The 4 meaningful levels of facilitation

They’ll be much more attentive and happy to participate when you consider what’s on the agenda and how it relates to their job and tasks. If you find your meetings just devolve into unregulated social gatherings then schedule monthly or quarterly social get-togethers. Often the information was something that had previously been emailed, posted by the time clock and maybe even sent home attached to paychecks.

Your workshop design should allow participants to feel the magic of group dynamics. This programme for a half-day starter workshop has been tried and tested for over five years and in different settings, including online. Read on to find out the rationale behind the design, what you should be looking out for in running it, and what pitfalls to avoid when training new facilitators. This is the first stage of facilitation, when the agile team facilitator, with the help of brainstorming exercises, encourages participants to brainstorm as many ideas as they can. The next stage (convergent thinking) is about choosing the most valuable ideas from the initial brainstorm. The final stage is when participants vote on which idea is most valuable and important.

Deliver better workshops without the hassle

When it comes to content and solutions, the facilitator stays on the sidelines and helps guide participants to find their own outcomes. Facilitators give the group the tools and guidance they need to succeed and everything they do in both design and facilitation is about supporting the group. See this list of facilitation skills and how to improve them to start bringing this skillset to life in your work.

Expert facilitators design a complicated web of interactions through combining tools, time, talking, and turbulence to help people do their best work in tough environments. For these reasons, rather than aiming to train all-rounded professional facilitators, start by framing your session as sharing facilitation skills, to be applied in many different contexts. Because the most common application is going to be in meetings, facilitating effective meetings is an attractive focus to begin with.

Teaching & Learning Resources

New York City has nine Barnes & Noble stores featuring four different logos above the front doors. Two stores are new; one has been fully renovated; and the others have had some updates but are mostly frozen in time, the still-functioning remains of bygone retail strategies in a company — and industry — that has undergone an upheaval. The design of a new location in Brooklyn reveals the polished concrete floors from its past life as a Barneys New York.

All because they lacked proper meeting ground rules for facilitators. A way to approach the dominant participant and pull in non-participants is to redirect the discussion to another person or another topic. Alternatively, you may wish to reframe their comments, making them viable additions to the discussion.

How do you chair difficult meetings?

In practice, facilitation skills are most often used when designing and then leading groups through a collaborative process such as a workshop. There are innumerable benefits of applying facilitation to day-to-day life inside companies and organizations. Listening and sharing activities encourage participants to reconnect to the source of their motivation, and to one another. Diverse, multidisciplinary teams can achieve astounding results, but collaboration takes work and practice. Facilitation skills, which include the ability to steer difficult conversations, design ways to ideate together, prevent and transform conflict, and get action points done, are essential to working together in diversity. Training new facilitators in the use of facilitation skills is essential as the profession gains recognition and organizations come to realize the advantages of having facilitative leaders and team members.

• The ability to handle and diffuse tension is a skill that sets expert facilitators apart from others.
• When you finish a point or a part of the meeting process, sum up what was done and decided, and pause for questions and comments before moving on.
• Learn how to develop and deliver events that engage learners through the Training Delivery and Facilitation track at ATD Core 4.
• The meetings that occurred outside my own stores often allowed me to see and visit with folks I didn’t get to see every day.
• Knowing what to put on the agenda and what not to is one of the most important of the meeting ground rules for facilitators.

And if you can learn meeting ground rules for facilitators, guess what? Knowing what to put on the agenda and what not to is one of the most important of the meeting ground rules for facilitators. We’ll examine why most don’t work, but more importantly, we’ll examine the top meeting ground rules for facilitators so that your next meeting will be a hit with your employees and actually accomplish something. This ensures that the team addresses the important but undiscussed issues that are hindering its results and that can only be resolved in a team meeting.

Barnes & Noble Sets Itself Free

“Be present, or be elsewhere” is a good meeting guidelines to establish shared awareness and clear expectations one participants. We’ve had participants text friends and answer calls in the middle of sessions, clearly not paying attention; we’ve had others who were extremely late or in some cases crossed a personal line by making inappropriate comments. In such situations, the facilitator has to redirect and remind the participant agile team facilitation to stay focused, and in rare cases be prepared to end the sessions early. You need to adjust your facilitation style (amount of probing, talking, and assisting) based on the study goals and the stage of product development. We facilitate sessions that range from very structured with an emphasis on metrics, to less structured and exploratory. Consider the level of involvement needed as a spectrum going from babysitter to therapist.

It’s often difficult to reach an agreement in a meeting because some people are often dogmatic about their position. But if participants mutually explore the interest behind the positions, it becomes much easier to find a common ground. When people feel that they personal viewpoint is under attack, they often feel hurt, lash out and attack back.

What are the principles of facilitation?

Lively discussions, differences of opinion and new ideas are common occurrences in a well-facilitated workshop. Helping groups explore tricky problem spaces collaboratively can be emotionally charged, but it’s the facilitator’s job to guide a group through this process while maintaining psychological safety and mutual respect. Early in the process that will lead to an event or workshop, this means designing a process with your specific workshop participants in mind.

Facilitators should develop neutral reactions for both positive (successful tasks) and negative behaviors (task failures and usability problems). Joe Dumas and Beth Loring wrote a great guidebook that is an essential read for anyone interested in facilitating a usability session. Read on for some examples of specific sessions and scenarios where you might use facilitation for impact. A nice way to close a meeting is to go around the room and have people say one word that describes how they are feeling now that all of this work has been done.

“Make ideas tangible”

If the items are simply notifications that don’t require input or buy-in, consider emailing the team rather than just going down a boring list of FYI’s. If you do run out of time, figure out why that happened, and take a vote to see if they prefer to plow through, table until next time or call a special meeting for the final topics. They are reviled, divisive topics that can splinter an otherwise great team. Others might work better if the boss gets input one on one and just makes the call. You can create many different lists, or queues, and share them with whoever you like.