Group Facilitation is a skill that is too often untapped by those who own employee communications within an organization.
The Academy of Business Communications' co-founders, Elizabeth Williams and Andrew Brown sit down with the President of Facilitation First to discuss how, when, and why to use group facilitation to improve employee communications.
Group Facilitation is a skill that is too often untapped by those who own employee communications within an organization.
The Academy of Business Communications' co-founders, Elizabeth Williams and Andrew Brown sit down with the President of Facilitation First to discuss how, when, and why to use group facilitation to improve employee communications.
Hi everyone and welcome to The Swear Jar, the official podcast at the Academy of Business Communications, where we tell it like it is about corporate and employee communications and occasionally use slightly colourful language to raise money for worthy causes. My name is Elizabeth Williams.
Andrew Brown:I'm Andrew Brown. And today we're going to tackle a topic that all too often goes unaddressed by employee communications. And I believe it's completely artificially separated from employee communications as a discipline. We'll be talking about group facilitation and our guest is Michael Goldman President of Facilitation First, a bespoke consultancy from that trains people at all organization levels to be better group facilitators. So, Michael welcome. I'm going to start you off with two tough questions. First: Can you define for our listeners what group facilitation is and related to that, what were the problems you wanted to solve by launching and growing Facilitation
Michael Goldman:Thank you for having me. Those are really interesting questions and it's kind of hard to just narrow it down to one sentence. So let me just say that before I came, actually a professional facilitator, I was a speech language pathologist. So I knew a lot about communication, studied communications, but mainly from more of a. Pathological perspective. And that's why people end up coming to speech pathologists. But during that time I attended meetings and they were poor. And I saw that there was a leader that had a vested interest in a prescribed decision and was kind of manipulative in terms of getting to that outcome. And attendees were unclear about why we were there. What we're going to do and how we're going to do it. I was one of those people who noticed some of the leaders dominated. There was no equitable participation. It's like bullying going on. Sometimes some meetings between different kind of adversarial types and loud voices that dictated meeting outcomes. Senior people deferred without really seeking input from the less senior people. So these were kind of all the indicators of dysfunction. And what I also noticed is that the outcomes of the groups dysfunction impacted it. So, we had these long drawn out brainstorming or decision making processes, but we noticed that there was less informed decision making people just didn't come prepared. People didn't even want to come to the meetings. Actually, I think we all felt unempowered. We were never really clear about how much decision making authority we have. So we all felt disengaged. Everyone left thinking. I hate meetings, you know, we all, we all thought that. And then there's this professional development day that was offered to all the professionals in the board of education that I was working. And it was about group dynamics. And I thought that I didn't really like anything else, so, okay. I'll go to this. And I swear to God during this session, it was like the heavens opened. It was like, everything came together for me I love communicating and it all came together in this one workshop for me. And in this workshop, what was correct is I learned about the power of collaboration. What I learned was this third party could enter neutral. And they'd have to understand these collaboration processes and they'd have to have this know how for managing people. And I remembered the leaders who did this naturally and how it felt to be part of this process when you were with these leaders who really understood intuitively how to facilitate and how empowered and committed we ended up being to following through. So I wanted to learn, I wanted to do this. So when I think about group facilitation, if I was going to define it, I would say it's the act of helping groups to work together, to colaborate, to maximize voices, equitably, and leverage their intelligence, to achieve targeted outcomes that are important to the group.
Elizabeth Williams:All of us have sat there and many of us have led meetings and we go through the motions, right. We have ground rules and we cover the walls and. Lit charts killing a small forest so we can capture deliverables. We have frigging parking lot, which is where ideas go to die. Somebody is assigned to take notes because they weren't in the room. When you were assigning, who's taking notes. My question is, how is group facilitation then the next level up from that? Why can't people just shut up and facilitate,
Michael Goldman:You know, ground rules, flip-charts, parking lots they're all great tools, but, you know, think of a fork and knife a spoon. I mean, they're only as good as when they're required, right? It's really knowing how and when to use them. That's the important part because they're just tools. So rules are best when they're created by the folks who actually have to live by those rules and a willingness on the part of the facilitator and a knowhow on how to referee those rules when they get broken, especially new facilitators, they establish these ground rules, but they don't do anything about it. Especially if there's high risk individuals in the room, it's a CLM, you know, a career limiting move so, they feel threatened by that. Flip charts are useful. You know, in these days we're talking about flip charts, we're talking virtual white boards, Google docs, ms. Word docs, like anything that's online now because we have social distance thing is important, but what's more important is not only capturing that stuff, but showing how ideas are linked together, seeing where the trends are and non facilitators capture ideas like we're just note takers. You know, it's like streams of thought, not really organized or structured. It's how you organize the content that helps people to better make connections, a parking lot, knowing when to play something in a parking lot and how to use it to manage off-topic remarks when you need to recontract versus just park it and just aavoid it. You know, and the importance of eliminating items, you know, non facility use it just to place ideas without consent from the speaker. And they don't even return to them. You know, I was once hired by this crazy frigging company where I walked in. They had a parking lot. That was two years old. It was like five pages. And I said like, what's the deal? He says, well, you know, we don't know what to do with him, but we just feel bad getting rid of them. And I'm like, what? I said, why don't you guys deal with them? Oh, really? You deal with them in the meeting. I guess what I'm thinking. We call it a parking lot for a recent, typically when we didn't have social distancing, we'd be in our office. We'd look outside, you know, out of our office and there's a parking lot and it's filled by nine o'clock in the morning. And then by 5:00 PM. It's empty again, you know, and this is a way we need to look at parking lots is that they're temporarily there to park off topic remarks that will be looked at when the appropriate topic comes up or will be dealt with at the end of the meeting to figure out what are we going to do with this. So it could end with an action. It could be a new topic that we bring up in the next meeting, but the parking lot is empty by themselves. These tools don't guarantee. excellent group facilitation. It's like, you know, saying that flour, butter and chocolate chips are the same as a great tasting, completely made hot cookie right out of the oven. I mean, the ingredients are important, but the skills in assembling and applying those ingredients, or in my case as a facilitator, the tools that are used are key to making something effective.
Elizabeth Williams:It's not just the parking lots. I think in thousands of years when they excavate our offices, they're going to find all these scrolls, right? Which 20 flip chart pages wrapped up, held in a disintegrating elastic shoved behind a filing cabinet. That was the 2019 strategy brainstorming. And I think in many organizations, those rules are the physical representation of the widespread belief that nothing ever comes out of these meetings, right? You put it all on a flip chart, you have all these fantastic ideas. You feel great-like while the cookies are still warm and then, you know, three weeks, three months, three years later, nothing happens. Is part of facilitation, making sure that they don't end up shoved behind a filing cabinet?
Michael Goldman:It would just be terrible if I did a facilitation and I walked out and nothing was followed through it, part of my skill set is really about scoping out with the client not only what is it that they want to achieve in the meeting, but what's going to happen after the meeting. How are they going to utilize this content in order to ensure there's follow through and that people feel that their time was value spent in that meeting. And it's just not like what we call the spots phenomenon with strategic planning, and it's called strategic planning on the shelf, you know? As a professional facilitator, I care as much not only about what happens in the meeting, but what's going to happen after that meeting and how they're going to follow through. And that's where it gets into where facilitators have to know something about organizational development or OD. They've got to understand that facilitation occurs within a system. It's not only an isolated incident, it's something that is coming from somewhere and going to somewhere.
Andrew Brown:I really want to explore the purpose that you identified for group facilitation. That is, it enables collaboration. Yeah. When I think about our fearless communicators around the globe, who will be saying, geez, I would love meetings where there is greater collaboration. And so they're going to ask themselves, do I need to have group facilitation and meetings? And if I do which meetings and by extension, which meeting should I not have group facilitation? And of course, related to that are things like risks. Because if you introduce changes in a process that says familiar and comfortable as meeting, and you are going to change it by virtue of throwing in a facilitator, you know, you're going to get some pushback. So just even despite the best of intentions, can you help our listeners understand what kind of meetings should facilitations be involved in and which ones shouldn't be in and, talk a bit about risk as well.
Michael Goldman:Yeah, a really good question because you're paying for services for a professional facilitator to come in, or you're paying someone internally to develop those skills and taking that time to develop that skill set. So you really want to know, when is it going to be value add, when is it really going to be useful. So let's talk about the indicators that suggests the need for group facilitation. So, first thing, and again, in this first center, I'm going to say people who are sitting around the table don't necessarily are empowered to do anything about it, but if they were in any way whatsoever, the first indicator is I'd be concerned about having a leader, a meeting leader who is biased or typically will sway the group towards their solution or decision will be way outspoken. It's not necessarily paying off meaning it's resulted in poor decision making, there's no innovation if especially if you're trying to really shake up the system, you're not getting good problems or identifying the right problems that you're resolving. And so you're not getting effective, balanced strategy. So facilitators are really good in this circumstance because we learned the concept of neutrality and how to manifest the behaviors of a neutral third party. And so when we come in, the last thing we want to bring to the table is any sort of bias. So we're there really to leverage all the group's ideas instead of leveraging our own. And that's way you bypass a leader who can be very swaying, not necessarily swaying the group towards the right decision.
Andrew Brown:Are you saying that one condition whereby group meetings are going to benefit most from group facilitation is when you have a very powerful leader who creates an environment where there aren't the best decisions coming out of the meeting?
Michael Goldman:Right. They create an environment where that person becomes really like that the sole decision maker, even though he's asking people what they think because he's been told he should yet he still makes the final decisions on his own. And I, I shouldn't say, be saying he, it could be equally be a she or they who's doing this kind of thing. So that's one of them. The next indicator is where. the group is dysfunctional and that could be one person. It could be some of the folks and because of their peers, no one wants to really stand up or that person could have higher status or that clique could have higher status. So it's difficult. And as a result, they're infrequently achieving their desired meeting outcomes even if they exist due to personal agendas, getting in the way. There's old baggage between group members. There's.inequitable voicing ideas from team members. Facilitators, part of our skillset, is understanding interpersonal dynamics and learning how to deal with power dynamics like that, or when teams are storming, how to move them to performing. The next one is there's just like literally no meeting structure. People are all over the place. There's no clarity of why we're here or what we're here to achieve. People are jumping into solutions before we've even identified what the problem is. So it's just seems really haphazard and outcomes aren't being achieved. And again, it could be a pretty high stakes group. Again, great facilitators understand structural elements and how to structure the flow of the conversation and introduce the right tools to help the group more expediently achieve their outcomes. When the meeting is striving to achieve specific outcomes that will have a stakeholder impact, that's when you want to bring in facilitators, because there's lots of money, there's people involved who you're paying a lot of money to, the decision will have huge impacts on the organization. That's when you want to bring in a professional facilitator, because not only are they managing the group, they're managing the structure, they're keeping it on time, there's making sure there's equitable voices and someone who's internal may have difficulties doing that. Number one, they don't know how to do it. And number two, there's all those power dynamics and the stigmas that people have working internally. So when you're looking out for the symptoms of bias leadership, group dysfunction, a lack of good structure for managing conversational flow, and there's also that urgency to achieve outcomes that's when good facilitation can really help them. That's a good and the bad there. The point is when do you not need facilitators? You don't need facilitators to do a presentation and facilitate a Q and A, you don't need facilitators to do a status update where it's really a tell is where there really is no need to get the group to collaborate.
Elizabeth Williams:What I'm hearing then is even a little bit of facilitation skill can be applied to take those routine meetings back onto a productive track, to put the bullies back and stop the person with the highest paycheck from dominating the room. And all of that. Is that a fair sort of summary for our Fearless Communicators?
Michael Goldman:That's kind of like the negative or the challenging behaviors. But facilitators can also help strengthen the good behaviors. You know, really take advantage of the people who want to participate. The people who aren't necessarily participating, not because they don't intend to, it's just, they're more introverted. They can proving those people, help them shine
Elizabeth Williams:So let's go a little further on group dynamics because as you know, we offer a change communications that work workshop, which we're pushing now to a virtual version and one of the things that we talk a lot about is that change happens in organizations at multiple levels. And one of them, the most important of those levels is of course with groups. And, of course change happens both in groups and it's enabled by groups across the organization. So it's super important that groups. function well, so that change can be evaluated and then implemented and ultimately managed. So I'm wondering if you can share any thoughts you have about the different kinds of groups or teams that benefit most from facilitation.
Michael Goldman:Thank you. When I think of groups that need facilitation support, there are these types of groups. One is a group that's just thrown together to deal with a crisis. So kind of a ad hoc group, groups that devolve after tumultuous change. So that's kind of may have been an intact group or a project team, but as a result of change, they're falling apart, groups dealing with emotionally difficult issues. I can just imagine with COVID now and what's happened. And the groups that have to manage that, especially returned to work and newly formed group, they really haven't specifically formed. So everyone isn't really clear about what their role is, what their stake is and how we're going to work together. Or groups that have been together a long time, it's just gone stale. So lots of different types of groups. We wouldn't just leave to managers, directors, or vice presidents of those groups to facilitate on their own. I think we will do them justice, these folks, and we're doing this more and more of a Facilitation First is providing them with competency in effective facilitation training and facilitation. You know, it's multifaceted. And it requires extensive training and practice. And I think the assumption around a manager can facilitate on their own. It's like assuming a project manager, a communication specialist, a business analyst, a mediator can do their job by just giving them the title. Okay. All great facilitators have been receiving training formally or informally through years of practice, great coaching mentorship, and who they themselves were trained or spend years.
Andrew Brown:Let's jump in on that because I've long used facilitation and facilitators. My first OD class was on group facilitation. So we're all in, right? And this Elizabeth said, when we do our Change Communications that Work workshops, we highlight group facilitation is a key element of helping group dynamics. So you're preaching to the converted here, Help us understand the top five or six skills that genuinely creates great group facilitators so that our folks can choose to explore building those skills themselves or help them identify facilitators to come in and help them. So skills, and the other thing is quality. Are there specific qualities that you've also seen in great facilitators?
Michael Goldman:I may have more than five, so I apologize right up front. Because the first one is in fact five. And I would say these first five, that falls under the acronym S.L.A.P.S. Because every great facilitator needs slaps themselves once in a while, before they walk into a facilitation. This really amps up your ability really quickly. And I think communicators like the folks you train, I would not think that it's far different from what you're training them on the first thing slaps as an acronym'S'. And that means stay neutral. When we walk in as facilitators, a skill that we bring to the table is the ability to be neutral, but also enable people to be as neutral as possible as well through our role modeling so they can hear different perspectives. And in terms of different perspectives in slaps, L is Listen Actively. We help people through our role modeling and what we do to truly actively listen. And to understand how to do that because we concretely spell it out. Even with non participants who are coming for training in a professional facilitation, I'll help describe what I mean by active listening. The'A' is asking questions core to what we do is we don't tell, we ask. And in fact, if we had to tell something, we converted into an ask statement. So if I had to tell people, listen, guys, you know, we're focusing on ABC here, we need to focus on X, Y, Z. I would say guys, we're focusing on ABC, is that correct? And should we be considering also X Y set? So we're always converting our tells into asks'P' is Paraphrase where at the right points in time, we are repeating back at our own words, what our understanding is of the speaker in order to clarify, to validate, to help them expand again, to leverage their wisdom. And'S' is summarize at the end. We provide high level summaries to capture themes or trends or linkages between what people say. These are the behaviorals of a great facilitator when it comes to what we bring to the table in terms of our behavior. Put that under one, because it's kind of like what I bring to the table. I do want to add another one because now we're virtually facilitating. So how we also show up on the actual camera, how we do our lighting, how we use our hands, our face, and our non-verbals, how we project ourselves are equally important in engaging people now. So we got to know that as well, in terms of managing the meeting virtually or in person, we got to have process knowledge. We got to understand how to structure conversations, how to run a good brainstorming decision-making strategic planning, negotiation, conflict management. We've got to have processes and tools for driving this. We got to have that kind of knowledge and skills of when to bring them in when not to bring them. Another thing is what we need to understand how to organize information as it comes up from the group and how to synthesize it and prioritize it. And then we have to have good communication skills because we have to lead people through processes. We have to be able to articulate how we're going to lead them and prepare for them. So they know exactly where we're going and when we need to go, we also need to help de emotionally wise things. So people are trying to come from more of a cognitive perspective as opposed to too much emotion. So we have to deescalate de-emotionalize things. So we know how to do that. And we also have to understand consensus, how to build it, how to test for it and how to achieve buy in. And so these are the kinds of, like, for me, the core skills plus now, because of virtual facilitation, all the technical skills we need to know, we've got to know multiple platforms like Zoom and MS teams and Adobe Connect and understanding all the tools in order to help engage in, collaborate with people.
Elizabeth Williams:Wow. Okay. So one of the skills that we're working with, a lot of our clients on right now is their organizations around the whole return to workplace or not returned to work place. And so the thing that we're telling everyone, you know, is before you start shoving your strategies and plans out the door, take a couple of weeks and stop talking and let your employees, particularly the ones who've been locked up at home with their kids for 12 weeks, let them start talking. Right. We want to capture, lived experience. We want to capture ideas. We want to capture all of that. Or I would ask you, given that skillset required to be a truly awesome facilitator is substantial, where could our Fearless Communicators start with this? What are a couple of simple places that they could get support within the organization to bring in a skilled facilitator like you just described, pass the people in the organization who believed they're gods gift of facilitation, and then where can they pick up just enough skill probably to make themselves dangerous, but to have a little bit of an impact? So I'll ask you to answer those three conditions.
Michael Goldman:I think getting better at group facilitation themselves is first important. I think the more we role model, good facilitation, our groups, our people begin to see the difference. They begin to see that their voice is being leveraged. They're feeling heard, they're getting excited about the ideas that they're collaboratively coming up with. I think it's through show and tell that we can actually drive it us showing up us being able to do it. And of course, you know, and my company Facilitation First, that's what we are experts in is helping to develop people and their facilitation skills. And especially these days, we're doing tons of virtual training because we can't do in person. We become very savvy at understanding on how to facilitate now with remote teams in a virtual environment. So I would say number one, it's about learning it yourself. You could articulate, even if you didn't do facilitation, at least by learning the foundational skills, you can learn how to articulate and you'll know what you're looking for in order to find a good facilitator, because you understand what are the core practices of good facilitators. I think getting support from internally in the organization is again about asking a facilitator like me or one of my facilitators who work for us and get them to come in to demonstrate a small or simple kind of meeting. And so people can really see the difference and experience it, understanding that by doing or showing or demonstrating, I think that delivers the message the best in terms of those folks who are self anointed, facilitation experts. A lot of people may not have any control on those folks actually facilitating. But I think as a participant, once we learn facilitation, you can, what I call facilitate from the chair, meaning, you do have the right to say,'Hey, before we just, you know, engage in this conversation, can you just tell me why we're talking about again or what's the deliverable we're trying to get here?' And, sorry, I was just wondering, are we doing a round robin here or are we just like all talking like you, you can ask process questions in a kind of naive way in order to kind of get that self anointed facilitation expert to actually think about these things.
Andrew Brown:Michael, Elizabeth and I are always advising our Fearless Communicators and our clients, whether they sit in HR,Comms, Marketing Risk Management, or the senior executive on the importance of measurement. And we're also big about measuring behaviors. So let's start with what metrics should be used to demonstrate that group facilitation is worth the time, effort and expense. And that also say let's start with behavioral metrics.
Michael Goldman:Hm, good ones. I want to talk about two different types of metrics. One is the behavioral metrics, but the other one is also kind of the outputs from the meeting. So in terms of behavioral metrics, I would think people will see what good facilitation is fewer instances of difficult or challenging behaviors. So where typically in past meetings, we got into nonproductive conflict, we were wasting time, people were dominating their were side bar conversation, lots of people are going off topic we're not seeing that anymore. Or we're seeing less of that. Another one is increased active involvement of all group participants or in the past, we may have seen the few dominators take control. Now everyone is participating. Next one: less people talking over one another increase active listening, where people are leaving the meeting and saying,'I really felt, I was heard where in the past you know what I voiced my opinions, nothing happens'. And also this notion of follow through so that when we put an action plan together, people actually follow through. They're excited about it. These are the kinds of tangible, but the intangible things are like,people are saying,'you know what I'm excited about coming to these meetings. I'm sensing we're getting things done'. So that whole kind of excitement that you're hearing from people that's a metric in itself in terms of meeting indicators. I think that when effective meeting leader set meetings, they set outcomes like learning objectives, let's say in the case of training workshops, so we have objectives or outcomes. We achieved those within the given amount of time. That's an indicator. And that we're noticing the probability of getting actions deliverables actually complete it in that designated time is going up. So before it was maybe 50% now we're moving up to 70%. We're noticed that there's increased collaboration in terms of the types of activities that we do in the meetings, versus we're just saying, and being spoken to like one person at a time, doing their status updates or presentations, We're noticing we're getting higher satisfaction scores on the value people perceive from the meeting. We're noticing we're getting faster buy-in. Or, people are understanding quicker. Next steps are being defined in less time. We're noticing there's always a clear meeting, purpose outcomes and a structure for how we engage in our discussion. So everyone knows why, what, and how we're going to achieve what we're here to achieve. We're noticing attendance is improving and we're noticing the people attend are always the right people. We're not having people in there who are just sitting around and they're there just because it's nice to be there. Or they've been told by their boss, we have to have a representative there, or they might think we're not doing our job. And finally more accurate communications are coming out of this and actions that are being cascaded down at the right time to the right people.
Elizabeth Williams:Let's go to the part of our program where we do a shameless shill for something. So on behalf of the Academy of Business Communications, I would like today to shamelessly hawk our new book that is up on Amazon: The Fearless Communicators Guide to COVID-19 and it's for anyone in any organization who is trying to figure out how to communicate in this new pandemic world. It's available on Amazon and the proceeds will go to a charity. Michael. Do you have anything that you would like to help people understand about your business? Y
Michael Goldman:If folks are interested in becoming, let's say their trainers. They want to become more facilitated. Let's say they're communicators. They want to become more facilitative. Let's say they're meeting leaders or managers and they want to become more facilitative. You know, we've been doing this for 28 plus years now, so, you know, when you go to Facilitation First.com, you know, you can look at our training and particularly now we're specializing a lot in virtual types of facilition everything from building consensus, leading a problem-solving meeting, how to launch a meeting effectively, how to manage engagement participants, so you really leverage the true wisdom of the group. These are the kinds of workshops that we're focused on. So we're, we're really. Building some great core competencies amongst those folks who want to facilitate. And the interesting thing is that it's attracting people from every sector. Our clients are from every say oil and gas, healthcare, public schools, healthcare colleges, banks. The great thing about facilitation is that right? Anyone who leads any kind of group benefit from this? We have those workshops that are from like 90 minutes long to two half days, because we also appreciate now that online training needs to be shorter, simpler, get to the point and have lots of practice. So we've really worked on that.
Andrew Brown:You haven't made my life easy as I try to summarize some of the key points from this discussion. But, I'm going to try, okay? So first, the difference between running a meeting and facilitation at the core is about collaboration. And, if your organization is demonstrating symptoms like overbearing leaders, bad decisions, high stake decisions that aren't working well, lack of structure particularly under urgent conditions those are good times to use facilitators. Groups that are thrown together, dealing with emotional issues, groups that have gone stale those are additional conditions that should be used when considering facilitation. If you want to get started on building skills that will help in facilitation, focus on staying neutral, finding ways for other people to remain neutral, active listening, probing for questions, paraphrasing, validating, summarizing, and structuring conversations. Based on the kinds of meetings, how to organize and synthesize and prioritize, how do de-emotionalize and deescalate, how to build and achieve consensus. And once again, get thatfamiliar with all the tools to help collaborate. So. That in a nutshell are some of the skills for group facilitation. And finally, the measures you should be using, whether you're building business case for group facilitation or you've invested in group facilitation, and you want to afterwards demonstrate that it has indeed been worthwhile, take a look at your instances of challenging or difficult behavior. In groups, watch for a reduction in wasted time or conversations going off topic, look for the increased active involvement of all participants. Look for increases of active listening, eople being heard more, follow-through, people being more excited about coming to the meetings and pursuing next steps, providing a clearer sense of outcomes. And. I would also just emphasize a clearer structure for all. And people like structure.
Elizabeth Williams:I would, I would add to your exquisite summary, a thing that I actually took away. I have it circled here on scrolls is, um, Michael talked about the different kinds of groups. So the ad hoc groups, groups that are evolving groups that are in an emotionally difficult place and importantly, new groups. And I think we often forget when we've got changed you know, the current pandemic is, is a great example. New groups form very quickly, either for functional reasons or survival. And I think Fearless Communicators need to keep their eye on them in particular as they form and storm and norm and performance. So that was one of my takeaways.
Andrew Brown:Let's turn to what's caught our attention recently. Michael Elizabeth, what are you guys reading, listening to her, watching that you think would be of interest to our listeners?
Elizabeth Williams:I actually am rereading an article from McKinsey from December, 2019, and it's called Managing and Supporting Employees Through Cultural Change in Mergers. The reason I keep coming back to this article is it puts the onus for prioritizing cultural change among the, all the other changes squarely in the desk of the CEO, which is a kind of new place for that. And I really like it brief, it's full of interesting pictures and it offers some great models for our Fearless Communicators who might be trying to get some of their senior leaders to take cultural more seriously, and to understand their role as change agents with culture. Michael, what, what are you looking at?
Michael Goldman:My research these days is, again, as I said earlier, looking at interactive digital tools and how they can help expedite decision-making brainstorming, strategizing online. And so I've been working with a partner group called MURAL. I've Just been, you know, reading the articles, reading all this stuff, and they have really interesting, innovative ideas for how to do online collaboration.
Andrew Brown:Very cool. A few weeks ago, we interviewed Paul Smith who helps people become better storytellers. So I recently revisited some storytelling sources. One of my favorites is called Khrushchev's Shoe, as well as A Leader's Guide to Storytelling. And on that same note, we're giving away some copies of Paul's books. The 10 Stories that Great Leaders Tell and Sell with a Story. So listeners, just send us an email at info Academy of Business Communications with the subject line storytelling and tell us in a hundred words or less about a horrible group meeting that would have been improved with facilitation or great storytelling opportunity that went by you, that you wish you could have all over again. We'll select the top three, share them on an upcoming episode of The Swear Jar and send you one of Paul's books.
Elizabeth Williams:That's fantastic. You get a book for telling a horror story. So that is it for us. Thank you everyone for joining us. If you like this podcast, do us a favor and leave a rating or better still subscribe.
Andrew Brown:And of course, check out the show notes and resources at The Academy of Business Communications dot com.
Elizabeth Williams:Thank you very much, Michael. Thank you. Bye. Take care.