|
This Issue's Special: The Secrets to Masterful Meetings
Just Released!
This 2nd book in the Secrets series is powerfully designed to ignite a meetings revolution in your organization!
$16.95
Click here to order!
Upcoming Classes
The
Effective Facilitator
4-Day
Jan 30-Feb 2 Atlanta
Feb 13-16 Washington DC
Streamlined 3-Day
Jan 23-25 Dallas
Feb 27-Mar 1 Atlanta
Feb 28-Mar 2 Denver
Mar 6-8 Chicago
Mar 20-22 Los Angeles
Advanced Facilitation*
May 18-19, 2006 Atlanta
Facilitating IT Sessions*
Apr 28, 2006 Atlanta
Facilitator Certification*
Mar 2-3 Atlanta
Facilitation For Trainers
Mar 27-29, 2006 Atlanta
Masterful Meetings
Mar 20-21, 2006 Atlanta
The Effective Consultant
Feb 6-8 Atlanta
Strategic Planning
Feb 13-14, 2006 Atlanta
From Management to Leadership
Oct 16-18, 2006 Atlanta
See the entire Public Class Schedule
* Prerequisite Required
Click here
to register online now for a public class or call us at 1.800.824.2850 about a private on-site class!
Leadership Strategies is a national leader in meeting facilitation, facilitator training, consulting skills, leadership skills and soft skills training for information technology professionals.
|
|
Greetings!
Happy New Year!
I am pleased that the new year brings the publication of my second book in the Secrets series: The Secrets to Masterful Meetings. The book is available through our website and at Amazon.com and, hopefully, coming soon to a bookstore near you!
While Jossey-Bass was kind enough to publish the first in the series, The Secrets of Facilitation, this second book we have published through our recently launched publishing company, Leadership Strategies Publishing. LSP gives us the flexibility to allow companies to customize The Secrets to Masterful Meetings by branding the book with their own logo, including a foreword by their CEO, and other custom modifications.
The Masterful Meetings training class has already received rave reviews from companies like McDonalds and Georgia Power. While private, onsite classes are available today, we will begin offering public, open enrollment classes in March (see our public class calendar).
Finally, over the summer, we expect to release Masterful Meetings – The Online Course, a Web-based version developed for those whose hectic schedules make it difficult for them to attend training courses; this Web-based version enables them to learn the material on their own timeframe.
For this issue of the newsletter, we want to introduce you to several of the Masterful Meetings concepts:
- For Facilitators: Check out the quiz. Are your meetings masterful?
- For Leaders: We show leaders how to transform the meeting culture in their organization starting with a set of meeting rights.
- For Consultants: How do you address the problem of the executive sponsor who frequently arrives late for meetings?
- For Strategic Planners: What does a masterful strategy session look like?
As always, I welcome your thoughts and feedback. May this year be prosperous and may all your meetings be masterful.
Michael
Michael Wilkinson
Managing Director, LSI
Best Practice Tip for this Issue: Prioritize to Identify Key Items
Facilitators often need to have the participants identify the most important items generated in a listing or brainstorming activity. There are many prioritization techniques available, each with varying levels of complexity. Here’s a simple one to try: Using a round-robin technique, ask each person to indicate the most important item on the list. Place a "tick" mark next to the item indicated (using a different color pen) Once each person has voted, record the score and select the highest rated item. To promote anonymity, have participants record their votes on slips of paper first. The facilitator can then read the responses and mark the number of votes for each item.
To learn more about prioritization techniques, register for The Effective Facilitator course! For more details, call (800) 824- 2850.
|
| |
| |
| |
| For Facilitators: Are Your Meetings Masterful? Take This Quiz to Find Out! | | Are your meetings masterful? Answer the following questions based on the last two or three meetings you led. In responding, score each question based on the scale below. Try to be as accurate as possible in your assessment. If you really want to have fun, have someone who regularly attends your meetings score this for you, and then...
Click here to continue | | |
| For Leaders: Transforming Your Meetings Culture: Establish Meeting Rights | | “That was an awful meeting. What a waste of my time!” How often have you had this same thought? Why do we tolerate such bad meetings? Consider the last meeting you attended that was run by someone else. How many of these pitfalls were evident...
Click here to continue | | |
| For Consultants and IT Professionals: Getting Your Meetings Started on Time | | | It’s 9:12. The meeting was supposed to start twelve minutes ago. As the project manager, you purposely had this monthly Senior Executive update scheduled for 9:00 – not too early so you could avoid hearing the “bad traffic” excuse, and not too late so you could avoid “the last meeting ran over” excuse. Yet true to form, only a third of your audience is present – the ones who typically arrive on time. And the key person, the executive sponsor for the project, hasn’t arrived yet. She’s the one who will give the final sign-off on the status and you don’t want to start without her
...
Click here to continue | | |
|
For Strategic Planners: The Masterful Strategy Meeting | | | “I would like for our management team to go away for a couple of days to spend some time thinking about the future. We get so caught up in making monthly and quarterly numbers, that we never get a chance to look at where this whole thing is really going. I hate to say it, but while I can get everyone together, I’m not quite sure what we would do. I just know we need to take some time to really think and we need to get everyone on the same page. Can you help?”...
Click here to continue | | |
| Client Success Story: Training that Keeps on Giving! | | | “I’ve been exposed to a variety of training sessions covering numerous topics for over 25 years. So when my employer announced we were going through an organizational change that required every key employee to attend facilitation training, I hoped to pick up a little new knowledge and that would be it. Boy was I mistaken!...
Click here to continue | | | | |
| The PDI Difference | | | PDI stands for Practical/Dynamic/Interactive. It's what sets Leadership Strategies above the rest. The PDI Difference can be seen in every aspect of what we do.
Practical Methods that Produce Results: We use proven methods and techniques in both our training classes and our facilitated sessions. Each and every session is carefully planned and executed with precision to ensure consistent results that apply to real-life situations - and produce measurable results.
Dynamic Energy that Keeps You Engaged: Our facilitators operate on "Level 3" energy so participants are engaged from beginning to end. No doodling in our sessions! We also use a wide variety of techniques to keep the interest high and be sure everyone contributes their best ideas.
Interactive - Proven Methods for Successful Integration and Application: In our facilitated sessions, our trained facilitators set people up in teams to enhance collaboration and ideas that work from every angle. In our training sessions, it's "practice, practice, practice" so participants learn by doing it themselves, by critiquing others in the class, and receiving immediate feedback from the instructor.
Learn more about The PDI Difference
| | |
| Spotlight: National Facilitator Database | | | Are you looking for a facilitator for an upcoming session, and don't have a clue where to start? Or, maybe you're a facilitator with great skills and experience looking for clients. In either case, we can help. The National Facilitator Database does both. For details, click here.
NFDB.com is managed by Leadership Strategies. If you have any questions or would like to speak with one of our Client Relationship Managers, you can call 800-824-2850. Or, click here to email your questions.
| | |
| Would you like to get published? | | | Do you have proven strategies on Facilitation, Leadership, IT/Consulting or Strategic Planning that you would like to share in an upcoming newsletter issue? We'd love to hear from you. Each article should be 750-1,000 words. Include your contact information and a 30- to 60-word byline. Click here to email your articles to us.
| | |
|
