As team leader or manager, your job is to facilitate participatory meetings that draw on the knowledge of team members to help the team make better decisions. What is your "Facilitation IQ"? TAKE THE QUIZ!
How Productive are Your Meetings?
Engaging Adult Learners
As an adult learner, what do you expect when you attend a professional development program? See if you agree with my list: Participants actively participate The facilitator is aware of the level of engagement of participants and adjusts the delivery accordingly The facilitator does not do most of the talking, and pauses to allow others... Continue Reading →
Hush your inner critic!
Have you ever introduced a new tool in a facilitated process, and it didn’t go well? What did you do? A month ago, I was facilitating a 2–day business process redesign, in which the team had to change a business process from a rolling to an annual basis; there were a lot of moving parts,... Continue Reading →
“Flipping the Panel”
You’ve heard of “flipping the classroom”?? Well, think about applying that to designing an educational program with a panel of speakers! I had invited 3 panelists to speak on “Changing a System or a Culture” for the Boston Facilitators Roundtable (BFR). When I considered my experience listening to panels, I realized that quite often, after... Continue Reading →
Real communication… Andrew Cohen
"Real communication is a creative process at the highest level of human potential. When human beings come together for this purpose, something new is literally created in consciousness. Miraculously, the mind of enlightenment itself begins to emerge through the collective and an extraordinary potential is revealed." Andrew Cohen This is music to a facilitator's ear... Continue Reading →
Training: One size doesn’t fit all!
Picture this: Your organization is delivering skill-building programs to several project teams, all at different stages of team development. Do you have one curriculum for all these teams? Hopefully not - you/we need to adjust the curriculum to the different stages of development of the teams. For example, if team members are doing very well at... Continue Reading →
Sharing the facilitation: Helping teams & groups be more effective
One of my missions in life (smile) is to save groups from bad facilitation, to enable them to break through Groupthink, and to be able to ask process questions themselves. Recently, Rick Lent raised a great question about the challenges we face in facilitating meetings, and someone mentioned "setting round rules". I think it's not... Continue Reading →
Have Webinar, Will Travel
In this age of limited resources, companies are scaling back on travel. But they’re achieving “virtual travel” by providing web conferencing and webinars! Have you participated in any webinars or web meetings recently? If so, you've probably noticed that the field is advancing before our very eyes. In my attempt to keep up, I started... Continue Reading →
The Art of Intervening in Meetings
We’ve all been there: someone’s dominating the discussion in a meeting, or the discussion is getting off-track. What to do? Does the facilitator stop the dominating voices, or refocus the group? If not, do you sit there and put up with it? Chances are you’ve experienced both scenarios. As a facilitator, I see it these... Continue Reading →
