The Power Start: A Tool for Fixing Dysfunctional Team Meetings

The POWER Start is a facilitation technique that can make your meetings more effective. It’s one of many techniques used by facilitators to improve the quality and outcomes from meetings, especially if the people in the meeting don’t get along.

This is a quick video story of how I used this technique in a real-world situation to improve collaboration between two dysfunctional teams and ultimately deliver a big win for customers. I also explain what P.O.W.E.R. stands for…

In the video, I share my story of how I used The POWER Start after learning about it in the Agile faciliator training course, taught by our very own NZ Director, Biunca Hooper. After the training, I decided to use The POWER Start in a real-world situation, where I was leading a difficult piece of work. The project was causing some pain for a number of teams in my organisation, which was affecting customers. What didn’t help, was two of the core teams on the project had a history of not getting along. They didn’t want to be in the same room together.

“At the end of the session, they all spontaneously burst into a round of applause. Which was quite unexpected leading into the session.”

As a facilitator, my role exists to enable collaboration and facilitate productive conversations between teams and stakeholders, creating a clear picture of the end goal. Learning about this tool really built my capability as a leader. I was also able to bring these two teams together and build the capability of the organisation. The customer was the real winner at the end of the day.

Learn how to use The POWER Start and more