Who traveled with me to a client retreat.

For the team retreats that we are invited to facilitate, our goal is nearly always to help them improve their self awareness and ability to be stronger communicators - and ultimately, performers - together. This can take many shapes from training to experiential practice, but for one client last week, I leaned on every "thinker" I've learned from in the last decade+ to design this session.

This was a longtime client with some complex challenges I can't go into for purposes of confidentiality. But as I travel away from the two-day session, I wanted to pay my gratitude to the collection of thought leaders who helped me prepare.

Roger Birkman, founder of the Birkman assessment. We are indebted to his personality assessment tool in helping to reveal not just usual styles — but needs we have at work — and ensuing stress responses when they aren’t met. This client team individually and collectively does not like to plan (they are highly motivated by solving problems and being creative) which means they are challenged by establishing and documenting recurring systems that can make work more efficient and profitable. We did an assessment on each team member which meant we could pull composite reports for some really productive conversations. Birkman

Gino Wickman, Author of Traction and Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). We are EOS loyalists and our client is working on being one. I found myself pulling out their VTO, interrogating their values on it, connecting issues back to goals and rocks and leaning into practicing IDS. “Traction.” On the plane on the way to the meeting I read “People”(O'Donnell, Knight & Dube) - a new addition to the EOS library - which sharpened my thinking on “right person right seat.” I always need to nod to my longtime friends Rob Dube and Helmut Berthold when reflecting on my personal origins and journey with EOS. EOS Worldwide Gino Wickman CJ DuBe' Mark O'Donnell Kelly Knight Rob Dube Helmut Berthold

Susan Scott, Author of Fierce Conversations. Where EOS falls a little light on the "issues" deliberating, Fierce Conversations picks up. I love Scott’s “issues prep” form (among all of her tools) that puts the reponsibilty on the person raising the issue (in the IDS process) to think more strategically about why it matters and how to communicate it. The result is that the ensuing “discussion” is really robust and productive. There were some tough conversations to be had in the room and her seven Fierce principals were also grounding reminders for me how to work through them. Fierce Conversations Susan Scott

Jean Chatzky, author of Women with Money + longtime award winning journalist. For a leadership team (especially mine), I’m always overlaying our relationship with money as it relates to habits in compensation, pricing and general risk tolerance. For this predominantly female comprised group, Chatzky’s writing provokes important questions to consider. Related but not as important for this retreat I always kept Casey Brown’s TEDxColumbusWomen talk (admittedly that I helped to curate and TED continues to share quarterly!) close for reminding about how they communicate their value. Jean Chatzky Casey Brown

Angus Fletcher, author of Storythinking, and other notable titles. In the last few years Fletcher has been an influence on me. He's taught me namely that we don't make decisions logically, but rather irrationally. I carry his “green book” (Creative Thinking: A field guide for strategic thinking) around with me to be able to help draw out those emotional turning point stories that we unconsciously tug on during difficult decision making moments. I also attempt all the time now to "resist asking why" as it only creates a tug of assumptions, not a true investigation into "why." Assuredly I do my best. Angus Fletcher Sarah Lagrotteria

Edward Lowe Foundation. Women Presidents Organization trained me to be a peer facilitator at the Lowe Foundation several years ago. I’m always drawn back to the concepts of democratized sharing and of storytelling vs advice giving for these gatherings. Edward Lowe Foundation

Patrick Lencioni, author of multiple best sellers. I don’t facilitate any values exercise without a re-read of or reference to his seminal Harvard Business Review article, “Make your values mean something.” Differentiating between permission to play, accidental, aspirational and core values is the root of a good values interrogation. I pair “story circles” from an article I read years ago from a firm in Australia that rightly understood one story can evoke memory of another story to reinforce where and when values live in an organization. I also pulled from Leonconi’s “Five distinctions of a team” and the related survey to reveal any underlying issues of trust. Patrick Lencioni

Robert Dilts. While I didn’t share outwardly his pyramid of logical levels, I did refer to it in debating how it applied to this team's (+ individual) changing beliefs and how that could affect the capabilities, behavior, and environment, and more. I'm also including it as a note to dig deeper for next time. Robert Dilts

HAM Emotional wheel. I do carry this also in my toolkit. But I didn’t use it this time and as such, I may have missed an opportunity to help some feelings get rightly identified.

Russell Barkley, now retired but a leading authority on ADHD. His work to define our 23 executive functions are always with me (especially as a parent of a child with ADHD), but especially the last function we develop -- time. How long you have, how long you have left, and in these settings, an awareness of how long you are taking. Like how much time I’ve spent processing all of the tools I used against how much my audience cares in reading them (or listening) to the end of my thought. Russell Barkley

And with that, rest assured, time's up. ??