After the Lift-off Workshop

You breathe a huge sigh of relief… The Lift-off workshop was successful! You have secured the first 50% of the probability of success. Now it is time to keep increasing the odds.

The good news is that now you have a real partner who can share this responsibility with you. The team leader is now in the driver’s seat, and you are stepping into an advisory, coaching, and support role.

It is good to strike the iron while it is hot and to set up a time to meet with the team leader(s) a few days after the Lift-off Workshop – and before the first team meeting.

The purpose of the meeting is to establish your working relationship with them and to make sure they are clear about their role and the support they will need from you and others.

To prepare for the meeting, you must be clear on the things a team leader will need to do to increase the odds of success.

In the 2-3 weeks after Lift-off, the team leader:

Ensures that the team completes the work plan that they worked on at the Lift-off workshop.
Ensures that the team has developed a way to track progress against their goal, and that they actually started tracking this.
Sets the rhythm for the weekly team meetings by facilitating the first meeting, a week or so after the Lift-off Workshop.
Meets with the mentors to establish a rhythm of updates and consultations with them, ideally on a bi-weekly basis.
Communicates with others outside the team who need to be informed about the goal and the highlights of the plan, either directly or through the mentors.

During the 100 days of Implementation (Exploration Phase)

The main tool that the Team Leader uses is the weekly team meeting. The team leader prepares for this, sets the agenda, facilitates the meeting, and follows up as needed on decisions and tasks that are decided on. The team leaders need to keep an eye on both the outcomes and the process during team meetings. See text block below for more details.

OUTCOMES

Ensure that the team remains focused on the goal: start each team meeting by reviewing the chart developed for tracking progress towards the goal.
Manage the work plan: review with the team progress against action steps, and support team members who are falling behind on the assigned actions.
Push the team to think of new ideas to experiment with to increase the odds of achieving the goal.

PROCESS

Ensure that the team is living into the behaviours and commitments they made to each other in their Team Agreement.
Keep an eye on team energy – and find creative ways to keep the engagement and the energy levels high (e.g. bring cookies to meetings -:)
Keep an eye on the dynamics between team members, and intervene where needed to surface conflicts and ‘name tensions’, and to help the team deal with these effectively.

The team leaders have a lot on their plate…

Your role, as ambassador, is to help them understand their role and help them be successful at it.

After you go over the role with the team leaders, you can together decide where your support is most needed. As a guideline, the more the team leader is willing and able to take on, the better. But it is OK if they ask you, for example, to facilitate the first one or two team meetings. If you do so, use these as learning opportunities for team leaders. Make sure you meet with them before to prepare and after to debrief. And after the second meeting, invite them to take over the role of managing the next meeting while you observe. And give them feedback after that.

Once they feel confident and you feel comfortable with their understanding of the role and their abilities, you can dial down your involvement to a call every week or two with the team leader(s) to see how things are going and how you can help.