Keys to effective facilitation

Abstract

We have all probably facilitated a meeting or group session of some type in the past. This facilitation responsibility is core to the role of both the project manager and business analyst. However, comfort levels with facilitation vary from person to person. Facilitation can be even more challenging when you have globally disparate teams or conflicts between team members. Ensuring that a meeting runs well and achieves consensus is an art and a science. The science is all in the pre-planning for the meeting; the art comes when the meeting begins and you must facilitate the discussion, moderate the disagreements, and motivate the team to decision.

This paper examines what makes a facilitator successful. The first part examines the tactics (the science) that you can employ to be more successful in your facilitations. The second part discusses the strategy (the art) that can be used to make facilitated sessions flow more smoothly and collaboratively.

Introduction

Research shows that more than 35% of employee time is spent in meetings every day. Making this time productive is a challenge and takes effort and planning. It is challenging to bring even a small team together for dedicated focus on a specific topic. With larger teams who are globally located the challenge grows exponentially. There are many electronic contact management tools that can make the event easier to manage, but that does not mean that you can rely on a tool alone.

Setting up a meeting on everyone’s calendar for a few local associates is relatively easy. What if you have contractors who are not in your contact system? What about clients who are in another city or state? For a large audience, planning a meeting requires even more resources: rental of conference rooms, catering, audio/visual requirements…and you have not even got to the actual reason for the meeting yet.

Making the meeting productive is a challenge. To be productive means you want clear results. To get clear results, you need to know what your objectives are, research information to help you in the meeting, and plan, plan, plan. In addition, you have to be ready to handle the team. This means planning not only the meeting objectives and format, but also determining tools and tactics you will use to manage building consensus and dealing with conflicts.

Meeting Fundamentals

The Pros and Cons of Meetings

The Pros of Meetings

The biggest pro for a meeting is that is forces people to focus on a particular topic during the meeting time to try to reach a common goal. An advantage of a meeting that is all in-person is that you can see a team face-to-face. You can read body language, see when people are engaged or bored and change the meeting format to meet the audience needs if required.

Conducting meetings for team members who are not co-located is also beneficial. Using technology to link team members together while they are remote saves the cost of bringing the team together while it still builds the team performance. Virtual meetings can be recorded for future playback to review key discussions, inform group members who could not attend, or serve as a historical record. Working during meetings as a team can encourage collaboration, speed decision processes, and motivate the team to work more collaboratively as they establish interpersonal relationships, gain trust in each other, and become vested in helping each other succeed.

The Cons of Meetings

The biggest con of meetings is that they can be unproductive. If more than 35% of your time at work is spent in meetings then it is essential that this time is well used. Meetings are notoriously unproductive because there are too many people, no clear objectives, no one in charge; opportunity for lengthy debate, nobody ready to make decisions, politics, rivalries, dissention in the ranks, rabble rousers, and the list goes on.

For virtual meetings you can have additional challenges as well. Poor web conferencing technology, faulty network connections, and inadequate training on the use of the technology can undermine the success of virtual meetings. Virtual meetings lose important physical cues that show when team members are in agreement, getting frustrated, checking their email, or ignoring the discussion. Certain team members may be comfortable with the online meeting format, whereas others may find it a challenge to use and participate in and start avoiding the meetings or attend but not participate.

Productive meetings must be well-planned by the owner, well-attended by the required participants and stakeholders, and include a very clear set of achievable goals. Follow the guidelines in the next sections to make your next meeting more productive.

Setting Up for Success

Establish Purpose

Meetings require planning if you want to achieve a goal during the meeting. Consider each meeting a mini-project where you must clearly define the scope and deliverables that you want to obtain. Identify your stakeholders and work with them to develop the objectives for your meeting. If you are planning a large requirements gathering session or risk management workshop you may want to consider doing a formal charter document and gaining sign off from the stakeholders. Formalizing these types of meetings can help the team understand the importance of their participation in the requirements and/or risk workshop.

As you define the purpose of your meeting, consider the meeting as a cost to the project team. How much time will the meeting take for everyone involved? What is the hourly rate of each person’s time worth? How expensive is the meeting? To make the most of your meeting time help attendees prepare head of time so that when the meeting starts you can focus on the purpose of the meeting. Information can be distributed ahead of time that can make meetings more efficient working sessions.

Do I Need a Meeting?

Think through how essential the meeting really is and hold a meeting only when it is absolutely necessary. If you have a weekly status meeting planned and nothing has changed, you may want to cancel that meeting so the team can continue to make progress on their tasks. Meetings are rarely held to just inform; they are held to collaborate, brainstorm options, or make decisions. Typically, they require action on the part of the participants and this justifies the cost of pulling these people off of their job and into a meeting forum.

Planning the Meeting

Think through who needs to attend, what needs to happen at the meeting, when to schedule the meeting, why to have the meeting, and where and how to have the meeting.

Who Needs to Attend

Who should be invited to your meeting? This is where many meetings start going astray. If too many people are invited then it can be a large group that is difficult to manage. If the wrong people are invited it is impossible to meet your goals. Analyse the purpose of your meeting and invite only the stakeholders who are relevant to those scope objectives. Ask the stakeholders who they think should attend a meeting. The meeting should include anyone with a vested interest in the outcome, anyone who wants to see a decision made one way or the other.

What Needs to Happen

When you were defining the scope for a meeting you should have been developing a list of what needs to happen in your meeting. Do you need to identify risks? Get the team to make a decision? Persuade a stakeholder to fund additional changes? Further analysing what needs to occur and documenting it in the form of an agenda is an essential part of meeting planning (and sets you up for a great facilitated session). The meeting agenda should identify who is attending, how long the meeting is going to take, a timeline of what you will be doing during the meeting, and a clear call to action for the team members or stakeholders who must be active participants.

When to Schedule Your Meeting

Determining the right time to hold a meeting can be a challenge. Team members can be located across the globe so finding a common time that is convenient to everyone can be impossible. If you cannot find a time for everyone to meet then consider holding smaller meetings that are time-zone and/or region specific. Another option is to schedule a recurring meeting at alternating times. Perhaps the first month it is during normal work hours for North America but evening for EMEA and the next month you switch it so it is during work hours for EMEA but early morning for North America.

Asking your team is a great way to identify what meeting times can work with their schedule. They are often more flexible than you might think because they are used to working with international team members.

When you finally find the right time to schedule your meeting, be sure to send out an appointment request/reminder to all participants. You should attach the meeting agenda to the request/reminder as well as any pre-read or background materials that can help participants come to the meeting better prepared to immediately contribute.

Why to Have a Meeting

Have a meeting to make a decision, to analyze a problem, to identify requirements and risks, to resolve a dispute or to gain new information and insight. Meetings that have no tangible outcomes that you can identify probably do not need to occur. If you cannot say, “At the end of this meeting I will….” and fill in the rest of the sentence with something that requires action from other members of your team then you may want to reconsider having the meeting altogether.

Where and How to Have the Meeting

A meeting can be held in a conference room, at an outside facility, over the phone, through web conferencing, through videoconferencing, or by combining these modalities. Consider your audience, their preference and locations as you select where and how to have your meetings.

Face-to-face meetings are the preference for executives and sales people. For technical folks or others who often cannot travel, an alternative to traditional meetings would be the use of video conferences, web-based conferences, or telephone conference calls. Video conferences are significantly more expensive in terms of technology requirements, but they are becoming easier to manage and access as technologies mature. Check into what conferencing capabilities your organization has available for you to leverage.

Conducting the Meeting

Conducting the meeting is exercising the art of facilitation. If you have clearly established your meeting scope, defined who, what, when, where, why, and how for your meeting, then you are about to stand in front of a group of people and help drive them toward your meeting objectives.

The number one fear of most humans is public speaking. To stand in front of your peers and speak clearly on a topic of interest them strikes fear into the hearts of most project managers.

Facilitation skills are not common naturally in most adults. Most people are not born wanting to stand up front and speak to a group, to take charge, to deal with the different personalities and issues that inevitably occur during a meeting. For workshops that involve a large team you may want to consider finding a facilitator who does thrive on this type of spotlight. For most of us, however, an outside facilitator is not an option. Instead we must learn the skills to facilitate our own meetings and our own project workshops. The next sections give you some clear steps you can take to help build your skills with the art of facilitation.

Know Your Team

Before you start working with your team, take the time to get to know the individuals. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Personality types? Consider using checklists to help you learn about personal meeting / communication style preferences.

For project teams that are just starting to form, consider ice-breaker activities that will help the team members make interpersonal connections and gain trust with each other. These activities can help you identify people who may need encouragement during discussion or who might need more management during meetings because of their forceful personality. Starting your team off in a positive direction can help them work toward becoming a high-performing team. Many people like the Myers-Briggs personality assessment that categorizes individuals on four dimensions and can help a team bond through discussions about their “type” and give you insight into the profile of your team members.

Set the Ground Rules

At the start of each meeting you should set the ground rules. These rules should explain appropriate behaviour and etiquette for the meeting. How will someone have the floor for presenting their ideas? Who is recording decisions and action items? How will disputes be managed? What process will you use to build and reach consensus?

Stick to Your Promises

As the facilitator you have established the scope of the meeting through your agenda, and by establishing ground rules you have given everyone a common code of conduct. Stick to these promises by conducting the meeting by the agenda. Stay on topic and on time and keep the promise of your agenda. If the team wanders into topics that were not part of the original agenda, stop the discussion and put it on a “parking lot” for further discussion at a meeting dedicated to the topic and return to the agenda that was established for the meeting at hand.

Build Facilitation Behaviors

The following is a list of behaviours and learned skills that will help you successfully facilitate. If you want to increase your effectiveness as a facilitator, you should practice these behaviours and develop these skills.

• Compassion—Try to see things from another person’s perspective (e.g., having empathy and looking at situations from another’s point of view)
• Tolerance—Allow others to be different (e.g., understanding individual differences and appreciating them)
• Congruence—Have awareness of yourself and your own feelings and an ability to communicate in a straightforward way (e.g., walking the talk and making sure your actions are aligned with your thoughts)
• Giving—Being able to go with the flow (e.g., not stubbornly refusing to go with the group; this does not mean taking the lead always, it means having a proper amount of flexibility)
• Self-expression—Communicating both verbally and non-verbally (e.g., being honest and direct, not an open book but open)
• Involvement—Becoming involved, when necessary, and objective, leaving personal aspects out (e.g., not forcing the group to go with your way of thinking)
• Assisting—Preparing participants to contribute (e.g., giving everyone a chance to contribute and managing the meeting so all can and want to participate)
• Keeping everyone safe—Establish an environment where everyone feels comfortable to contribute ideas
• Allowing the thought process—Allowing individuals to think through their responses; some members will need more time to consider issues and will be more quiet when they do so
• Paraphrasing—Repeating members’ contributions in your own words to make sure they are understood and to show that you are engaged in the group work
• Pushing—Not accepting a wrong answer or point and not allowing the group to settle for the first thing they can agree on; groups may want to settle just to save time or because they don’t want to deal with an issue, especially an important one

Learn Facilitation Skills

A good facilitator is developed by practicing and improving a number of different facilitation skills. These skills include:

• Responding—Responding in appropriate ways and at appropriate times (e.g., knowing when to intervene and how). Responding is both a learned skill and an active behaviour
• Stimulating—Asking mostly open-ended questions that stimulate thinking and discussion
• Summarizing—Giving a shortened version of what was said and checking for understanding
• Dealing with conflict—Knowing and applying appropriate resolution techniques including avoidance, pushing, accommodating, withdrawing and confronting
• Keeping your opinion to yourself—Not backing up any one particular person or offering your own opinion (you are the facilitator not a group member)
• Modelling—Demonstrating ways of behaving in the group
• Listening—Being fully engaged in order to listen actively for facts, emotions, and intentions; using all senses (not just hearing)
• Observing—Being objective and seeing from many different viewpoints; watching the group in order to diagnose the group’s current level of performance and where it needs to go

Solve the Disputes

Dealing with difficult or dominant people is the job of the facilitator. Dealing with any heated conflict is best done after the meeting, whether that conflict was caused by a heated discussion or stems from a difficult team member.

Difficult people come in many varieties—snipers who throw out barbs at other team members, steamrollers who ignore everyone else and keep going with their own agenda, pleasers who agree with everyone and everything even when it contradicts—but they all have one thing in common, they want attention and want to be heard. Most difficult people are not trying to throw the meeting off course, often they have a firm belief that they know how it “should be done” and are passionate about helping the team. As a facilitator, your job is to help the team stay on track but not lose the ideas of a difficult team member. You can help them get the attention they want and the listening ears they are hoping for and still accomplish the objectives of the meeting. If they have more to contribute suggesting a separate side meeting where the two of you can collaborate is a positive way to recognize their contribution but allow the conversation to move forward.

Build Consensus

The facilitator can use additional tools, including the nominal group technique, affinity diagrams, and prioritization matrices, during the meetings to bring-about decisions and build consensus.

Nominal Group Technique

The nominal group technique (NGT) is a highly versatile technique that can be used at several steps in analysis. NGT can be used in the problem formulation and needs assessment phase as a tool to discover and refine the problem statement and determine its causes and consequences. It helps to obtain and refine the problem statement and its major causes and consequences.

NGT has six steps that are followed:

1. Determine the questions to be asked of the participants.
2. Select the participants.
3. List ideas in silence.
4. Have each participant read aloud their ideas one at a time.
5. Discuss the ideas.
6. Vote on priority of ideas.

NGT has several attributes that distinguish it from other methods for generating ideas and achieving group consensus. Those attributes include the following:

• NGT maximizes creativity of the participants.
• NGT allows for balanced participation by group members, and therefore minimizes the chances that the group will be dominated by a select few.
• NGT has been demonstrated to be a valid method for determining group consensus in a reasonable period of time.

Affinity Diagrams

Groups use affinity diagrams to clarify complex issues and to reach a consensus on the definition of a problem. Affinity diagrams answer “What” questions, such as “What are the root causes of events that determined or impacted the quality of our product?” There are eight steps in affinity diagrams:

1. Record the ideas on cards or sticky notes.
2. Develop a data dictionary of needs.
3. Eliminate obvious redundancy and restate.
4. Spread the cards or sticky notes on a table or wall.
5. As a team, look for two items that seem related in some way and move cards together.
6. Continue to organize cards into groupings that are related.
7. Select a card or create a statement that captures the meaning of the grouping.
8. Eliminate redundancy and restate.

An affinity diagram is used to organize a large amount of data into groupings based on natural relationships between each item.

Prioritization Matrix

A prioritization matrix is a useful technique you can use with team members to achieve consensus about an issue. The matrix helps you rank problems or issues (usually generated though brainstorming) by a particular criterion that is important to your organization. This technique helps clarify which problems are most important. The steps for prioritization matrixes are:

1. Conduct a brainstorming session for a problem.
2. Fill in a prioritization matrix.
3. Each participant votes three times for each criterion (for a total of nine times).
4. Total the votes.

The item with the highest total count is the biggest priority.

Consensus Seeking

Consensus is a creative decision-making process in which all people involved make a decision. Because all members agree to the final decision, consensus is the most powerful of all decision-making processes. Because all participants have a direct vote and veto power, this is truly radical democracy.

Consensus can work with groups as small as five and as large as 300, or even with groups of over 500,000 people. Within a small group, consensus tends to be simpler if all the group participants are kept abreast of each other’s activities and all the factors of the decision. Within groups of 300 of more, consensus takes different shape. For instance, the small group may have a single facilitator whereas the 300 person group may be arranged into mini-groups of five using consensus with one spokesperson who speaks in the larger group setting. In short, consensus takes into account and validates each participant. Everyone gets the opportunity to voice her opinion or block a proposal if she feels strongly enough about a decision.

Consensus usually takes longer than voting. However, since all parties participate and either accept or agree, the chance of buy-in is greater and decisions will tend to be stronger and last longer. The consensus process is as follows:

1. Present item to make decision on.
2. Answer any clarifying questions.
3. Have discussion.
4. Call for major objection or strong concern.

Conclusion

Facilitation and meetings are your life and lifeblood of many organizations. With proper practice and planning and full commitment form sponsors excellent facilitation is within your grasp. Take the time to get it done right. Preparation up front will greatly increase the change of success during your facilitation.

Remember to start any facilitation session on time, distribute the plans ahead of time, and make the participants as comfortable as possible. Make sure that everyone knows why they are there and what the expected outcome is.

Stick to your agenda, keep any necessary records of the event, and don’t forget any follow up. A good facilitator is worth their weight in gold. Provide the best venue, with the right equipment, clearly define who, what, where, when, why and how you will meet. Do not waste anyone’s time, including your own, and plan, plan, plan to succeed!