Teams are not the sum of their parts – they are the product of their interactions. As today’s organizations grapple with rapid change and uncertainty, they increasingly turn to teams to address complex challenges. Yet most team meetings do not create the conditions necessary to tap into everything that the team brings into the table. Poorly designed meetings squander the opportunities that organizations are relying on teams to exploit.

Have you ever attended a meeting where you had no idea what the desired output was or how you were expected to contribute to it? Or one where the purpose was clear, but the structure of the meeting actively interfered with the team’s ability to achieve it?

In this interactive workshop, you will learn three tools for avoiding these problems. You will diagnose a current meeting to see how it is not currently addressing the teams’ needs. You will break down the patterns of engagement in that meeting to understand what needs to shift in order to address its shortcoming. And you will apply ten principles of collaboration to determine what you can (and will) do to make the interactions in the meeting serve the team’s purpose.

"Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.”

– Jerry Weinberg

In the Agile world, leaders can struggle to provide clarity and direction for their teams. Particularly when they are expected to deliver breakthrough business results, leaders often do not see how to lead in an Agile way. They may waver between rigid command-and-control practices and a chaotic laissez-faire style. What these leaders need is a vision to steer them between the Scylla and Charybdis of these two approaches and empower their team.

In this interactive workshop, you will create a draft of a Leadership Vision. This tool clarifies what results leaders are steering towards. It also reveals the behaviors their teams need to exhibit to get there. Finally, it shows leaders how they need to change their own behaviors to adjust the team’s course. This provides a map to acting toward a new reality. 

If you are a leader in an organization, you can use this workshop to draft your own Leadership Vision. (If not, you can draft one for a leader you work with.) You will get feedback on your vision to bring it into even sharper focus. You will leave the session with a plan for empowering your team to achieve the results your organization needs.

Conflict a signal that something new is trying to happen.

We often don’t think of conflict in this way; instead we may think of (seemingly) pointless debates, personality clashes, hurt feelings, and distractions from the “real work.” But what if we got good at being able to disagree productively with one another? What if we could be fierce and engage in passionate discussions around issues of importance without worrying that they would devolve into mean-spirited personal attacks? How much more effective would our teams be if they could do that?

In this session, after discussing how our perspective on conflict shapes our experience of it, we will explore our own (often problematic) tendencies in conflicts, what triggers those behaviors, what more noble intentions they are trying to serve, and what choices we have about what to do instead. Drawing on the work of John Gottman, Patrick Lencioni, and Marita Fridjhon & Faith Fuller, this workshop will help you to better understand how to avoid the dilemma of choosing between artificial harmony and unproductive conflict and leave you with a plan for how to apply that new understanding.

To help people and teams thrive, we want to be fierce: we want to “show heartfelt and powerful intensity” (as the conference organizers remind us). Doing that requires that we create a strong container around that fierceness to use its energies productively. And that requires empathy.

This talk will explore how empathy – the ability to understand others' needs and ensure that they know that you understand them – is what Charles Duhigg calls a "keystone habit", a behavior change that unlocks other cascading behavior changes. Building the habit of empathy will help you to build trust, influence others, give effective feedback, and enable collaboration. Along the way, we will look at seven tools to enhance your practice of empathy and help you to be fierce.