You just walked out of a meeting that was intended to discuss the development of next year’s product line. Sadly, the meeting had no real focus with too many distractions and off-point discussions. You left the meeting feeling confused and unprepared. Not a very productive use of the last two hours, was it?

Many companies have found that meetings can be counter-productive if they are not led in a way that maintains focus and follows a well-defined process. It is imperative that the meeting leaders understand how to facilitate and accomplish the meeting objectives. A professional facilitator can provide them with the skillset needed to meet the company goals.

Leadership Strategies believes that a professional facilitator is an educator and motivator. Through team building, strategic planning, and professional coaching, they can help your company develop a process that will make your meetings effective and your presentations more valuable. By educating key members of your company in the art of facilitation, you will improve your overall project management, create teams that work more effectively towards a  focused, common goal, and improve the overall work environment.

It is important to reevaluate how your company communicates both internally and externally. Effective communication ensures that your time is being used efficiently and that the focus remains on the current and future goals of the business. The tools that are provided by Leadership Strategies will prove invaluable to your team members when dealing with clients, building marketing programs, educating others within the company, and many other facets of your business.

The guidance and information provided by a professional facilitator are instrumental to your company’s success. These techniques can greatly improve your team members’ focus and level of engagement so that projects will run more smoothly. By making the best use of company time, you will see an increase in productivity. You will also have given your team members skills that can improve both their professional and personal lives.

(Adapted from The Secrets of Facilitation)

Great facilitators demonstrate what appears to many as an innate ability to ask the right questions. They use questioning techniques when preparing, starting, focusing, information gathering, consensus building and in every other stage of our facilitation methodology.
The starting question is the term we use for the question the facilitator asks to begin a discussion. Typically, a starting question is used at the beginning of every agenda item in a facilitated process. For example, for creating a plan to fix the hiring problem, the facilitator might use the following agenda.

Leadership is the most over-analyzed, thoroughly dissected, and utterly confused topic in business. In Leaders Open Doors, long-time friend to LSI and author, Bill Treasurer, simplifies what’s most important about a concept that is still in short supply. He introduces the concept of Open-door Leadership – that is, the responsibility that leaders have for noticing, identifying, and creating opportunities for the benefit of people, organizations, and society.

To our friends who enjoy adventure and jet-setting, we recommend a couple increasingly-popular destinations - Denver, CO, and Toronto, ON! Our facilitators have classes, conferences, and consulting engagements all over the world, but these are two cities in North America we especially love. There are many attractions in both places, including The Effective Facilitator.

I find it interesting that most executives tell me they wish people speaking to them would get to the point right up front and people speaking to executives tell me they don’t feel their executives listen.

Hmm… What’s happening here?

A Case Study

(Adapted from The Secrets of Facilitation)

A member of our team was serving as coach and assistant  to a lead facilitator from another organization.  The lead facilitator was working with a group of 40 people responsible for identifying methods to improve public safety in a large, urban area.  The task force included judges, police chiefs, sheriffs, district attorneys, juvenile court officers and others who have an interest in public safety.

At this particular meeting, the lead facilitator got the session started and asked the participants to identify the key issues they wanted to see discussed during the collaborative process.  One of the participants, a police chief, indicated, "We have to address the recidivism rate.”  The lead facilitator responded, “So, what you are saying is that the recidivism rate is too high.”  The police chief, just a bit annoyed, responded, "No.  What I said was that we need to address the recidivism rate.”

Every so often you learn something that permanently transforms the way you think about how you do your work.  I certainly did a few months back.  And if you design training, I think you may as well.

I had the pleasure of traveling to Saudi Arabia to co-teach The Effective Facilitator.  I have been teaching this particular course for nearly two decades and we continually update our methods and instructional processes. Teaching in a foreign country is always fun and it is not unusual to have people positively overwhelmed with the rich content and highly practical techniques that we teach in this course.   

So I was not at all prepared when, at the end of a practice exercise, a participant said,

“Well, obviously you didn’t teach that very well.”