Mid NJ ATD
Facilitation Mastermind
1st Gathering – November 1, 2018 6:00-7:30 Panera Bread Nassau Park, Princeton
Group – Please review and edit as needed. Rich
Attending:
Shalini Jetli (Shali) from Bridgewater area, comes from a corporate background (15 years with IBM) doing leadership development and talent development and has a lot of experience facilitating groups and wants to share what she’s learned and hear what else is going on and has a passion for issues of diversity and inclusion and women’s leadership development
Jeanne D’onofrio is from Princeton area and works at Princeton U doing HR/Leadership/Culture development. She has an accounting background but realized immediately she enjoys people development work and has also facilitated many training and group conversations. She is interested in depending her skills and exploring how design and facilitation go together.
Denise Katula is from Somerville and works for the County doing leadership development and culture work for her organization of 1200 people. She is newer to the work and has been learning by “throwing herself into the fire” and is looking to this group to see if what’s she’s been doing and experiencing is what others have found.
Elizabeth Lachowicz is Director of Education for a professional association headquartered out of Princeton. She has a small team where they do everything in terms of professional development for their members/customers. She came from the public sector Pharma and Telecom and is finding she really needs to facilitate and influence her SME’s, and would like to facilitate internal group dynamics. She is looking to deepen her skills, share what she’s learned and hear about what’s happening in OD, TD, etc.
Vernon Jacobs is from Princeton area (but originally from Kentucky and still adjusting to the Northeast style 😉 and has a long background with large multinationals where he has been abroad doing training and consulting a lot of it in the 6 sigma/lean space. He is now independent and is looking to network and stay current.
Rich McLaughlin is from Yardley, PA area and has been doing leadership development, facilitating innovation/design thinking sessions and large group transformation processes for several after years working for big companies in Chicago area. He wants to continue to network and keep his skills sharp.
We confirmed our purpose as a chance to get together to explore and deepen our skills and have spirited conversation. We also agreed to meeting once a month (approximately) and our next gathering is scheduled for Dec 13. Elizabeth with host and facilitate; tentative location is her office in Forrestal village from 6:00-7:30 more on that to come.
One specific question we explored is what we have found helpful to do to help groups we gather connect and create an environment for candor and authentic conversation. Ideas offered include:
- Use guidelines/ground rules to establish and declare a “safe zone” for conversation (“What’s said here stays here”) a variation of this is to ask for the group’s help in helping you keep the group to the agreements and establishing that we can “agree to disagree, agreeably” as another option
- Be authentic and candid yourself to show the way
- Share a personal story that illustrates the challenges with being authentic in a corporate setting
- Use an ice-breaker where each person talks about themselves until someone else in group finds a connection, then they talk until a new person finds a connection with what they are sharing. This is repeated until all have connected.
- A variation of above is a kind of 6 degrees of separation – where people share things about themselves until they find a group of 5-6 who share that same attribute
- Asking good, open-ended questions that are worthy of our attention (instead of “how can we reduce the costs of our service?” ask “How can we reduce the costs of our service, without compromising our quality and without creating more work or complexity for us?”)
- Ask people to tell their story in 6 words as an ice breaker
- Instead of having people introduce themselves at beginning of a workshop or training session or long meeting, ask them to find someone they don’t know well, chat and find out some info about them (e.g., name, their goal for the session, one thing the group doesn’t know) and they introduce each other
Group – any feedback on my facilitation (positive first, then constructive) is appreciated. I’d like to make this a part of our commitments so that each host gets specific feedback when they are done. Let’s have this as one of our topics at the next meeting. If you want to offer me some feedback, just email [email protected] or call 609-577-3072
Also, please provide phone #’s.
Be well,
Rich
