STEP 5 -- Team Feedback Process and Building Your Library

Nice work on the analysis. A solid project—good guide, excellent participants, impressive analysis and insights development. We’re done, right? Well, not completely. We have two final tasks that develop your organizational knowledge base and capacity.

Conducting a Team Feedback Process:

In my many years of consulting I have learned a few things about feedback. The first is that feedback is the breakfast of champions. It’s what skilled professionals and learning organizations thrive on. Second, feedback is most effective when it is immediate, specific and non-judgmental. So, we recommend a short team feedback session during the same day or the following day of your session. It’s like an After Action Review but without military tribunals or repercussions. It is a 15-30 minute review, I would recommend that the lead facilitator for the session conducts it, but they are an equal participant and need to be open to any/all feedback. Three questions:

What worked?
What didn’t?
What should we do next time?

You can decide how to document, just try and capture any key lessons learned so that the current and future team members have access to them. Many of the recommendations I have shared in this guide are lessons learned over 25 years and (literally) thousands of group based sessions I have facilitated with technology platforms. I have found, quite simply, you can learn something from every session you facilitate. Over time, this can differentiate you and your organization.

Considerations for Session Re-Use:

Many of you have certain methodologies in your consulting work, or common sessions you might be asked to facilitate. Converge has implemented library support that allows you to create a company library of successful sessions that might be candidates for re-use. These can be as simple as an effective demo session/agenda or as complex as a multi-step risk assessment process. As a session leader, you have access to creating and using sessions that have been added to your library. I would suggest that you establish someone on the team as your librarian to look for and help manage session content. This is not to create cookie-cutter sessions, but to provide effective starting points for sessions, leverage effective session techniques and create consistency in the implementation of your methodologies.

In our STEP 1 in creating sessions/agendas, we covered how to look for and access Global Converge Templates as well as Company Templates. To add to your library, you can take a candidate session and export it to your library using the EXPORT drop down. Add a description, date of use, who’s the owner. If you want, you can review it and make it a little more generic so it is easier to bring down and edit/use for a subsequent session. Our first Converge Global template is the very common SWOT Analysis template. We plan to add at least one template a month and are always open to new session candidates. This is all ‘open source’ content, you are welcome to use our templates and we hope they are helpful to you both for learning Converge and conducting sessions.

Global Converge Use—Multi-Language Sessions:

One final re-use aspect for your sessions. Converge is a global platform and we have already translated Converge pushbuttons, messages and even e-mail support to 7 languages and can add others in short notice. The support is quite impressive. Here’s how you can take your English version session guide and send it global:

After you have completed/tested or executed a session guide in English (in other words it works and is solid), you can go to the EXPORT tab and click on MANAGE TRANSLATONS. Your first step is to add a language for your session, for example, let’s add Spanish for this session as noted below:

In this case we have added Spanish from the supported language drop down. The next step is to click on the 3 dot ellipse to the left of the language and download excel so your English guide is downloaded—activity titles, instructions, intro comments—the works. English in one column and then an open column for the Spanish translation.
Engage a skilled bi-lingual professional to do the language translation in excel. Nuance is really important here and this is a far better technique than using Google Translate or AI. It really doesn’t take that long—a couple of hours perhaps.
Now, you have the update excel file can you can now upload excel into Converge so you have the Spanish version of the guide co-resident with the English version.
As a leader, you can simply click the global flag at the top of your screen to see the guide in English or Spanish (same for observers). Participants have a language indicator in their registration for which version will be shown to them. You can have half of the participant group see an English version and respond in English and half the group see a Spanish version and respond in Spanish. Generally, you will facilitate session with one language at a time;
Converge supports dynamic language translation so if you are an English speaking observer you can watch the session with the English guide while the responses of all Spanish speaking participants are dynamically translated into Spanish as they are submitted. We actually ran a session last year with half English-speaking participants and half Spanish-speaking and each group could see all responses real-time in their native language. Kind of amazing, and all documentation was produced in terms of session results in English with the support of the system translations. Below is a shot of the guide in Spanish and the global flag for the facilitator:

For those of you with global clients or multi-language consumer segments, this can be a very powerful use of Converge and way of re-using a session guide that was effective in English.

Final Comments—Team Feedback and Building Your Re-use Library: While this may be the last step in our five-step facilitation journey, it is one of the most important as it creates continuous improvement and creates a way to leverage your session guides.

You don’t have to make the team feedback session seem like a formal project review—just the three questions: what worked, what didn’t and what to do differently next time?
Seriously consider the Company Template (library) concept. Even if you end the year with a handful of library-housed guides, I think you will find this to be very valuable;
We are in a fast-moving global environment—the ability to conduct Converge sessions in multiple languages with dynamic language translation may find you a new client or partner that you had not previously considered.

We are serious about looking for additional global templates in 2024—we don’t want you to give away intellectual property, but if you have a generic session topic that really worked well we’d love to hear about it and consider it for Converge Global Templates. You know, pay it forward.

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