My guest today is Lindsey Caplan, founder and lead consultant of The Gathering Effect. Through her company, Lindsey partners with businesses, executives, chiefs of staff, marketing leaders, etc., to assist them in defining, diagnosing and adjusting their gatherings for their desired effect.
Think about your last work gathering. Why did you come together? What was the feeling you wanted to create? What were the feelings you wanted people to leave with? Thanks to Lindsey’s expertise in organizational psychology, she is analyzing these questions and showing how you can improve the outcome of your gatherings.
But before Lindsey became an organizational psychologist, she was a screenwriter. She found success there and thought it was what she’d do for a long time. She ultimately learned a lesson many of us are familiar with — that dreams change.
“I wanted to do more to help people and see the people that I was affecting. I sort of realized I wanted to develop people in real life instead of characters on a page, and that led me down this path.” Since then, she has helped countless companies create better gatherings.
Punk Rock HR is proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is a B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Gatherings Create an Effect
Lindsey’s work helps people feel a sense of belonging and a sense of community within their organizations. The word “gathering” is crucial here. It can be defined in many ways, but for Lindsey, gatherings are a way “to create an effect.”
“My background is a lot of communication and screenwriting, as we mentioned, but it’s also organizational psychology and learning and development,” she says. “I put those two things together to look at how gatherings are matching a message with a moment to create an effect.”
Having worked in learning and development for so long, Lindsey saw how using gathering as a tool can not only share information within the company but also help employees feel moved and included.
“These gatherings are things that we’ve all participated in — town halls, all-hands, conferences, webinars, trainings, new-hire orientations,” she shares. “Because they’re such a prolific tool and they’re used so often, I think there’s a real opportunity to learn how to do them better.”
Participation’s Importance When Gathering
Work gatherings commonly involve employers pushing, pulling and incentivizing people to show up for these events. However, that’s not the only setting where gatherings function that way, Lindsey says.
“One thing that my background over three disciplines has helped me realize is gatherings all have something in common. They’re either ‘push’ or ‘pull,’” she says. Another commonality is that gatherings are also either one-size-fits-all or personalized.
There are “push” gatherings that are worthwhile, such as to gain buy-in or seek behavior change. But many push gatherings are the ones that feel mandatory, like a training or an all-hands meeting. In these situations, employees are pushed into passive roles. “Pull” gatherings are more interactive, more likely to involve activities and engaging tasks.
Whichever framework you use, it’s important to create an environment where people can participate in some way. “The gathering is being done with me, not at me. Yes, I want to be there, likely, but also I’m contributing. I have a role to play,” Lindsey explains.
Creating Better Work Events
Beyond the “push” and “pull” framework, personalization in gatherings helps create a sense of belonging to all in attendance. Unfortunately, in the business world, the assumption is that personalization is expensive.
That’s not necessarily the case, however. Personalization can be as simple as how a leader presents information to a crowd. “The key difference between personalized and one-size-fits-all is emotional involvement,” Lindsey explains. “If I want to entertain someone, I’ll rile them up and they’ll feel a pull, but it might not feel personalized unless I connect personally to the material.”
Personalization doesn’t necessarily mean a speaker, for example, can’t give the same basic talk to different audiences. It’s how you engage with the people at the gathering that counts.
“One way to do this is to help the audience connect your content to their personal need, give them time to debrief the material, to talk through what it means for them, to connect it to a critical incident,” Lindsey states. “Maybe there’s a question on the screen as people arrive that prompts people or primes people to think of your content in their context. All of this serves to just bring your information closer to people and help them ultimately connect with the material.”
[bctt tweet=”‘The gathering is being done with me, not at me. Yes, I want to be there, likely, but also I’m contributing. I have a role to play.’ ~ @lindsey_caplan, founder and lead consultant at The Gathering Effect. Tune in to the latest episode of #PunkRockHR!” via=”no”]
People in This Episode
- Lindsey Caplan: LinkedIn, Twitter, The Gathering Effect website
Full Transcript
Laurie Ruettimann:
This episode of Punk Rock HR is sponsored by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com.
Hey, everybody. I’m Laurie Ruettimann. Welcome back to Punk Rock HR. My guest today is Lindsey Caplan. She’s the founder and lead consultant of The Gathering Effect. She partners with businesses and executives, chiefs of staff, marketing leaders, whoever, at an organization to define, diagnose and adjust their gatherings for the effect that they want. Think about the last time you came together at work. Why did you come together? What was the feeling you wanted to create? What were the feelings you wanted people to leave with? That’s what Lindsey diagnoses and improves.
If you’re interested in rethinking your offsite’s workshops, new-hire orientations, manager training or whatever, sit back and enjoy this conversation with Lindsey Caplan on this week’s Punk Rock HR.
Hey, Lindsey, welcome to the podcast.
Lindsey Caplan:
Hey, Laurie, nice to see you. Thanks for having me.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, I’m so pleased you’re here. Before we get started talking about all things gathering, why don’t you tell us who you are and what you’re all about?
Lindsey Caplan:
Sure, yeah. My name is Lindsey Caplan, and I run a consultancy called The Gathering Effect. I’m a screenwriter-turned-organizational psychologist. Basically what I help companies do is I help them script or rescript their gatherings so that change sticks inside companies.
Laurie Ruettimann:
That’s really cool. A lot of people are trying to get out of organizational design and consulting and human resources to go be a screenwriter. Let’s start there. Why did you give up what some people would consider to be a dream job to go corporate?
Lindsey Caplan:
Yeah. For a while, this was my sole dream. I was pretty convinced I was going to be a comedy writer in Hollywood, did that for a couple of years, and learned an important lesson — that dreams change. But purpose is, I think, a bit more persistent. Really, I was lacking meaning from my work. I wanted to do more to help people and see the people that I was affecting. I sort of realized I wanted to develop people in real life instead of characters on a page, and that led me down this path.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I just want to say that it’s not like you were writing for shows that never made it to air. You were doing some significant writing, correct?
Lindsey Caplan:
Yeah. I was lucky to work on a few different shows and that was pretty awesome.
Laurie Ruettimann:
The reason why I’m asking you about the work that you did is because so many people fear stepping out of Corporate America and starting down a new creative path and not doing work that reaches an audience at scale. You began a career and worked really hard and were working on shows and on scripts and on dialogue that reached millions of viewers. I mean, you were for, all intents and purposes, living the dream. I get what you’re saying about purpose and meaning, but I just want to take a second and talk about how freaking awesome that must have been — at least for a minute, correct?
Lindsey Caplan:
Oh, it was really cool. It was really, really cool. I don’t think at the time, when I was 22 and 23, I really appreciated it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, that certainly makes sense. Now you’re doing work that is more aligned with purpose and meaning. Before we talk about that, you are an organizational psychologist. I believe that your work is not your worth, and that you get meaning from other aspects in the world. You’re a pro at this. What’s your take on that, because you’ve now had a couple of different careers? Do you really believe in purpose and meaning from work, or is it something bigger than that?
Lindsey Caplan:
I think it’s something bigger than that. I have to remind myself of that often, but I learned that lesson about five years ago. I was lucky enough to take a sabbatical from the corporate job I had leading learning and development to go work on what’s become my book and this business. I had a whole identity crisis of, “Who am I if I don’t work for this company? Do people need me? Do they care about me? Will they remember me?” It was really a rude awakening of how much meaning and how much attention I gave to the work. I’ve tried to be much more thoughtful since then.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I would hope so, because the work you’re doing right now around gathering, and we’re going to talk about that in a second, is so purposeful, it’s so meaningful, but I hope there are other things that you’re doing so that you can still retain joy in your work. I think that’s been my challenge throughout my entire career. I overndex on the thing that I’m doing in the moment, and it’s like, “Whoa, wait a second. I’m a partner. I’ve got all these other things in my life. I like to foster cats and dogs. Why am I forgetting about that? Why am I going whole hog into this one thing?” Does that resonate with you?
Lindsey Caplan:
Yeah. The question “How do you describe yourself? — it’s so easy to fall into the identity traps that people expect you to say and use. It’s just interesting, even the question of “what do you do and how you describe yourself?” can take you in so many different directions. At least here in the Bay Area where I live, the joke I make is people tend to ask you where you work, not even what you do. To shift people away from that can be a cool opportunity.
Laurie Ruettimann:
You’re doing some interesting work around making sure that people feel a sense of belonging, feel a sense of community. Tell us a little bit about the word “gathering,” because I would imagine that you end up explaining this word over and over again. How do you define gathering?
Lindsey Caplan:
You’re right. I do explain it a lot, which I welcome that. My background is a lot of communication and screenwriting, as we mentioned, but it’s also organizational psychology and learning and development. I put those two things together to look at how gatherings are matching a message with a moment to create an effect. There’s some piece of content I want to share with somebody else, usually inside a company, to help them feel or be moved or be changed. Having worked in learning and development for so long, I came to see this reliance on the tool of gathering and an opportunity to learn how to use this tool more effectively.
Specifically, these gatherings are things that we’ve all participated in, town halls, all-hands, conferences, webinars, trainings, new-hire orientations. Because they’re such a prolific tool and they’re used so often, I think there’s a real opportunity to learn how to do them better.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I’m thinking so often in the world of work, we have to really push or pull people to go to these different events. Can you talk a little bit about that and really what’s the optimal way to get people involved in a gathering?
Lindsey Caplan:
Sure, yeah. You used some important words, “push” and “pull.” One thing that my background over three disciplines has helped me realize is gatherings all have something in common. They’re either push or pull, or they’re one-size-fits-all and personalized. Once we sort of understand that framework, we can, A, have a common language, but also understand our experience and maybe what’s missing from the participant side and the creator side. Push and pull. Push gatherings feel, well, A, they feel mandatory. We have to be there, but they also put the employee or the audience in a very passive role. Our job is just to sort of sit there and be consumers of content, open our brain, dump in information.
I think a lot of all hands or town halls tend to feel this way, a lot of trading classes tend to feel this way, and they don’t need to. On the other end of the spectrum is pull. Pull, as an employee or a participant, I’m much more active. The gathering is being done with me, not at me. Yes, I want to be there, likely, but also I’m contributing. I have a role to play. We think about this maybe from an entertainment example, which is where some of my background comes from. Musicians and comedians, they know how to pull in an audience. They show them why they’re important and they can’t do it without them. We create this feeling by making some specific choices in our gathering that help it feel more pull and ultimately lead to different kinds of effects.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, one of the things you talked about is personalization. And as a keynote speaker, who goes into organizations and talks to sales departments, human resources departments, the old way of doing that was telling everybody, “Laurie Ruettimann is coming. Show up.” And now it’s much more of a personalized experience where I may do some marketing internally at that organization. I may speak to different departments beforehand. I do what it takes to really get to know that audience before I show up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or Paducah, Kentucky. I wonder if that’s what you mean by personalization, and how could we do that better in our own gatherings at work?
Lindsey Caplan:
Yeah, that’s a great question. One disclaimer, when I say personalization versus one-size-fits-all, people, specifically in business units, tend to see dollar signs like, “Wow! That is so expensive. I need to customize this gathering every single time.” Not what I’m saying at all. It’s very possible for a leader to give the same speech or for you to give the same keynote a hundred times, but still make it feel as though it’s made for that group in that one moment in time, which is the goal of personalization. The key difference between personalized and one size fits all is emotional involvement. If I want to entertain someone, I’ll rile them up and they’ll feel a pull, but it might not feel personalized unless I connect personally to the material.
How do we do this? I think you’re probably an expert at this, but one way to do this is to help the audience connect your content to their personal need, give them time to debrief the material, to talk through what it means for them, to connect it to a critical incident. Maybe there’s a question on the screen as people arrive that prompts people or primes people to think of your content in their context. All of this serves to just bring your information closer to people and help them ultimately connect with the material.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I was thinking when most people come together, especially around the context of work, it’s often because there’s a phenomenal change brewing, whether it’s a change personally, like they’re taking a new job, or a change in the organization in direction, in strategy, in leadership, in just a change in revenue, right? We often come together around that. Talk to me a little bit about the relationship between change management and gatherings, because I would imagine the two often go hand in hand.
Lindsey Caplan:
They do. At least what my research and work has shown me is, gathering is a symptom for how we bring change to other people in our company. The way that we gather is the way that we approach change, and they have common characteristics. The gatherings that stick and change that sticks happen because of the conditions that are created in the room. If we learn to gather well, which is something I care about and help people do, then we can learn to make change easier inside our companies and make change stick, which ultimately, I think, is important because we’re all changing all the time, as you mentioned.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Let’s talk a little bit about how to gather well. What’s top of mind? What are three things people can take away from with this podcast to go, “Oh, I learned how to gather well listening to Punk Rock HR?”
Lindsey Caplan:
I’ll give you three tips. One is we tend to really think about what we’re going to share, and I encourage people to think a lot more about how they’re going to bring it to the employee. For example, we tend to spend a lot of time on what our new values will be in our company. And then when it comes time to think about how we’ll bring it to our employees or how they’ll get excited or motivated to use these values, we rush it or we don’t think about it, and we wonder why the change doesn’t stick.
Laurie Ruettimann:
We just post it on a website and expect people to jump on board and get excited about it.
Lindsey Caplan:
Exactly, yeah. The gap is not what the values are, it’s why people should care. It’s mostly a motivation game. That’s the sort of overarching tip is, how we bring change to people matters, and it could be a pull, or it could be a push, or it could be one-size-fits-all, or it could be personalized. That’s one thing just to think about. Secondly, is to start with the effect, not the content. I tend to see this over and over again, and I understand why it happens, as much as I want to help people do something differently. We tend to gather first by thinking about, again, what content we want to share, what goes in our agenda, versus what we want people to do differently because of this gathering or this change effort.
From my screenwriting days, we start with the end. What does the character do? Where do they end up? Who do they have to meet? What are they motivated by? What’s the journey that we’re creating, so that by the time we get to the end, they’ve achieved this goal? It sounds, again, obvious, but we tend to skip this step. Step two, start with the effect versus the content.
And then the third tip — again, there’s many that I could give — is to avoid what I call stuffing the suitcase. I think we’ve all been a part of a lot of gatherings where, especially push gatherings, there’s so much content. Maybe it’s conferences with 500 speakers or training classes with a 90-slide deck. We think it’s an efficiency game, but really we’re trying to improve effectiveness.
If you’re going to stuff the suitcase, if you’re going to pack it full of content, just know that that won’t help people necessarily retain the material, and all the time that you spent putting this content together may be wasted.
Laurie Ruettimann:
That’s really interesting because I was just thinking about speakers who maybe don’t have the 90-slide presentation, but tell 90 stories. I get it. You’ve got 60 minutes to fill. You need to be entertaining. You need to be lively, all that good stuff, but it’s like almost too much. I wonder why gatherings are like that, why we tend to say we have to meet at work for 60 minutes, or why we have to have this 90-minute slot. Do you know what I’m saying? Or like new-hire orientation — on the first day, you’re going to meet with HR for 60 minutes. Why is this always so prescribed in these weird time slots?
Lindsey Caplan:
That’s interesting. Something you said about filling time, I wish that we didn’t view gathering as filling time. One of the things I help people look at is space. Not the physical space of the gathering, but how we help people absorb or retain information. When we focus on just filling 60 minutes, we’re not leaving necessarily a ton of space for people to personalize the content, or connect it to them, or think about it, or talk to each other, all these things. Social science and organizational development science talents are important for making change stick. That’s one thought.
I think the second thought around this prescribed nature of gathering — two things. One, a lot of it I think comes back to our educational institutions that we are a part of. We tend to sort of think of education or learning or gathering as we sit, and someone speaks for a certain amount of time. We replicate what we know, which doesn’t have to be that way. But lastly, I think, again, we’re very quick to pick up this tool of gathering without thinking about why or if we need it. We’re really stuck in this routine. Again, I encourage people to think about the effect versus just this tool.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Now we’re in this age that many people are calling “post-COVID,” but I don’t know, people are still getting COVID, right? We are having more and more in-person gatherings. We’re still doing some virtual, right, in all aspects of work, but I just wonder what’s the impact of COVID on gatherings, and what’s the future of all this?
Lindsey Caplan:
Big question. There was some learnings, at least from my perspective, on gathering during this time, and I think we’re still learning a lot. I think we all now have a bit of a higher bar. Call it Zoom fatigue or the cost of going into the office, I think this time really reveals what the purpose of gathering is, which is not to share content. It’s not to give people information, because we can do that on our own. The purpose of gathering is to connect and to connect that content to what we care about, in some ways good. It exposes a gap, and now we can learn to do better. Now, I also think we blame Zoom and we blame this technology, but there’s still someone behind the scenes making choices on how to use it, so that’s really not fair.
Well, one practical tip I’ll give folks to consider is thinking about, “do I bring people in? Do I make it hybrid? Do I need a gathering?” We talked about push and pull. I’d encourage you to consider this motto: “pull together, push apart.” If I need buy-in, engagement, ownership, behavior change, that’s worth pulling people together for and bringing them into the office or even having a gathering.
If all I’m doing is pushing information on people to consume or passively sit there, I can do that either asynchronously or have people watch a webcast later. Now that we have this vernacular and this language, maybe we can learn to make better choices in this time.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, you’re certainly optimistic. What I hear you saying is that we need to meet whatever moment is before us with appropriate content, right? Is that what I’m getting?
Lindsey Caplan:
Let’s match the message with the moment, Laurie. That’s exactly it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I love it. I love it. It sounds like it’s in a book.
Lindsey Caplan:
Weird, huh?
Laurie Ruettimann:
Yeah, yeah. Well, Lindsey, you are just a content machine. You’ve got a forthcoming book. You’ve got a ton of articles out there. If people want to learn more about The Gathering Effect and how to create better gatherings, where should they go? What should they look at?
Lindsey Caplan:
Yeah, thanks for asking. They can find me at my website, which is gatheringeffect.com, gathering with an E. I often write a bunch of articles on gathering strategy, communication, I’ve got some case studies on introducing values, town halls, new-hire orientations, things of that nature. You can find me there.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Well, I love that recommendation, and I also love that you have to tell people that effect is spelled with an E.
Lindsey Caplan:
Yes.
Laurie Ruettimann:
I mean, we all have problems with our brand. My podcast is called Punk Rock HR. I hear Punk HR. I hear Rock HR. We all have brand challenges, but I love it. Gathering Effect, with an E, dot com. We’ll make sure to include all of your good stuff in our show notes. I just wanted to take a second and thank you for gathering with me and talking about your work. It’s been a real pleasure to learn about more effective gatherings. Thank you for being a guest.
Lindsey Caplan:
Thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Laurie Ruettimann:
Hey, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Punk Rock HR. We are proudly underwritten by The Starr Conspiracy. The Starr Conspiracy is the B2B marketing agency for innovative brands creating the future of workplace solutions. For more information, head on over to thestarrconspiracy.com. Punk Rock HR is produced and edited by Rep Cap, with special help from Michael Thibodeaux and Devon McGrath. For more information, show notes, links and resources, head on over to punkrockhr.com. Now, that’s all for today and I hope you enjoyed it. We’ll see you next time on Punk Rock HR.