When the Client Needs to Pivot: A Hybrid Success Story

Author: Joran Slane Oppelt

I recently visited St. Cloud, Minnesota, for a three-day Team Performance workshop with a group of HR/Learning and Development leaders that put my COVID-polished hybrid facilitation learnings to good use in surprising ways. 

When I landed in Minneapolis, it was sunny and warm, and I had no idea I would soon be experiencing 10 inches of snow, scraping it off my rental car each morning with a visitor badge, and facing a work-related pivot that would have me seeking nightly refuge in the hot tub of a sprawling Holiday Inn. 

Little did I know that the pivot would end up being a blessing; it gave the workshop participants more than what they needed and taught us all a lesson in how to think on our feet. 

Preparing the Room

The day of setup began like any other Team Performance engagement. Weary and stiff from a full morning of travel, I drove to the client’s office, entered the corner conference room on the fourth floor, and saw the familiar horseshoe-shape of tables and chairs oriented toward a large TV screen on one end of the room.

At The Grove, we design our rooms for optimal connection and collaboration, with the highest degree of visibility and engagement. Theater seating—or rows of chairs facing the same direction—suggests a one-to-many approach, but also only allows participants to turn left or right in their seats. This limits the number of connections and observations that can be made during the session. 

I immediately started unlocking the wheels and moving the tables into square-shaped pairs, positioning them throughout the room so that there were no right angles. At one point, one of the staff wandered by, stuck their head in, and said, “Ooh, I love this setup!”

After the tables were set with markers and sticky notes, I hung the large wall templates—one for the Meeting Startup, an Interdependence Continuum, a Team Charter, and a large poster of the Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Model®. 

I used the TV screen to display the Mural app from my laptop, which contained a virtual whiteboard of the training I’d built years ago to lead remote versions of the workshop. This allowed me to zoom and pan around to different sections of the material without having to “flip” back and forth through a deck of slides. 

So far so good. Everything was going according to plan.  

A STKY Situation

The next morning, as a light snow began to fall, the participants filed in one at a time, smiling and ready for the first day of the workshop. I introduced myself and shared that I was born in Central Wisconsin and appreciated seeing the Kwik Trip, Menards, and Fleet Farm on my drive through town. It had been at least 20 years since I had visited the rural Midwest. 

The client was a 100-year-old construction company focused on renewable solutions, such as wind and solar energy. Its values centered around learning, leadership, character, and safety for everyone—from their executives to their foremen and work crews.

The participants brought me up to speed on how they had been using the TP Model to lead kickoff meetings with their project teams and how they hoped to gain a better understanding of the Model and its associated Best Practices during this refresher course. 

Two hours in, the group realized that though it thought it had a pretty good grasp on the Model and Team Performance System, there was much more to discover. Participants had been sharing the Model internally (endearingly called the “bouncy-ball model”) with their teams for many years, but much of the nuance and detail of the Model hadn’t survived the translation. From its foundation in Arthur M. Young’s Theory of Process to its ability to serve as a self-assessment and frame for team conversations, the Model proved to be rich in new possibilities and applications.     

We broke for lunch, admiring the beauty of the snowflakes as they fell heavily past our wrap-around windows to land on the highway and parking lot below. When we returned an hour later, it was still snowing steadily, and the entire landscape had turned a blindingly solid white. The roads glistened with moisture and enough slush that motorists were driving slower. 

It was only then that we realized the snow might affect the second day of the workshop. Some had traveled from as much as an hour-and-a-half away. If the snow melted and re-froze on the roads in the night, then that would make travel the following day very dangerous. 

One of the team’s core principles was “Safety First. Always.” Adhering to this principle had prevented many sticky situations. In fact, the team had a name for this—STKY (pronounced “sticky”)—which stood for “sh** that kills you.”

This situation was no different than double checking that safety standards were in place on a jobsite. Team safety was always the priority.

The team leader pulled me aside and asked if there were any options for leading the workshop virtually on Day 2. I told her that, yes, the Mural we had been looking at all morning was available for the team to access remotely, contained all the workshop materials, and would stay open after the workshop like an unlocked room. It was decided we would call in from our hotel rooms using Zoom on Day 2 and that I would facilitate the second day using Mural. 

Pivoting to Mural

Normally, we limit our virtual sessions to five hours, but this would be a full eight-hour day. I knew I couldn’t sit for that long, so that night I fashioned a standing workstation by flipping the room’s trash can upside down and placing it on my desk. This made a great square perch for my laptop. 

The following morning, I opened the blinds and benefited from lots of natural light and glare from the snowbanks streaming in my window.

The Mural session went flawlessly. There were even members of the team that identified opportunities to leverage Mural for their own meetings and asked about how to build virtual whiteboards of their own.

We took plenty of short bio breaks and got through the second day safely.

Having the Team Performance Model on-screen and using The Grove’s Graphic Guides and other visualization techniques in Mural meant that we had a continuous flow of information and understanding across the two meetings.

Next Steps

On Day 3, we were back at the office. Everyone was grateful for our ability to pivot to a virtual solution, but voiced that there was still no comparison to in-person meetings and our ability to be present with each other physically, emotionally, and energetically.

The workshop concluded with an Appreciations activity (listing the positive qualities of someone they’d been secretly observing all day) as they presented their workshop certificates to each other. Hugs and smiles were exchanged, and people left the room slowly, engaging in multiple side conversations—something that isn’t possible on Zoom. 

The team now had both the memory of the in-person meeting—the books and handouts, somatic energy, body language, and inside jokes—as well as the virtual archive of workshop materials stored in Mural. The best of both worlds. 

And I had the knowledge and confidence that I could pivot at a moment's notice—even in the midst of a snowstorm, just over a thousand miles from home—all thanks to visual tools that had been developed in advance; thanks to the 1,000 hours of practice during the pandemic; and thanks to honoring this group’s safety requirement. 

Interested in learning about Team Performance from Joran? Take our Team Performance Workshop. Or download a free best practice.