How To Be A Good Facilitator In A Meeting | Part 2

How to Be A Good Facilitator in Meetings: Part  2. Focus on the traps that professional and novice facilitators often fall into. So,  whether you're a leader or an educator or you identify as a facilitator, this video is  going to help save you some.

. . from some really common stumbling blocks that I learned  from training hundreds and hundreds of facilitators in some of the top universities and  organizations on the planet.

Let's get into it. Trap number 1, we'll just dive in  and I learned this from my work with an organization called World in Conversation where  my job was to facilitate and to actually train dialogue facilitators to lead conversations with  small groups of people. So, think 8 to 12 people in a room talking about really soft fluffy  topics like long-term conflict, race relations, gender, politics etc.

So, if we can talk about that  productively and facilitate a meeting like that, we can definitely talk about a strategic plan or  a business project or a whatever it is that you're facilitating a meeting around. So, one of the  most common traps that leaders, educators and professional and novice facilitators  fall into is forgetting to remain neutral. So, in those conversations that I was leading, I'm  hearing people shared views that are different from my own but my job is not actually to  insert my view.

In fact, in Microsoft Word, if you right click on the word facilitator,  it gives you a synonym or a sort of synonym that is "to smooth the process of. " By far  my favorite definition of facilitation. Your job is not to convince anybody, it's not to  lead anybody to.

. . your job is to smooth the process of meeting for whatever purpose they've set out  or whatever intention you've made clear at the beginning of your meeting and if you need a little  bit of a re-up on intention or the idea of meeting for purpose rather than for time, jump back to part  one of this video which will be linked up here.

So, how do you overcome the trap of not remaining  neutral? Because as soon as you have an opinion, you're not a neutral party that's able to  guide people. You're going to actually start creating sides and division rather than creating  consensus.

And so, as a facilitator, for me, the best way to trick my brain and what I would teach  all the educators and facilitators that I work with is convert your bias into curiosity. This is a  really good social justice, equity conversation as well as when you convert your bias into natural  genuine and empathetic curiosity, you can avoid traveling down the path of "I need to be right  and this is my view," and you can actually remain more open to what other people have to share. So,  shifting from this idea of "I need to be right or "you're sharing something that I don't agree  with or I think is wrong so I need to jut in with my opinion," if you're the facilitator, I just  don't believe that that is usually your job.

Your job is actually to open possibilities for  people, right? It's to create a pathway for the group to smooth the process to get where  they want to actually go. And so, to shift the group from this need to be right to openness,  you might really consider being really curious about the different opinions or, and this is a  really solid facilitator tip or a tool to have in your back pocket, is invite curiosity from other  people.

Meaning rather than just being curious to yourself of like, "Hey, I don't quite understand that.  Can you explain your intention behind that more? " You can do that, fine, but what is way more powerful  is if you see 2 people start to disagree and they start to talk like this where it's a sentence  that ends in a period and a sentence ends in a period and a sentence ends in a period which can  become mortars just fired over to the other side.

Mortars that are trying to win the battle of "I  need to be right in this moment. " What you can do as a facilitator to stop that mortar fire and  turn that combat or conflict into collaboration is to say, "Hey. Pause.

I see that you are not  agreeing with this. I'm curious before you share your opinion, what are you curious to know about  their opinion? " That little pause.

. . so really good facilitators act as traffic cops so they hold  up a stop sign or a go left green light, right?

They hold up different directions and that's  what they're doing. You're literally directing the traffic and the flow of conversation. I'm  working with a coaching client right now and we're designing her sessions and meetings.

She's  facilitating a series of sessions with a number of executives. She had been putting all this time into building out tons of content and PowerPoint slides and activities and all this stuff and with a group  of really smart people, oftentimes, facilitation is actually just begins with 1 single good  question and then you become a traffic cop for the rest of the 60 or 90 minutes. So, they're discussing  that 1 question or they're trying to answer that 1 question and you're just directing and trying  to smooth the process of that conversation so that people really hear each other and they're not  just launching mortars in the form of sentences and declarative statements back and forth.

Trap  number 2 is facilitators think a lot about how they start a meeting but they don't think so  much about the end of it. And so, you get to the end and you're like, "We didn't accomplish everything  or we have more to do," or. .

. like you just. .

. we actually didn't think that far ahead. We did all of our  planning up until the final moment.

The way to avoid that trap is to either literally set a timer  like, "Hey, google. Set a timer for 55 minutes from now. " Google's not listening.

Maybe your Google is  listening. And when that timer goes off, that's your cue to take 5 minutes and end with intention  and really deliberately and whether you want to end on a reflective note, a high note, an action-focused note, you choose whether you want to end with an activity or round robin closing statements,  do something to put a cap on the meeting. Close it down with intention rather than letting the end  fizzle out or even worse, letting it bleed over time a little bit in hopes that you can accomplish  everything because I promise you like, that extra 4 minutes is likely not going  to solve all the unsolved things.

Meetings are generally unfinished conversations and so  as a facilitator, you've got to create endings or transition points of like, "Hey, I know we're not  done and let's do this to end on a productive note," that's how I might frame the start of a closing  and then I might have people make closing statements or if I am really short on time, I might  have them say, "If you reflect back on this last meeting, what's 1 word that you would attach to  this meeting? " If you're interested in going deeper with closings, go ahead and watch this video on  how to keep a remote team engaged where I actually explain 5 specific closing exercises that  I really love to do as a facilitator to end meetings. I'm Chad Littlefield, there's a billion  other videos on the channel.

Have an awesome day.