing. And but remembering to do that as a habit is the challenge.
So, what might you do to remind yourself? Is it a Post-it note on your screen? Is it, I don’t know, something that you write to yourself every morning? Is it setting up templates? Or every time you open an email, it’s there in your signature, so that you remember to put it into the subject line. So, it is like, what do we need to do to create that change, make that change easier? I mean, I’ve learned a lot from books like James Clear’s “Atomic Habits.”
BILL YATES: Excellent book.
ALISON COWARD: And where he, yeah, it’s fantastic. I mean, in fairness, the book is, I mean, it’s brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant. He’s talking about change on an individual level. And what we’re doing is where, you know, when we’re working with teams, we’re trying to apply that to a collective level, which is even more difficult.
Workshop Facilitation Skills
WENDY GROUNDS: Facilitating a workshop, especially for maybe project managers who are new to the game, it can be a very intimidating thing to do. What are some, in the moment, some key facilitation skills that you could recommend that would benefit a project manager?
ALISON COWARD: Do you know, I think the reason it feels intimidating is because often people have witnessed a workshop facilitator doing a brilliant job, and they can’t place their finger on what it was. It just feels like magic.
BILL YATES: Right, right.
ALISON COWARD: As we discussed earlier, actually it’s not magic because we’ve done loads of work upfront to make it happen in that way. So, we’ve done a lot of preparation. So, I think that’s the first thing. I would say, you know, don’t think that you have to turn up to a workshop and, just do the thing, and it all falls into place. There is preparation that happens before. Saying that, there will always be things that happen in the workshop that aren’t planned for. And that is probably one of the reasons why people find it really intimidating. So, if you have your plan, then you’re going to feel more prepared.
But I always think that there’s four skills that you can practice outside of a workshop. One is getting really good at asking good questions because I feel that that’s the language of facilitators. A facilitator isn’t there to share content. They’re there to ask questions of the group. And so, if you get really good at asking open-ended questions that really do elicit deep thinking responses, then that’s one skill.
The next skill is listening. If you ask really good questions, people are going to share, and you have to really be able to listen deeply, spot for the patterns, spot for what they’re saying, make sure that they feel acknowledged and heard.
And the third thing, which is almost a bit of a paradox, is if you’ve asked good questions, you’re allowing everyone to share. If everyone shares, and they share openly and honestly, then you are going to have lots of diverse viewpoints. And that’s going to feel quite confusing and chaotic in the moment. So, the third skill is being okay with that chaos and that uncomfortable feeling that might come from it not feeling kind of linear or clean and tidy, and sort of having the first answer or the final answer straight away. It’s going to feel like it’s up in the air. So that’s the third skill.
And then the fourth skill is synthesis, bringing all of that together because that’s one of your roles as a facilitator is that you’re there to bring all those diverse viewpoints together. So, it will feel confusing. It will feel messy. But your role there is to be able to connect the dots and kind of close it down and, you know, create that clarity for the group if they can’t see it themselves.
BILL YATES: That is excellent. Those are so good, Alison.
ALISON COWARD: Thank you.
BILL YATES: Those are so good. And on the fourth one, just from my own experience too, I used to be intimidated thinking I had to be that synthesizer. It was all on me. But again, it’s like you’re facilitating. “Okay, I think what I’m hearing is there seems to be general consensus along this area. Am I right on that? You know, does anybody want to challenge that, or do you see it a different way?”
So again, it’s almost back to that first point of asking good questions and open-ended questions. It’s like, okay, I’m kind of hearing this is the general direction we think we want to go with the solution. What are you guys thinking? What are you hearing?
So again, you’re continuing to ask questions and look for – because usually I’ll come up with some statement that’ll be, you know, maybe 25% of the final, yeah, this is what we need to do. Maybe more, but the more the team speaks into it, the better. Oh, I like that word. I like the way you reference this, you know, and it just gets better and better.
ALISON COWARD: Absolutely.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
ALISON COWARD: You can actually get the team to do that, do exercises. There’s a tool that I use quite a lot called the KJ method, which is where it’s downloading onto Post-it notes, sticking those Post-it notes up, and then organize them into themes. Often as a facilitator I’m right at the back of the room, you know, it’s like, okay, guys, everything’s on the wall.
BILL YATES: Do it.
ALISON COWARD: Now organize it into themes. Absolutely. Yeah.
Successful Workshop Culture Adoptees
BILL YATES: That’s excellent. Alison, I have to ask you this. I think it’ll be helpful for all that are listening. Can you share examples of organizations that have successfully adopted this workshop culture and describe the impact that it had on their teams?
ALISON COWARD: Yeah. So, I think one of the things to say is that where I think this works best is at the team level, depending on the size of the organization. So, I have worked with a couple of organizations that are, you know, relatively small, maybe 60 to 150, worked at the leadership level and then it trickles down.
So, there was one example where I worked with a professional services firm, probably one of my first examples of workshop culture, actually, where I changed the way they ran their board meeting. It turned from a very formal meeting to something that was a lot more informal, with Post-it notes and people having, you know, side conversations and then feeding back flip charts, Post-it notes on the wall.
What was happening therefore was that they realized that they were having more cross conversations across the team, whereas before this had been a very much kind of one person speaking at a time and not really kind of cross fertilizing across the team. And they were starting to mix up a little bit more. And so, what happened was they started to identify opportunities for different types of meetings.
One of the things that came out of our engagement together was they decided they needed an ideas generation meeting that they never had. And they were doing that, you know, regularly on a Friday just to kind of capture ideas and brainstorm together. So that’s, I think, one of the sort of first examples that I’ve experienced of a workshop culture.
Another smaller organization and agency, again working with the senior management team, and we were running a program where we were doing, you know, workshops over time. But previously these managers had worked in departments that didn’t really interact with each other. And through this sort of workshop program, they were noticing opportunities for more collaboration, and they were just interacting with each other more, which was serving their clients better. So that’s the second example.
And then the third one, this was a team within a larger organization. And this is actually quite a recent case study, and it’s a team that I love because it was a museum, and it was a creative team within the museum that their output was very creative in the work that they did, but they weren’t quite having the opportunity to do that as a team together.
And again, you know, under this kind of broader umbrella of a team, there were three different pillars that weren’t having the opportunity to interact. And one of the things that we did, so simple, again, just changed up their meetings to a team of 20, changed up their meetings to have little breakout opportunities for little breakout groups. And so again, supporting more collaboration across the different pillars.
Yeah. Opening up more opportunities for creativity, understanding a little bit more what was sort of happening across the team, and just sparking up conversations to kind of support each other a little bit more. So yeah, very sort of quick stop through different – one was a professional services firm, one was an agency, one was a smaller team within a larger institution.
Facilitate Team Involvement
BILL YATES: Those are excellent. One of the common complaints that I hear from project managers is I feel like I’m the only one talking in the status meetings or these idea generation meetings. And how do I get the team more involved? You’ve just nailed it, applying that workshop culture. One of the benefits is other people are speaking. They’re breaking into smaller subteam conversations, coming back and sharing. Those are things that project managers are looking for, you know, less about me, more about the team. How do I get them engaged?
ALISON COWARD: And also, just use questions. You know, if you ask a question, people have to answer. And I think the other sort of facilitation tip that I would give is that, you know, I think this is one of the things that intimidates people a lot is that often when they ask questions, they’re silenced. That’s not a bad thing because people are thinking. So just give it a bit of time. I often say, kind of take it to the edge of where it feels really, really uncomfortable. Someone will speak up.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ALISON COWARD: If you literally kind of sit there, I’m not saying anything, someone will speak up eventually.
BILL YATES: I’m laughing because, you know, we’re a training company, and a lot of the interaction I have with the instructors is just that.
ALISON COWARD: Yeah.
BILL YATES: You know, you have got to get comfortable with silence. When you’re helping someone understand a concept or figure out how to apply it, you need to ask questions and then just shut your mouth.
ALISON COWARD: Right.
BILL YATES: And wait and wait and wait. Yeah. So, the awkward silence, that’s good. Embrace it.
ALISON COWARD: Absolutely.
Facilitation Mistakes
WENDY GROUNDS: What are some of the other challenges, other than the silences? Some common challenges or even facilitation mistakes that you see people doing when they’re implementing a workshop culture? And how can they overcome these?
ALISON COWARD: Yeah, I think one of the first things is being too ambitious, trying to go too far and too hard, too soon. Because this is change, you know, we’ve been having conversations about how change is difficult. And, we often think that change has to come in a really big burst when actually long-term change happens through small shifts done consistently over time. So, when a team believes that, you know, in order for it to matter, for it to take hold, it has to be something completely different, something completely new. That’s wrong.
Well, it’s good to have those ideas. But trying to implement that and kind of have that sustainable change, actually, you want to break it down into something small. So, I think that’s the first mistake, trying to do something too big.
The other mistake is the opposite, is not thinking that the small shifts that they can make is going to make a difference, and giving up too soon. So not keeping that consistency of doing things regularly over time to make that difference. So, I think those are probably the two biggest challenges that I’ve seen. And also, I think, you know, coming back to something that we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, this is all a continuous conversation.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ALISON COWARD: It’s not just about changing the way that you meet. And it’s not just about implementing facilitation. It is a mindset. And one aspect of this is thinking about the way that you work together as an ongoing experiment. And it’s okay to try things and for them not to work because that’s learning.
BILL YATES: Right.
ALISON COWARD: And you have a conversation around that. And then you think, okay, so how do we need to tweak this so that it can work?
BILL YATES: Yeah, leaders need to, especially with project teams, we need to feel that freedom to fail.
ALISON COWARD: Right.
BILL YATES: And to say, “Hey, I tried something new in this little part of the meeting. My bad. I’m going to go back to the drawing board, and I’ll try to bring better questions next time or tee it up better for you guys. So, I can tell the way I described what I wanted from you, I got a lot of puzzled looks. And I’ll take another shot at it.”
ALISON COWARD: Absolutely.
A Remote or Hybrid Team Implementation
WENDY GROUNDS: So, another question we want to ask you is talking about a remote or hybrid team. How do you implement this workshop culture in a hybrid or remote team?
ALISON COWARD: One of the things I was really careful to do throughout the book was not to really make that distinction. I did talk about it a little bit. But for me, a team is a team. And a team works in the best way for that team to get work done, whether that is in person, whether that’s remote and hybrid.
The thing with remote and hybrid is that there needs to be more intentionality to the way they work together because, as we know, you know, it’s common knowledge now that we don’t have those kinds of serendipitous moments where I can tap someone on the shoulder or go for a coffee and have a conversation. We need to engineer those a little bit more.
So, with hybrid and remote teams, it’s going deeper into those conversations. You know, how do we craft moments for connection? How do we make sure that everybody has visibility over what is happening in this project, and making sure that the team is having those discussions regularly and checking in on those?
So, yeah, it’s almost like turning up the dial on what you would do if you were a co-located team to if you were hybrid or remote. One of the other things, I kind of sit back, and I look at a lot of those conversations around the return to office. And as I said, I kind of keep quite hands-off because I think that it’s situational, it’s all-around context, and whatever happens, happens.
But I think one of the mistakes that a lot of teams aren’t making is that they just adopt hybrid working. And they again, they don’t have the conversation of, okay, if we are in together these days, what do we need to do on those days together? What are the meetings that we need to have on those days together? When we’re not together, what are the tools that we use to communicate and stay in check; you know.
BILL YATES: Yeah, that is so practical. I think of, you know, so many project leaders have a number of developers or test engineers that work with them. And if they’re coming into the office two days a week, and all they’re doing is running their tests on their own or doing their own coding, what is the point? Right?
ALISON COWARD: Right.
BILL YATES: So yeah, you’ve got to just think about it and have a conversation, and then just adjust your schedule. It’s like, okay, this weekly meeting that we usually have on Thursday afternoon, let’s do it on Tuesday because that’s when we’re all in the office together. And I think we’d actually benefit by being face to face.
The Workshop Culture Book
WENDY GROUNDS: Alison, why don’t you tell us a bit about your book, “Workshop Culture.”
ALISON COWARD: Oh, thank you. Yeah. So “Workshop Culture,” and the full title is “Workshop Culture: A Guide to Building Teams That Thrive,” and published it in November 2023. And it really just goes into everything that we’ve spoken about today in much more detail. It starts off with the inspiration behind Workshop Culture, how it was developed, and talk about some of the main problems in organizations today and why a workshop culture is a solution and starting off with meetings and really talking about how modern organizations are really changing.
We cannot get work done without collaboration, but yet – and that’s speeding up. That’s not going to rewind. We’re not going to reverse that. We’re only ever going to need more collaboration in the future. Yet we are not really as upskilled as we need to in this area of collaboration in order to match the pace of change in the world.
And so, for me, “Workshop Culture” was one of those solutions. We find it hard to articulate collaboration and understand really what does that mean. If we liken it to what we’ve experienced in the workshop, you know, we described all of those feelings of a workshop is almost like an intense version of great teamwork.
BILL YATES: Yes.
ALISON COWARD: And so therefore, if that’s what we can achieve in a workshop, how do we learn from that? And then I go through the five pillars, the align and cohesion, communication, design and change with lots of tools and exercises, as well, to start implementing this in your team.
Find Out More
WENDY GROUNDS: How can our audience connect with you and find out more about what you do?
ALISON COWARD: So “Workshop Culture” is available on all good bookstores. Although if you do buy it directly from my publisher, Practical Inspiration, and you’re in North America or the UK, and then I’ve got a special discount code for you, 30% off if you enter WRKCULT30. And I think we’ll put that in the show notes, as well. So that’s a 30% discount. And then you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m Alison Coward on LinkedIn, and my website is BracketCreative.co.uk.
BILL YATES: Outstanding. Well, again, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for that contribution. And it helps all teams, not just corporations, but project teams that are at the grassroots getting things done. It’s excellent.
ALISON COWARD: Thank you so much for having me. You’ve been absolutely fantastic hosts. Thank you so much.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: Thank you for joining us here on Manage This. You can visit us at Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to this podcast and see a complete transcript of the show.
You’ve also earned your free PDUs by listening to this podcast. To claim them, go to Velociteach.com. Choose Manage This Podcast from the top of the page. Click the button that says Claim PDUs and click through the steps.
Until next time, stay curious, stay inspired, and keep tuning in to Manage This.
Leave a Reply