My response to this query in the Working Out Loud Facebook group this morning:
I’m panicking! I’ve got my first WOL circle starting on Monday! It’s an experiment and then if it goes well I hope to roll it out across the company. Any advice or tips very welcomed!
This was the first Saturday of 2019 when I had no plans or expectation of doing anything circle-related. We finished our latest WOL circle last Monday. However, I saw your post and knew that I should respond as I have a heart for facilitators and leaders of circles and in all spheres of life.
It is good to hear of someone else in the UK doing circles and an organisation that is looking to "do" circles - PS our company – xxxxxxx - uses xxxxxxx mobiles!
I decided to do this as a "My Top 10" list channelling one of the WOL circle guide exercises.
There are no doubt many more than 10 but these are the results of a one-pass personal brainstorm as I thought of them.
These apply to any kind of circle - physical or virtual, in-company or cross-company or with complete strangers or colleagues or friends and any ages etc.
My experience of facilitating / leading WOL circles is the result of doing that role in 6 global virtual circles since the start of 2017 (including one of the self-care pilot circles). These have all been with people who were either complete strangers (mainly) or those who I knew from Twitter chats and other online interactions. The company I work for does not use circles and I cannot see that changing any time soon.
PS I love music. This is a great tune when planning to start, lead, run anything ....
https://youtu.be/Xu3FTEmN-eg
... and so on to my list ...
1) Show up as the real, authentic, vulnerable "you" (in appropriate ways) in everything you do relating to the specific WOL circle(s) you are facilitating.
2) Do a "Week 0" call with those who have expressed a commitment to joining your circle - a forum to address all queries, concerns etc that the members may have. See this post: https://www.linkedin.com/.../week-0-best-practice.../
3) Get into a cadence of each week doing the circle guide exercises as individual members of the circle prior to the relevant week number call/meeting.
4) Encourage people to make their circle guide exercise responses and other inputs to the circle available to the other members of the circle before each meeting / call.
5) It is really easy to be in a WOL circle and NOT work out loud. Always encourage your circle members to work out loud about their circle experience as it goes along in as public a forum as they feel comfortable which may mean just to other members of the circle but it could mean on their internal company enterprise social network (aka collaboration platform) or public blog.
6) Model the behaviours you want to encourage in your circle members - facilitate / lead by example.
7) All members of the circle should pick an individual goal that meets the criteria in the guides but especially pick something that you are passionate about.
8) Each member of the circle should be able to state what each others' goals are for complete clarity and cheering each other on.
9) You are not responsible for the learning of the other members of your circle.
10) You are responsible for facilitating in such a way that each member of the circle. including you, experiences a "pure" WOL circle consistent with the spirit of the circle guides.
There are a number of WOL-related resources on my blog (http://srjf.blogspot.com/) and in a community of learners on Workplace by Facebook. If you want to join us on Workplace, just let me know. A number of us have used Workplace to host our collaboration within and across circles.
I see from a tweet from early 2018 that you are a book reader. I am currently reading through a list of books this year in a book club on Workplace, see invite: http://srjf.blogspot.com/.../my-year-of-reading-2019-book....
One blog post that may help you as you start is this: http://srjf.blogspot.com/.../considerations-when.... Note that I reference Slack in that post but all my learning activity is now done in Workplace.
If you need anything else, please ask.
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