They Are Happy To Come To My Meetings!
Effective Meeting Facilitation

My previous articles on “They Are Happy To Come To My Meetings” have brought you to the point where you are now prepared to hold an effective meeting. You have a clear, focused, measurable objective. You have the right people invited. You have the logistics in place. You have announced the meeting. You have listed the preparation required and set expectations that the attendees should arrive at the meeting ready to contribute. The next step is to run the meeting effectively.

Facilitation
An effective meeting has two different levels of activity that need to be addressed. You can think of the two levels as strategic and tactical, if this helps. The most obvious level is the content and the people interacting around the content (Tactical). The less obvious level is the meeting process (strategic).

The meeting process is the activity of monitoring and adjusting the interaction of the people, process and the time to ensure that the meeting objective is achieved. You are basically “floating above the meeting”, observing the components. From this vantage point, described by some as watching from the balcony, you can see problems and make any necessary corrections. This is the facilitator role. It is this role that keeps the content from straying too far afield and keeps the people focused on and interacting with the content and interacting with each other around the content.

The meeting facilitator role is frequently handled by the person who called the meeting. This can be effective. However, if this person is heavily involved in the content, he/she can easily lose sight of the meeting process. When you expect to be hip deep in the content discussion, you may want to assign the facilitator role to someone not as deeply involved.

Start the Meeting

Objective
You should open the meeting by stating the objective and the criteria you will be using to measure success. Ask the room if everyone agrees to that objective. Anyone who disagrees, or thought we were going to do something less or different with the topic, now has the opportunity to speak up. It is better to find out about any differences early. Otherwise it will continue be a speed bump throughout the meeting.

Asking for agreement on the meeting objective will surface any “honest” disagreement. It will not smoke out any hidden agendas. So you need to keep and eye open during the course of the meeting for people who seem to be driving to a different objective.

Norms
The meeting has a better chance of hitting its objectives if all the “kids play nicely together.” Acceptable meeting behaviors are necessary for smooth interaction. These norms are merely the way that we have agreed to work together. We agree to let people finish what they're saying, not interrupting. We agree to listen to all of what a person says before formulating our response. We agree to take no offense if a person points out that we are breaking the norms. There are many possible norms.

If the people coming together are new to working with each other or are an existing team that does not work well together, you need to establish norms. You should ask the group to create these norms. When people create something, they are more likely to agree with it and abide by it. The ones your attendees choose vary based on the participants.

If the group has worked together, they have already established norms informally. It is helpful for existing teams to re-visit norms occasionally. If there is existing bad behavior, you need to establish new norms to target this existing (negative) behavior.

Facilitator Activities
The main responsibility of the facilitator is to keep the meeting moving to achieve the objective in the time frame of the meeting. Scan the meeting to determine if the content continues to be appropriate and if the people are dealing with it in a way that moves toward the objective. If not, the facilitator needs to make some adjustments. These adjustments could be to content that, while interesting, is not on the path to the objective. The facilitator needs to cut off this discussion. Or it could be two people holding side conversations. They need to be re-focused on the content. These types of corrections need to be made with a light touch. A heavy-handed approach causes problems that we will deal with in a later article.

SIDE NOTE: Decisions and action items and responsibility need to be written down. This avoids and issues of shaky memory or disagreement on what was decided or what the action was.

When a meeting process is facilitated effectively, the meeting objective is much more likely to be achieved.

You now understand that you need to split yourself in two in order to hold an effective meeting. You have to be both the policeman directing traffic and a person driving one of the cars. It may be difficult to do this at first. Fortunately, it becomes easier with practice. We will talk a little later about how to handle the content and the people during the meeting.