Tips for Ensuring Successful Meetings: How Facilitators Can Help
In order for meetings to be successful, they should be led by a skilled facilitator. The lists below provide teams with an idea of how facilitators can best help the team to make meetings productive and inspire team members to contribute maximally to the work at hand.
Good facilitators should:
- Listen actively
- Maintain eye contact
- Help identify individual and group needs
- Assure buy-in from all team members
- Surface concerns
- Define problems
- Involve all team members in the discussion
- Use good body language and intonation
- Paraphrase
- Provide feedback
- Manage the meeting’s time and pace
- Provide useful feedback
- Monitor and adjust the process as needed
- Ask relevant, probing questions
- Keep an open attitude
- Stay impartial
- Offer suggestions
- Be optimistic and positive
- Manage conflict effectively
- Adopt a problem solving approach
- Stay focused on the process
- Take accurate notes about the discussion
- Be flexible and change the approach when needed
- Check in with the group periodically
- Skillfully summarize what is said
Good facilitators should not:
- Be oblivious to group needs
- Ignore members’ concerns
- Be poor listeners
- Stray into content
- Lose track of key ideas
- Take poor notes
- Ignore conflict
- Avoid or deflect responsibility for restructuring the discussion when needed
- Get defensive
- Be dismissive or put people down
- Allow certain group members to dominate the conversation
- Allow the group to get sidetracked
- Use a negative or sarcastic tone
- Talk too much
Facilitators should also ensure that meetings have closure. Here are some tips to help facilitators end meetings on a positive and productive note and set the stage for future team meetings.
Facilitators can help to bring effective closure to a meeting by:
- Making clear statements about what has been discussed and decided and noting those decisions on a flipchart
- Ensuring that they have created detailed action plans with names, accountabilities, and dates for each item
- Noting items that were not discussed at the meeting, including those that have been tabled or placed in a “parking lot” for later discussion and create plans to address them at future meetings
- Deciding on a method to provide follow up to the meeting
- Soliciting feedback from participants about the meeting
- Creating an agenda for the next meeting
- Adapted from Bens, Ingrid (1999). Facilitation at a Glance! AQP/Participative Dynamics/GOAL/QPC.