If you’re looking to change things up in your next team meeting, I have 2 questions for you to play with …

🤔 QUESTION 1
What is the #1 (unvoiced) question our team isn’t asking?

🤔 QUESTION 2
What is the #1 (voiced) question our team isn’t answering?

These have been 2 of the most effective questions I’ve seen for creating rich and affirming conversations amongst teams – both mature and newly-formed, stable and erratic. And the richness of the resulting conversations will occur, whether people have strong opinions (which some will) or have never before consider the question.

🧪 You’ll need to experiment.

These questions weren’t just dreamt up. They are the product of trial and error, reflection and adjustment. I mention this ingredient of experimentation to highlight that you, too, as team leader, may need to experiment. Be ok with that. The experimentation, in itself, will generate valuable conversation, learning and change. (Plus it’s a great opp to model outstanding team leadership skill.)

⚖️ You’ll need to facilitate.

You’ll also need to bring some strong facilitation skills (a topic absolutely top-of-mind for me, right now: see my last post for some ideas and inspiration.) If you’d like a top tip on that, I’d simply suggest: be ok with whatever arises.

🤔 2 questions to bring to your team meeting.

Unusual? Perhaps. But a good portion of our precious team time is best-spent on developing our interrelationships. Provocative questions like these are one way to do that.

Team meetings routinely focus on task progress and delivery. There’ll likely be some process in there, too. How much time is dedicated to the quality of our relationships, and to the discussions that matter most?