For 3,013 days at KPMG, the global advisory firm, my biggest enemy wasn’t my suit. For 3,013 days my biggest enemy wasn’t my tie. And for 3,013 days not even the baloney bingo we played every single day was my biggest enemy. For 3,013 days my biggest enemy was… the meeting!
Together, in a highly energetic workshop we “killed the meeting” at our Toastmasters Continental Europe Conference in Budapest! Thank you so much, all you 80+ energetic people who worked with me in that small, cozy room. We generated impressive content for both of the workshop success factors – workshop leader and workshop format.
Once we finished after 40 minutes you gave me all your content – the workshop leader’s requirements on white paper, creative ideas for the format on yellow paper:
In a following step I threw all your ideas into an Excel sheet, grouped the content, came up with category titles and generated a mind map based on those categories.
You can download the mind map clicking on the image below.
As a summary, we expect workshop leaders to be charismatic, energetic, professional and adaptable. They should also be great, empathetic communicators who know how to listen and connect with the workshop participants.
On the format side, we identified three success dimensions – dynamics, efficiency and fun. Especially, the latter makes all the difference between a workshop success and a lame duck.
You don’t have to kill the meeting! Meetings are an essential part of business and NGO life. But – you can add workshop elements to your meetings. Turn your meetings into work meetings. They will be much more dynamic, much more efficient and, definitely, much more fun!