Do you seek to make your meetings more engaged? Are you dreading the cynical reaction to your upcoming strategy announcement? Are you looking to increase participation and responsibility in your team and organisation? Then Liberating Structures might just be the thing for you.
In the past two weeks, we’ve shared our growth edges with regards to our personal flavours of being reactive, and how they have impacted our ability to show up powerfully.
In our experience, the bottom line to leadership is the ability to recover ever faster from reactive to creative being and doing. As leaders we create the world we want to live in. When we are reactive, we don’t!
Instead, we try to fit in, are inauthentic, or get lost in our mental ranting or fretting about this that or the other. And all of this happens frequently in interaction with others.
So this week we want to come back to how creative leaders invite and inspire those around them to engage and contribute.
The reality is all too often that those you pay for their work, in turn pay lip service and complain behind your back about your failure as a leader. I have found that office meetings are wonderfully rich and rewarding places if you are a student of the different ways of how people act out their unique personal style of reactivity:
Active and passive aggressiveness
Talking a lot from the need for looking good (hard worker, competent, successful …)
Not listening, and instead reading emails, interrupting, and bashing others from a better than others world view, or
Complaining from a deserving something better attitude.
What’s your personal style of being reactive? And isn’t it so much easier to spot it in others?
It can be daunting for a leader to have to break through the wall of “oh, here comes another tedious, ineffective office meeting.”
However, it can be much easier than you think.
Today we want to share with you an easy-to-use toolbox that brings lightness, creativity and engagement to any group and any type of meeting: from the weekly office to the annual strategy meeting. We’ve used it both online and offline, for small and large groups, and it has never failed to bring joy, engagement, connection, and last but not least: results. This toolbox is called Liberating Structures. There are 33 of them, and you can find a detailed description here: Liberating Structures.
If you desire meetings that engage all participants, that are productive and bring about innovation with ease, then Liberating Structures are worth giving a try. No matter what state your team is in now, you can trust the process to unlock co-creation and engagement in your team. If you follow every step of the descriptions faithfully, and if you take the generously shared tips and tricks to heart, you’re set for hosting a powerful meeting.
You’ll set the stage for a meeting that everyone will remember as different: efficient, engaging, fun, and effective.
A great way of diving into Liberating Structures is to participate in an immersion event. Liberating Structures immersons are two day workshops where you try out 15+ different structures in a group. You can participate alone or with your team. You can come if you have never used a Liberating Structure before, or if you use them all the time.
In March, two Liberating Structures pioneers and maestros from the US – the wonderful Anna Jackson & Fisher Qua are touring Europe again. They will share their magic at the Liberating Structures Immersion in Berlin, on the 19th and 20th of March 2020. You can get tickets here: Immerson workshop Berlin.
See you there?
