My role at the Landing Workshop
Mentors' role at the Landing Workshop
Workshop Overview
This marks the end of the team journey in the 100-Day Challenge. It is a time of celebration, bragging, reflecting, and pontificating! Yes, you read right: pontificating. The team has earned the right to tell the mentors what they think the latter should do and to challenge them to sustain and build on the gains they (the team) have made and the insights they have gained over the past 100 days.
What success looks like at the end of the Workshop.
The team will feel proud of what they have achieved and will feel acknowledged and honoured for the hard and creative work they did and for the impact they helped create. They will feel that, even though the past 100 days were exhausting, it was an experience they would love to go through again.
Mentors will feel proud of the team and will look back at the experience as liberating: “We do not have to figure out everything ourselves. We have a bigger role to play than solving problems. We need to decide on a direction of travel and then pick the right team to explore the way in that general direction. We trust they will figure things out. We will stand back and support them as they do this.”
Watch the video to see the essence of the Workshop.
Key outputs
- Menu of action recommendations that will be shared with leaders at the Re-Launch Workshop.
- One or two commitments from each team member to the shifts they would like to bring into their own organisation and day-to-day work, building on their experience over the past 100 days.
- List of leaders to invite to the Re-Launch workshop.
Remember the enabling environment we talked about earlier? The Landing workshop is designed and facilitated with this enabling environment in mind.
Lift-off Enabling Environment
Transformational Experience for those involved (new way of working). This new way of working is rooted in humility, respect for others, and a deep appreciation for what teams can deliver if the right environment is created.
Sustaining and scaling – Each 100-day cycle builds on previous cycles and in turn, the enabling conditions are strengthened for long-term impact. Through the experiments and the team experience, strategy emerges and gets clarified.
At the Landing Workshop, teams take power equity a step further. They effectively reverse the power relationship with leaders by challenging them to develop and implement plans to sustain the level of performance that the team achieved during the 100 days.
Leaders get to practice leading with humility, by accepting the challenge and involving team members as subject matter experts, advisors and mentors.
Prepare yourself before the workshop
The briefing with Ambassadors is more substantive than before the Refuelling Workshop. Mentors will need to carry the “sustainability torch” after the Landing workshop. And the Ambassadors will help you get ready to do this.
Set up a meeting with the Ambassadors a few days in advance of the Landing Workshop. Go over the overall agenda, and zero in on the segment on sustainability. The Ambassadors can share with you highlights of the discussion on sustainability at the Refuelling Workshop.
For the first part of the agenda, where the team is sharing highlights of what they achieved, it would be helpful to prepare some questions that the you can ask that will give the team an additional opportunity to brag about their achievements. This is especially important if there will be other leaders in the room who may be less familiar with the work of the team.
For the part of the workshop where the team is developing its sustainability recommendations, you need to be ready to play an active role and to contribute your own ideas. In fact, one of the mentors can facilitate this part of the discussion – which will signal ownership of the follow-up to this. If you are ready to do this, go over the facilitation guide with the Ambassadors to help you practice, and see what support you might need at the session.
Finally, go over the list of leadership invitees with the Ambassadors. Who else needs to come? Who may need special attention at the session? Who may need to be briefed in advance? Assign tasks as needed to make sure visitors are impressed, and to keep a positive energy in the room.
Next steps after the workshop
Set up a time to talk with the Ambassadors, debrief and discuss the way forward. Here are topics to cover during the debrief:
- Your impressions and takeaways from the workshop
- Review the sustainability recommendations. Based on these, decide on the best way to move forward.
- Prepare a draft thank you note from you, the mentors, to the team, with a cc to their managers. Try to highlight specific contributions of the team, so it is not a generic note. You can use some of the things that emerged at the Landing Workshop in this.
- Where appropriate, the mentors can send private messages to managers of specific team members who shined during the 100 days. Praise them.
- Agree on check-in call with the Ambassadors in a month or so to help keep you accountable for the sustainability recommendations.
