Activate Leadership Mastermind Circle

What is it? 

The Activate Mastermind Circle provides a peer learning opportunity for your organization. In this program, a group of leaders meet monthly to share challenges and experiences, provide feedback, and brainstorm solutions to help each other achieve goals. There is less of a focus on training in this program. Instead, participants focus on action planning and shared group accountability for execution of leadership goals in a mastermind-style format.

Intended Audience: All leaders and managers at your organization, although program participants should be same-level peers

Program Details

Activate Circles typically meet monthly over 6-8 months. The group participants bring the content to the meeting via real cases, challenges, and feedback requests from their peers and the group facilitator. At the end of each mastermind session, members verbally confirm leadership goals/action items they will work on over the next month. Members report on the status of their action items at the next month's meeting.

As the facilitator, Laura's role is to keep the session on track while helping participants clarify their feedback requests and focus their brainstorming sessions toward solutions. Laura may also offer relevant recommendations and resources. Smaller groups of 6-10 participants are recommended for this program to allow adequate time to discuss several leadership challenges brought by different members of the group each month. Groups typically meet for 2-3 hours at each monthly session.

Why is it Important?

Laura has facilitated mastermind circles within a variety of contexts including with IT professionals, social workers, adult learners, and women entrepreneurs. Every program cycle indicates that peer-to-peer learning in the Activate Mastermind Circle is an extremely rewarding and effective for participants. Participants learn by explaining their challenges and giving/receiving feedback with others. By being in an active problem-solving mode with others, participants develop cultivate important leadership skills such as organizing and planning goal-oriented tasks, assertive communication, working collaboratively with others, giving and receiving feedback, self-awareness, and evaluating their own progress.

Additionally, research indicates that peer learning experiences promote more autonomy, increased collaboration, and communication among colleagues which leads to more innovative solutions to everyday challenges. The Activate Mastermind Circle is a great standalone experience that encourages trust building and peer support amongst leaders at the same level. It is also an excellent follow-up to a training program, as the focus is on real implementation and problem solving around leadership issues.

Sample Monthly Agenda

• Check In
• Action item status updates from the previous session
• "Hot Seat" discussing urgent challenges with discussion/coaching/brainstorming/feedback from the group
• Action item verbal confirmation
• Check out

What's Included? (all options are fully customizable)

• Pre-event planning meeting(s) to learn more about your goals and align the program activities with your desired outcomes
• Group orientation to establish group rules and fine-tune the standing monthly agenda.
• (Optional) Behavioral assessment + personalized debrief report for each team member (DISC or Core Values Index). Results will be integrated into the goal planning.
• Facilitation of monthly sessions over 6-8 months. Can be done virtually or in-person.
• One post-event 60-minute coaching session with the manager/leadership team to discuss insights and provide recommendations for maintaining the momentum gained from the program.