Our favorite meetings include:

• Annual staff retreats - rich with participation, new ideas, wise decisions, and a practical action plan
• Creative brainstorming - maximum idea generation, followed by thoughtful consideration, evaluation, and decision making
• Annual board planning conference - an opportunity to move from big-picture visions to board development strategies and action planning
• Multi-stakeholder visioning - loosely structured, high participation, and results that engage people to passionately follow through
• Weekly staff meetings - teaching skills that move these meetings from boring and time-wasting to highly efficient and productive
• Process improvement teams - helping teams through the "form, storm, and norm" phases to the high performance phase, while defining their mission and learning the tools to measure, analyze, and improve processes.

What are your meeting challenges?

Call Sue Martin for a free consultation: 801-209-3062, or sue@cocreativeworks.com

Are employees hesitant to speak up in front of the boss?

Very often it's not shyness nor lack of ideas that make employees reticent. It may be the boss's communication style, particularly in meetings, that makes employees hold back.

Even the most well-meaning boss may inadvertently create an atmosphere that says "only good ideas welcome here." Creative collaboration and full participation require an environment where it's OK to express wild, possibly ridiculous ideas. Evaluation comes later.

Do some employees seem to hijack the meeting, making it difficult for all to participate?

When your team learns and practices facilitative meeting skills, the hijacker can be subdued peacefully and the meeting can benefit from everyone's input.

Do you often leave meetings with an ill-defined follow-up plan so that nothing gets done between meetings?