Tune up your EQ

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Flickr Credit: Photo by: halfwaytoconcord: Creative Commons Attribution License

A retreat is announced at your organisation. Do you feel excited, apprehensive or neutral? One thing’s for sure, you’re feeling something

I’ve facilitated retreats of all sizes, from community events, to business strategy sessions to summits led by Jamaica’s (then)Prime Minister. There’s a thread that runs through every retreat encounter.

Emotions are always involved..for those taking part…and for the facilitator

Tune up your EQ reader from Jamaica, Tanika Williams, who also featured in the Me and My EQ series, asked me this question about retreats:

” is there a way by which the facilitator may get feedback as to how each participant feels? In other words, is it possible to ask each participant to give a quantitative summary of at least two strengths and weaknesses of such a process/presentation? Or what they think could have been done better?”

Here are 13 tips that I use to help my participants use their emotional intelligence (instead of leaving it at the door on their way in). It helps them to get the most out of their retreats.

Before

1) Engage participants before the programme by inviting their comments, queries and expectations. Thanks, Ellen Weber for this suggestion.
2) Gauge where people are at emotionally at the beginning of the retreat by getting them to rate how they feel.

During

3) Continue to check how they’re feeling by asking them as the retreat develops.
4) Observe participants’ body language.
5) Adjust your approach during the retreat as 3 and 4 change.

Towards The End of Each Session

6) Ask participants to rate their levels of understanding of the planned next steps.
7) Ask them about their level of commitment to the next steps.

At The End of The Retreat

Finish off the retreat with a “closing circle, where everyone gets the chance to offer his/her comments.
9) Ask everyone to complete a written evaluation form.

After The Retreat

10) Produce a report that summarises the evaluation form
11) Review the summary report with the project sponsor
12) Ask the project sponsor a series of open ended questions to help evaluate the impact of the retreat.
13) Do a follow up evaluation in six months time.

Could these tips help you achieve more at your next retreat?

What other tips would help to make it more effective?

Be sure to read the other tipsd in the Related Posts section of this article.

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7 laws of emotional intelligence bright ideas presentations emotional intelligence failure leadership learning project management retreats

See the BrightIdeas™ Presentation Archive

Why we must learn to embrace failure

When you learn from your failures the outcomes can be very powerful.

This month’s BrightIdeas™ presentation

How to Transform Organisational Failure into Superior Results, tells the story of a leader in a public sector organisation who inspired her team through her willingness to learn by embracing failure.

Although it wasn’t easy, she was able to restrain disruptive trigger impulses. Instead of shutting down (which would have pushed her organisation further down the steep hill of failure), she was able to manage her emotions.

As a result her leadership approach had a great impact. It led to superior organisational results.

This leader vividly demonstrated how my 7 Laws of Emotional Intelligence can help you to achieve personal and organisational breakthroughs in the real world.

Download The How A Transformational Leader Learned From Failure Presentation

You can download your copy of the presentation here.

How To Transform Organisational Failure Into Superior Results< includes graphics(253kb) PDF format

But this could never work for me!!

This story touches on numerous work themes, including how you lead, whether and how you empower employees, how you plan and how you manage projects. They apply wherever you live and wherever you work.

All that is different is the conclusion that YOU reach when you decide how you feel about the presentation.

Be aware of the 3 levels of failure

As you view the presentation, I encourage you to think about how you deal with failure at work at 3 important levels, firstly as an individual, secondly, as a team member and finally, at the level of your organisation as a whole.

I’m curious to know how you feel once you’ve answered the 5 questions at the end of the presentation.

Recognising an inspiring, authentic and humble leader

Thank you so much, project sponsor. Writing this post and the presentation reminded me that it was a great learning experience for me to see an authentic leader in action and it was my privilege to be involved in facilitating the retreats.

More resources

There’s a lot to this story. Towards the end of her opening presentation, the project sponsor observed:

“it is my belief that by examining these failures, and implementing plans to address them, along with continuous process reviews we’ll build confidence and product branding within the region.”

You can download the project sponsor’s presentation Is Failure A Good Thing ?here.

Click here to read more about the project in this press release.

Recognising a community building Tune up Your EQ Blog reader

Thank you, Dr. Ellen Weber for suggesting that I look more deeply into how my 7 Laws of Emotional Intelligence7 Laws of Emotional Intelligence work in the real world.

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