Buoyant Firefighting Team

Summary

Buoyant firefighting team that needs to improve internal communication and their meeting rhythms. 

Client

Africa Business Heroes (Alibaba)

Goal

ABH is a small distributed team that runs a massive yearly competition that involves hundreds of entrepreneurs, judges, and mentors.  ABH wanted to provide its employees with training to improve internal communication and facilitation skills to run the continent-wide competition even more effectively.  With a small team, every member counts.  Ensuring time is not wasted on ineffective meetings, and everyone working worldwide is aligned is critical.

Solution

A series of research-backed communication trainings built on each other:

• Foundations of Communication - Increase Impact & Influence: Before you can host meetings or engage with others, it is important to start with the basics.  In this session, we covered six communication styles and how to adapt your communication to different stakeholders. You will become aware of your communication style versus colleagues and improve your situational communication flexibility.
• How to Moderate & Facilitate Effective Virtual + In-Person Meetings: Facilitating effective meetings is even more critical as workplaces become more diverse and distributed.  The training consists of learning the five techniques to keep the participants engaged and, most notably, how to shift five different types of critical situations during a session.  During this session, we also explored a relevant case study to demonstrate how to apply different communication styles and situations.
• How to Deliver Insightful Presentations & Speaking Sucess: Building on the previous training, we covered how to speak influentially to different audiences using a three-step process. Together we reviewed a short speech to discuss which speaking elements were used by the speaker and whether they were effective.

The highly engaging sessions offered hands-on learning and relevant case studies so participants could see how to apply each of the tools provided. 

Recordings of the sessions were available for the duration of the engagement so that participants who could not attend the workshops live could still benefit from the content and additional resources. 

The facilitator was also available to observe team meetings and provide immediate feedback. 

Michael Mang of Africa’s Business Heroes Prize Competition Team reported:

“The most valuable part of her training was leading an effective and efficient meeting.  As a remote team, we are in different locations and have different types of meetings.  People would complain that our meetings were too long and inefficient, and personally, our meetings were something I wanted to improve.

The training came at the right time, and we are already implementing much of what we learned.  We are focused on making sure our meetings have a specific purpose and have found it useful to define the category and what we want to get out of each session. 

Our meetings have improved.  I can tell because we have less frequent meetings, and they are shorter, but the engagement in our meetings is up. 

Akua's training had a direct and tangible impact on our small team and directly impacted our business.”

If you are interested in having a research-based and highly engaging training to fuel growth, reach out to learn more about my approach.  We always start with a needs assessment and identify the key goals you want to achieve as an organization or department.

About the Facilitator

Akua Nyame-Mensah creates sticky learning experiences.  She is an external member of Google’s Mastery Faculty, a selective group of facilitators committed to creating live magical learning experiences in-person or virtually.  She is also a #IAmRemarkable Platinum Tier Facilitator and an Association for Talent Development member.  Leaders around the world have attended her practical and actionable training and workshops.  All her content and support are based on her three-step leadership system that makes leadership easy.