The facilitation thermometer
In our culture, it is common to make recommendations or comments to our co-workers. Most of the time, we do not stop to think about the effect it can have on our co-workers when they receive them.
Although most of the time the intention is to improve, the opposite happens, negative feedback is given and interpreted as criticism and produces the effect of contempt on the person who receives it. On other occasions, positive feedback is given and the receiver of the comment does not interpret it in the same way.
A study made by Gallup mentions that 26% of employees fully agree that the feedback they receive improves their work. A reason is if it is done indirectly and gently, the brain does not recognize that it is receiving feedback. Another reason is if it is done directly, the brain recognizes it as a social threat, therefore, it becomes defensive. This number is quite low, considering that the goal is to improve productivity in a collaborative environment.
If you want to know more, you may see here.
Therefore, previously to the practice, I had the opportunity to participate in some meetings listening to negative comments about the performance and productivity of the Quality area in the assigned projects.
This area is made up of 12 people who work for a company in the Financial sector, whose focus is to ensure the quality of software products.
After listening to the team, I decided to add a practice after developing the “Celebration Grid” practice. The application aimed to make each participant mentions the good, the bad and the ugly comments that they took from the facilitation in a direct and transparent way.
The name of this practice is Happiness Door. If you want to know more about this practice, I invite you to visit the following link.
The goal of the practice is to ask for timely, specific, and honest feedback to raise collective happiness and collaboration when a participant shares the good, the bad, and the ugly about a meeting, conference, or training.
I applied the following steps:
Step 1. Preparation. I prepared the environment for the practice on the Miro Collaboration tool, placing a door and inside of it, emojis that represent “the good”, “the bad” and “the ugly” so that each participant can share their comments in a post-it with transparency. The practice was done remotely using Microsoft Teams.
Step 2. Thermometer. I asked each participant to write their comments about the Celebration Grid facilitation on a post-it, according to the emoji showing on the Happiness Door, and then they could withdraw from the activity. The suggested time was 3 minutes, although some took about 5 minutes.
For this practice, the Quality Director, the Quality Leaders team and the Quality Analysts participated.
Now I want to share with you, as a facilitator, I learned that not belonging directly to the Quality area, contributed to the team commented their opinions about the practice with transparency and without fear. Another learning is, we as leaders have an exceptional opportunity to develop skills by listening to team members.
Next, I am going to share some of the learnings of the work team:
· The team learned a practice to express their opinions without fear of feeling questioned.
· The team learned that practices facilitate exploration and reflection about the work they are doing to improve and increase productivity.
· Team members concluded that everyone has different perspectives and challenges.
My next experiment with this practice will be to get feedback in business meetings from attendees to learn about them. In addition, I will experiment with other Management 3.0 practices to improve people facilitation.
A different action will be to increase the scale from 3 values: “the good”, “the bad” and “the ugly” to 5 values “the very bad”, “the bad”, “the regular”, “the good” and “the very good” to make the feedback more accurate.
As results obtained by the team, it felt listened to, happy and took a proactive position for action, feeling part of the solution as a team and not as individuals.
Dear Reader, if this is the first time you read about these practices, I encourage you to listen to your team without judgment and without seeking blame.
If you know about Management 3.0 practices, I encourage you to promote a transparent culture and continuous improvement to increase productivity.
Finally, I want to invite you to practice Happiness Door to promote collective happiness through the feedback from the work team transparent.
