Facilitating Effective Meetings
How to Make Meetings Work
❝ If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. ~ Henry Ford
Benefits
Cooperation in a group does not just happen. It doesn’t work to get people together and just, “Talk things over.” A productive meeting is a carefully crafted process.
Facilitators make meetings work by designing and implementing that careful process. It is also a personally satisfying experience when you, as the meeting facilitator, bring out the best in people and can help a team improve its performance.
Learn to facilitate meetings to get more done, save time and money, increase participation and teambuilding, improve problem-solving and creativity, increase accountability, and reduce stress in your work life.
And the ability to build collaborations among diverse stakeholders is a leadership skill. Be recognized as a person with that leadership ability.
What This Workshop is About
A study by Microsoft® pointed to worthless meetings as a major time-waster. Respondents in their survey spend 5.6 hours each week in meetings and 71 percent of these people thought those meetings “…aren’t productive.”
This course is for anyone who wants to increase their effectiveness as well as improve meeting productivity. You will learn basic and advanced facilitation skills to create shorter meetings, build positive working relationships among meeting participants, and deal with difficult situations such as an audience that does not have the instinct to cooperate.
This course covers four kinds of meetings: Information Sharing—facilitation techniques to respectfully manage a dialogue for sharing different points of view as well as presenting an outgoing message when there is no expectation for dialogue. Idea Generation—facilitation techniques to generate new information, ideas, options, solutions, etc. Evaluations—facilitation techniques to evaluate the merits of alternative information, ideas, options, solutions, etc. Decision Making—facilitation techniques to get a group to make a firm decision by the end of a meeting.
This course covers,
Meetings as decision-making events, not just discussion sessions.
Best management practices for moderating respectful conversations, creating the right setting for a meeting, designing group processes, etc.
Designing meetings-by-objectives—transforming agendas from a list of topics into a work plan for the meeting.
The four core types of meetings and how to succeed with each.
A facilitator’s toolkit of techniques to actively engage meeting participants and create a concrete outcome by the end of the meeting.
Dealing with difficult people and difficult behaviors.
Facilitator communication skills.
Mediator conflict resolution skills for when things get tense.
Who is this Course For?
Team leaders, project managers, analysts, mid-managers, and executives who lead groups to make critical decisions, design and implement projects, conduct strategic or operational planning, tackle consensus building—in short, anyone who is responsible for making meetings work.
This course is also good if you attend a lot of crummy meetings and wish you had some ‘lead-from-the-side’ tools for making things better.
Aspiring facilitators who want to improve their skills at getting groups to produce results.
Professionals who want these collaboration-building skills for career development and personal growth.
If you derive a personal sense of satisfaction when you bring out the best in the people attending your meetings, this course can help you achieve that goal.
What is Unique in this Course?
This course focuses on improving meeting performance, not just moderating a discussion. We combine the core curriculum with the participants’ knowledge and experience to translate learning to real-world situations. Because the course proceeds from simple to complex facilitations, you have a grounding on how to handle a range of meeting complexities. And we sharply focus on how to define the tangible and concrete deliverable that is wanted by the end of the meeting, matching that with the right meeting design, and then managing the group process to achieve that meeting objective. Participants devote about 50% of their time practicing the skills taught and receiving constructive feedback for improvement from the instructor and peers.