Facilitating Meetings: A Guide To Making Your Meetings Effective, Inclusive And Enjoyable

A conversation meant to explore an issue should not be structured the same way as a conversation meant to coordinate collective action. Deliberation is a process for weighing options, tradeoffs, and consequences. It is especially useful when a group or community needs to make choices, consider public impacts, or move toward action with greater shared understanding. Before choosing an agenda or inviting people into a room, it helps to understand what kind of conversation you are trying to host. Dialogue, deliberation, and facilitation are related, but they are not the same thing.

Rather than rushing toward answers, this phase helps participants name themes, patterns, surprises, and missing pieces. Our nervous is Asiavibe worth it system really does set the tone for how people engage with one another. The goal is not to shame people who speak often or force people who are quiet.

What Is Group Facilitation? 12 Tips For Better Group Management

If you have time to prepare beforehand, there are a number of things you may be able to do to make the participants more comfortable, and thus to make discussion easier. The need or desire for a group discussion might of course arise anytime, but there are some times when it’s particularly necessary. As explained in the opening paragraphs of this section, group discussions are common in a democratic society. There are a number of reasons for this, some practical and some philosophical.

• We have particularly focused on facilitation of consensus decision-making.
• Four ears hear better than two, so co-facilitators are also useful to check understanding of what is being said.
• Here the participants brainstorm ideas and then categorize them according to their similarities.
• Think carefully about which elements of a topic are really urgent to discuss.
• By including facilitation in your day-to-day workflow you can ensure productivity, a better agenda, and better relations all around.

A productive pattern of engagement is established if used at the beginning of a working session. Loose yet powerful connections are formed in 20 minutes by asking engaging questions. Everyone contributes to shaping the work, noticing patterns together, and discovering local solutions. A group and a team might seem like the same thing, but there’s an important difference. A group is a collection of individuals who share a common interest or purpose but work mostly independently.

You may run over time or have to alter your agenda to discuss them. If necessary, ask for a five-minute break to confer with key leaders or participants on how to handle the issue and how to restructure the agenda. Be prepared to recommend an alternate agenda, dropping some items if necessary. The version of facilitation most of us are familiar with includes using activities, tools, and methods in a workshop setting. Experienced professional facilitators develop an extensive toolkit of proven-to-work processes, activities, and workshop templates for this purpose. In practice, this means imagining a world in which most people know how to apply facilitation skills to their work, as well as when to call in someone more experienced when need be.

When you are responsible for taking minutes, you should keep in mind the two main reasons we do this. The first is to include team members who were not present, so they can learn what was discussed and decided in their absence. The second is having a “single source of truth” to refer back to for decisions and action points. Once you have a direction to refer to,  it’s a good idea to have it present and visible in the room, e.g. in a poster or at the top of your shared minutes. In this method used at the Airbus Leadership University, the organization’s best interest is invited to attend the meeting, in the form of an empty chair, as a reminder of the team’s purpose.

Often people do this unconsciously because they feel that the meeting isn’t relevant for them. “Be present, or be elsewhere” is a good meeting guidelines to establish shared awareness and clear expectations one participants. The sentences without end, the side-conversations, the time it takes. That’s why, as a facilitator, I started implementing constraints to maintain relevance and focus.

Doing so will ensure that your group conversation is respectful, enriching, and empowering. The last step of group discussion and decision-making is to follow up and evaluate the process and the outcomes. You should summarize the main points, decisions, and actions that were agreed upon by the group, and communicate them clearly and timely to the relevant stakeholders.

#5 Incorporate Team Building Activities

For more ideas on what facilitation skills are and how to develop them, read SessionLab’s guide to the head, hands and hearts of facilitation skills. In group facilitation, what some might label as “troublemakers” can actually be seen as valuable contributors. Often, those who challenge the process or raise difficult questions are highlighting issues or needs that others in the group might also be feeling. Thinking of these individuals as message-bringers can shift the dynamic from conflict to curiosity. In practice, putting connection before content is often as simple as having a round of check-ins before starting a meeting, or asking for expectations before a workshop. Impromptu networking is a great method to create connections, including in large groups and/or online.

We recommend you watch this video of a facilitator training session. Conflict can arise if disagreements aren’t handled respectfully. It’s also helpful to establish a group norm that disagreement is welcome for the purpose of understanding, but not for convincing. Invite (but don’t force) ParticipationIt’s common for a few people to speak more often than others in the group. Encourage Relationship-BuildingIt’s often both a goal and a motivator for many people in groups to build better relationships with other group members.

Groups have a tendency to wander far from the original agenda, sometimes without knowing it. When you hear the discussion wandering off, bring it to the group’s attention. You can say “That’s an interesting issue, but perhaps we should get back to the original discussion.” Check with the group to make sure they agree with and like the agenda. You never know if someone will want to comment and suggest something a little different. This builds a sense of ownership of the meeting and lets people know early on that you’re there to facilitate their process and their meeting, not your own agenda.

Please share your comments, questions, and experience on this topic in the comment section below. Here are five guidelines to effectively facilitate group conversations. As a caution, keep in mind when making interventions, to be polite and take a “curious” versus a “commanding” perspective.

Ask team members to take opposing sides of an issue and have them discuss the different points of view. This helps to open up conversations and get everyone thinking critically about the task at hand. Exploring the reasons why people like different ideas may open up new ways forward. Having an idea what people are trying to achieve will give you some criteria to guide your decision making. In a strictly linear and rational process, agreeing your aims might come before discussing ideas.