You receive an invitation to a meeting. What is your first reaction? ‘Great, but it will be fun!’ Or perhaps more like ‘No, again? I don’t have time to work!’. If the latter, you are no exception. For many people, meetings are a painful way of wasting time comparable to having to file tax returns. Sitting for hours in a windowless conference room, watching boring presentations, long discussions and endless arguments. Or staring at a screen all day long during incessant ‘zooms’ and ‘teams’ where the other participants don’t even bother to turn on the camera to show themselves. In the end, no decision is made anyway, which means another meeting soon.
Does it have to be this way? In the main, it depends on the meeting participants, including you. You can greatly improve your meetings by using a couple of simple practices, starting with identifying a meeting facilitator.
A guide for meeting facilitators
The dictionary definition of ‘facilitation’ is ‘to facilitate’. The facilitator is therefore responsible for facilitating the process that takes place in the group by ensuring that meetings are planned and conducted in an effective way. The facilitator’s focus is therefore not on ‘what’ you want to establish, but ‘how’ you want to do it. He or she therefore has to observe the group processes – who speaks, how, who withdraws, whether someone is imposing an opinion, whether different perspectives are taken into account and select tools to support participants in generating ideas, making decisions and reaching conclusions. To help you in this task, we have prepared a download that will remove boredom, eliminate your distress and enable you to conduct effective and interesting meetings.
Download facilitator checklist
Effective participation
Effective Facilitation is the first key to effective collaboration. The second is Artful Participation. My favourite definition is given by James Priest, who formulated it in the form of a question:
‘Is my behaviour at this point the best contribution I can make to this collaboration?’
As a facilitator, you are responsible for making sure that everyone present contributes. If the answer to the previous question is ‘no’, you should ask people to change their approach or simply leave the meeting. Either option will make your meeting better.
It sounds like you are ready to lead your meeting in a new way. Let us know how it went and if the checklist was useful.