Bravo Events and Design Foundry incorporated the silent auction items into the decor. Items were displayed on two walls as well as on tables and stands.
Photo: FotoBriceno
Without the need for bidding sheets, Design Foundry could display the local dining gift certificates and plaques on a mixture of shelves and crates attached to one of the gallery walls. This provided a better vantage point for multiple guests to view the items at once, like in a museum, compared to a table arrangement where only one guest can view an item at a time.
Photo: FotoBriceno
The wall arrangement for the auction items opened up 100 square feet of event space that Design Foundry filled with high-boy and café table seating.
Photo: FotoBriceno
Lounge areas provided a secluded respite for V.I.P. guests and sponsors compared to general admission. Design Foundry mixed tufted chairs with wooden tables, metal stools, and industrial-style accent tables to create the farm-to-table meets urban chic ambience requested by the Board of Visitors.
Photo: FotoBriceno
Chalkboard signs indicated the V.I.P. lounges listing the sponsor levels—each named for various types and bottle sizes of wines—for that lounge.
Photo: FotoBriceno
When using tables in a silent auction layout, planners often face the challenge of how to use them after the items are cleared away. Windows Catering turned the tables to dessert buffets throughout the room within 15 minutes of the auction closing.
Lucite chairs, candles, and sleek white linens dressed the 150-foot tables at the Joffrey Ballet gala in Chicago in 2010.
Photo: Greg Davis/Powell Photography Inc.
From simple, elegant table settings to sleek stages and lighting, here are minimalist ideas to incorporate into events and meetings.
For his September show in New York at Spring Studios entitled “Beauty,” Jason Wu went simple and stark with the all-white venue. Produced by Bureau Betak, the space featured simple white bench seating and a floor-to-ceiling backdrop that mimicked a deconstructed boudoir mirror—with detached molding that created a mirage-like effect.
Photo: Jamie McGregor Smith
The 2006 Screen Actors Guild awards gala in Los Angeles had a striking but simple look from event designer Stanlee Gatti, with bunches of upside-down calla lillies hanging overhead. White furnishings were arranged in lounge-like formations.
Photo: Nadine Froger Photography
At this year's Dining by Design, the annual fund-raising event hosted by Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, Smartwater's space aimed to reflect the brand's natural water purification process, which is mirrored after rain clouds. The fluffy fixtures lit up like a storm above the simple table setting. The event took place at New York's Pier 92 in March.
Photo: Cornelia Stiles/BizBash
A joint event between Variety and British Airways in 2013 took place at a Los Angeles mansion, and black-and-white decor took on a residential feel. To celebrate the heritage of British Airways, the Union Jack appeared on black-and-white pillows at a seating group that surrounded a modern fire pit.
Photo: Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Variety
At a Saucony-hosted event in Boston in 2011, an art exhibit around the perimeter of the space incorporated the brand's sneakers and minimalist art.
Photo: Phase One Photography
In 2012, Yahoo marked the relaunch of Genome, a brand previously known as Interclick, with a minimalist affair in New York. To create a modern aesthetic inside a SoHo townhouse, the producers employed a mix of clean lines and white furnishings. For entertainment, the organizers brought in synchronized swimmers dressed to look like aliens.
Photo: Sean T. Smith
At a 2013 brunch for L'Oréal, designer and producer Joe Moller added subtle branding to the setup on the Viceroy Miami's outdoor terrace, adding L'Oréal lettering to the backs of chairs and using shallow gold vases filled with products as tabletop centerpieces.
Photo: Joe Moller
The Women's Wear Daily Beauty Summit in 2013 had a sleek, all-white design from Shiraz Events. Guests sat in clear Miro chairs at communal tables topped with white linens and simple birch vases holding cobble moss balls.
Photo: Sean Smith
To cap off New York Fashion Week in 2010, Calvin Klein hosted a party with seating vignettes of minimalist, low-slung white sofas and ottomans around fireplaces.
Photo: Billy Farrell/PatrickMcMullan.com
At a product launch for watch brand Q&Q in New York, guests were encouraged to take photos against a modern backdrop. Guests who posed for snaps received a coin that would allow them to receive a free watch from a giant gumball machine.
Photo: Kent Miller Studios
To launch its newest A8 model at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2010, Audi created a 45,000-square-foot temporary structure. EventStar worked with Audi, German architecture firm the Design Company, and Miami event management firm Siinc Agency to design the pavilion.
Photo: Elizabeth Renfrow for BizBash
At a dinner to mark new gallery openings at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011, Heffernan Morgan bathed webbed scrims in golden light to cast spiderweblike patterns throughout the modern dinner space.
Recently, I wrote on this blog about creative team building events and how a Spartan Race fulfilled our team building goals for 2015. In response to that article, a couple of questions popped up that sounded similar to:
“We’re not really the Spartan Race kind of company. Do you have additional thoughts for how we can build/strengthen our team?”
As I have for many years now, I’ll start the conversation of team building at the bottom of Patrick Lencioni’s pyramid for highly functional teams – Trust. Like many other authors and leaders have suggested, trust is the first, and most critical foundational piece for building strong teams.
But saying trust is important for your company is a bit like saying a foundation is important to building a house. It’s likely one of the first elements you thought of. But why is it the most important element? How can you assess your teams’ trust level, and what actionable steps can you take to build trust across your teams?
Trust IS the Foundation
I’m a big fan of Patrick Lencioni and, especially, ‘The Five Dysfunctions of a Team’ which is widely considered one of the best books (Amazon Top 10 for Leadership Books) on team-building. It was one of the first books I read as a new manager and has significantly shaped how I view, talk about, and try to build teams.
In the book, Patrick describes the 5 dysfunctions of a team and uses a pyramid to show the levels:
Absence of Trust
Fear of Conflict
Lack of Commitment
Avoidance of Accountability
Inattention to Results
Alter the pyramid to show the 5 critical components of a highly functional team, and Trust is at the bottom: the most important piece. For Patrick—and for me— a lack of trust prevents a team from true commitment, accountability, and results.
Along with the ‘Five Dysfunctions of a Team’, there are other great books that are specifically about trust or discuss trust and its importance:
Trust Works! By Ken Blanchard: High trust = lasting relationships
The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey: High trust = high-performance
The Trust Edge by David Horsager: High trust = foundation for genuine success
Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek: High trust = Circle of Safety
All of them point to trust as a critical and fundamental piece to success – in business and in life.
Piggy-backing all these thoughts and making it personal to myself, trust enables me to be more. It enables me to:
Accomplish more and do better work by getting feedback and synergizing
Grow and learn more by allowing myself to be “open” and receive information
Teach more and serve by letting me focus my attention on others
Care more and empathize because I’m not constantly worried about protecting myself
Be more human
Trust helps you accept deepening relationships and removes politics and silos from the work place, creating an organization within which people feel safe. At its simplest, trust is a catalyst for your organization to be more: more nimble, more efficient, more effective. It’s like oxygen for a successful team – one simply can’t exist without it.
As strange as it sounds though, it’s important that it is the right type of trust.
What Type of Trust is Needed?
There are two types of trust that are (possibly) present with teams: “common” trust and vulnerability-based trust.
“Common” Trust: the confidence / belief that a co-worker or team member won’t break generally accepted laws, norms, policies, etc. It’s the trust that you extend to others that they won’t steal the computers if left in the office alone or deliberately corrupt the DB.
It’s the type of trust that we extend to each other when driving. We “trust” people know the rules of the road, will stay on the right side, and stop at red lights.
Without “common” trust, it would be very difficult to operate as a company (or society). Belonging to the team typically grants you this type of trust.
Vulnerability-Based Trust: a much deeper confidence that you can be vulnerable with teammates. The belief that you can do things like take risks, ask for help, admit mistakes, or confront and hold others accountable without fear of retaliation, humiliation, or resentment.
This type of trust has to be earned and given.
Strong, high-performing teams base their entire foundation on vulnerability-based trust. “Common” trust simply isn’t enough.
So, how do you build vulnerability-based trust?
How to Build Trust
Authors and leadership experts offer many great ways to build vulnerability-based trust. Some of my favorites include:
“Go First”: As a leader, it is your job to model the behavior. Be the first to “open up” and extend trust to others. As Ken Blanchard says, “When you open up and share about yourself, you demonstrate a vulnerability that engenders trust.”
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”: From another of my favorite books, ”The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’”, this encourages you to listen with the intent to understand rather than with the intent to reply. It’s not a competition; you have to be willing to stop thinking about winning and open up to considering someone else’s idea.
Create a “Circle of Safety”: You do this by first, treating your people like people. Give them a sense of belonging, a shared purpose, some autonomy, and care for them. People must feel cared for and safe to trust.
Try any (or all) of the “13 Behaviors of High Trust” from ‘Speed of Trust’: Behaviors like, Talk Straight, Right Wrongs, and Keep Commitments. All of these behaviors help build and strengthen trust.
Pick up the “Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide” and try any of the exercises inside.
Patrick offers a couple of them online for free: Personal Histories Exercise and Team Effectiveness Exercise
Share an experience together: (As you know, I recommend a Spartan Race.) Any time you actually get to practice being a successful team, you re-enforce the trust and strengthen the foundation.
Whichever method you choose, it’s important to understand that building trust is not a destination. It’s ongoing, and you’re either building it up or tearing it down.
Delivering the keynote address a few years ago at an Annual Users Group meeting of TMA Resources, maker of association management software, usability expert Amy Schade, director, Nielsen Norman Group, told attendees she’d visited all of their websites in preparation for her talk, a review of the 10 biggest mistakes nonprofit organizations make in designing sites. (She kept her promise not to name names.)
“Nobody’s intention is to have a poorly designed website,” she said. “The crux of the problem is that you and your colleagues use the same information and the same lingo, and everything on your site makes perfect sense to you. But your users have a totally different mindset. You must engage with your users and do user testing.”
Based on her perusal of attendees’ sites—in addition to her company’s careful study of more than 1,300 other Web sites across 17 countries—she offered her top 10 mistakes, along with ways to remedy them.
Mistake 1: Believing that users read what you write
People don’t read, they scan to find the answer they want right now. “Eyetracking”—which shows exactly where a user’s eyes are focused—reveals that people look at bulleted text, headings, bold text, and hyperlinks. Therefore, Schade said, “a wall of text is not a good way to relay information.”
Remedy: Write copy so that it’s easy for people to find information when they’re scanning, not reading. “Chunk it,” she said.
Mistake 2: Reflecting your priorities rather than the user’s needs
You want to increase membership, encourage participation, drive conference registration, and get users to stay at your site. Users want clearly stated benefits, useful information, the answer to the question they have at the moment, and to get in and get out.
Remedy: Balance the two sets of priorities. Schade showed a Web site with compelling “industry news” headlines. But clicking on a headline brought up a log-in window. “It’s OK to require users to log-in, but don’t do it right away,” she said. “The user doesn’t know yet if your organization or your site is worth it. Give them something, then ask for the log-in.”
Mistake 3: Ignoring user’s top questions
Organizations often assume everyone knows who they are and what they do. Don’t believe it. Schade’s research revealed that 53 percent of nonprofit home pages do not offer basic information about what the nonprofit does. This can cause them to lose potential donors, members, or conference registrants who come to the site and can’t easily figure out the group’s purpose.
Remedy: Put a clear and concise mission statement on your home page. Show your expertise. Clearly state the benefits of membership or conference attendance and make it easy for users to identify themselves as a certain type of member or attendee.
Mistake 4: Ignoring standards
Don’t innovate for the sake of innovating. People expect to see a search window in the upper right corner of your site, for example. Don’t hide it somewhere else.
Remedy: You can innovate intelligently. If it’s a new design and it’s usable, it will become a convention. Web standards are changing all the time.
Mistake 5: Using the wrong images
“I saw a lot of stock art out there,” Schade said, as the audience chuckled in recognition of a common practice. Images that don’t get attention are those that are: generic, boring, not related to content, or look like ads.
Remedy: Images that do get attention are related to content, clear, appropriately sized, and of approachable, “real” people or actual association members.
Mistake 6: Taking control away from the user
Tops in this category: the home-page carousel, a revolving set of images and headlines whose movement is automatic.
Remedy: Use a carousel that rotates through several images and stories, but show all the headlines alongside those images as they scroll, so the user can select any one of them at any time.
Mistake 7: Making content look like ads
Why is this a problem? “Banner blindness,” Schade explained, which is the tendency for users to ignore anything that looks like an ad. She showed an almost unbelievable user-testing video, where the subject was at a major bank’s website trying to find a tool that would help him calculate how to save for a home improvement project.
Dead center, taking up a third of the home page, was just the tool he needed. But it was highly designed and included a smiling young female model. Although he scrolled up and down that home page for minutes, he never “saw” the tool. The user-testing facilitator ultimately had him stop scrolling and clicking and just look at the home page, and at that point he finally saw the huge sentence “I want to save for” and the drop-down menu that included “home improvement.”
Remedy: Don’t over-design your content, and don’t mix your own content blocks with advertising blocks or it might be overlooked.
Mistake 8: Overwhelming users with options
According to Schade, this is common on membership pages: There are too many links and too many choices.
Remedy: Believe it or not, the U.S. government is a model of simplicity at its home page. “If they can do it for the entire U.S. government, there is hope for you,” Schade quipped.
Mistake 9: Leading users on a wild goose chase
How often are your users clicking on the same word in different places but getting no closer to their goal?
Remedy: It’s not the quantity of clicks, it’s the quality. In Schade’s view, a design goal such as “users will never have to make more than three clicks from the home page” is pointless. Your goal should be to offer some kind of value or fine-tuning with each click.
And while she was on the subject of clicks, Schade said users should always be clicking on something descriptive, never on “click here” or “more.” And don’t have your content open in a new browser window, which “breaks the back button” and prevents users from returning to where they were. “Go through some key paths on your site,” she said, “to find out where and why users are dropping off.”
Mistake 10: Thinking your full site looks fine on mobile devices.
It doesn’t.
Remedy: The mobile version of your site should have less information and fewer options. “Choose appropriate content. Mobile users are killing time, looking for a specific answer, or engaged in time- or location-based activities,” Schade said. Keep that in mind when creating your mobile design.
This article was originally published at MeetingsNet.com in 2011.
