Imagine there is a set of questions, so central to the nature of your organization, that if asked powerfully, they would ripple throughout your team, fundamentally altering the nature of your business. Welcome to the 17 Questions that transform teams.
17 Questions is a 1-day program that engages information workers, team leaders and managers to ask simple and powerful questions that create an entirely new level of personal engagement, accountability and transparency in teams.
What drives our day-to-day actions?
The day begins with an inquiry into the personal and team cost of our ineffective communication and negative language patterns. Participants examine and tell the truth about their negative habits. As they recognize motivation based on fear, guilt or failure they begin to take control of their individual communication and team results.
What will take us to the next level?
Team members engage in a learning dialogue and a series of exercises in which they practice and develop a capability to ask powerful questions, listen with intention and create certainty in every interaction. When an entire team or business begins to master this powerful yet simple context and set of questions, it creates the foundation for organizational transformation.
Participants learn how to ask questions so that team members experience:
- Instant team relationship
- Relating to others from a learning and development frame
- Tiny contracts for results in every interaction
- A new ability to listen to others and create fault tolerant agreements
- Thinking backwards from outcomes to results to actions
- Drilling down to expose wishful thinking and turn tasks into promises
- Creating certainty in every interaction
What gets people into action, solving problems?
Participants work with and begin to understand the team context of the recent research into the reptilian, mammalian and visual areas of the human brain. This powerful and simple segment allows people to separate fear, guilt and failure from creativity, alignment and action. They practice the questions and language patterns that go with each thinking style and begin understand the role of each in a team and management context.
Throughout the day participants ask and answer questions that:
- Create engagement between individual goals and business milestones
- Generate immediate energy, action and assist team members to know when and when not to use this approach
- Create trust and alignment between individual and team focus and priorities
- Hold a context of inquiry and drill down to resolve problems and business challenges
- Develop visual thinking practices for accelerated problem solving and creativity
How can we create a coaching culture?
Participants practice a powerful set of accountability questions while developing the ability to coach and listen effectively. The program design structures the basic principles of coaching as outlined by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) into a team accountability context that quickly and creates an effective coaching culture.
Why is this program so effective?
This program breaks through the clutter of everyday work practices with questions and key statements that shift the context of work from rules and procedures to promises and engagement. The simple and engaging exercise driven format makes learning easy. Broad concepts are distilled into simple questions and key statements which are included in handouts and homework.
After the 1-day training, the critical coaching and follow-up maintains the presence of the program while the new practices are established. Follow up is best integrated into a hand-off into existing in-house training initiatives and reporting structures.
