What Is Meeting Facilitation?

Have you ever stepped into a meeting and experienced any or all of the following:

• An unclear purpose as you and others are joining the meeting
• Meeting goals or outcomes are too ambiguous or non-specific, leading to different perspectives as to what you are trying to accomplish
• Problems are being solved before they are clearly defined
• Decisions are made haphazardly and are re-visited or challenged in subsequent meetings
• Team members go off-topic, try to dominate the discussion or others are not contributing at all and zoning out

Meeting facilitators are experts in dealing with these challenges. We understand what underlies great meetings and we educate our clients on best practices to achieve success.

What Do Meeting Facilitators Do?

First, meeting facilitators help you define the purpose and outcomes of your meetings. Then we work alone, but ideally with meeting stakeholders to develop a meeting process that is geared towards high attendee engagement, ensuring group intelligence is leveraged throughout the meeting.

Meeting facilitators know how to structure meetings to enable discussions to move forward in a logical, respectful, and productive manner. In a problem solving meeting for example, this structure allows for an organized breakdown, identification, and mutual agreement of the root problem before participants can jump to finding solutions.

Our best practices ensure we use the right tool or process to help a group reach consensus and keep participants, who might sidetrack meetings, purposefully or unconsciously, on track.

Great process facilitators ensure that meetings are not a waste of time, but rather become forums for great idea generation, problem-solving and decision-making.

Who can benefit from developing meeting facilitation skills:

• Project managers
• Program Managers
• Managers of any level who run meetings
• Councillor or Committee Chairs/Leaders
• HR Professionals
• Business Analysts
• Six Sigma, Agile or Continuous Improvement Professionals
• Professionals who needs to increase buy-in and decrease resistance in group settings