My previous articles on “They are happy to come to my meetings” have gotten you to the point where you are now prepared to run an effective meeting. You have a clear, focused and measurable goal. You have the right people invited. You have the logistics in place. You have announced the meeting. You’ve listed the preparation required and set the expectations that attendees will come to the meeting ready to contribute. The next step is to hold the meeting.
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 that helps you. The most obvious level is the content and the people who interact around the content (tactical). The least obvious level is the (strategic) meeting process.
The meeting process is the activity of monitoring and adjusting the interaction of people, process, and time to ensure that the objective of the meeting is achieved. Basically, you are “hovering over the meeting”, looking at the components. From this point of view, described by some as looking from the balcony, you can see the problems and make the necessary corrections. This is the role of facilitator. It is this role that prevents the content from going too far astray and keeps people focused and engaging with the content and interacting with each other around the content.
The meeting facilitator role is usually handled by the person who convened the meeting. This can be effective. However, if this person is too invested in the content, they can easily lose sight of the meeting process. When she expects to be up to date on content discussion, she may want to assign the role of facilitator to someone who isn’t as involved.
start the meeting
Aim
You should open the meeting by stating the objective and the criteria you will use to measure success. Ask the room if everyone agrees on that goal. Anyone who disagrees, or thought we were going to do something less or different on the subject, now has a chance to speak up. It is better to find out the differences early. Otherwise, it will remain a bump for the entire meeting.
Asking for agreement on the purpose of the meeting will bring up any “honest” disagreements. It will not remove any hidden agenda. Therefore, you need to be on the lookout throughout the course of the meeting for people who seem to be leading to a different goal.
Rules
The meeting has a better chance of achieving its goals if all the “kids play well together.” Acceptable meeting behaviors are necessary for smooth interaction. These standards are simply the way we have agreed to work together. We agree to let people finish what they are saying, without interrupting. We agree to listen to everything a person says before formulating our response. We agree not to be offended if someone points out that we are breaking the rules. There are many possible rules.
Whether the people you meet are new to working together or an existing team that doesn’t work well together, you need to set standards. You should ask the group to create these norms. When people believe something, they are more likely to agree and stick with it. The ones that attendees choose vary according to the participants.
If the group has worked together, they have already informally established norms. It is helpful for existing teams to revisit the standards from time to time. If there is bad behavior, you need to set new rules to address this existing (negative) behavior.
facilitator activities
The main responsibility of the facilitator is to keep the meeting moving to achieve the goal in the meeting time frame. Scan the meeting to determine if the content is still appropriate and if people are approaching it in a way that is moving toward the goal. If not, the facilitator needs to make some adjustments. These adjustments could be for content that, while interesting, is not on the path to the goal. The facilitator needs to interrupt this discussion. Or it could be two people having side conversations. They need to be re-focused on the content. These types of corrections should be done with a light touch. A heavy-handed approach causes problems that we will cover in a later article.
Side note: Decisions, action items, and responsibility need to be written down. This avoids problems with unstable memory or disagreement about what was decided or what the action was.
When a meeting process is effectively facilitated, the goal of the meeting is much more likely to be achieved.
You now understand that you need to split in two in order to hold an effective meeting. You have to be both the policeman directing the traffic and a person driving one of the cars. It can be difficult to do this at first. Fortunately, it gets easier with practice. We’ll talk a bit later about how to manage content and people during the meeting.