The Circle of Encouragement is one of the things that we’ve been doing with clients when we work with them during The Dream Employee process. This is something you might want to do after a long strategy meeting, a coaching session, or a team meeting that you have on a regular basis. This will end a meeting on a different note and in a different way. We talked earlier about starting a meeting with wins (things that people are excited about), so now we want to give you a new strategy of how to end a meeting. This may be a real stretch for you, but it is going to create great culture, great collaboration, and unity within your company in a profound way.
This is something I learned taking teams all over the world – to Africa, India, Haiti on mission trips. I would gather the team at the end of every day, and we’d get in a circle. One at a time, we would turn to the person next to us and speak 30 or 60 seconds of encouragement to the person sitting beside us. We’d go around the circle one way and then go back the other way, so everybody got to be a receiver and a giver of encouragement. After doing this with about 30 different teams that I’ve taken out in the last 10 years, I’ve adapted it to business. We are now doing this with our people we are coaching, with their employees and employers at the end of the meeting or training session. We call this process the Circle of Encouragement.
Basically, it’s a very simple idea to do in your company. One person starts out and they turn to the person next to them and for 30 seconds they say all the things that they appreciate about that person in the work that they do within the company. Then that person turns to the person next to them and does the same. This process repeats itself and goes all the way around the circle. Then when you get to the beginning, it flips the other way around. Each person gets to speak and receive encouragement from the people on either side of them.
What this really does is it brings unity. It brings appreciation. It brings respect. It creates a culture where positive things are verbalized and people get to hear about the things that they’re doing well. This creates unity within the team. It also helps other people in the circle that maybe don’t work closely together get to know each other better and understand what each person really brings to the team. It’s a great value.
We like to do this to end a meeting instead of ending a meeting with “I’m overwhelmed because I’ve got 15 new things I’ve got to do”, or “I didn’t understand that”, or “that meeting didn’t go well”. The meeting begins with wins and ends well with encouragement. This is how you create a culture that is unstoppable. A culture that goes beyond just doing a job, but actually really doing a job with a group of people and a team that is all about seeing the best in one another.
We call this a Circle of Encouragement. We’re way out on the frontier of employee engagement and creating culture with some profound, but very simple things that we teach and help our leaders put into place in their business so that they can get the maximum result from each team member. Everybody in this day and age needs encouragement! And so we actually put it in the meeting agenda. We teach it; we do it with people. It’s uncomfortable at first. But when you see the result — people start receiving that encouragement — you see your whole culture just be transformed.
Here at Confidence Coach, that’s what we’re about – transforming cultures, making a working place for employees and for owners to be awesome. In order to be awesome, people have to feel encouraged and to feel like they’re winning. And this has to be done on a regular basis. This has to be something we do all the time.
Share this with people that could benefit from this. Let us know if you’d like to know how to do this, and we’d be glad to come in and show you how to do this either virtually or in person. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check us out on confidencecoach.org. There is a free 60 minute catalytic conversation if you’d like to talk about this area of employee engagement, employee retention, or how to improve the culture of your company. We’re passionate about it. We do this every day. We love what we do and we’d love to help you!
