Don't Spring a Brainstorming Session on Your Team, Do This Instead
Ben-Jamin Toy, HSG
Experiential Team Building: Keeping your remote, in-person, and hybrid workforces productive & engaged.
"Hey everyone! Gather in the conference room for a spur of the moment brainstorming session!"
When organizational leaders announce this employees react differently. The outspoken extroverts are excited to share their big ideas. Their minds are already churning with input they are excited to share during the meeting.
But the quiet introverts, the ones who have hundreds of ideas they are too shy to share with a spotlight on them, are dreading the brainstorming session. They know any good ideas they have will be drowned out by the more outspoken teammates.
"Brainstorming is powerful, but it’s not perfect. If you aren’t careful, traditional group brainstorming tends to favor the quick thinkers and the loudest voices in the room. Quieter, introverted personalities (and their ideas) can easily get left out of the conversation." (Lucidspark blog)
It's not just an introvert vs. extrovert dilemma. Group brainstorming can also become a popularity contest. For one, nobody wants to tell the boss they don't like his or her idea. Also, nobody wants to vote against their office best friend's idea.
What's the solution? It's simple:
Lead on Purpose
If leaders are striving to Lead on Purpose, they need to be intentional with how they ask for brainstorming input in order to generate the best ideas. This means managers don't fling the idea of a group brainstorming session on teams.
Instead, leaders make a deliberate plan for a successful group brainstorming session. I recommend using one of these group brainstorming strategies.
4 Group Brainstorming Techniques
1. Brainwriting: This technique allows the shy introvert to write down their ideas rather than sharing them out loud with an audience. A popular form of brainstorm, when brainwriting everyone writes their idea down on a piece of paper or sticky note. Then the papers get shuffled around and a different teammate builds onto the initial idea. The papers can get passed around to every teammate or a certain number of rounds. After the final round, the moderator collects everyone's worksheets, then displays and talks through every suggestion made
2. Mind Mapping: A group mind map involves writing down a central theme and brainstorming new and related ideas which radiate out from the central theme. Begin by writing the central topic on a whiteboard or online collaborative tool. Then write each teammate's ideas on a branch off the center. Make sure every teammate gets their own branch to include everyone in the brainstorming session. Mind mapping makes it easy to share ideas in a visual and collaborative manner.
3. Rapid Ideation: The purpose of rapid ideation is to produce an abundance of ideas in a short amount of time. Allow employees the opportunity to free write ideas off the top of their minds. The short time frame removes judgements and other constraints. Employees don't have time to think 'is this too expensive, too crazy, too out-of-the box?' Rapid ideation can lead to highly innovative and unanticipated solutions to complex problems.
4. Starbursting: This brainstorming technique prompts your team to create questions before answers. Create a star and label each point of the star with "Who?" “What?” “When?” “Where?” “Why?” and “How?”?These questions encourage participants to expand their thinking and come up with creative solutions. Employees then approach the subject from different angles to generate a variety of ideas leading to protentional solutions.
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Allow Your Team to Prepare
My final piece of advice: Provide the brainstorming topics prior to the meeting. Allow the slow thinkers the ability to come up with fresh ideas that they can share in a meaningful way.
After collecting everyone's ideas, you can even present all ideas without any attribution to individual team members. By not attaching ideas to an employees' name, the discussion will be based on the idea's merit and not the team members popularity.
Then discuss these ideas during the group brainstorming session. In this way, you remove the anchoring effect, where employees quit brainstorming midway through the meeting to focus on the initial ideas proposed.
You also won't have the loudest voices being the only ones heard. All personality types can bring their great ideas to the table and be heard. Additionally, all ideas can be introduced before delving further into any one proposal.
Leaders believe group brainstorming is the best way to get everyone's input and empower employees to share out-of-the-box thinking. Anyone in the office could create the next big thing and who wouldn't like that? Actually, many employees don't feel impromptu group brainstorming is a good way to make their voices heard. But by utilizing these techniques, whether in-person or virtually, leaders can better provide every employee the opportunity to provide creative ideas and solutions for the organization.
Want to learn how we can help engage all employees whether extroverts or introverts, in-person or virtual?
Schedule a time to chat at:
Dr.?Troy?Hall's Cohesion Corner
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THINK OF CULTURE AS A STRATEGY NOT A TACTIC …
If companies want to survive today they need to understand current worker expectations. I call this "The Entrepreneurial Spirit." Leaders face the challenge of transitioning?their thinking from treating culture as a tactic to a strategy. Read to the end of my newsletter linked below and find four things you can do to push beyond the limits and meet emerging employee needs.
All the best,
Ben-Jamin Toy
Ben-Jamin Toy?works with elite clients spanning the globe, from well-known Fortune 500 companies to special ops forces representing five countries. He is the founder of On Purpose Adventures , a driving force in purposeful, unconventional, and effective team building for over a decade, and co-founder of Cohesion Culture?. A sought-after facilitator, consultant, and speaker, Toy continues to focus his heart, soul and substantial knowledge of culture wellness into each learning experience, promising a fun and engaging encounter with tangible results.
Director and founder of Encouragement Now Ministries
2 年I love this Ben, great insight, tremendous leadership wisdom, this was a gift this morning, a gem, this info & pragmatic skill/strategy implementation will be huge in me leading my team, thanks so much, sending this to my team leaders this very morning, keep up the good work, hope to talk to you soon, blessing always to you & yours :)
Father and Husband I Help Agencies and Consultants Optimize Their Business Systems and Processes?? Saving Over 8 Hours a Week
2 年I think using a tool like Miro to allow all voices to be heard is great. To your point, sometimes the quite people that observe can have the best ideas. As a leader, I think you also need to be very intentional to make sure all voices are heard and create a culture where everyone feels empowered to share and add value to the conversation, even if they may be an introvert. Being part of a team should feel like a family, you're speaking up in front of an entire company, you are sharing ideas with your family. If your team doesn't have this dynamic, I think that should be one of the first steps you take to help improve future brainstorming sessions.
I help forward thinking businesses create a culture that attracts, retains & develops great staff. ?? So you can focus on running your business with a strong team supporting you. ?? Speaker, Facilitator, Consultant
2 年I LOVE brainstorming! I get so much energy from collaborating. So I'm definitely guilty of springing that on my team, not realizing that not everyone enjoys that. ?? I did eventually learn to slow down and have everyone write out some thoughts before we began doing anything else. I've had them do ideas on post it notes and then they were put on a wall and grouped with similar ideas. Then had the group come look at the ideas and start to see where one idea could be utilized with another. I love your 4 different styles Ben-Jamin! I'm going to use some of those in the future.
Bestselling author on Talent Retention, international speaker, and founder of Cohesion Culture??
2 年To prepare for a brainstorming session, I like to give folks time to think about the topic. In that heads up message, I ask them to bring one to three ideas to share already recorded (manually or digitally). The ideas do not have to be thoroughly thought through and I strongly advise against it. When people arrive, they get to share what is written down. This allows for harmony between introverts and extroverts. We get out everyone’s contributions before qualifying whether the suggestion works or not. In the session, the highest ranking leaders are always the last to speak. For me, effective brainstorming facilitation follows the principle of cohesion and promotes belonging (inclusion), value (meaningfulness), and shared mutual commitment (collaboration). #cohesionculture #leadership #employeeretention #drtroyhall
Organizational Development || Operational Process Optimization || Team Building & Career Growth || Strategic Roadmapping || HigherEd Philanthropy || GS 40 Under 40
2 年Ohhhh! Ben-Jamin Toy such an interesting post and timely as we head into our 2022 Retrospective and are thinking about SWOT for the upcoming year. Need to do a little noodling on this and gather examples. I'll start by saying I have 100% been guilty of springing brainstorming on teams ?? and wondering why it didn't go as planned or generate the volume of ideas I expected. I work primarily with virtual teams which presents its own unique issues with regards to attention, focus, and methods to use as well as tools to facilitate the methods! Initial thoughts: 1. Anonymous idea submission is helpful in getting out the crazy ideas or thoughts that might be controversial or unpopular but need to be surfaced for consideration. 2. A tool/mechanism for clustering/grouping ideas together and establishing patterns is helpful for virtual teams. 3. Time and space to consider what will be brainstormed is important. While a rapid Round 1 of initial ideas can be beneficial, some people need time to consider the problem, think, talk, research before being expected to just spout off ideas. We use a tool called Parabol that has been extremely helpful on a number of fronts for idea gathering, pattern establishment and prioritization of ideas.