Five Future Focused Conversations To Have With Your Team

As we have emerged out of Winter and the latest wave of COVID, we have been asked to undertake numerous Team Offsite Events which range from groups of 6 people to 200 people. Not only has it been wonderful to be back in the room with people in a face-to-face format, it has revealed the importance of taking time to celebrate what’s working inside Organisations and to explore what’s possible when we harness the passion and talent of everyone inside the Organisation. 

Inspired by these experiences, we want to share five questions we have identified through facilitation to be incredibly powerful catalysts for bringing about optimism, focus and camaraderie as Teams work together to achieve shared goals. 

1. What Experience Would We Want, If We Were Our Own Customer?

This question puts us straight into our customers shoes, looking back at ourselves. Invite your Team to explore this question in vivid detail. You may be surprised as to how well your people understand the ideal customer experience. They might have been thinking about it more than you realise, and, if they have received negative feedback, they can use that as inspiration to shape a better alternative. If you’re up for some extreme fun, why not invite your team to ‘act out’ or ‘perform a role play’ about the perfect customer experience as a part of this exploration to increase the sense of energy and fun in the room. 

2. What Binds Us Beyond The Pay Cheque?

This question asks us to think about the intrinsic motivators that drive us to perform at our best. In today’s competitive environment where someone from a competitor organisation is likely to entice your people with more money, you need to know the reasons your people stay. Invite your Teams to open out this discussion and listen to understand what they truly value about their workplace, each other and the culture. If you are looking to identify your organisations source of sustainable competitive advantage, listening well to what people truly value may point you in a helpful direction. 

3. Of These Initiatives, Which Are The Game Changers?

Inevitably, Team Offsites can feel like wading through lists of objectives and initiatives and feeling uninspired by the breadth of them. Consider starting your Event with this list already in place and engaging your people in their perspectives around which objectives and initiatives from the list are actual game changers that can shift the dial towards your strategic vision. Posing this question seems to elevate the energy in the room and has people critically think about where it is that they direct their finite attention. What might your people identify as game changer initiatives and how might this lift your game?

4. What Are The Missing Conversations Of This Team/Business Unit?

This question is both risky and liberating. There’s nothing worse than having a group of people sitting in a room and avoiding the discussions that need to be had. Posing this question will require you to hold a safe space as people begin to share their views on the missing conversations. It can be helpful to have people break into groups of two or three to explore this question so that there is relative safety in extracting the outputs from the group. Once you identify the range of missing conversations, see if you can use a voting mechanism to identify the top three and start working your way towards them. You may need a professional facilitator to make sure the space is safe enough for people to identify and declare these concerns. Imagine clearing these concerns and making space for the conversations you need to have as a future focused business. 

5. How Can We Multiply Our Impact?

This question assumes that you are clear as an Organisation as to your impact and that your people are invested in that. If you are not clear and if your people are not invested, this is a great conversation to be able to reconnect your people to the ‘why’ and begin to focus on leveraging what’s working well inside your Organisation. Depending on your sector, impact can be expressed very differently. For example, working inside spaces of Not for Profit, impact can be on lives and the choices that are enabled, whereas working inside more commercial entities, impact might be in creating spaces for people to live or creating more choices for people through the way that they manage their wealth. Sometimes you may need to look at shareholder impact and sometimes direct impact.

Team-based Events, well designed, can truly multiply your engagement and sense of connection to the ‘why’ of your Business. 

What we offer here is merely a teaser. How might you design your event in a way that brings people together, allows them to share and commit to a shared way forward? 

What other questions might help you release the potential that lies within the resource space of your Business, including your human potential?