Are you preparing to have a meeting that might get a little sticky? Here are some professional facilitator tips
Recently, a colleague asked for my advice to help prepare for a meeting she plans on facilitating. She anticipates the participants to be…ummm, confrontational. Here is what I gave her.
Negotiation tip that works:
The calmest person in the room usually “wins”, so be calm.
Sometimes I need to think of myself as The Excuse Eraser when facilitating a meeting. My tools are exploratory questions intended to: get to a shared vision of the end objective, there are mostly minor issues to getting there, if the issues are not minor-break them down into smaller parts, strive to get people into an action oriented mindset rather than a victim/closed mindset.
Sample Exploratory Questions
What is keeping us from accomplishing XYZ by ABC?
In a perfect world, what should we be doing to get to XYZ?
If we were delegating this whole thing to a different team, what would we tell them to do?
What is in your way?
What would you like to see happen here?
What help do you need from the people at this table?
What approaches worked or didn’t work before?
When discussing proposed solutions/ideas have these question at the ready:
Interesting idea, what would that look like?
I think see where you are going, how would we use that?
I think I understand, where would that leave us?
Does this help or hurt anyone else in the room? How can we tweak this to make sure all get is needed?
If things are getting nowhere, try some shocker questions like:
Do we have a capability issue here or a willingness issue?
Are we here to fight or work something out?
Do we want to accomplish this or still be talking about it in X weeks?
Is this an approach issue (e.g. do we have a process) or is it an execution issue (e.g. people are not trained/capable of following the process) or is this a management issue (e.g. the people/process are not being managed so that the rest of the organization can take those results and move forward)?
Why is this not a viable idea? Is there a safety issue, money, reputation...?
What conditions would change you from "no" to "yes"? -or- What do you need to say yes?
Have an agenda. The most important parts of the agenda for this kind of meeting are the desired outcomes
Be super clear on what the objectives are of the conversation.
Review the agenda and desired outcomes at the beginning.
Make a show of checking off agenda items as you get through them.
Try to keep the agenda to 3 main desired outcomes.
Establish overall desired outcome for the meeting.
For each agenda item, have a desired outcome listed
Have a visible action plan (flip chart/screen share) to fill-out as you go along. Use a grid with: Item, Who, When. Complete the grid with each action as they are established throughout the conversation. Always get agreement on the deliverable, who is responsible, who will help that responsible person, and the date of the deliverable.