Recently did a facilitation for a client whom I've worked with for years and once again I fell in to the pitfall of facilitator hell not trusting my gut instinct! The client who connected with me was not the 'primary' client or decision-maker but rather the go-between for me and her boss. I was very clear from the outstart that I needed to connect with the primary client and was assured that this would happen. Having to deal with the go-between also increased from one to two people. In the end the primary declined from meeting with me and I therefore ended up going through 5 iterations of the meeting design which was approved by the primary. How it was explained by the go-betweens is not clear.
Besides the meeting design, the facilitation was critical yet only designated for 2 hours with incredible outcomes to fulfill. I knew to some extent I was setting myself up for failure, but I trusted in the integrity of the client to support me fully. On the day of the facilitation the primary client ends up walking in late to the meeting and we are immediately forced to begin. At one point during the facilitation I do a process check to see how the client is doing (who by the way is on his Blackberry looking at messages) and he turns to me stating 'he's lost'. When asked 'what is making you lost?" he provided little input leaving he rest of the participants and myself included guessing. Though the objectives for the meeting were actually achieved, the primary decided not to hire me again.
So what did I learn???
Trust my gut - when the primary refused or delayed meeting me I should have told the go-between that I can't do the facilitation unless I meet with him - AND stick to my guns!
During this meeting I would ensure that what the client wants is what he's getting so as to avoid 5 iterations of a meeting process design! Also, I would have negotiated with the primary, roles and responsibilities (i.e. no use of tech during the meeting and if she breaks a rule is it okay for me to intervene? I felt reluctant to intervene with her during the meeting as it would have put her on the spot and I hadn't built any rapport with her yet)?!
Finally, not take on a job where the objectives are outlandish and possibility for failure is so close you can almost taste it!
Monday, February 25, 2008
Facilitating Virtual Teams
More and more I'm hearing from folks about the inherent difficulties in facilitating virtual teams. When I start to question what they're doing I'm amazed at how everything they know as facilitators gets thrown out the window when it comes to speaking to someone via phone instead of face-to-face! I'm wondering why? I think that because the person isn't in front of us and we're missing out on all of those visual cues that we get sort of freaked out - forgetting how important the 'auditory' cues are in helping us make distinctions in degree of buy-in. PLUS facilitators forget the importance of structuring the meeting like using simple rules like:
- starting your name before contributing
- recording on a sheet using a '√' every time a person speaks so we know who's participating and how often
- directly calling on people to comment rather than waiting for them to respond
- having members paraphrase and/or embellish on other member's statements as to avoid people NOT listening or validating other's comments
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Taking Responsibility and the Importance of Purpose for Making Meetings Work!
Welcome to Making Meetings Work!
This blog will be dedicated (at least at this point) to sharing best (and worst) techniques for facilitating ALL kinds of meetings. This is your chance to share with others, best practices for running effective meetings, or nightmare stories that will help us avoid sins of the past. With 17 years of facilitating under my belt my hope is to provide my very own best practices and ideas for running wildly successful meetings. What I'm hoping from my fellow bloggers is to be critiqued and/or validated. To share stories, tools, techniques and processes that help all of us be better meeting leaders.
To start off this blog I'd like to recognize a few things about meetings – most organizational meetings suck big time yet few meeting participants or leaders are willing to do anything about it!? Yeah, yeah I know some of us exist in a resistant top-down structure, or we have idiotic management who know nothing about empowerment and building collaborative culture, but where does the essence of change begin in creating successful meetings? Well to be frank, it's got to be grassroots and it begins of course with us – each one of us taking accountability for running good meetings.
Why you, why me?
Well once we notice or become aware of something in a meeting that isn't working ("how come we keep on going off-topic?" "Why is Joe always folding in to what other members say?") we're therefore at a choice point to, at minimum, bring it to everyone's consciousness, or continue to say nothing. I know that just being conscious does not necessarily mean we can do anything about it, but it does mean that we have a choice to find out:
a. is this also bothering other people?
b. so what can we do about it?
Awareness enables choice. I know this is soooo obvious, however time and time again I keep on seeing the same mistakes being made at different meetings with people consciously doing little to make any changes. The question is why aren't we choosing to do something about changing our meeting when we know something is not working?
I believe that answer somewhat lies in the observation that many of us would rather stay in our fur lined ruts doing nothing different for fear of change, repercussions or having to put in some rigor (or time or energy) to change our meeting behaviors and lord knows I got enough on my plate right to now that could easily qualify as a two person job!!!
Yet, what's the outcome of doing nothing? Wasted time, lost $$$'s, frustration, and declining job satisfaction. Count the number of people around your table at the next meeting multiplied by the per hour salary they make times the number of hours for the meeting. Then multiply that figure by the percentage of time wasted and you'll get the dollars being lost to ineffective meetings that could have otherwise been attributed to value added, bottom-line generating activities.
Yeah we can blame it on management, culture, crappy teams but seriously the only change that we can control is the changes that we bring forth to a meeting. So let's talk about what can be changed to create more successful meetings. I believe the best ideas are those that are simple and practical but isn't going to demand and arm and leg of our time!
(Note: My experiences really only speak to Western culture, however I really want to investigate meeting practices in other cultures. What's different or the same? How can we manage virtual cross-cultural meetings when expectations for leading the meeting and interpersonal norms may be so different?)
In defining best practices in meeting management I want to refer to the more 'stable' elements of meetings that if we were to embrace would actually help to create more successful, collaborative discussions. For me the first and foremost is that ALL meetings require 'structure'. Creating structure is the primary role of a meeting leader, meeting facilitator or Chair. Its purpose is enable meeting participants to engage in brainstorming, decision-making, strategizing, problem-solving, etc. without them having to worry about ‘are we discussing this logically? Are we on topic? Are we achieving our intended outcomes? Are we talking respectfully to one another?’
However it is virtually impossible to structure a discussion until we understand 'why' we're having the discussion in the first place. The 'why' refers to understanding the purpose or goal of the meeting. We can't fully understand or articulate the purpose until we get clarity as to the tangible, concrete outcomes that the meeting needs to achieve.
The purpose is our ultimate destination, the outcomes are the 'what' we want to achieve in getting to our destination. Once we understand purpose and outcomes we can then define the structure or steps required to achieve the purpose and process. Without clearly defining the meeting's purpose we may run the risk of creating an agenda that totally misses out on why people think they're attending the meeting. This could result in meeting attendees not participating, tuning out, or coming across as wanting to push their own agendas. So to avoid this potential meeting pitfall get clarity as to the overall purpose of a meeting and, the purpose of each agenda topic that will ultimately help the group achieve its purpose and outcomes.
What are your thoughts on defining purpose? Is it possible to enter a meeting without clearly defining purpose and outcomes? What are success or failure stories you can share? What about meetings keeps you up at night or allows you to sleep contently?
Michael
This blog will be dedicated (at least at this point) to sharing best (and worst) techniques for facilitating ALL kinds of meetings. This is your chance to share with others, best practices for running effective meetings, or nightmare stories that will help us avoid sins of the past. With 17 years of facilitating under my belt my hope is to provide my very own best practices and ideas for running wildly successful meetings. What I'm hoping from my fellow bloggers is to be critiqued and/or validated. To share stories, tools, techniques and processes that help all of us be better meeting leaders.
To start off this blog I'd like to recognize a few things about meetings – most organizational meetings suck big time yet few meeting participants or leaders are willing to do anything about it!? Yeah, yeah I know some of us exist in a resistant top-down structure, or we have idiotic management who know nothing about empowerment and building collaborative culture, but where does the essence of change begin in creating successful meetings? Well to be frank, it's got to be grassroots and it begins of course with us – each one of us taking accountability for running good meetings.
Why you, why me?
Well once we notice or become aware of something in a meeting that isn't working ("how come we keep on going off-topic?" "Why is Joe always folding in to what other members say?") we're therefore at a choice point to, at minimum, bring it to everyone's consciousness, or continue to say nothing. I know that just being conscious does not necessarily mean we can do anything about it, but it does mean that we have a choice to find out:
a. is this also bothering other people?
b. so what can we do about it?
Awareness enables choice. I know this is soooo obvious, however time and time again I keep on seeing the same mistakes being made at different meetings with people consciously doing little to make any changes. The question is why aren't we choosing to do something about changing our meeting when we know something is not working?
I believe that answer somewhat lies in the observation that many of us would rather stay in our fur lined ruts doing nothing different for fear of change, repercussions or having to put in some rigor (or time or energy) to change our meeting behaviors and lord knows I got enough on my plate right to now that could easily qualify as a two person job!!!
Yet, what's the outcome of doing nothing? Wasted time, lost $$$'s, frustration, and declining job satisfaction. Count the number of people around your table at the next meeting multiplied by the per hour salary they make times the number of hours for the meeting. Then multiply that figure by the percentage of time wasted and you'll get the dollars being lost to ineffective meetings that could have otherwise been attributed to value added, bottom-line generating activities.
Yeah we can blame it on management, culture, crappy teams but seriously the only change that we can control is the changes that we bring forth to a meeting. So let's talk about what can be changed to create more successful meetings. I believe the best ideas are those that are simple and practical but isn't going to demand and arm and leg of our time!
(Note: My experiences really only speak to Western culture, however I really want to investigate meeting practices in other cultures. What's different or the same? How can we manage virtual cross-cultural meetings when expectations for leading the meeting and interpersonal norms may be so different?)
In defining best practices in meeting management I want to refer to the more 'stable' elements of meetings that if we were to embrace would actually help to create more successful, collaborative discussions. For me the first and foremost is that ALL meetings require 'structure'. Creating structure is the primary role of a meeting leader, meeting facilitator or Chair. Its purpose is enable meeting participants to engage in brainstorming, decision-making, strategizing, problem-solving, etc. without them having to worry about ‘are we discussing this logically? Are we on topic? Are we achieving our intended outcomes? Are we talking respectfully to one another?’
However it is virtually impossible to structure a discussion until we understand 'why' we're having the discussion in the first place. The 'why' refers to understanding the purpose or goal of the meeting. We can't fully understand or articulate the purpose until we get clarity as to the tangible, concrete outcomes that the meeting needs to achieve.
The purpose is our ultimate destination, the outcomes are the 'what' we want to achieve in getting to our destination. Once we understand purpose and outcomes we can then define the structure or steps required to achieve the purpose and process. Without clearly defining the meeting's purpose we may run the risk of creating an agenda that totally misses out on why people think they're attending the meeting. This could result in meeting attendees not participating, tuning out, or coming across as wanting to push their own agendas. So to avoid this potential meeting pitfall get clarity as to the overall purpose of a meeting and, the purpose of each agenda topic that will ultimately help the group achieve its purpose and outcomes.
What are your thoughts on defining purpose? Is it possible to enter a meeting without clearly defining purpose and outcomes? What are success or failure stories you can share? What about meetings keeps you up at night or allows you to sleep contently?
Michael
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