To be able to facilitate better is one of this decade's critical skills for leadership

These elegant, collaborative and engaging capabilities aren't just for trainers, presenters or coaches.

Executives, business analysts, project managers, middle level team and people leaders and those new to managing and leading experience the benefits of being able to:
🌕engage with a group or team,
🌕draw information from that group, and then
🌕help them collaborate to achieve an agreed outcome.


Leaders can do so much better to create the right environment and set up the processes that will help that team work together and collaborate.

But make no mistake, facilitation is not ‘soft’ work. 

Better Facilitation will help you balance:
- Achieving outcomes
- Boosting engagement
- Driving productivity
- Encouraging contribution.

Make meetings and workshops better, engagement and collaboration better ... and results and impacts better.

Design for relevance

When we bring people together to collaborate, co-design and solve problems, we must consider how to help them do their best work.

We’re so bad at meetings - and boring ones - that our bad meeting culture gets transferred and stretched into longer sessions like workshops. 

We don’t just have boring meetings for an hour; we end up having boring workshops for 3-hours! 

So many of the leaders I train in better facilitation skills want to know about fun games for their workshops. They soon realize the best activities are those that actually help us do the work we are there to do. 

Careful you don’t waste time, energy and participant engagement on games that might be high on fun, but end up being low on relevance and results. 

It is possible to design agendas and activities for workshops that are interesting, engaging, creative ... and help get the work done too!

Don’t be distracted by the pursuit of cute; you could completely miss out on designing for relevance and results. 

That workshop will need some design

Many of us are leading more workshops and meetings than ever before.

We’re bringing people together, helping them with learning, planning, collaborating, discussing and decision making.

So how do you ensure the workshops you lead are interesting, engaging ... AND effective?

By design.

Successful workshops and meetings come via better design.

And whether we’re leading online or face-to-face sessions, they all require some design ... before the day.

Careful though, because we can also go overboard and over-engineer! There’s a sweet spot where we have designed the most valuable elements and then we can let the rest roll.

Focus on these 4 things in design :

1. Engagement
2. Activities
3. Participation
4. Outcomes.

Give good face - show a sign

Our world of online meetings serves up screen after screen of faces.

You might even wonder if someone’s screen is frozen.

Have they even moved?

But we’re focusing and listening intently, making sense of the information, thinking, analyzing, processing.

And our faces show it.
Thinking. Working. Connecting dots. Imagining.

As comedians, speakers and theatrical performers know, audience members who ‘give good face’ are such a blessing.

A smile, facial expressions, teeth showing, eyes alive, rosy cheeks ... all give feedback that says, ‘I get it; yes, good; keep going.’

So if you’ve trained, presented or spoken in an online session recently, you’d know that we don’t give good face. At all.

Let’s do better.

Be a great participant, a caring colleague, a good human ... and give good face.

Smile. Nod. Clap. Wave. Big head nod. Smile.

If you can’t give good face?

SHOW SOME SIGNS.

Easy!

Words.
Written on paper.
Wave them about when relevant.

My favorites are:
Applause
So good
You rock
Awesome!

It’s feedback that the humans - who are working SO hard to train, speak, present and deliver for you - will find invaluable, encouraging and inspire them with... ‘yes, good, keep going.’

Leading interactive workshops

We’re getting the hang of online meetings. But how are the interactive workshops going? 

If we just press the breakout rooms button and think that’s how to interact and collaborate ... that’s a limited view. 

Some facilitators use apps like Mural or Miro for interaction but still, it’s not about just choosing an app or breaking people into groups. 

The art of facilitating interaction involves:

📐DESIGN
and
📐DELIVERY
of the interactive workshop experience. 

Many workshops default to ‘now, go chat in breakout rooms’. These are usually poorly framed and then not debriefed, totally losing the gold from the group interactions! 

Breakouts are generative... they generate contributions. 

What will you do with all of the generation and contribution? Most of us do little, perhaps asking a ‘so, what did you talk about?’ question. 

Helping a group do great work together doesn’t happen via a button. 

If you’re leading a group in a workshop setting, sharpen up your skills for better group interaction. 

Consider the DESIGN of the experience. 
Then the DELIVERY.