Facilitating More Productive Meetings
You can transform meetings, often considered a time-waster, into a powerful tool for getting things done and strengthening the team, by learning the specific skills needed to manage more productive meetings. Participants will learn effective techniques for building an agenda, facilitating and focus the activities of a group, keeping the meeting moving, managing the work of the Minute-taker, assuring that discussion leads to decision, and dealing with conflicts as they arise among meeting members.
In an interactive and practice-oriented environment, participants will also learn whom to invite to meetings, the roles and responsibilities of key meeting members, and the necessity to delegate such tasks as room arrangement and minute-taking. Handling "difficult" meeting members is an important skill they will practise. As they distinguish between various types of meetings, they will grow in the confidence that they can lead any type of meeting to a conclusion satisfactory to themselves, the members and to the organization.
With our extensive knowledge of the different software currently on the market, including all Microsoft and Adobe applications, ON-TRACK Corporate Training Ltd. has a diverse and flexible schedule that can be customized to your needs – we offer group course (both public and corporate), one-on-one training, and on-site training options. We also have easily accessible on-line training videos available.
Duration: 1 Day
Objectives
After this workshop, the participants will be able to:
- Identify different purposes of meetings
- Assess their personal meeting leadership style and adapt it to various situations
- Conduct different types of meetings and feel confident in managing them
- Develop and follow an effective meeting agenda
- Set up meeting rooms using optimum proxemic arrangements
- Recognize and manage the dynamics among people in meetings
- Use specific skills to facilitate inclusive, orderly discussion toward satisfactory decisions
- Refocus a group toward meeting goals (time; decisions; completions)
- Summarize a decision or problem upon which the group is to make a choice
- Distinguish between a majority decision and a consensus
- Manage problems that may arise (avoidance, unscheduled topics, side-chats)
- Manage "difficult" meeting members and conflicts that may occur
- Bring the meeting to a satisfactory and timely close
Outline
- Part I: All About Meetings
- Myths about meetings
- The purposes of meetings, and alternatives to reaching these purposes
- Types of meetings
- Assessing the cost of a meeting
- Major meeting problems and how to fix them
- A productive meeting needs a product (What is that product?)
- Part II: The Facilitating Leader of Successful Meetings
- What is leadership, applied to meetings?
- A working leadership model
- What is my leadership style and how can it work for me as a meeting leader?
- A decision-making style model that works
- Part III: Who Should Attend Our Meeting?
- Criteria for inviting people: Who must we include? Why?
- How to integrate reports and special presentations
- Foreseeable issues to prevent (last minute invitees; no-shows; chronic lateness)
- Part IV: The Dynamics of a Group in a Meeting
- The four stages of team development
- Setting meeting objectives with the group
- Recognizing the signs of group dysfunction, with strategies to improve it
- Gaining the team's respect for you and for each other
- Sustaining high performance in your meeting team
- Part V: Facilitating Successful Meetings
- The role of the facilitator (Why do we need to facilitate?)
- How to facilitate effectively while maintaining neutrality and objectivity
- Adult learning styles
- Types of thinking in meetings (Six Flags)
- Content and process
- Part VI: Building and Following an Agenda
- Process for preparing the agenda
- Stating meeting objectives
- Components of a successful working agenda
- When to distribute the agenda
- What to do with last-minute pre-meeting items
- Estimating times for agenda items
- Part VII: Ten Key Facilitating Skills
- Using the agenda to control the meeting without taking sides
- Establishing workable ground rules at the start
- Using a "Parking Lot" to manage unscheduled items
- Making effective "process interventions"
- Deciding when and when not to use Robert's Rules of Order
- Modelling the neutral, respectful language of facilitating
- Refocusing a group that has gone off-track and off-time target
- Summarizing and paraphrasing
- Guiding a group's discussion toward a decision point
- Encouraging and supporting group members through contention
- Part VIII: Additional Communication Skills for Effective Meetings
- How and when to ask "process questions"
- Making interventions that avoid raising defensiveness
- Active listening skills
- Giving feedback to the members
- Using assertiveness to manage conflict
- Other conflict management skills
- Recording skills (Should we maybe write this down somewhere?)
- Assigning action items (Delegating post-decision work)
- Assuring that meetings start and end on time
- Managing those "difficult" meeting members
- Part IX: Conducting Meetings with a Virtual Team
- Key challenges to the virtual team
- Successful teleconferencing
- How to raise people's morale in the teleconference
- Professional telephone behaviour and good member conduct
- Advantages and disadvantages of the videoconference
- Email etiquette (How to avoid disaster)
- How to ensure virtually-decided action items get done
- Part X: Improving our Meetings
- Room set-up: Optimizing our chances for success through proxemics
- How to get increased and balanced participation in discussions and decisions
- What must we stop, start and continue, in order to make our meetings more productive and satisfying? (Do a "Wisconsin")
- Meeting action items form
- Methods for following up on action items
- How to close a meeting so people know it's closed
- Part XI: Course Closure and Evaluation