026 - How to design meetings that we love to attend - with Gustavo Razzetti

In this episode, I talk to Gustavo Razzetti, a speaker, author, change facilitator and the founder of Liberationist. He is an active blogger and has written over 400 articles on change, on leadership and team development.

We speak about organizational and behavioural change, about leadership and about meetings that are an integral part of a change process. We discuss the difference between meetings and workshops and how you stop having meetings on auto-pilot.  

Gustavo shares his concept of workshops being a tool for experimenting and practising new behaviours. And along these lines, he shares some of his favourite exercises that you can apply in regular meetings and which will help to foster communication across hierarchies.  

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Questions and Answers

[3:23] What do you mean when you call yourself a “change instigator” and to what extent is it different from a “change consultant”?

[4:34] How much will do you need from the organisation to really drive the change?

[5:53] What do you think is the biggest misconception of change?

[8:15] How do you help leaders to find comfort in this uncertainty? 

[10:16] What does it take for a leader to trust their team?

[20:48] What is the key difference between a meeting and a workshop according to you?

[23:39] If you could change one thing in the way how organizations meet, what would you change?

[24:53] What is according to you, the best strategy to get out of autopilot?

[26:28] How do you get everyone to speak? 

[29:58] How do you avoid auto-pilot in recurrent meetings that tend to follow the same structure every week?

[32:16] Do you believe in virtual meetings?

[36:48] Do you think this is related to the safe space? 

[38:11] What would be your advice to a new team leader to have meetings that matter?

[41:15] How important do you consider courage for a team lead or for team leaders to be good meeting facilitators?

[47:03] What makes workshops fail according to you?

[49:19] What is your favourite exercise?

[53:27] How do you build the pairs of two?

[55:30] Anything you would like to share that we haven't touched upon?

[56:09] Would you have this conversation with a team? 

[57:12] When did you start calling yourself a facilitator?

[1:00:32] What do you want the audience to remember?

Related links you may want to check out:

• Gustavo’s business page: https://liberationist.org/
• Gustavo’s ultimate guide to successful meetings
• Google study on remote teams
• Gustavo’s blog post on increasing mistake tolerance.
• Exercise: Who are you?
• Template for accountability exercise.
• Our sponsor SessionLab

Any thoughts? Share them with us!

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