A Metaphor for a Meeting Make-over

Is it a pack of wolves?
Is it a beehive?
Is it the Muppets?
NO—it’s a metaphor!

Patience dear reader, I shall explain in a moment.

Imagine that you are an employee in a group that has just had one of its newer members leave because he couldn’t work with you and your colleagues. It is time to hire a new employee. Your manager brings you together to talk about what it will take to successfully induct a new team member. So you start gossiping about what went wrong with the guy who left and why it was all about him. Then you realize that you may have had a role to play too. And your manager asks you to start identifying some concrete things you can do differently and even asks for some suggestions from all of you about what she can do to better prepare the candidate for the group’s work. All good stuff but a little boring and really you have a lot of work to do. How much longer will this meeting last?

Enter the right brain [and an inspired coach! :) ]

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine that your team is a living breathing organism. What real or imagined creature would it be? How would it move? What would it feel? How would it interact with others? How is it healthy? How does it evolve? How does it integrate new entities into its midst and remain healthy?

You look around and see that, in fact, your colleagues are doing this so you do too. Then you talk to each other in pairs about your organism. And the room is buzzing. The energy is sky high. No one is checking blackberries. Your teammates start talking and each one is more interesting and potent than the next. Not only are you getting brilliant and powerful ideas about how to integrate a new teammate you are beginning to get a much better sense of who you actually are as a team and who you want to be. There is some good discussion about what would happen if your roles really were as clear as those bees in the beehive. And you have made plans to talk about what it would take to have more of a sense of collective responsibility like those wolves.

This really happened folks.

Right brained exercises in general and metaphors specifically are a great doorway into the real work of your organization. Stash the skepticism and give it a try. And let me know what happens.