Virtual Leadership Conference: How To Design A Virtual Program For 210 Leaders

The team at Tonka Learning have been ‘virtualling’ (we have created a new word) well before the pandemic hit. And yet there is always something exciting and nerve-wracking about being asked to design and facilitate a 2-day workshop for the 210 most senior leaders of an organisation, especially when you have been given 6-weeks to prepare!

This scenario played out for us in February 2022. Feedback after the workshop was outstanding and the journey to get there was just as enjoyable. For the record, 13 internal speakers, 1 external speaker, keynotes from us on culture, shared leadership and high-performing teams and 12 breakouts across the 2-days.

Here are 3 things we learned…

1.      Role Clarity

On the day role clarity is crucial, so is narrowing each person’s role so they only have to focus on 1 or 2 elements. Here’s our back-of-house plan; we had someone do each of these activities:

• Manage breakouts; push people into breakouts, screen share slides, let them know how long to go, bring them back, create a breakout group for the back-end team and ensure that breakout groups don’t have too many executive members in the same group.

• Manage people that join late or lose connection and need to join a breakout.

• Time-keep, deciding what gets extended or reduced depending on over/under time.

• Spotlighting guest speakers and attendees when they have something to say.

• Mute people on returning from breakouts.

• Control the movement of slides.

• Oversee the Google documents and if necessary, manipulate to ensure groups don’t push other groups to next pages.

• Posting pulse-check evaluations.

• Downloading Chat throughout.

• Screenshot automatically assigned breakout groups so we knew which groups said what.

2.      Engagement

It’s so easy to think that with 210 people in a virtual environment that all the engagement happens in the breakouts and in the plenary people switch off. Here are a few things we did that worked with engagement:

• When groups came back from breakouts, we spotlighted 1 group and invited some or all individuals in that group to comment on their groups learning.

• We ran breakouts of all shapes and sizes; people in pairs and people in groups of 5-6; breakouts of 3-minute durations and breakouts of 40-minutes.

• Groups returned from breakouts with 1 designated scribe to record questions in Chat, for executives to answer these questions after the main break.

• Dividing the group in half and running 2 facilitators.

• Not being afraid to ‘open-mic’ and inviting attendees to comment (there’s real skill in how you do this!)

3.      One-Team

In this example, Tonka Learning and the client from the very beginning embraced this idea of one-team, no egos and no hierarchies and just a commitment for excellence. There was weekend work, around the clock WhatsApp messaging and countless iterations … and we got there. A great team effort with an amazing outcome.