Month 7
CULTURE: RELATIONSHIPS & FUN
Building community among your team and creating joy in the workplace.
PRE-WORK
Here is messaging to send to your participants prior to this meeting. Feel free to modify to fit your personality:
Thank you all for your participation in last month’s MIBE Meeting. During our next meeting we will be discussing our culture and how we can be more intentional about how we create a great place to work. No pre-work is necessary, but please think about the culture initiatives and events that we currently do. Which ones are your favorite? Which ones should we get rid of? Hopefully after this meeting we will be inspired to think about things that we want to add. Thank you all, I’m looking forward to another great meeting!
AGENDA
Intro from facilitator (2-5 min)
The Why: Use this opportunity to communicate with your team as one group. It’s powerful for them to hear the same message together and a great opportunity to recognize participants in front of their peers.
The How: Choose the things that are most relevant for your company to go over.
Suggestions:
• Welcome – Reinforce your mission/vision/values – Why do you exist as a company?
• Announcements
• Celebrations
Centering Exercise (5 min)
The Why: This exercise helps everyone to be present and focus their attention on the meeting. The quick-fire questions keep participants on their toes and force them to think about what they’re feeling right now.
The How: Go around the room and have everyone complete the sentence one at a time. As the facilitator, you should go first. You can reverse the order of who responds after each question if you want to mix it up. Remind participants that this is meant to be fairly quick and their first thought is often their best thought, so don’t overthink it and go with what pops into their head right away.
Examples:
• I’m proud of _________
• I’m ready for _________
• Today I need _________
• This week, I really want to finish _________
Video from MIBE® (10 min)
The Why: Anthony will provide an intro to the topic and give more information about the overall program. Each month, educational and inspirational information will be shared through this method. The video should make your job as the facilitator easier so you are not responsible for having to “teach” the lesson.
The How: Use the video below. It will be helpful for you to view it prior to the meeting. You will just need to be prepared to show it on a screen to your team. We recommend testing ahead of time to help avoid streaming/buffering/internet issues!
Discussion (45-60 min)
The Why: This is the opportunity for the group to share, collaborate and build trust. Ultimately the goal of these meetings is to move the people in your organization forward as leaders and improve your overall culture.
The How: As the facilitator it is very important that you seek participation from everyone at the meeting and that you create space for people to be open, honest and vulnerable. We will provide you with the content each month, it’s your job to facilitate the discussion around that content.
1) Review the ground rules for these meetings (2 min)
You don’t necessarily need to go over the post it notes, just review the rules and hang the poster in the room as a reminder to all participants. If there is something that needs to be added or modified, you can also do that at this time.
2) Culture Initiatives (10-15 min)
Decide how you want to move forward with culture initiatives and what areas you will focus on. Pass out the worksheets and have each person fill out what they would like to see the organization KEEP, ADD and MIBE. Collect those sheets as they will be used to help you or the Culture Club with their initiatives. You may decide that a Culture Club is not right for your company and you would prefer to assign culture initiatives to a few people or handle them yourself. If you decide that a Culture Club is right for your team, ask to see who is willing to participate. You could have them make a note on their culture sheets to save time, or if you’d like to figure out the Culture Club during the meeting, ask for volunteers. It’s up to you how many people you want, but 3-6 is a good range to shoot for depending on the size of your company. Having representation from each department will help with buy-in when you start planning events and implementing things. Use the Culture Club 101 Worksheet to help your culture club get started. Ideally they should come back ready to give an update next month. This will also apply if you decide to do it on your own.
View & Download Company Culture Initiatives Exercise
View & Download Culture Club 101 Worksheet
3) Getting to Know You Through Drawing (45+ min)
The purpose of this exercise is to help your team build stronger relationships by getting to know more about the things in their lives that have shaped who they are. Drawing these (instead of just speaking about them) is a fun and unique way to talk about the events and having a picture to go with a story will help the rest of the team remember what has been shared.
Instructions: Before the meeting starts, hang a flip chart paper around the room for each person who will be in the meeting. You can write their name at the top of each paper if you want. Have each person go to their paper and give everyone a bold sharpie. If you didn’t write names, have them write their name at the top. Then instruct everyone (including yourself) to draw three significant things or events in their life that have shaped who they are as a person. Give everyone about 10 minutes to draw. You can reassure participants by saying that most people in the room are not professional artists and that stick figures and rough drawings are fantastic! Once everyone is finished drawing, go around the room and have each person explain their pictures, why those events were significant and how they shaped their life. Depending on the number of people in the meeting each person should have 2-4 minutes to explain their drawings. If they breeze through them, it will be helpful for you as the facilitator to ask follow up questions to dig a little deeper. Bonus opportunity - have everyone write their top two values on their paper as well to see where those show up in these events.
Recap Video from MIBE® (3-5 min)
The Why: Anthony will close the meeting and summarize the content with an inspirational message. This is also our opportunity to share our post-meeting action items for participants.
The How: You will need to queue up the second video below. Again, it will be helpful for you to view it prior to the meeting and we recommend testing to help avoid streaming/buffering/internet issues!
