Assessing Peer Group ”Health” with Bob Halperin

Hello and welcome to Mastermind Mastery, the podcast for professionals who want to create and run successful peer advisory councils, or as we call them, PACs for short, or they're also known as peer groups or business mastermind groups. I'm your host, Tina Corner Stolz, founder of Elix Council, where I've been in the industry running groups since 2005 and now help those like you with education, certification, and support wanting to do the same. At one time, I ran 10 groups, nearly 100 members, and sold my groups For a Good Multiple and recently released my second book, Your Seat at the Table: How to Create and Run Your Own Peer Advisory Councils, published by Forbes, and grateful to you that it's an Amazon bestseller. I invite you to join each week where we share strategies and techniques to successfully launch and become a master of running your PACs. You'll hear insights, perspectives, do's and don'ts, learn from my and my guests' mistakes, successes, and get the inside track to key takeaways. Each time we have guest, we'll be having a bit of fun. So are you ready? Let's get going and dive into today's episode. So hello everyone, welcome to another episode of Mastermind Mastery. I'm Tina Corner Stolz, your host, and I am excited about today's guest, Bob Halpern. And as we start, you know, I asked Bob a question in regards to a song that was meaningful for him. And also particularly, as I understand now, it's meaningful for this topic we're going to talk about today, which is Assessing Peer Group Health. And I'm very excited about this topic. I'm excited to have Bob on because Bob has a wealth of experience. We're gonna get in that in a minute. But Bob, tell us about your song and why is it important?

Well, the song I always think about when I think about peer support groups or forums is Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Simon and Garfunkel. And I won't read all the lyrics to you, but if you look at that song, it's a perfect way or metaphor to think about what a forum or peer support group can be. And that is, it can be, when it works, when it's healthy, when it's fulfilling its mission, it is a bridge over troubled waters for all the members. And it's one way to judge forum health is, is your forum, is your peer support group serving as a bridge over troubled waters for you? So that's why I think that song is very appropriate to the topic.

That is great. It is appropriate. So appropriate. And for the experience, right, that any member has in their group, right? It is formed as a bridge to all their troubled waters. So Bob and I originally got connected because of an article he wrote in Harvard Business Review about peer groups, of which the link to that will be in the show notes today. So you guys can also see that. But Bob has so much experience and moderating even. So let me just list off a little bit about his background so you know that in today's discussion, he has a wealth of experience behind him to talk about this topic. But he's on the academic board chairman of the Meritus Institute of Management. He also is a certified forum facilitator for YPO. He also is a research affiliate at MIT Center of Collective Intelligence. He's president and co-founder of Alum Forum Services, which is what we'll hear a lot about today, and even moderator of Harvard Business School Publishing and a US fellow of Eisenhower Fellowships. So a big mouthful, but a lot, which is excellent. So today's topic, the whole assessing peer group health. Let's get started, Bob, by helping all of our listeners understand first about group health. What does that mean? And then we'll get into like what to do with, how to assess it.

Sure. Well, group health for a peer support group or forum, fundamentally, foundationally, is about take-home value. That is that the members feel that every meeting they go to, that it meets their needs, it helps them to go back to the song, it helps them get over troubled waters as well as helps them live up to their highest aspirations. So that's the core dimension. But there are many sub-dimensions that we'll get into as we talk about measuring it. We talk about the openness of the members, the trust, whether this feels like the right peer group for me, whether it has good peer quality, and a number of other features that we'll talk about in more detail. But those are the headlines that I think about when I think about group health. Maybe I'll just say one more thing here, which is members vote with their feet. So if they're showing up reliably, they are investing their most precious asset of all, which is their time, uh, in the group. And if they keep showing up month after month, year after year, then that's a good physical indication of value and of health.

Absolutely. That's so true. And one thing about the whole group health, to your point, and you talk about forums, and just for our audience, is the words forum, peer group, peer council, group, et cetera, all the same, right? We're all— that's what you're talking about.

They are all in the same category. There are those of us who are experts, those of us who study and lead these. There are nuances. There are variations. But yes. They're all essentially the same thing.

So group health, and one of the things that you have done is create a survey. And so tell us a little bit about the survey. How did this come about in regards to you finding this was a good way to assess group health?

Well, you may know the line, what gets measured gets accomplished. And So I think that measuring group health, which is in its essence a kind of a qualitative subjective thing, it's not an easy thing to do, but it is important for a group, its leader, and its members to understand how are we doing? How can we do better? There should always be a spirit of continuous improvement. And even not necessarily at every meeting, but on a regular basis, what went well today? What would we maybe change in the future? And you can ask that if you're a leader, you can ask it as a member. And so a survey which includes both quantitative questions and qualitative questions is a good way to get at that. And to do that on a regular basis, I would say once a year, it could be done more often, it could be done— excuse me— as needed. But once a year is a good baseline for assessing forum or peer support group health.

Right. And this makes me think of two things. Number one is you talk about annual. So the first question I have is, when is it kind of, do you think, appropriate? Like, how soon can you do a health survey? Or when is it too soon to do it? Or is the person that's running the group needs to use their intuition to know, like, when do I know, like, you know what, I better do this survey?

Well, I would say all of the above to your question. It's possible to do it at any time. In fact, I like to be proactive. I like to get ahead for groups that I'm leading or responsible for or supporting. I don't want to wait till there's a crisis and, okay, now we're going to come in and do the, you know, somebody's about to leave, or a number of members have left, or people are complaining about the value proposition. So I like to do it. That's why I suggest on a regular basis. But certainly if, if there are indications of poor health Members leaving, members not showing up, members coming late, members saying they're not going to renew their membership if there's a fee involved on an annual basis. All of those could be reasons to, to do the survey. But, but just having your fingers on the pulse of, of how the group is doing. If you're a leader, and I know many of the people listening to this podcast are people who lead these groups, if you don't know how you're doing, you're flying blind. And that's why these surveys are so, so important. The survey is not the whole answer. It gives you a snapshot. It gives you a point in time. It gives you what people are willing to write in a SurveyMonkey or Google Form or whatever technical mechanism you're using. It doesn't give you all the nuance. And so often I suggest to people who are leading groups that in addition to the survey, to talk to the members. That's when you hear about, as I say, the nuances, the things that are really either great or problematic, or, gee, this other member is decreasing the value for me because of the way they participate. They may not want to put that on a written survey, but they might say it to you in person or on a Zoom call. So the combination of the physical or the automated survey plus some conversations where you're listening not only for the words but the tone and the emotional weight of what the members are saying about the health and the value.

This brings up a point because I can imagine some people might be thinking, well, I'll just ask them. I'll just ask either one-on-one, or I'll just kind of ask in the meeting, generally speaking, or something. But I think there's a big difference between when there's something more formal, like a survey, versus the casualness that can come across if I'm just kind of asking. Right? How are things going? So what are your thoughts about that? Like the benefit of actually having this formal NWEI survey?

Well, the formal survey, several things. First of all, the expectation will be that everybody will participate. It's essentially required. You might have to send 1 or 2 reminders. That's not because they're not interested, but because people are busy and that's okay. But asking just shows you value their input if you're leading one of these groups. It gives you a standard set of data from each person. So whereas if you do it just informally or in the group or even one-on-one, you're inevitably going to ask slightly different questions and have slightly different conversations, go down different pathways with different people. This survey, my example survey, and I have many variations, I'm going to share one variation, has just 8 core questions, 8 quantitative questions and 3 qualitative questions. There are many, many other questions and many other variations, but that's a very good start. And I call it a baseline. Just here, here's where we are. And then you can build on that to then have one-on-one conversations, to have a group conversation. All of those are appropriate follow-ups. And then the most important follow-up is to take action based on the results of the survey. It's not just an academic exercise. You're looking at For example, if people are downrating attendance, their value is decreased because too many other people are missing meetings. There are some actions that can be taken about that on that line. And we could talk about each of these areas separately. But that's the point, is to take action and to, again, be in that spirit of continual improvement.

And really, those questions— when we talk about peer group health, I really want to distinguish is it's really about the group. The whole concept of what you're gauging is that particular member's experience with the group, their group experience, right? Versus what I'm getting at is that there's also about the leader and how they're doing and running the meeting, which is—

Well, but that's one of my questions, actually. One of my 8 questions is about leadership. On the bottom end of the spectrum, I find the moderator, leader, facilitator, whatever term the particular group uses, to be not effective in leading the forum. That's the bottom. The top, I find the moderator to be effective. And then it can be on a 5, 7, or 10-point scale. But are you at 1, like this person really is not doing a good job, or 10, they really are nailing it? So that is a key question that contributes to overall forum health. Absolutely.

Yes. So let's talk a little bit about how to execute on it. So what are your thoughts about what you've seen works really well on how to give the survey, you know, and then we'll talk about what do you do with the results and how to, how to compile that and do something with them. But, um, what do you, what have you found on the right way or the, the best practice, etc., to execute?

Sure.

Or some dos and don'ts around Absolutely.

There's how to do it, when to do it. First of all, I think it's important to get the agreement of the group. If you're the leader, I, as the leader, speaking as the leader, I'm saying, I think this could be helpful for our group, for all of us. And so everybody's buying in. Yes, I'm willing to take 5, 10 minutes to fill out the survey. You don't want to just send it over the transom and, well, why is this? Is there something wrong? Am I Why am I being asked to do this? So certainly asking that. When to do it, you were getting it before. Do you want to do it after 1 meeting, after 2 meetings, after 6 meetings? I typically would not do a survey, a standard general form health survey until the group had been meeting for at least 6 months. I think you need to establish a certain rhythm, norms, protocols, process. This is what the agenda looks like. This is how were participating. So I think typically I'd wait 6 months. There could be a different kind of survey that we're not talking about here today. At the end of every meeting, you could do a pulse check. You could do a quick thumbs up, thumbs down, or give it 1, 2, or 3, just— and there's a classic facilitator tool or agenda item, plus delta. What went well today? What could have been better? That's just a quick on that meeting. I don't think you need to do that. At every meeting either. People, I like to say, people don't come to their peer support group to talk about process, structure, norms, you know, forum health. They come for the substantive value. So you don't wanna overwhelm people with this, but in 6 months and certainly after a year, it's a reasonable checkpoint and it's a good checkpoint. And if you're not doing it, and again, I would say you're flying blind.

Right, right. Because you don't, you can't, you cannot assume you know what's going on in everybody's head.

That's right.

That's right. And what they believe their real, the experiences that they're getting from it.

And there's another key, excuse me, if I can just say, Tina, there's another critical point to a standard survey. Usually these are done anonymously. That is, the members of the group are not identified as to who's responding. It could be done with names. If you have a group that is being professionally led and the person who's leading the group says, I will keep confidential the individual responses, and then you could ask for people's names. And that of course could be helpful 'cause knowing how different people feel and the interaction of different peoples, that could be helpful. What I usually say when I do a survey for a group where I am collecting the names or when I'm doing, say, one-on-one, sometimes I'll do one-on-one interviews as opposed to this formal survey. I will tell the people I speak to in the group, this is confidential. What you share with me is just going to me. I will take the collective aggregated results and give feedback to the group on how it could be improved or how the leadership could be changed, et cetera. But I won't be sharing your individual feedback without your permission. If you were, I might say, wow, that's something I'd really like to be able to share. And but only with permission.

Have you ever had anyone take time in the actual meeting for the group to do the surveys? You don't necessarily review it then, but take time during the meeting versus—

actually, we're so accustomed nowadays to doing electronic surveys, which, of course, you could do that in the meeting as well, because people on their phone could, could do the survey, right? The advantage of that is clearly you have a capped interactive audience. Everybody's sitting there. I'm ending our regular agenda 10 minutes early so we can take a few minutes so everybody can just do the survey right now. Of course, you could do it on paper as well in the meeting. And that could be a very efficient way. If you have 8, 10, 12 people, it's not so many people that you can't just tally it in the old-fashioned way.

Yeah, exactly.

So yeah, doing it in the meeting is actually a good idea. That way it's done. Nobody has to take additional time, and you have it right away. You could even— again, usually I like to have time to process and look at the results before just launching into a conversation. But it could be you could take a 10-minute break. The moderator could then play back, here's what I've heard, and let's now have an open conversation about how we're doing. One of the things you'll see in the Harvard Business Review article that I published is there's a chart in there, which is another variation of a forum health survey. It's just a little table that says, how effective is your forum? So you could either have the actual survey, or you could just use that table, which I've suggested to a number of people. Just use that table, ask everybody to look at those things— purpose and content, membership, group norms, management, technology. How are we doing on all those dimensions? And you can have a great conversation, and maybe you don't need to do a formal survey. Again, you have to look at the nuances of the particular group and how they're doing.

Yeah, it's a—

If I can share just one more thing, Tina, on this. I've, over the years, in 15 or more years of running these forums, I've come up with my own informal 5-point rating system for these forums and peer support groups. Okay, sure. Let me just tell you, this is— and anybody, the leader or any member could just do a— this is a gut check. It's not a—

right.

5 is high, 1 is low. 5 is transformational. This is like incredibly powerful for, for me. This is how I'm rating. All right. Or I could rate the whole group, uh, this way. 4 is strong, um, or even very strong. 3 is good. 2 is having issues, um, that really need to be addressed. So it's fair. And 1 is poor. This thing is about to either blow up or fall apart, dissolve. And I have my own info for the many forums I've supported. I have my own informal 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and I give groups 2.5 or 3.5. Yes, but that's a very quick— that's not a fancy— it's just based on a lot of— for those of your listeners who've been running groups for years, I'm sure they have their own similar system of saying this group is is a 4.5, and this one is a 2.5, and I really need to work on it, or we need to work on it. That's just another— that's the quick and dirty version of the survey.

And I love the 5 different words that you use because it helps people. When you have a scale of 1 to 10, as an example, if you're not really clear about what's a 7, what's an 8, somebody's 7 may be the equivalent of somebody else's 5. But if you don't know that, then you're thinking the 5 is worse than a 7, and they're actually on the same page, right?

Yeah, yeah. 10-point scales are a little probably too much. People can't actually grade and differentiate between a 6 and an 8 very well.

Correct. Yes. Yep, yep. But giving guidance on whatever scale you use is a good rule of thumb. So people understand kind of where they're ranking, what that definition is, because everybody's definition is a little different.

Absolutely.

Brings me probably to the last piece of this conversation is now you have the results. And so what have you seen is the best thing to do with that? And specifically when you have some challenging news? Because I know for sometimes those of us running groups, doing this kind of a survey can give the leader a bit of anxiety because it's like, you know what? I'm going to maybe find out something I don't want to know, and I'd rather be unconsciously unaware.

Yeah, ignorant.

Right? But there's tons of value of why you don't want to go that route. So here come the results in. So now what, Bob?

Yeah. So as I said, if you're not taking action on it, you might as well not have bothered to do it in the first place.

And it'll make everybody upset because they're like, why did I do this? Why did I take time to do this?

Well, yeah, if you do it and then people don't see any action. So the first thing, of course, is to report back to the group the summary of how we're doing, right? The quantitative assessment of these. 8 questions or whichever questions you choose to use to report back to the group to then have a conversation about those areas that are particularly strong. Like, wow, we've had really good attendance in our group. This has been terrific. It seems like that's a key indicator of forum health and value. On the other hand, people are complaining. I'm just using this as an example. One of the Typical things of these peer support group meetings are some kind of monthly update where every member is gonna have a chance to go around. And if you just look at the language I use here, on the low end, updates are rambling, unfocused, or superficial. That's on the bottom. At the high end, updates are timed, deep, and generate a rich parking lot for discussion. So this, let's have a conversation about how we're managing it. I need some feedback from the group. Maybe we need to manage this a little more tightly. Maybe we each need to pay attention and focus on respecting the timekeeping that we're, we're doing. So we're having a conversation about this. The, um, another thing that may come up as an action item is most of these groups have some set of norms or constitution principles. There are different words that different groups use.

Guidelines.

Guidelines, all, all of these things. Sometimes the survey suggests that we need to revisit those norms or guidelines and reinforce what we said at the beginning we were going to do, how we are going to operate. So a norms review. Another thing that is sometimes necessary is that there needs to be a clearing of the air between the leader and, and one or more members, or between individual members— member A and member B, for example. And there is a whole process— this would be a whole separate podcast to talk about the clearing the air process— but there is a very well-developed, uh, set of processes and guidelines for how to do that. And the moderator facilitator can play a key role in member A and member B clearing the air. Uh, one of the things I say— in fact, this is something else we should include in the show notes— is I, I did a, um, I've done a blog for many years, and I did one on top tips for moderators or facilitators. And one of my points in that, I think 7 or 8 points, is clear the air early and often. So if something is coming up, don't let it fester. Don't let it—

You got to deal with it.

You got to deal with it.

And if you're a leader that doesn't like conflict, that's really hard.

It is very hard. Yes, it is hard.

Very hard.

And yet it's essential. And having a process for doing it makes it easier because we just have— this is how we've all agreed we're going to do it.

And it's not personal.

It's not personal. It always starts by affirming the value of the relationship. So if, Tina, I was clearing the air with you, I would start by affirming the relationship before I start criticizing or sharing my facts or feelings or my story, et cetera.

Yeah.

Because I only clear the air with people I care about. And if I'm in a peer group I care about you. That's why we're here together.

Right. Right. Good point. And you're right. That's a whole episode in itself. So, Bobbi, as we come up on our time, we've talked about the why to do this, the when, the how, the importance of it. Now, you have to give everybody the feedback from all the input. You reward good behavior by saying, We're doing great over here. We got to keep that up. Here's areas of opportunity. So of all of this that we talked about today and just in your whole experience of moderating and the peer group concept, what would be the one takeaway you would love the listeners to be sure they grasp? If you were to share, what would be the one takeaway you want them to come away with?

I'll leave you with one takeaway, and that is that everyone in the group, the leader and the individual members, everyone is responsible for the health and success of the group. It, it never sits only with the leader, uh, or with one or more members. It's everybody contributing. We all lean in to make this valuable for all of us so that we have individual value and group value. And, and so if I can just summarize in 3 words, everyone is responsible for forming.

I love that because that is so true. It's not just the leader, it's everyone in the group, right? Because the group is only as good as everybody together, right?

You know the story about the chain and the weakest link, right? So we need to be a strong link. We need to be— to go back, excuse me, back to the song we started with. Building that bridge over the troubled waters. We all have troubled waters. We all have difficulties and challenges, regrets and dilemmas. Building that strong bridge, the peer support group as a strong bridge. Each of us are key elements of that bridge.

Yes. Excellent. So, Bob, thank you so much for being a guest today, sharing, first of all, your health survey, which will be in the show notes for a link, the article, which is a great read. I encourage everybody also to read the article and And, and if you are doing groups and you haven't done a survey, do one soon, right? Get on it, do it, just do it. And you'll be so grateful because it will just increase retention and the member experience, but also give you some peace of mind at the same time. And so with that, a great takeaway. And again, thanks for Bob for being our guest today on the whole importance behind doing a group health survey. And until next time, everyone, make it happen. Hey, moderators of groups, thank you so much for listening to today's podcast. To get access to today's show notes and exclusive content and resources, visit TinaCornerStolz.com/podcast or LXcouncil.com, where you can also become part of an exclusive online community, attend our academy, or get free resources, templates, checklists, and more. And you can even contact me there as well. So if this episode resonated with you and you know someone who can also benefit from listening, please share with them by taking a screenshot and even posting on your social media. I also love reviews and appreciate hearing from each of you, those actually doing this wonderful work. Work. Please tune in next week for another episode of Mastermind Mastery. And I'll close by sharing something my mentor did after every learning moment. He shared a shiny pebble from his pocket with anyone he passed knowledge to and asked them to forward that pebble—knowledge—on. So now I encourage you to go pass on a pebble, the takeaways you learned today to either your existing groups or fellow peers. Now go make it a great one.