The Collaborative Leader with Evan Unger - podcast episode cover

The Collaborative Leader with Evan Unger

Aug 28, 202437 minSeason 4Ep. 6
--:--
--:--
Download Metacast podcast app
Listen to this episode in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episode description

In this episode, Evan Unger dives into the intricacies of effective team leadership, decision-making, and enhancing productivity in remote virtual meetings. With his extensive experience at Schwartz and Associates, Evan sheds light on the essential services that have helped countless organizations thrive in today’s dynamic work environments.


What to Expect

Team Leadership: Discover how Evan approaches team leadership with a collaborative mindset. He shares strategies for fostering a culture of inclusivity and engagement, ensuring that every team member feels valued and empowered to contribute their best work.


Decision-Making: Learn about the decision-making frameworks that Evan employs to navigate complex challenges. His insights will help you make informed, timely decisions that align with your organization's goals and values.


Remote Virtual Meeting Productivity: In an era where remote work is becoming the norm, Evan discusses practical tips for maximizing productivity in virtual meetings. From setting clear agendas to leveraging technology effectively, he provides actionable advice to keep your team connected and productive, no matter where they are.


Why You Should Listen

This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to enhance their leadership skills and drive their team's success in a rapidly changing work landscape. Whether you're a seasoned project manager or just starting your leadership journey, Evan's expertise offers valuable takeaways that you can implement immediately.


Tune In

Don't miss out on this insightful conversation with Evan Unger. Tune in to The Everyday PM podcast on your favorite streaming platform. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and share with your network to spread the knowledge!


Join us as we explore the art of collaborative leadership and unlock the potential of your team. We look forward to having you with us on this exciting episode!

Transcript

Welcome to the Everyday PM Podcast, the podcast where we discuss project management principles for your everyday life. My name is Ann Campia, I'm a certified project manager. I also have education and project management. I am just so very much passionate about this role and the space. I've had the awesome opportunity to work in different industries like tech, marketing, healthcare, you name it.

I just love being a project manager and I am super excited to welcome our guest today, Evan Unger, who is the Managing Partner at Schwartz and Associates. He and I have had a chance to connect offline together to talk about a lot of the exciting projects he's working on. But I am happy to have him on as a guest host for today's episode where we'll be talking about everything from virtual coaching, leadership development, and all the amazing things that he's doing as part of his business.

So Evan, welcome to the Everyday PM podcast. I'm so excited to have you on. Well, thank you Ann for having me on. I'm excited to be here too. And for those who have not met you yet, can you please take a brief moment to introduce yourself to our audience? Yeah. I guess I'm looking at your

LinkedIn page. I think I go back a little further than you do. And but I got out of Business School 1989 and went to work for a big pharma company, Merck, and they put me in a leadership development rotational assignment, like what I was doing. And then just invented this job called director of change leadership and development, which honestly was a fancy title for. I had no idea what I was doing.

I'm three years out of Business School, A new CEO comes on board from outside of pharma, does an assessment of the organization, is frustrated because it's siloed, bureaucratic, people aren't collaborating. And somehow I got charged with figuring out how to deal with collaboration, right. And So what I've done for the last 30 years is work with small to medium sized organizations on cultural transformation efforts.

And so that's what I do Now, truth be told, I'm going to point in my life where work life balance is very important. So I'm mostly training people how to do high stakes workshop facilitation. I mean, you know, you don't have the easiest job in the world. Let's let's consider that for a second. Evan is in the business of changing culture for organizations and for those that are listening, and I know we have non PMS that are listening and even PMS that are listening to this episode.

Changing anything #1 is really difficult. Changing organizational culture and finding a means to do so that is effective is so hard in my opinion. I am in a role myself right now where we are consistently, consistently experiencing change. And sometimes change is hard because it's driven by the culture in which you are trying to operate in. And so Evan, I just, I know that we talked about this offline when we were trying to come up with the topics for this

conversation. And I was just in awe about the fact that you not only fell into your role, but then you figured it out. And now kind of like you said, being more at the tail end of your career and your journey and wanting more of that work life balance, you found a way to kind of infuse it by helping others do the same thing that you've done. So all of that to say, I'm so excited to have you on because of all of the accomplishments that you're able to share with our audience.

Well, I mean, it's interesting because if you go back when I was challenged to figure out how to get people to collaborate, this is 93. I don't have e-mail till 94. You don't go back that far, right? But there's no there's no Zoom or Webex or Microsoft. Teams. None of that stuff exists. So what we were doing back then was teaching people how to facilitate collaboration. Sitting in a room together, They were sitting there and 12 people.

We're running workshops teaching people facilitation now. Decades go by and clients start asking us to teach people how to collaborate virtually on screens as tech came along. And then the pandemic hit. And really all we're doing now is teaching people high stakes workshop facilitation. And we can get into how this is part of a cultural transformation effort in a moment.

But that's really what we're doing, is working like we are right now on screens, teaching people how to run these hybrid teams, these virtual teams. Yeah, I think I love the history there because I don't know that everybody is familiar with the work environment pre Zoom, pre Microsoft Teams, pre all the collaboration tools that are available now. Obviously now your company has embraced virtual coaching, virtual leadership development and that sort of thing.

Did that come organically or was that a conscious decision for you to move to that type of model as your customers were asking for it? I would say it was more organic. I would be honest. Truth was we were working, running, you know, high stakes workshops face to face as part of change initiatives. And as part of those interventions we were always teaching people this collaborative leadership skill set, right, high stakes facilitation skill set. And you know, for so many years

that's what people were doing. They were meeting in rooms. Now, I think Webex and live meeting Gotomeeting came in early and clients started saying, well, wait a minute, we're not flying people around the world anymore like we did in 93 to run these meetings. Can you start teaching us how to do this virtually? And the honest truth was I resisted. I did not think it was going to be that interesting to sit on screens like this.

So we dabbled in it. And then when the pandemic hit, as I said, really that's all we're doing because almost all of our clients are in air quotes, working hybrid and I think organization trying to figure out how do we run these teams when people may never even meet each other face to face or certainly it will be very infrequent. And so it was more organic than conscious. And I'm not trying to ask you to, you know, divulge the secret ingredients to the recipe around how you train folks.

But in this move to a virtual environment, how has it changed? If anything, the way that you you train folks on virtual coaching, leadership development, how do you train executives? Has it changed anything at all? Well, it's interesting. The mental model of how we might engage groups has not changed, right? The platform has so where we would have taught people how to work and we've all done things like simple storyboarding or affinity diagramming and sticky dot voting.

So when we're working face to face, of course, we're working on real whiteboards or real walls virtually. Now most of our clients are in the pandemic started using platforms like Mural or Mirror or Lucid Spark. So the platforms have changed and working on the screen is, you know, different. But the principles of collaboration remain the same in many ways because we're still human beings. And, you know, I always like to say, you know, people don't hate meetings, right?

What they hate is wasting time. And as human beings, we're all dysfunctional. There's politics, there's ego in any group setting. But the principles of this type of collaboration and remain the same, independent of the fact we're working now on screens instead of sitting in the room

together. Well, you know, that I, I shared with you that I am in a complete 100% remote environment and I often think to myself, how much more effective can I be as a leader if I could just, you know, be in person with my team. Have you gotten anything from those that you've coached so far around this element of the well, I guess where do you stand, you know, in terms of art? Can you be an effective leader in person virtually? Does it matter anymore?

Well, I, I think nothing replaces a face to face meeting. I mean, that's the honest truth. How organizations, and I'm sure McKinsey and Accenture and Bain and all these companies are selling, you know, the how, how you run hybrid organizations. But the truth is we've lost so much human connection sitting here on the screen. And one of the things I think organizations do need to figure out is how to leverage in person

events. Right now we just happen to be teaching people how to collaborate virtually. But the truth is, I don't think you'll ever replace the dynamic of a face to face meeting because all the informal networking that takes place even at a break, right, where you find out about people's kids or you find out just the simple things, those pieces are very hard to have happen virtually.

Even in our trainings, right, which is a four day training when we were doing a face to face is a three day boot camp, People would go to lunch together, they might have dinner together, right? When we take a break on our meetings, they're in their house or they're in their office and there is no informal connection. And so I think it is very different. And I think it is harder as a leader to figure out how do I engage the people I am responsible for getting results from.

And what about the benefits of moving to this virtual environment? What have you seen come out of your your coaching program in terms of the format? Well, the honest truth is, as we're teaching people this, it is a better program in many ways because I can, we can do things virtually in terms of screen sharing and painting pictures. That is much harder to do. And we used to run our workshop using flip charts, which I'm sure you've been in that, but

they're not very dynamic. And so it is in many ways, I was surprised when we switched over to teaching people virtual collaboration that and as I said, I resisted it because I didn't think it'd be very interesting or very powerful. But what I quickly realized is it's, it's amazing how much tighter the repetition in teaching is when you can paint visuals and pictures for people over and over and connect the auditory part of teaching people with the visual part of

teaching. And so I would say, and I wouldn't say the program we're running now is a much better program. We have stopped running the face to face program except for clients who want, they're really old clients we have who are like, I want to run the face to face program and I have clients running the face to face program who all their meetings are hybrid, right? They're still running them on Microsoft Teams.

But the reason they're running them face to face is for the very point we started with, which is the connection piece, the team building piece, the human sort of dynamic. So they like running the program face to face for that reason, even though the skill set is more relevant for running meetings virtually. Yeah, I hear you. I think that is one thing I just miss having as the opportunity to, if I needed walk over to somebody or let's go grab a coffee and have a chat about this project.

And that's definitely something that I continue to miss being in 100% remote environment. But I'm glad to hear that there's so many benefits for your organization in terms of moving to that type of virtual model. I'm curious about, I know for a fact, but I would love for you to explain to our audience about how the program is very high

touch. She talked about some of the collaborative tools that you're using, but it's also just there's a lot of elements that you've infused to your program that even though you're virtual, feels like it's a very high touch program. So how do you ensure that you're, you know, stakeholders are feeling that they're getting a very personalized training program when it comes to coaching? Well, I mean, it's, it's very personalized, right? We're running, you know, a four

day intensive, right? We're running this thing on Zoom, eight to three, eight to three for the first two days, eight to four, eight to four in the second two days. And people are like, how are you doing this with Zoom fatigue? And we say it's not hard because it's all practice, right? Effectively, the program, the 2nd and the 4th module are people, it's a boot camp being asked to practice. They're going to get feedback, give feedback, they're going to

get videotape. So the bulk of the program is practice. That's how adults learn. I always have senior clients, right, who I say, you know, they're, they're running a group of, you know, APMO or an agile group. We're doing change and transformation because these are very much just change agent skills, process improvement skills. And I'll say, you know, I'd ask them to take the program, but VPS are like, I'm too busy. Four days, I don't have time for

that. Now, the truth is sometimes they're modeling for people what fairly ineffectual leadership looks like from a collaboration standpoint. But they're not going to take the four days, but they'll come in for three hours and watch the 4th day when people are practicing and integrating things. And they'll always say, this is tremendous, right? This is awesome. I want all my agile people, all

my PMS to know how to do this. And I'll say, great, let's do it. And then the less wise ones, we'll then say, but I can't take my people offline for this much time. And I'll ask people quite if you ask. I mean, look, you work for what? Hasbro, Apple. Amazon. Right? So I. For for 30 years, I've asked clients two questions. How many meetings are going to take place in your organization today, right. And I'm sure Amazon with 1.6 million people probably has a half a million meetings, maybe

more today. And I've asked exactly could be a lot more. And I've asked clients what's the average effectiveness of the meetings you attend. I never asked them the ones they run because they'll think they're better than they are. And in 30 years asking that question, I've never had a client say our meetings are 80% effectiveness. I would say the vast majority of the time people tell me 50% or lower. And I say to people, this is insane from just a cultural

performance issue. You're going to at, you know, Amazon run half a million meetings today. Even if we gave you the high bar of 70%, no one ever says that C minus. This is just a cultural performance issue that organizations don't address. And So what the workshops trying to do is target the fundamental building block of the culture of the organization, which is how we engage people in meetings. Now we're focused on high stakes

meetings, workshop meetings. When we did culture change, one of the first things we always did with an organization is figure out how to stop so many meetings because there's so many meetings that don't need to happen. But we're really getting at the fundamental Bill and Brock performance of an organization, which is meetings because that's where people are going to spend time. And when you do the math, most senior people spend at least 50% of their time in meetings. Yeah.

And what that means is if you're spending 50% of your time in meetings and only working 8 hour days, you will literally spend a year's worth of your life in hours in meetings in under nine years. I don't know how organizations tolerate this, but they do. Oh my gosh. Those are incredible statistics to share with people and it's almost little bit sad for me to hear that probably a majority of my life has been spent in those types of meetings.

But I, I do know what you mean by, you know, when you're sitting in a meeting that is being run effectively and has purpose and a goal and value for what you're trying to achieve. And you know, the meetings that could have just been an e-mail that could have just been a one-on-one or something like

that. So again, without giving folks the secret ingredients to your recipe, you know, like what are some of those interactions that you're having your the people taking your program or your workshops go through is can you give us one of the scenarios that you have the work through? Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no, there's no rocket science here. It's really about fundamentals.

The metaphor we often use for high stakes workshop or a task force I'm leading or a project I'm leading, right is it's, it's like a plane flight, right? There's three parts take off, right, flying and landing. Now we all know, you know, last time I was out, I'm in Denver and at DIA, the airport, it took 42 seconds from the time they hit The Jets to wheels up. If that doesn't go well, we're all dead right from the get.

It's the same thing on a consulting engagement or a project or a task force on leading or a workshop. The first fundamental is taking off well. Most meetings should never be allowed out of the hangar onto the tarmac because the leader, they haven't thought through the fundamental questions to take off. Well, why are we having the meeting and what are we trying to get done? And we teach a simple pop from up which right, which just stands for purpose, objectives,

process roles and agreements. The purpose is why we're here the the objectives for the meeting or workshop or what are we trying to get done. If I can't answer those two questions, the truth is I shouldn't be having a meeting because I'm guaranteed to waste people's time if I don't know why we're what we're doing. I'm going to be bouncing off other people's objectives and agendas for my meeting if I don't know what we're trying to get done, the destination,

right? If I were coming to visit you, I don't know if I'm flying into LAX or where I'm flying into to visit you. But if I don't know I'm going to LAX, I'm going to end up up in SFO in San Francisco, which means I can't. If I don't know that doesn't design good process architecture for collaboration, the flight plan, the agenda for the meeting. If I don't know the why and what, I can't decide who really needs to be there, who shouldn't be there, what roles I need them

to play. And so those fundamental questions, the why, what, how, who and in what way do we need to interact the in a personal group, That's the work I have to do before I show up. And that's just one of the simplest things that we work on in the workshop is good framing, good take off. Because if I don't take off, well, you know, any flight plan will do and I'm likely to have a ton of turbulence when I haven't really thought through that.

I mean that's a lot of the problems in meetings have to do with poor take off. I think that is so applicable not just to the executives and the leaderships, you know, groups that you coach, but to anyone that's in, in the world of business that has to run a meeting. I think for the PMS that are listening and even for the non PMS that like to tune into this podcast, everything Evan just said is something that you can certainly take away as something

you can practice on your own. Just taking a little bit of time to think through all of those elements that Evan has just presented and making sure that you're ready for those prior to the plane getting on the tarmac, as I love that analogy so, so much. I think everyone can take into account all of those elements, go in and have some preparation. And with that, you're going to have a lot of success in facilitating your meetings, I would think.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've gone into meetings where there's not even a purpose or an agenda attached to them. And to me, that's very scary because that tells me, signals to me that the person who has organized the meeting may not have even thought through what the travel plan is going to be for them. Yeah, I mean, Patrick Lenciona, you may or may not have read his book The Five Dysfunctions of Teens, right? His his first book was Death by Meeting, right.

And what he one of his quotes, I won't get a perfect was, you know, bad meetings lead to bad decisions, which is a recipe for mediocrity. Now, it also leads to something else. If I'm the one running all these bad meetings, it leads to people seeing me as a bad leader because again, I'm wasting their time, right. And so, and that proper model, those five questions, they don't just apply to meetings. That's what we're doing when

we're launching a project. That's what project chartering is, is getting clear why we having the project, What's in scope, what's out of scope? What's our vision for this project? What's the mission for the project, right? The objectives, right? Are the deliverables for the project. The process is the project plan, right? At the highest level, we've got roles. This is why we do racy charting to get rolled alignment, which also helps with decision making alignment.

And then we have to have interpersonal agreements for, you know, when we meet, who gets to attend, how do we deal with people who didn't show up and all the communication and decision making. And so that's really, there's a popper, if you will, for the meeting, but there's a bigger popper for the project charter. And that's why it's so important to take off well when I'm launching a brand new project. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I'm curious around and yes, absolutely.

I mean there's substance and everything that you've shared with us so far, Evan. But I think in particular what you just said around just making sure you've got all your ducks in a row before you walk into that meeting or you log into

that meeting. But I'm curious around if you had any challenges presented to you during your coaching experience or during any of your workshops that were challenges for yourself to try to resolve or kind of provide guidance to as part of your coaching, as part of your collaborative sessions that you've done. Has anything kind of popped up or you're like, oh, I've never encountered that before? Well, I've been doing this for 30 years, right?

And every time you bring a group of 12 people together, it's different. And it's the same, right? Different in the sense you have new people, right? They're from different organizations, different cultures, right? But the same in the sense that we're all working organizations and they're just some fundamentals we have to bring to bear, regardless of whether we're an IT person, an engineer, a biologist, doctors, lawyers.

I've trained them, all, right? Because when we're being put in leadership positions, what we are asked to do is to get other leaders to collaborate to help them make the best decisions and get them to buy in and implement. So have I ever come up with challenges and workshop?

Sure, right. They're difficult, challenging participants, which is great because the second of the five core things we're trying to teach people and we practice over and over is the art of handling challenging, disruptive people. And there is an art to it. And a lot it's, there's different ways of course, we could think about leadership, right?

The simplest way we might think about our leadership is to think about it on a continuum where I could run a project team or a meeting and I'm the expert, right? I have all the expertise and I run it where I'm the expert. The other way, and this is where we're working, is even though I have expertise to bring a bear on the project, I remain completely neutral on what the ultimate outcome is.

So if we were trying to decide how to roll something out, even though I have strong opinions, I remain neutral and I am an expert in getting the group to collaborate the right roll out strategy. And that's where we're working. And that's what pure collaborative leadership is, is the art of knowing how to tap the expertise of the group and help them work through things right.

And so you can think of expert leadership is telling people the decision right, what the roll out and collaborative leadership is asking them to figure it out. Now there are advantages to deciding for the team and telling them, of course, it's quicker. I, I don't need to listen to them and I get my way now. It's not very artful because you had eight other people who were engaged who had expertise. You've tapped none of the diversity of the group.

You have A1 pointed decision. That's my point of view. And you're not going to get any buy in. So if you're artful in this type of facilitative collaboration, you're going to help groups make better decisions that are going to get the right roll out strategy. You're going to get a ton more buy in and ownership. Now, people say when there's a disadvantage to asking the group to figure it out for themselves. And I say, what's the disadvantage? And they say it takes longer.

And I laugh and I say yes, of course, again, to get eight people to agree on anything's a minor leadership miracle. We're all, as I said earlier, dysfunctional human beings. There is politics, there is ego, right? So it is not easy to get a group to reach consensus and agree on things, but it doesn't take longer, right? Because what you've done is help the group solve the root cause, not the symptoms. It's a better decision from the get go. So it sticks.

There's not all these rework cycles and the group owns it, so it gets implemented. So that's the real art of collaborative leadership. And again, in the real world, we're in the middle of the continuum. Is it OK to make decisions for the team?

Of course, especially if they're about to make a decision, you know, the CEO is going to come unglued or, but really the art is knowing how to ask them to figure it out and only move into the middle of that continue when the group doesn't have the expertise to do it themselves or they're about to do something that you know, is not going to be either politically supported or is a good decision in the 1st place.

So that's really what we're doing is the art of how to get the group to engage and make the right decision and. Would you say once you have gotten a group to the point where you feel like there's true collaboration happening at the leadership level, is that in the argument of like chicken before the egg sort of thing? Is that what needs to come together in order for the organizational culture to start shifting into a certain thing? Or are they?

Are those two completely separate concepts in your mind? Well, the, the way I, I would think about this is meetings are the building blocks of the culture of the organization. So if you look at the, and we're talking about high stakes workshop, right, there are a lot of meetings that shouldn't be

happening. And so if our leadership of those meetings is modeling, engaging people, right, working on the right side of the continuum, it begins to change the culture of the organization because that's where the culture is forming. So it really we're not this, what we're doing is not a course in meetings, right? It's going to, it'll help meetings, but it's a style of leadership that we have to have when we're leading project teams, when we're leading consulting engagements, when

we're leading transformation. So we're really trying to transform the culture of an organization by intervening at the level where we're going to spend all this time, which is in meetings itself. Let's talk about, you know, after the program kind of just around out this conversation. I'm curious to hear is there any follow up from your organization with the folks who have taken it?

Is there any success stories? You know, you don't obviously have to divulge any specific people, but anything that you would want to share in terms of the results that you're seeing? Well, I mean, there's a big difference between training people and using this as a cultural intervention. Now, for a long time, this was a piece of cultural transformation. We would train the C team in this style of leadership and then roll it down.

When you're training people, it's very hard to change the culture if you don't have support from the C team level. So in terms of follow up, when we were running it as a cultural intervention, it was built into people's performance appraisal. You know, it was, you know, people would meet with their managers who were already trained in this. They were, they would then come out and they and then meet again and talk about how they're going to do it.

The honest truth is right now we're training people. And so that's why we like to work with an intact PMO or an intact change in transformation group because you're not going to transform a giant company like Merck or Apple or Amazon training even 1000 people, right? But you can transform APMO, right? Or a process improvement group, you know, doing lean by training all those people so that they are now in a position where they can hold one another accountable.

And the leader of the group has to go through that because she, he or they obviously are the ones that that are the key to building the capability, holding people accountable. So generally when we run the program, what we want to do is run it for 12 people in an intact organization, train everyone in this set of skills. So we begin transforming the culture of that part of the organization who are then change agents because they're all in change roles.

You can then start modeling that for others. But I wouldn't want to sit here and say any training program is going to transform an organization. There's so many other systems that have to happen. How we select people, our communication systems, you know, how our succession plan. I mean, there's a lot that goes into transformation, and this is one piece of that, but at a very practical level. Absolutely, absolutely.

And I think that's how we intro you is that I don't even know how you even began to master this concept because it's just been so such a complex and not an easy thing to have to do for an organization. So for that, I am so gracious and honored that you were able to join us today for this conversation because I think there's a lot of folks who may be in that bubble of, you know, considering something like this

for their organization. And hopefully through this conversation, they've been able to figure that out or get some insights as to whether or not they would want to move forward with that. So why don't we round out the conversation, Evan, with kind of sharing the details around like how this program works, so you know, where can they access more information, that sort of thing. Well, they probably the easiest thing is to just find me on LinkedIn, right?

Evan Unger. I think the last time I looked there, 5 Evan Ungers, but I'll be the one who's pictures. I've got a blue shirt and a goofy grin and you can access my website there. It's a mouthful. That's probably the easiest way now with new clients, right? Four days is a big commitment and in this day and age, what a lot of people want are like a master class or a LinkedIn learning video series where we can watch it self-paced learning. And I have clients who ask for

that all the time. And I and I always say I'm not interested, go find someone else going to waste your time and money. And some clients find that a little off putting. They're like the clients always right. I say, you're not right. And they'll say, what do you mean? I'll say, did you have kids who learned to drive?

And they'll say, of course, I'll say, would you ever let your kids watch 10 videos on how to drive and hand them the car keys for 10 videos on how to swim and hand them a car key? So how the program works, it's practice, right? It's two consecutive days and two consecutive weeks, right? So we will run a program, for example, on a Monday, Tuesday in the first week and finish it the Monday, Tuesday of the second

week. It could be Wednesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Thursday. But as I said earlier, it's all practice. There's two hours of lecture in the program. No one learns through lecture. No one learns through watching videos. They learn through doing. And it's action learning based.

And the reason it is powerful working in an intact PMO, right, is because just having to give each other as participants coaching and feedback in and of itself, there's a major team building piece and skill building piece and relation piece of having to give feedback. So it's chock full of practice. It's a four day program. I always with new clients say, hey, send me your two best people. I'm going to deeply discount

that for you, right? Because I know people need to stress test something and I know they're going to come out of there and say, amazing, all the people in the PMO have to be trained in this or are people doing agile or lean or whatever it is. Because those are the type of people doing high stakes workshop facilitation organizations. And so people going to reach out me on my website and they can set up a meeting there. And that's, you know, the best way to reach me.

Amazing. I will make sure that I drop all the links to your LinkedIn as well as to your website around the program so that everybody listening to this episode can access it. And more importantly, have a conversation with you about whether their organization or if they've got a team that they want to go through this program and and learn a lot more about how to facilitate team collaboration in this high stakes environment. And then let's not forget virtually as well.

So, Evan, any other thoughts to leave with our audience before I let you go for the day? We are closing right, so they're staying with this plane metaphor, right. The five things we're trying to teach people is that take off piece then how to handle challenging people, right, especially senior people. And then the third thing we do in the program is the art of holding space. The tools and techniques to hear from all voices from diverse include. But the fourth thing is landing,

right? And so people do a fairly mediocre job of landing the plane. And so we got to help him with that. And then the fifth thing we're going to help him with is what you do before you show up. Because in a high stakes workshop meeting, the work is not the meeting itself. The work is everything you did as a change agent to set it up for success. And so those are the five fundamentals we're working on. And we'd love to have your

listeners reach out. I'm glad to always Zoom with people, show them the specifics and, you know, send us one or two people to check it out. I'm confident it'll be the best program they take in their career because I hear that decades later from people. We've been doing it for 30 years. Amazing. I, Evan, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing all the wisdom that you could without giving us the full entire workshop as part of this episode.

I'm so excited for our listeners in terms of those who will reach out to you and be able to go through the program themselves. If you do work through Evan, please let us know, drop a comment with this episode and let us know how that goes for you. Evan. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Like I said, I'll make sure all your links, associated links are a part of this episode so that people can reach out to you.

And for the folks that are listening who are maybe new to the everyday PM, give us a follow, give us a like all those things to show your love for and support for the everyday PM. If you can leave us a review on any of the podcasting platforms you are listening to this on, please do so with love Five Star Review. Great comments. Feedback as always appreciated as well. You can follow me on LinkedIn as well.

And if I need to connect you in some way to Evan because you can't reach them, I'm happy to try to do that too. Thank you so much, everybody. On behalf of Evan, myself and everybody else that is associated with the everyday PM in terms of the production pieces of this, thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you on the next episode. Take care.

Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android