Creating Alignment and Interconnectedness
Guila Muir, M.Ed., Guila Muir and Associates LLC

If you feel a slight chill of dread at the prospect of leading a meeting, you are not alone. Meetings have a bad reputation, for good reason. According to a Harvard Business Review survey, 71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Another study shows that the more meetings we attend, the worse we feel about ourselves and our jobs.

Why? Because most professionals haven’t learned the behaviors and skills of effective meeting facilitation and instead simply duplicate what they have seen other meeting leaders do. As a result, meeting members often feel bored, frustrated, and disengaged. Even if your own experience has been more positive, no doubt you have sat through meetings that accomplished little other than wasting your time.


The good news: Over the years, I have seen the positive impact that confident meeting facilitation makes on overall workplace engagement and productivity. Although none of us is born hardwired to run great meetings, we can all learn the relatively simple skills of effective facilitation and, in doing so, improve workplace culture.

Before exploring effective facilitation behaviors, let’s review three fundamental steps that create fertile ground for improved meetings.

Three Steps to Improve Meetings

1. Acknowledge that effective meeting facilitation is a core leadership competency. Those who can facilitate productive, meaningful meetings play leadership roles at all levels in our organizations.

2. Prevent “meeting to meet.” Be able to verbalize the purpose of every single meeting you lead. Ask yourself “what will have changed as a result of this meeting?” (If you can’t answer the question, don’t hold the meeting until you can.) Write the meeting’s purpose at the top of every agenda, and include it in every email reminder you send out.

3. Clarify your role throughout the meeting and verbally communicate that to meeting members.

 Content Expert or Facilitator?

 Content Expert (“Tell”)

 Facilitator (“Ask”)

 Presents information

 Guides process

 Provides the right answers

 Provides the right questions

 Content-focused

 Outcome-focused

 One-way communication

 Multi-directional communication

If your goal is simply to transmit information (content expert role), consider doing so in ways other than holding a physical meeting. These options can include using online meeting tools, memos, video, or one-on-one conversations. Remember, the goal is to have fewer, but more productive, actual meetings.

When you want to elicit and use the collective brain power of the group, you are taking on the role of facilitator. Your job is to make participation easy and meaningful for meeting members. That’s where essential facilitation behaviors (described below) come into play.

If your role is to both “tell” and “ask” during a meeting, it’s important to verbally clarify what you expect from the participants. Do you want them to provide input throughout the meeting, or only in one section, or to hold questions until the end? The level of safety is higher when people know what is expected of them. (Don’t claim that you want people’s input but then proceed to just talk at them. There’s no better way to shut down collaborative group processes.)

Essential Facilitation Behaviors

Practice and model the following behaviors when group engagement and productivity is important.

Playback. Reiterate what a participant has said as closely as you can. Try not to infer meaning. “Greg, I’m hearing you say that you want this to go a little more slowly. Did I get that right?”

Consolidate. Pull together ideas, showing their relationship to each other. “As you can see from Juan’s and Cathy’s comments, there seem to be enough resources and commitment to take this on.”

Play devil’s advocate. Disagree gently with a participant’s comments to stimulate further discussion. “Is that always the case?” Or, “When this happened last year, we did [X] and it worked. Why discard a successful strategy?”

Relieve tension. State what you see calmly and without evaluation. “Bill and Mary are bringing out two different sides of this issue.” Or,  “I see many furrowed brows. Let’s take a quick break to reflect on this.”

Change the process. Alter the method of participation. “Let’s break into small groups to see how many alternate options you can come up with.”

Taking Facilitation Seriously

These are just a few tips to improve your meeting facilitation. If you are serious about improving your work culture, I encourage you to implement new skills and behaviors in your very next meeting. Chances are, it will move along faster and be more productive.


Sources

“Stop the Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness.

“Meetings frustrate task-oriented employees, study finds,” Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 91, No. 2), http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/frustrate.aspx.


Guila Muir is a member of the University Consulting Alliance and is principal of Guila Muir & Associates, a Seattle-based firm creating leadership by developing professionals’ training, facilitation, and presentation skills.

Winter 2018 | Return to Issue Home