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A large part of facilitating groups is helping them to get to know each other and thus I collect questions to use as openers. However, I have found that I have a handful that I return to over and over.

Here are my top 4 Get to Know You Questions: 

1. “What are you reading or listening to?” If asked for clarification, this could include books, magazines, podcasts, audio books, or music. I personally am often looking for books or podcasts. Even if the conversation doesn’t go well hopefully I walk away with a book or podcast to check out! Many of the groups I attend have business leaders who are constantly learning and thus this is not often hard for them to answer and typically leads to interesting conversations. If someone asks this question to the group at the start, I find that I often want to go ask quite a few people more questions later because their book choices pique my interest. For groups that may be less likely to read as often, I have changed it up to say “What was the last thing you read or listened to?”
2. “What group or activity are you involved in?” This is especially helpful when I facilitate something that brings in a variety of organizations where people may not want to be associated with their day job, but they do want you to know that they volunteer with a specific group. I find this is often a really good way to know what people are passionate about enough to tell you what their time goes to.
3. “Why did you attend this event today?” This is used really often so I sometimes get bored with it, but for many events it helps to show what connection the individuals there have to the event as well as gets to what they want (which if you have spent much time around me, you know I think is knowing what other partners want is essential to collaboration).
4. “What other events, meetups, or conferences do you like to attend?” This is an opener, but I personally like it because it tells me what other events are out there and I can get feedback from someone who has attended the event. Sometimes I will also ask something similar like “What is the best conference you have ever attended?” This can be especially helpful when you are trying to find events someone with similar interests will attend.

If you follow me, you probably know that I believe relationships are crucial to your success. However I admit, that doesn’t mean I love networking events. I want valuable authentic relationships, and a quick chat and business card swap doesn’t cut it.

So how do you turn this business card swap into something of legitimate value?

1. MINDSET MATTERS!  Why are you attending this event? If you show up with a mindset of trying to sell your thing, it likely won’t go as well for you. If you approach it with the mindset that this is an opportunity to start cultivating relationships, it will likely play out better. The thing with relationships is that they often take a bit more work than swapping a business card. This is just your first connection. Your goal should be to connect further.
2. ALWAYS OFFER VALUE! Give first. Look for ways to offer value when you connect with someone. Did they mention a project they are working on or something that they are trying to figure out? Do you have resources you can share on this topic? Perhaps a link to a Ted Talk or an article you can email. Make note of these during the conversation so you have something of value to follow up on. Look for ways you can help them at no cost.
3. CONNECT ON SOCIAL MEDIA! One of the first things I do with that stack of business cards is look up connections and then like their business facebook page, connect on linkedin, follow on twitter and instagram, and subscribe on youtube. Fun tip- a great way to follow up is simply liking their posts, retweeting, and commenting on social media. Some of us get so caught up in our number of followers we forget, that we learn a lot about the people around us by following them on social media. I am not suggesting you be inauthentic and like things you don’t legitimately like, but by following them you have the opportunity to see what they share. This allows you the chance to deepen your connection and when you see something you do like, take the second to let them know!
4. EMAIL FOLLOW UP! This can be very simple. Just a quick email stating it was nice to connect. This is a great time to share resources that you can offer them such as links to a book, ted talk, or article you recommend. If you have something further you want to discuss with them, this can be a great time to suggest meeting for coffee or further connection. Additionally, I love to use these emails to further conversations on mutual interest. We both discussed an interest in connecting with others and this person seems to go to a lot of events, maybe ask that they let you know about fun events they see coming up.

I recently observed a team as they brainstormed ways they could make another team member’s tasks easier. Finally someone stopped the group and pointed out the look on that team member’s face. He didn’t seem receptive to the help. Upon further discussion, it was determined he had indeed tried many of these suggestions and the team wasn’t really helping, but rather they were adding more tasks for him.

There are two lessons from this experience:

1. Do you pay attention to your team member’s body language in meetings? What communication are you missing?
2. Are you trying to solve problems that don’t exist? Or overcomplicating situations?

One of my favorite questions to ask when consulting or leading a meeting is “How can we simplify this?” or “What can we eliminate?” More often than not simplifying makes the team better.

What comes to mind when I mention collaboration?

What do you think would be essential for a solid foundation of collaboration?

When I ask these questions in my consulting work, I am typically given responses in the realm of “kind” or “caring” or “helpful”. Most of us do indeed appreciate kind, caring, and helpful collaborators. However, I believe there is a more basic characteristic that is the foundation of collaboration: Self awareness.

It is extremely difficult to collaborate with someone who doesn’t know what they want.

As a collaborator, collaboration always starts with me. Before I can be a good collaborator, I have to know myself well enough to know what I want.I have been teaching collaboration and leadership skills long enough I can tell you that when one or more collaborators don’t know what they want, this is typically not a collaboration that will end well. Failure is often eminent.

So how do I figure out what I want?

That isn’t always a simple task. In college, I studied psychology and took multiple personality tests and even had graduate coursework in career advising. I thought I knew all there was to know about self awareness.

Then after I graduated, I found myself in situations where I was looking for what was next in my life and people would ask me what I wanted, but all I had to offer were blank stares. I had influential people with access to resources offering to help me, but I couldn’t tell them what I wanted. During one particular rough patch in my life, I found myself in a conversation with a highly influential individual. He seemed surprised that I was not in a better job and asked me “What do you want to do?”. I responded with “I don’t know” and I will never forget the seriousness to his expression as he told me “You have to know what you want to get it”.

Seems simple enough right?

This was not one of those aha moments. In fact, it was rather embarrassing. This person could have offered me a job, but I couldn’t even say what I wanted. After being called out for not knowing what I wanted, I started putting a lot more effort in to trying to figure it out.

I researched and experimented for some time with trying to come up with tips, tricks, and techniques to make this easier. I have a list of suggestions for those seeking self awareness that I will share in a future post.

For most of us, self awareness is more of an adventure and it does not have a simple and quick answer.

I have found one particular question that I love to ask clients that often sparks an incredible awareness journey. It may not be over night or even in a year, but I promise if you can answer this question, you are ahead of many of your peers:

What do you want enough to fail at over and over?

What do you want badly enough that you are willing to put yourself out there and fail at it and still get up and be willing to continue to fail at it in order to someday get it? What is worthy of repeated failure for you?

Hopefully you get to enjoy some time off and a little more time to relax and read this summer. A road trip or sitting on the beach reading sounds good to me. At the very least those of us here in Phoenix tend to hibernate in the air conditioned indoors so we get a bit more reading done during the summer.

Reading is one of the best ways I have found to level up my own growth. Books introduce me to new ideas, they cause me to stop and reflect on my own life, and they inspire new questions for me to consider, keeping my curiosity forever growing.

Powerful Collaboration requires strong collaborative leadership skills and continuous growth. Here are my top 7 picks for anyone seeking to level up their game as a collaborative leader:

1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck – In Mindset, Dweck disrupts the idea that your abilities and talents are simply genetic, fixed, and thus cannot change. Dweck presents the well researched idea that it is far more our mindset that sets us apart than our actual talents. Let me warn you, the book is a bit repetitive. You may be wondering why I would start out my list of suggested summer reading with a book that I caution is repetitive?Understanding growth mindset and seeking to live life with a growth mindset is essential to powerful collaboration. Approaching collaborations with a growth mindset will change your collaboration. The book, or at least reading the full thing may or may not however be necessary for you to get the concept.
2. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want by Alex Ostenwalder – This is a fun book filled with illustrations and photos that make my facilitation brain giddy and the content is something EVERY human should understand. This extensive book covers value proposition design, design thinking, empathy mapping, and event touches on the business model canvas. More than just helping you understand value proposition, this book helps you walk through finding what your value proposition is. If you want to be a better collaborator, know what you bring to the table.This is a business book, but it applies to far more situations than just business. If you have a business, all the better. If you don’t have a business, read this with the frame that you are your business. What you personally bring to each collaboration is your value proposition. Each person you are interacting with is in some way your customer.
3. Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently by Dawna Markova and Angie McArthur – Markova offers a whole new approach to understanding thinking, building trust, and communicating with others who have different thinking styles. We often assume others think like us, this book explains how others think differently. Not just in that values may differ, but in the process of how we think (visual, kinesthetic, auditory). This book provides great insight in to how we communicate with others and how we can improve communication by better understanding those we work with. I would strongly suggest this book to anyone who leads groups of people and especially those who are responsible for training or educating others.
4. Daring Greatly by Brene Brown– Brene Brown calls herself a researcher storyteller and she truly is. I love all of her writing. It is backed with research and written in an engaging manner. In this groundbreaking book, Brene Brown discusses her research on shame and vulnerability. Vulnerability increases trust as where shame diminishes it. This book was a game changer for me. Her work is provides substance in better understanding how to deepen relationships and build trust as well as what actions break trust.
5. The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help by Amanda Palmer– Palmer describes that Brene Brown has been influential her work. In some ways, she considers her writing an applied version of Daring Greatly. Brene writes from a research perspective while including some of her own stories, Amanda’s writing is simply her own story. Asking for help is one of those things that I personally struggle with, yet I, like Amanda have experienced over and over the power of asking for help. Reading Amanda’s story as she learned to lean on others was thought provoking for me and a reminder of how more often than not, when we ask for help, we find collaborators who want to help us.
6. Impro by Keith Johnstone – This book is hard to describe. Johnstone is considered a father of improv. He created many of the improv games that are popular now. Traditional descriptions will tell you this book is about Improv, and it is, but it is about so much more. Johnstone has a depth of understanding about humans that is rare. This book is both fascinating and useful. For me, his work on status was life changing. Reading Impro was the start of a journey in learning about body language and how others played up or down status without ever saying a word.
7. Presence: Bringing Your Biggest Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy– My adventures in learning about body language and status after reading Impro continued with Amy Cuddy’s work. She also has a great Ted Talk on the topic. Cuddy’s is a psychologist by trade and thus her book is research based. This fascinating work delves in to the variety of ways your body posture impacts both how others react to you and even how body language can change your own biochemistry.

I hope this lists gives you some new ideas and helps you to become a better collaborative leader. Do you have a book you think is essential for powerful collaboration? Comment below with any book suggestions you have or thoughts on these books as you read them.

I keep track of the books I have read and those I want to read on goodreads.com. If you enjoy this list, hit me up on Goodreads. I am always glad to have more people to discuss books with.

Or if you are local, join me on the second Weds of the month at 6pm for the Guilt Free Book Club. We meet at Gangplank, a local collaborative workspace in Chandler. This month we are discussing Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. The book club is guilt free, so no need to read the book. You just need to be interested in the topic. The book covers a variety of social psychology topics and is another good one for collaborative leaders.

One of the roles in my job is helping groups to see how important relationships are to successfully completing their goals. The ability to build connections, influence, and trust is often crucial to the success of a project.

I recently facilitated an activity for a group where we brainstormed all around the topic of recruiting more champions.

We defined champions as highly influential people who believe in your cause and support you. These individuals can:

• Open doors to new opportunities
• Make introductions to valuable connections
• Provide expertise and consulting

When I facilitate this exercise, it is not uncommon for groups to quickly realize they don’t have any champions.

Have you ever been there? You set a lofty goal,  but you lack support to really make it happen?

A dear friend of mine (Katie Hurst) created what she called her personal board of advisors. These were trusted individuals she would reach out to for support. This is something I encourage everyone to do regardless of if you are on your own or part of an organization. We all need champions.

To create your own personal board of advisors:

1. Brainstorm a list of who all you would want to be your champions. Think BIG here. Don’t cross people off the list because you assume they would never agree to be your champion. Focus on possibilities in this stage. The more people on your list the better your odds of creating an incredible board of directors. I have a friend who chose 100 women who she admired and wrote them all individual handwritten notes. When I first heard this, I was blown away. First, I am not sure I could even come up with 100 people I admire to write a letter to. Then just thinking of the time on top of that to write the letters! This sounds like crazy talk. However, many of the women she wrote, wrote her back. Several years later they still champion her work and have opened numerous doors for her. With those kind of numbers you don’t even need a high response rate!
2. Contact your list of individuals you brainstormed. Influential people are busy, but a heart felt note expressing admiration and asking for help is more rare than one might realize.
3. Ask for help. There is psychological research behind this. When people help you, they will convince themselves of your worth to explain why they helped you. The more they help you, the more attached they are likely to become.
4. Respect their time. Influential people are typically busy. Know what you want when you enter the conversation. Be succinct. They don’t need to know every detail of your situation.
5. Finally, be open to helping others get to where you are and making connections for them as well. It also helps to pay it forward.

Let me know what projects you are looking for champions on in the comments below and of course if I can help, let me know that as well.