Delia Horwitz is an entrepreneur, collaboration specialist, leadership coach and professional facilitator. She has extensive experience consulting and facilitating with hundreds of groups in a wide variety of circumstances, beginning in the late 1970’s. She has extensive experience helping good people do great things.
Delia co-founded and served for three years as Executive Director of Leadership Santa Barbara County. In addition to partnering with Paula Vigneault on Collaboration Soup, Delia owns and is the principal of Business Relationship Consultants: www.brcteams.com.
She is also the author of The Achieving Agreement Workbook: Managing Your Internal and External Conflicts and Letters From My Future Self: Musings of a Mid-Life Seeker.
We talked with Delia about her six step recipe for co-creative meetings and other conversations. How do we have a conversation where we are building something together?
- Ready – Make sure people are ready to go.
- Engage your stakeholders.
- Conversations – Have conversations that cook.
- Integrate the ideas from the group.
- Plan the actions.
- End with clarity.
We also talked about the listening circle, detailed in her book:
- Confirm that you are asking the right questions by everybody agreeing that it’s a good question.
- Give everyone one full minute of silence for everyone to think of everything they could say to answer that question.
- The assignment is to come up with their “nugget” that they are going to contribute in 20 seconds or less.
- Then, one person starts. Nobody talks twice until everybody has spoken once.
- Everybody has 20 seconds to go around the circle and answer the question with their best contribution.
- The assignment for everybody else is to listen for what they agree with, or what resonates with them or seems right.
- Integrate then: What does it sound like we are saying?
- Close with clarity.
Collaboration is the way of the world. Join us as we talk further with Delia about Collaboration Soup and team science. You can listen to the complete recording, without commercials, above.
Coach’s Corner
Managing Snapshot Management #2
This is another of the 108 strategies from Leading with Emotional Intelligence.
In the last blog we talked about how Norma’s manager didn’t see her for who she was today, she was a victim of “Snapshot Management.” This blog explores being under the spotlight and how she can publicize her changes.
Leaders are under the Spotlight 24/7
Communication is important to all of us, but as a leader you are under the spotlight by your direct reports and the organization all of the time, 24/7. Like Santa Claus, the organization sees when you are good and when you are bad. Almost all leaders I have dealt with don’t realize this to the extent that it happens. Therefore, most leaders have underestimated their influence on others and consequently they have under performed as have their teams. Most leaders are more concerned with getting their job and tasks done rather than how they are perceived by others. Learn more…
