- 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
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:
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2 comments:
Great advice Michael. I particularly like the checkmarks each time a person speaks. It's always a challenge for me to notice who is speaking and who isn't. I tend to get caught up in the discussion with the more vocal participants - my biggest failing as a facilitator!
I like the blog - keep it coming!
Julie
Hey Julie,
the question remains also is how to intervene with the more vocal participants so that you can allow others to speak?!
My sense is that upfront, we should be imposing a round-robin just for an initial round of comments, then move in to a 'popcorn' or 'free for all' scenario. As well, asking meeting participants to stay within a 1-minute timeline may also help to shorten comments.
thanks for the feedback!
Michaelexfzpwa
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