An agenda for a people centred kick off meeting
The problem: We know that teams which work best together generate a psychological safety in which people can operate. This allows them to share innovative and effective ideas without feeling a risk of being harmed by their fellow team members. (More info on this and other effective team elements)
However, most kick off meetings focus solely on the project itself, rather than spending any time on the people who will undertake it.
Solution: Use kick off meetings that focus solely on understanding the people you’ll be working with, rather than the project you’ll be working on.
The Agenda:
9:30–9:45 Check-in
Give everyone in the room a chance to quickly introduce themselves and let people know how they’re doing today. You can talk about work or the fact that you had a sleepless night thanks to a new born. The aim is to connect on a more human level rather than simply your name and job title…
9:45–10:45 Myers Briggs, Strengths Finder etc analysis
Myers Briggs, Gallup’s Strengths Finder or any of the other frameworks around are a fantastic way to understand how you and other people see the world. They ask you lots of different types of questions and give you some thoughts about where your natural strengths may lie.
In groups of 3–5, use this time to plot your individual propensities on a grid and then discuss how you see these play out in real life. You can then see where your overall team strengths are as well.
The most important elements to understand are how people prefer information to be presented and to get a sense for what types of activities are going to be particularly stretching for individuals.
11:00 –12:00 Retrospective
Use the kick off meeting to reflect and learn from previous experiences. If the project is recurring, then you can focus on what happened last time. If not, then look at the last 3 months and what’s been going well and what hasn’t.
The aim is to come up with a list of actions to avoid previous mistakes and lessons that have been learned from the wins.
12:15–13:00 Network mapping & Decision making styles
No project or team exists in a vacuum. It will have to report to someone and will rely on numerous parts of the organisation to succeed. Spend time marking out who those people or teams are, how they like to make decisions and who might be able to influence them.
LUNCH User Insights speed dating
Finish off the session by spending time looking at the people the project is trying to add value to. If you’ve got existing research then this is a great time to discuss it as a group. If not, then use your imagination, experience and various perspectives to come up with some ideas for who your users are and what they need.
Get people to bring their lunch along and every 5 minutes rotate them between a partner. Get them to discuss who they think the project is for, how it’ll help them and what the barriers could be…
NB — if possible, get someone from outside the project to facilitate, so you can concentrate on building your own understanding and relationships
PS: Thanks to Sophie King and the UNICEF Comms team for the inspiration for this post from their team away day.
