Team Connecting
Building engagement, collaboration & psychological safety (brain-friendly team workshop or webinar)
- Duration: 1-3 hour workshop, plus pre-work videos
- Format: in-person or brain-friendly webinar
- Flipped design: bite-sized pre-work theory videos, to maximise workshop reflection opportunities
- Suitable for: team meetings, off-sites, leadership or talent programs
- Complements the Team S.A.F.E.T.Y™ Debrief Workshop
- Size: 4+
This Team Connecting Workshop explores
Simple, brain-based strategies to increase social & emotional intelligence, group cohesion & psychologically safer team interactions
Building a sense of belonging may help improve collaboration, participation, engagement and potentially group outcomes
The session demonstrates brain-friendly ways to connect more, engage more, respect more, listen more and interrupt less, which naturally gives rise to safer (as far as the brain is concerned) team connections. Such psychological safety better supports a neuro-diverse workforce, who may typically disengage in regular interactions because of 'unsafe' group behavioural norms such as interruption, dominance, urgency or inattention. This session is especially recommended therefore, for groups that include introverts
Put simply; this session shows different ways for the group to behave with each other, which helps bring the humanity, psychological safety & inclusivity back to group meetings and interactions. Real authentic human connection gets results. The more high-tech our meetings and connections have become, the more high-touch they need to be too
Theories about the brain at work (social threats & psychological safety) and social sensitivity, turn-taking & mentalizing1,2 are combined with key elements (behaviours) from the Thinking Environment®
This unique combination typically creates team meetings and collaborations which are:
- calmer, psychologically safer & more participatory
- more enjoyable
- surprisingly shorter
Meetings run in this way may also increase team collective intelligence, insight & creativity, leading to better thinking, decision-making & outcomes
Testimonials
“I thought yesterday’s meeting was fantastic! I really enjoyed it.I think it brought the team closer together and will make meetings much more productive. Thank you!”
“I have been talking to the team and they have all said how useful it was and how they are more of a team now as a direct result..”
Learning outcomes:
- An understanding of what starts/stops/upsets/supports the brain at work and how this impacts collaboration with others
- An understanding of the behaviours, psychological safety & environmental requirements necessary within meetings for improved collaboration or interactions
- An experience of generating insights for self & others
- An opportunity to reflect on the team's inclusivity, ways of being and performance, using the principles of social sensitivity
- An experience and understanding of psychologically safety (connection, listening, attention, ease, un-interruption) within meetings & work interactions
- An experience of meditation within a team setting (if appropriate)
- An experience of real-time stress measurement (in-person workshop only)
This Team Connecting Workshop covers:
Pre-work videos (+ workshop facilitated discussions):
Work & Your Brain: Social threats, psychological safety & peak mental performance - and the impact on belonging
Workshop activities:
Social & Emotional Intelligence: An experiential activity, using elements of the Thinking Environment® to illustrate how behaviours and social threats can either stop thinking or help generate moments of insight and team connection. Uses a question to focus on the team's performance, effectiveness and style of collaboration
Guided meditation: clean, clear, secular & simple meditation to calm & rebalance. This demonstrates the experience of ease within a meeting
Real-time stress experiment: demonstrating the impact of thinking & stress on the body (in-person workshop only - virtual participants referred to on-line assessment alternative)
The Mind at Work 4 pillars
To address key team challenges:
1. Team Thinking: Boosting collective intelligence, clarity & insight
Great for a group that needs better thinking, insights and innovation. Or a team that works well together, but is facing tough business challenges
2. Team Connecting: Building team engagement, collaboration & psychological safety
Great for a team that needs improved bonding, engagement and trust. Or a team that is newly formed or altered
3. Team Changing: Supporting team change, reorganisation or restructuring
Great for a group facing change. Or one that needs to adapt, transform & reshape
4. Team Thriving: Strengthening team resilience, supporting self-care & avoiding overwhelm
Great for a team that needs revitalizing, refreshing and a reboot. Or a team that has completed a major project, undergone recent change or is in a sector prone to burnout
Each workshop uses the same Work & Your Brain pre-work videos and includes similar theories and activities, but with a different aim and focus
Team Thinking & Team Connecting, in particular, are similar sessions. Team Thinking, however, uses a business related issue to practice 'thinking', with the aim of improving team outcomes through thinking & performance. Whereas Team Connecting uses a question about the experience of being in the team, within a safe facilitated discussion, to improve team outcomes through cohesion and connection
Because the topics of thinking, connecting and resilience are all interrelated, there may well be some overlapping of outcomes or benefits between all 4 workshops
Mindless meetings - the Research
The key elements of this workshop were explored in a small unpublished pilot study in General Electric (Smarter Meetings: Changing Behaviours to Boost Meeting Effectiveness). The hypothesis was that altering meeting behaviours through practically applying collective intelligence research findings (turn-taking and mentalizing), in effect making them more ‘brain-friendly’, might result in safer, trusting, more pro-social, shorter, smarter and more satisfying meetings, improving team performance, meeting effectiveness and workplace thinking and decisions
An overview of the GE findings is given on the Team Thinking page
Citations:
1 Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups (2010). BY ANITA WILLIAMS WOOLLEY, CHRISTOPHER F. CHABRIS, ALEX PENTLAND, NADA HASHMI, THOMAS W. MALONE. SCIENCE29 OCT 2010 : 686-688
2 Collective Intelligence and Group Performance (2015). Woolley, AW., Aggarwal, I., & Malone, T. W. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(6), 420–424