Why You'll Always Hear Me Recommending Embedding Workshops

As I finished the 1st embedding session of our QLD team’s Team Building Workshop, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Why the sigh? To answer this, I need to give some background. What I recommend for outcome focused learnings solutions is to approach the solution in 5 stages: 1 Discovery, 2 Define, 3 Design, 4 Deliver, 5 Embed. However sometimes (due to time, cost, or other reasons), 3 or 4 stages are wanted instead of 5. Guess which is the first to get dropped? 5 Embed.

I believe passionately that Stage 5 Embed is the make or break of a learning solution.

AMICUS’S QLD TEAM BUILDING WORKSHOP

My role internally focuses on Leadership Development and Talent at Amicus. I also take on external clients from time to time.

The Amicus QLD team’s Team Building Workshop was an internal offering. Simply, our QLD team is quite newly formed. Whilst they are already going great guns, we wanted to press the fast-forward button on team building to take their already great results to the next level.

It started with 1:1s and Profiles – Individuals’ completing their Team Management Profile and Values Profile and participating in a debrief with me

Then, a group workshop. We answered these questions - What happens when we overlay styles and preference as a group? What types of work tend to get done more so than others? How does that work tend to get done? Also, what types of work might we not be so great at as a collective as that's not where our collective strengths lie?

Then, an embedding workshop which is the central focus of this blog.

THE EMBEDDING WORKSHOP AND WHAT WE DID

One of the main goals was to recap the action plan that resulted from Workshop 1 and how the action plan had or hadn’t been lived out since. If we had only focused on this alone – the embedding workshop would have still been a great time investment.

Tip: This group could easily articulate statements for their action plan. However, should you do a similar activity and need statements and proposed actions you could look at ReContractYourTeam.com, Ray Dalio’s principles, or a Capability guide that highlights the difference between unskilled and skilled for each capability.

We also completed a Quickie 360, another terrific exercise conducive to embedding. Given the Team Management Systems products put a spotlight on individual’s workplace styles, presences, and values in Workshop 1, doing a quickie 360 per person in the embedding workshop allow people to receive (in real time) what their colleagues would like them to keep doing, do more of, stop doing and start doing going forward.

Also, a Leadership handover. One of the final activities was an individual reflection that included using the insights from the Quickie 360. The prompt was to capture what you can/will celebrate in with your Leader. Also, capture what you can/will add to your personal development going forward to work on with your Leader. And yes, you spotted it, this is another form of embedding.

EMBEDDING WORKSHOPS AND WHY IM SO PASSIONATE ABOUT THESE

In my opinion, a follow up session with an emphasis on embedding is the difference between a learning solution that is fun, engaging, and interesting vs a learning solution that is serious about bunkering down for the long-haul of accountability to make results happen.

FROM HERE

As a wise person (Jerzy Gregorek) once said:

“Short-term easy is long-term hard. Short-term hard is long-term easy”.

It’s not easy to form elevated ways of working. Having a facilitator return for an embedding session can make the short-term hard much easier.

For this learning solution we hoped to see some actions achieved in weeks following Workshop 1, and we did. More actions were achieved than anticipated. Now, we hope for more actions to be achieved in months.

I would dearly love to get my hands on data, analogies, articles etc. that explain the criticality of embedding sessions (so please share if you have these!). But, for the simpler explanation on why results were achieved, I believe it is this: Often, it’s simply the awareness that there are check-ins (like this embedding session) where we keep coming back to what we agreed that drives commitment to putting commitments into action.

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