The quality of a conversation is determined long before it begins.
You are bringing your team together for a gathering. A workshop, training or team meeting.
Beforehand, you obsess over the practicals. Ensuring you have planned the agenda, arranged the room and ordered a good lunch.
But you forget one big thing.
Preparing the people.
In The Art of the Gathering, Priya Parker explores this problem and why it's important.
When you fail to prepare people, the conversation never reaches its potential.
Imagine you want a creative, open discussion but people turn up fixed on their solutions.
The alternative.
Prime people ahead of the conversation.
You are running a session on coaching in your company. A behaviour you want people to show in the conversation is empathy.
To prepare people, send an email out ahead of time. Include real, heartfelt testimonials from three senior leaders sharing personal, specific examples of the transformative power that a coach had on them.
These primes people for the conversation ahead.
Before your next team meeting, think about this.
- How do you want people to behave?
- How can you prime that behaviour ahead of the gathering?
Learn more from The Art of the Gathering by Priya Parker
|