Guerric

What if you could actually convince your boss?

I know…

From playing the game of politics to slow decision-making to lack of time, we often face many obstacles at work. ?

It can be hard.

So here are 11 effective tips to persuade your boss to make change happen.

People who’ve used these tips got their boss to implement new ideas and made an impact at work. This is a guide to help you make innovation happen too.

Warning: you are NOT going to find anything about being a bootlicker (dull) or working hard (boring) here.

Now that you’re ready:

Let’s explore each of these 11 ways to convince your boss to try new things.

1. Frame your suggestion to match the goals of your boss

If you get this first tip right, you’ve got 80% of the job done.

As humans, we tend to think about ourselves first. But this is not how you can convince someone.

Take this approach instead:

Frame your suggestions in terms of how it can help your boss.

Here’s what matters to your boss: convincing her own boss, improving how your team performs, generating more revenue, or simply making your boss look good in front of everyone.

For this you need two things:

1. Understand where your boss wants to be—the goals;
2. Find how your suggestion can help your boss get there—the way.

Here’s an example about convincing your boss to work from home:

Your boss may not care about the fact that it will make your commute less stressful. But she will care if you explain that you can start working an hour earlier.. or that you’ll get work done faster because you’ll be less interrupted.

Put yourself in your boss’s shoes.

As a side note: I’m using the term “boss” to keep it simple. I should say: “decision-maker“. In many cases, the person you need to convince is not your boss but a team member or a colleague from another function.

They want to know how your ideas can help them.

What are their goals? What will get them look good in front of their own bosses? What do they need to get promoted?

2. Pay extra attention to your boss’s problems

It is natural to think first about solving your own problems. “If I could automate this task, it would make my life so much easier.”

New ideas often come from problems we face every day at work.

But here’s the thing:

Your boss cares more about making their lives easier than yours. For example, instead of presenting an idea as a way to make your life easier, frame it as a way to make yourself more productive.

The more you understand what your boss wants, the more chances you have to persuade him.

This is an example of emotional intelligence.

You must genuinely care about your boss’s problems. Read How to Win Friends and Influence People to understand what I mean. (It is such a great book.)

Stop considering your problems first. Look at the world from the perspective of your bosses.

Ask yourself:

What is bothering them? What do they have in mind? How can you solve their problems?

3. Build the reputation for being a great performer

Any boss would trust more a great performer than the average employees.

This is normal:

Heroes get praise and attention.

In an organisation, what I call the “hero effect” is similar to how brands impact consumers.

Your personal brand—i.e. reputation—is the result of how people perceive you at work.

The “hero effect” leads people to value you, your work, and your opinion. If something goes wrong, you’ll earn the benefit of the doubt.

In his great book Power (recommended read), Jeffrey Pfeffer highlights with sarcasm that, as long as you keep your boss happy, performance doesn’t matter that much:

“Make sure that those in power notice the good work that you do, remember you, and think well of you because you make them feel good about themselves. It is performance, coupled with political skill, that will help you to rise.”

Getting noticed is primordial.

The more you see and hear about it, the more you trust it.

And the best way to get your boss’s attention is to pay attention to what your boss cares about.

If you are looking for inspiration, besides reading Power, I also recommend that you read Tribes. In this book about leadership, Seth Godin tells stories of people who have had a significant impact within and beyond their organization.

Keep in mind:

Bosses are more likely to consider ideas from those they see as the best in their team. It depends on two things:

1. The quality of your work—what you do;
2. How your boss sees the results—what people say about you.

Building a good reputation takes time. Be patient. Match the size of your suggestion to the quality of your reputation.

4. Take advantage of the FOMO

Most organisations are (very) conservative…

People don’t want to risk their reputation. They do not like change and avoid any bold decisions. So they love killing new ideas.

Here’s what you can do:

Create a sense of urgency. Comparing is a great tool for that. Mentioning what competitors do can trigger a fear of missing out (FOMO).

FOMO is a scientifically proven phenomenon. Dr Andrew K. Przybylski, a research fellow at Oxford University, defines it this way:

“A pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.”

You can make a strong case by establishing that some competitors have implemented a new idea with success. (Nobody wants to stay behind the competition.)

You can also use an analogy.

Tell the stories of organisations in other industries. It can help your boss understand how this would work in your own company.

Mentioning what other organisations do can support your ideas. Bonus: you’ll be more likely to convince your boss if you talk about companies she respects.

5. Look for inspiration

It’s easy to get stuck in our own thinking.

In this case, what you need is external stimuli.

One way of getting inspiration is to read books. It gives you new ways of approaching things. And most books also share interesting examples you can share with your boss.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you want to influence your company’s recruitment process. You could get some inspiration from books about Google and how the HR team uses data to make decisions.

Your boss doesn’t have to read these books.

You can just create a one-page summary and share it with your team, for example.

I’m talking about books. But actually, any format works. Search for blog articles, scientific publications, podcasts, or YouTube videos.

Searching for a good book? Have a look at my reading list.

6. Build a coalition

Build an internal network.

If you’re not alone to suggest an idea, it will sound more compelling.

Think about how your idea can also help your colleagues—how it can be useful to them. If possible, try the idea at a small scale with them. If you want to roll out new software, you could invite them to try it with you.

When should you talk about your idea?

The best moment is over a cup of coffee in the kitchen or corridor. I find that scheduling meetings with colleagues to talk about a new idea can be too formal, especially at the beginning.

Once you’ve found a few people interested in your idea, your boss will be more likely to agree on trying it.

Try to get your colleagues involved.

You may even want to let one of them lead the initiative, instead of you

7. Use data to tell a story

We say “numbers don’t lie”.

But they can be difficult to understand.

For example, the human mind can’t get the concept of billions of dollars. But once you make it visual, it’s easier to understand.

Here’s a visualisation of things that were worth billions of dollars in 2009:

You can now see the size of the Beijing Olympics Games 2008 compared to the funding of NASA.

Stories are more convincing than numbers.

Data visualisation helps us see new patterns.

It’s a visual story changes how we see things—i.e. how your boss makes decisions.

The word “data” can be scary. Fortunately, you don’t need obscure numbers to make people see things differently.

Here’s an example:

Look at how the blog Wait But Why changes how you may look at life. It simply shows the life of a typical American (data available to everyone).

It’s simple. But it can really help you think about how you spend your life.

But where can I find data?

We’re lucky. Finding the data is easy.

You can find a lot of data in secondary research. You can also have a look at your marketing tools—e.g. online analytics and CRM. Have a chat with the accounting department and use financial reports.

These sources of data can already give you a lot.

If your idea involved creating a product, you can also leverage customers interviews. (Read my reflections on how to ask better questions in a customer interview). For example, interview several potential customers and record their reaction in audio or video. You can be able to visualise their reactions plotting quotes on a graph for example.

There are tons of things you can do to convince people using data visualisation.

8. Derisk the decision for your boss

Low risk, high reward.

These are the characteristics of a decision that is easy to make.

The reward is how helpful your idea is to your boss: Does it help her achieve her goals? Does it solve one of her problems? Does it make her look good inside and outside the company?

The risk involves costs, the likelihood of failure, and the consequences of failing.

The lower the risk, the more convincing your idea will be. So find ways to lower how risky the idea is. One way of achieving this is by experimenting.

9. Experiment with your idea

If the risk is high, your boss will struggle to make a quick decision.

A solution is to go step-by-step:

A small-scale experiment will help you test your idea, without costing too much.

It could be testing a new feature for your product using a prototype.

It could be experimenting with a new way of working for a couple of weeks.

…

What’s important:

1. You need to define what success looks like;
2. You need a way to measure the result of your experiment.

Experimenting makes the chat with your boss more concrete. You’re getting real data to prove your case. It will help you make your boss more confident that your idea can work.

Bonus: You can use data visualisation to tell a story with the result of your experiment.

10. Know how to pitch it to your boss

The infamous pitch.

It’s the moment you get to persuade your boss to say “yes”.

How should you do it?

You need to know what your boss likes. Should you discuss it informally while having a coffee? Should you book a meeting with other stakeholders? Should you first send a one-pager to present the idea? It depends on what your boss is used to.

Observe how other people pitch your boss and what tactics seem to work best.

My rule of thumbs is to keep it low profile at the beginning. It makes things less scary (and more human). Obviously, it depends on your boss.

If you want to become better at pitching:

1. Read this article about how startups pitch investors (a lot of good examples);
2. Pick a book about negotiation. They teach you how to persuade other people. Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff is a good one.

11. Make sure people know about it

Getting your boss to say “yes” is just the beginning.

It’s often when an idea becomes a project.

A project needs a leader—someone who is accountable for it. A project creates results that you monitor overtime.

And managing a new project requires a lot of effort. I often see my clients, who are running a new project, doing it in their spare time.

New ideas can lead you in many different spaces. It could be a project about improving a way of doing things, launching a new feature for your product, or creating a new subsidiary. Some are more complex than others. But they all have one thing in common:

You need to make sure people know about it.

It’s your role to advertise the project internally (and externally when relevant). It’s your role to get people excited about it. It’s your role to make sure people get involved if you need them to do so.

Once your boss has agreed to give it a try, you have to focus on two things:

1. Do everything you can to make sure that it will work;
2. Get people involved and make sure everyone knows about the new project.

It’s now your turn to persuade your boss to try new ideas

I hope you’ll use these tips to make stuff happen in your company.

Keep in mind:

Focus first on what you want to achieve and why. Once you have an answer to these two questions, find out how your idea can help your boss and the rest of the company.

This approach will help you convince your boss to try new ideas.

Running a workshop is an effective way to train a group or get them to do collaborative work.

But there’s still lots of misunderstanding around how to do this.

As part of running innovation projects at ?What If!, we use workshops as a tool to harvest and leverage the creativity of our project teams.

Though I cannot recreate online the exciting experience of participating in one of these workshops, I wanted to share with you some of the most useful things you can implement in your workshops.

What a Workshop Really Is

First, a workshop has to be interactive. It isn’t a lecture. Scott Berkun explains this well:

“A cooking workshop means [participants] cook things. A writing workshop means [participants] write things. If most of your “workshop” is people not actually making anything, you should perhaps call it a class, a lecture, or a mistake.”

I see workshops as a way to get a group to collaborate efficiently or learn in an interactive way.

Usually, workshops are organised at the start of a project or as a milestone in the project.

In many cases, a project team is made with people who do not work together on a daily basis. Organising a workshop gives you the opportunity to get everyone in the same room in order to:

1. Facilitate collaborative work (planning, ideating…);
2. Teach new skills to the team;
3. Tap into the tacit knowledge of each team member
4. Update the team to get everyone aligned on the current state of the project (this should be a secondary goal, as it’s not the most efficient way to update a group);
5. Get the participants to make a decision (be very careful of decisions by consensus).

A great workshop requires preparation. Here’s how you can do this.

How to Prepare a Great Workshop

There are five key phases in preparing a great workshop:

1. Analysing
2. Planning
3. Developing
4. Rehearsing
5. Evaluating

The distinction among these phases will help you focus on answering the right questions at the right time, i.e. avoid putting the cart before the horse.

1. Analysing

Before preparing and running a workshop, you must be confident it’s the best way to get the outcome you need. When it’s not the case, a workshop becomes an entertainment or a time waster, i.e. a mistake.

You must be clear on the context of the workshop.

• Why do you need a workshop? What do you want to achieve?
• Do you really need a workshop for that?
• If yes, what is your vision of success (ideal outcome) for this workshop?
• What outputs do you want to have by the end of the session?

Analysing should lead you to a clear objective for the workshop.

Workshops are often scheduled weeks or months in advance. Preparing a workshop will force you to think ahead of your project plan.

2. Planning

Planning is about creating the structure of the workshop.

Start planning a workshop with the end in mind. Visualise the outcome and outputs you want. Then, work backwards so your plan really gets you there.

It’s better if you can create a detailed day plan for your workshop. This includes:

• Headlines for each moment of the workshop
• The detail of each activity: what you will tell the participants and ask them to do
• A time box for each activity
• Who does what
• What materials you’ll need for the session

At each moment of the day, you should be able to picture exactly what you do with your audience. The more people in the room the clearer you have to be.

This is also the moment to ask yourself who should attend the session. You should also identify what state you want the group to be in, e.g. energise the team; focus on an intense planning session…

In my experience, if you’re clear on the context and what you want to get out of the workshop, planning becomes easier.

3. Developing

The Developing phase is about creating the content you will need (or sometimes, finding it, if you already have a log of content and exercises).

If you think you’re going to reuse the content, I encourage you to write scripts. This will allow you to remember what happened and have other team members run similar workshops.

There’s a reason I make a distinction between planning and developing. Both activities require you to focus on different things:

– Planning is about creating the outline of the workshop.
– Developing is putting all the things in place to be ready to execute your plan.

It’s like writing and editing. They require two different mindsets. You need a clear focus on one or the other.

4. Rehearsing

If you feel nervous at the beginning of a workshop, the chances are that you didn’t spend enough time rehearsing with your team.

Rehearsing is a good way to gain confidence and sense-check if there are any issues in the plan. In the ideal situation, you’d like to run a pilot workshop. But it’s hard to find time for this (except if you run the same workshop several times with different groups).

Fortunately, you can get your team ready just by going through the plan ahead of the session. Make sure everyone is clear on what they have to do and say.

(5. Evaluating)

Evaluating how the workshop went will help you achieve two things:

1. On a project-level, you’ll get a clear understanding of the problems that need to be solved in order to ensure that the rest of the project is going to run smoothly;
2. On a personal level, it’s the best way to improve your ability to run workshops. It’s also the chance to improve your preparation process.

You can evaluate the workshop and the process with your team or by yourself. I encourage you to follow the feedback analysis method (comparing expectations with results) or the clearing session approach (spotting what worked and what didn’t work).

That’s it about the preparation process.

Now, let’s get into the arena. I’d like to share some practical tips that will help you run great workshops.

15 Practical Tips to Run a Great Workshop

1. Start with the end in mind

Share a clear vision of what you to want to achieve this workshop.

It will help onboard the participants and make sure that they understand what you will expect from them.

2. Start communicating clarity on the why, the how, and the what

At What If, we use a framework called Purpose, Process, and Payoff.

Since we want [purpose], we are going to do [process] in order to arrive at [payoff].-

• The purpose is the result. It’s the reason you want to do this workshop, i.e. where you want to be at the end of the workshop.
• The process is the way you’ll get there. It’s an explanation of who does what and when.
• The payoff is the output. It’s what people can expect to get at the end of the process.

Explaining these three elements to the participants will ensure that everyone is aligned with the agenda and the outcome of the workshop.

3. Create a collaborative environment

The environment–the space and the atmosphere–has a huge influence on us. In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande highlights an interesting concept called the “activation phenomenon“:

“Giving [doctors and nurses] a chance to say something at the start [of an operation] seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up.”

An easy way of doing this is to get everyone to introduce themselves in an engaging way.

Besides asking them about their name and their job, you can also ask them about: what excites them the most about the workshop or their best memory eating out or driving a car. These questions sound naive but they will encourage everyone to share a personal story and will make them more comfortable.

4. Make it interactive

There are moments in a workshop, where you need to explain concepts to the participants.

Make this part interactive too.

Ask them questions. Run an exercise to put the concept into practice and have them share back and debrief on what they did.

5. Run exercises in a structured way

All exercises follow the same framework as your session. They have a purpose, a process, and a payoff.

You brief the exercise by doing the following:

1. Remind the participants of the purpose;
2. Tell them exactly how it’s going to work: who does what, when, and for how long;
3. Be clear on timing;
4. Explain what output you expect to get once it’s done;
5. Ask if there are any questions.

Once the exercise is done, you may want to do two things (depending on your goals):

1. Share back. Have each person or group to share the result of the exercise with the rest of the participants. It can be a chance for them to build on it or ask questions.
2. Debrief. Depending on the context of your workshop, you may ask if there’s any additional comment, whether they found that fun/hard/frustrating, what are the key things they learnt, when they are going to use this process…

Then, you can repeat with the next exercise.

6. If you want them to learn something…

There are three things to keep in mind when you plan to teach something new.

1. The starting point — What do the participants already know about it?
2. The learning objectives — What do they need to know about it?
3. The context of use — How will they use it in the future?

The last question is really important.

Emphasising the situations in which what you’re teaching will be useful increases the likelihood that the participants will remember it and use it at the right time.

7. Manage the team’s energy

Make sure that people are in a positive/constructive state of mind.

At What If, we use what we call “energisers“, which are playful activities (such as doing a short team building exercise, or asking an unusual question). This helps keep the energy going and build good group dynamics.

There are plenty of ways to make people relax and adopt a constructive mindset. For example, Equal Experts, an IT consulting company, uses icebreaker cards.

You can also change the energy in the room by varying activities: make the participants stand up, go to another room, work in pairs, or reflect on their own…

8. Be in the moment

You have to drive the group. In a workshop, every participant follows your lead.

And at different moments, the group needs to be in different states. You have to adapt your own state to prime the rest of the group.

Running a workshop requires you to play various roles: at times you need to be a teacher, other times you become a coach facilitating what’s going on, and other times you are a leader driving the whole team in the same direction.

Some activities require a lot of energy, while others can require people to be more reflective. It’s up to you to get the group to that state.

9. Be a good speaker

A workshop isn’t a speech or lecture. But you need the ability to address and engage with an audience.

I listed here my top advice for speaking in public. What’s key in a workshop is that you can make this interactive. Tell them a story. Ask questions. Encourage the participants to illustrate the concepts you’re sharing with their personal experience.

There’s a wealth of knowledge that participants can share in a workshop.

10. Use the space

Most workshops end with tons of things stuck on the walls.

That’s because we often do our best thinking best when we use the space around us, rather than when we limit ourselves to a computer screen. Jake Knapp, Googler and the author of Sprint, a book about running innovation workshops, explains this phenomenon:

“As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team.”

Two things are important here:

1. Using the space and sticking things on the wall help us think more effectively;
2. Landing outputs on the wall encourages collaboration, as all the work remains visible to everyone.

11. Constantly assess what’s going on

There’s the plan. And then, there’s the reality.

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

Of course, you need a day plan. But once you’re in the arena, you also need to rely on your intuition to find the best ways to get to the ideal result.

It’s important to keep the main structure. However, since new things may come up, you also need to be flexible.

12. Encourage collaboration

Having many participants means that there are lots of different opinions in the room. As a workshop aims to be collaborative, it’s important that the team stays open-minded.

At ?What If!, we talk about “greenhousing“. This refers to three actions: suspend your judgment, understand what the person means, and nurture the idea.

In my workshops, I encourage participants to say things like “let me build on what you said…”. Have a read of Sticky Wisdom that gets into the details of this and many other innovation behaviours.

People from Pixar talk about “plussing“. It is a similar approach but uses a different metaphor:

“The practice has been built on the core principles [of] improvisation, which are: accept all offers (accept the idea, don’t reject it), use “yes, and …” instead of “yes, but …”, and make your partner look good.”

In both cases, the ambition is the same: to encourage collaborative work (and keep a positive dynamic).

When someone just criticises an idea and doesn’t provide an alternative solution, or a means to improve the original idea, they’re not really helping the team. You can find more on the practice of group creativity techniques in this article.

Watch out: What I said doesn’t mean that you should welcome all ideas. If an idea is irrelevant, find a way to refocus the conversation. You don’t want to waste everyone’s time with a discussion that is off topic.

13. Highlight the progress

Remind the participants of your goal at the beginning of the workshop. Then, talk them through the headlines of the journey to show how much progressed you’ve made.

Make sure they realise that the group did what needed to be done (answering important questions, making key decisions…). And put an emphasis on the key things they learnt.

Keep the outputs in front of them. It signals progress. You may even want to talk them through what the group achieved, step by step.

14. Follow up

Once the workshop is done, you need to keep the momentum going:

1. Highlight the key takeaways;
2. Share the outputs;
3. Explain the next steps and clearly underline the actions you’re expecting from them (put a name on each action, and give them a deadline).

15. Enjoy

The best way to run a great session is to make it as nice as possible. If you enjoy running it, the participants will feel that and it’ll motivate them too.

Joining an innovation workshop is a big ask.

Your colleagues are busy so you need to make sure everything goes well.

How?

In these reflections, you’ll find out about useful activities that will help you design a successful innovation workshop.

4 activities to start your innovation workshop

The start of an innovation workshop is a chance to set the tone for the day.

How?

At this moment, you can remind the participants about:

• Why they’re in the room
• What they’re going to do
• What the workshop will feel like
• How you want them to behave

Let’s dig into activities that will help you do that.

1. Objectives

Purpose:

When you clarify the objectives of the session, you allow the participants to understand why the workshop is important and how it relates to their day-to-day work.

It’s a way to make sure everyone is engaged.

How it works:

There are two categories of objectives:

1. The high-level objectives
   These are the context and vision for the overall project. They give the participants reasons to be in the room with you.
2. The direct objectives
   These are the expected results and outputs of the session. It’s what you will have achieved as a group by the end of the innovation workshop

2. The Agenda

Purpose:

It’s important for participants to have access to the agenda for the workshop. It allows them to relax as they can anticipate what’s coming next.

How it works:

From my experience, there’s something that works well:

• Share an outline agenda ahead of the workshop (when you invite the participants).
• And then, introduce a more detailed agenda at the beginning of the session.

Print it or draw it on a large sheet of paper so you can put it in a place where everyone can see it during the whole workshop.

Bonus if you can give them the exact timings and indicate when the breaks will happen.

As Roger Schwartz wrote in HBR:

“The estimated time enables team members to either adapt their comments to fit within the allotted timeframe or to suggest that more time may be needed.”

It helps the participants plan the workshop in their head and see the relative importance of each activity/topic.

3. Group Agreements

Purpose:

Group agreements help you set the tone by telling your audience how you want them to behave during the innovation workshop.

How it works:

You want to share agreements that are relevant for your workshop.

Here are some ideas:

• Say yes
  Not everything maybe 100% on point for you, open yourself to it and build on it.
• Be present
  Stay away from distractions, e.g. don’t use your phone or computer during the workshop.
• No need to appear clever
  Avoid asking the “smart” question if it doesn’t contribute to anything.
• Be punctual
  This is a polite way to tell the participants that time is tight and it’s possible that we end a discussion because we need to move on to something else.

I think it’s faster if you share how you want people to be in the room and get them to agree.

But some facilitators suggest to get the group to create their own set agreements. (Caveat: it takes a lot of time for very little impact.)

4. The Parking Lot

Purpose:

Having a Parking Lot is really useful when you want to keep the group focused on a topic.

It allows to avoid distracting or interrupting the flow with something that is off-topic at the moment.

How it works:

You allocate a space on a wall to “park” ideas or questions that do not relate with what the group is working at a specific time.

For example, the first phase of your innovation workshop is about reviewing the customer journeys of your target market.

A Parking Lot is useful to keep the ideas people may have while focusing on the customer journeys. Therefore, they won’t interrupt the flow by sharing their ideas with the rest of the group.

Ideas of exercises for your innovation workshop

There are many exercises that be done during an innovation workshop.

It really depends on what you want to achieve.

Here are some examples:

• Defining your current challenges
• Understanding your customers better
• Reviewing a new innovation process
• Generating new ideas
• Deciding on the next phase of a project

Now let’s dive into more detailed exercises.

Co-creating a Customer Journey

Purpose:

A good exercise for an innovation workshop is co-creating customer journeys.

Indeed, it’s helpful to leverage the expertise you have in the room to map the different journeys your customers go through.

How it works:

First, you need to pick the segments of customers you want to focus on.

In the room:

1. You need a lot of space. A big wall would be great.
2. Then, get a group of 3-5 participants to create the customer journey of a specific segment.
3. They can use Post-it notes to indicate each step, the touch-points with your company, and (if you have the data) how the customers feel at each step.
4. Finally, get the group to share back and ask the rest of the participants to build on the journey.

For more information about creating a customer journey, read these reflections.

2 ways to end your innovation workshop End on a high note

At the end of an innovation workshop, you want the energy to be high.

There’s a psychological reason to it:

The peak-end rule.

“It’s a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”

Here are two exercises to leverage it.

1. Reflections

Purpose:

Having the group share reflections at the end of an innovation workshop is a good way to finish on a high note and emphasise the positives.

How it works:

There are many ways to set this exercise.

Here’s one:

• Have the participants work in pairs.
• Ask them to write on Post-it notes any important takeaways or anything that stood out.
• Then, get each pair to share back with the rest of the group.

As a facilitator, you should try to categorise the reflections to reinforce what is being said.

2. Next Steps: Actions and Ownership

Purpose:

Capturing the next steps allow you to make sure that you will keep the momentum after your innovation workshop.

How it works:

It really depends on how things are organised.

Sometimes, all the facilitator will own all the tasks. In other cases, the ownership is divided between some participants.

But it’s important to answer the following three questions:

1. What’s coming next?
   Remind the participants of the next milestones for your strategy/innovation project.
2. What needs to be done?
   Clarify what tasks will be done and their deadlines.
3. Who owns it?
   Make sure that each task is clear and has an owner who’s committed to making it happen.

You’re about to organise a workshop?

Read these reflections about how to run a great workshop.

Sharing constructive feedback gives you this ability to guide your team members and help them learn and grow.

Unfortunately, we never learn how to give feedback. We assume that it is intuitive; and that you should naturally master this skill.

But in practice, giving feedback feels uncomfortable.

We even often avoid doing it…

[In these reflections, I focus on “individual feedback” given to a team member (e.g. superior, peer, or subordinate). This excludes traditional employee review, team performance check-in, and managing yourself with feedback analysis.]

Feedback is an undervalued tool.

“Important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning.”

– Carol Dweck, Mindset

Let me emphasise a key part of what Carol Dweck wrote here: “Plus allies in learning.” This is by giving useful feedback to your team (employee, peer, boss…) that you can make a real difference in their personal development.

In these reflections, I tackle three main mistakes:

1. No feedback;
2. Vague feedback;
3. Not focusing on improvement.

My goal here?

To give you the tools to be more comfortable giving useful feedback to any members of your team.

Mindset: How to approach sharing feedback

If you want to be able to give great feedback, you need to be aligned on the purpose of feedback.

So what is it?

The purpose of feedback is “to improve“. The Oxford dictionary defines it well:

“Information about reactions to a product, a person’s performance of a task, etc. which is used as a basis for improvement.”

Feedback differs from:

• condemnation (punishing someone for having done something wrong) and
• criticism (saying that something is bad).

“Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”

― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

The goal of giving feedback is to seek improvements.

We say, “giving feedback” for a reason

As a team leader, you should consider feedback as a gift to their recipients. It aims at helping your team members grow and get better at what they do.

Giving feedback benefits three groups:

• The recipient, as it focuses on helping them grow and deliver great work;
• The team, as a better team member increases the overall performance of the team;
• You, the team leader, as it’s your role to increase the value of what each team member and your team, as a group, can deliver.

Having this in mind, you can agree that the worst feedback is no feedback. It doesn’t help anyone. Unfortunately, it’s an easy way out that many people take, since giving feedback often feels uncomfortable.

So it’s your role as a good team player to help your team members grow and create more value for them and the team as a whole.

Positive feedback vs. Negative feedback

There’s a debate about positive vs. negative feedback.

Praising is important. Positive feedback tells someone that they did something well. And it encourages them to continue. It’s motivating.

“A sincere compliment is one of the most effective tools to teach and motivate others.”

— Zig Ziglar

But giving negative feedback also matters. It helps someone understand what they could have done better, and define how they can improve. It’s empowering.

“Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance and arouses resentment.”

― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Negative feedback is very different from empty criticism, which has no positive purpose.

Both types of feedback are important

Though I like to praise my team members when they do well, I consider that negative feedback can be even more helpful than positive feedback.

That’s the recipe I apply to myself when I do my own feedback analysis.

But be careful:

Being constantly reminded of how you could be performing better can feel overwhelming and demotivating…

As a team leader, you should find the right balance between encouraging your team and helping them spot opportunities to grow. 

What’s constructive feedback?

Simplified to the maximum, constructive feedback is “GUSI”.

That means:

1. Genuine. There’s no point to hide the reality. Don’t ignore the elephant in the room. It doesn’t help anyone. If there’s something clearly wrong, just communicate it to your team member. Be honest about that.

2. Useful. Obviously, your feedback has to be useful. It must help the recipient understands what’s wrong, and how to course correct this.

3. Specific. Giving clear examples will really help the recipient identify what is wrong. Make it fact-based, as much as you can.

4. Immediate. The frequency of your feedback makes a real difference. Every week or two weeks, I try to meet one-to-one with my team members and share my feedback. The chat can be as quick as a 10-minute session (longer if necessary).

So be honest. Aim at helping. Give examples. And do this frequently.

Before: 5 steps to prepare yourself to give feedback

You have to be prepared before you can give constructive feedback.

1. Observe carefully.

Observing is the key to being specific and useful.

You need to pay attention to your team members, their work, and their challenges.

2. Suspend immediate judgement.

When something negative happened, try to understand the context. It’s important to acknowledge the issues the person had to face and the effort they put into doing their work.

Try to understand why they did what they did.

3. Pick the most important points.

Every “battle” is not worth fighting. Avoid overwhelming your team members with tons of feedback. Just focus on the feedback that really matters.

And remember that feedback is about behaviour, not personality.

4. Create themes.

This is another trick to be more specific and avoid being overwhelming. It is actually easier to receive feedback when they are grouped in themes.

You first share the theme (e.g. public speaking) and you illustrate with specific examples (e.g. Tuesday’s presentation).

5. Identify paths to growth.

Before sharing your feedback, get some ideas of how the person could improve. This is actually the most important part of giving feedback.

Here’s what a friend told me:

“The worst is when you get feedback and no suggestions on how to improve. I’ve had that before. Bloody pain.”

You see how important this can be.

Depending on the situation, you can either encourage the recipient to come up with ideas first and guide them. Or you can share immediately what would be the best way for the person to grow.

What else?

Here’s a framework I find useful when I prepare myself to give feedback:

When you give feedback to someone, you actually comment on either of two things:

1. The what: the content of their work;

2. The how: their way of working, being, and communicating.

 So when you’re creating themes, ask yourself if are you addressing the what or the how.

During: When and how to give constructive feedback

The first few times you share your feedback, you may feel a little bit out of your comfort zone. With practice, it becomes more intuitive.

My suggestion is to keep it informal and human.

Actually, one mistake is to make it feel like a review or a trial. That happens when you make it too formal.

(The only reason to keep this process formal is when something really bad happened. But that’s almost when we jump from giving feedback to managing a crisis.)

What should a feedback “session” look like?

As I give feedback every week (or two), I often do that in a 10-minute chat.

We grab some tea or coffee and chat about how we feel about the work we’ve done. If I’m travelling with my team, I take a cab ride or a flight as perfect excuses to take a step back on our work and share feedback.

I also always make sure to ask for feedback too.

First, it’s essential for you. Second, it makes your team members feel that it’s a two-way process. You’re not being patronising since both of you are working on helping each other become better.

Depending on the rhythm in your workflow, you can schedule regular catch ups. It can help.

Keep this in mind with new team members

If it’s the first time you give feedback to a new team member: explain the role of feedback.

Set the person in the right mindset. Make sure they understand that it’s not empty criticism, but constructive feedback that aims at getting better at what they do.