Meeting Facilitator

The ever increasing use of teams has created a need for the competent facilitation of team meetings that is far greater than at any time in the past. By using the Model for Successful Meetings, teams can always increase their potential for achieving superior results and can learn to perform or interact at higher and higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness.

Facilitators make meetings effective because they:

• Involve everyone
• Promote equitable participation
• Prevent anyone from dominating or avoiding the issues
• Make methodical progress toward results
• Facilitate agreements and consensus
• Convey that results were reached through a fair process

Tools used by facilitators include:

1. Idea Harvest
• Issue definition
• Brainstorm
• Force Field Analysis
• Cause and effect diagram
2. Maintaining balanced dialogue
• Respectful
• Concrete
• Relevant
3. Voting methods
4. Prevent discussions from wasting time
5. Summarizing
• Agreement
• Change
• Retraction
• Understanding

More and more the work of more organizations is being accomplished by groups or teams. Work done by teams is less and less a temporary arrangement and being more and more the permanent structure in organizations.

Teams provide a structure for delivering whole projects and for managing processes from end to end. They perform functions that only they car perform. Teams are the best way for

• Integrating tasks
• Integrating information
• Maximizing competency
• Managing performance
• Managing uncertainty
• Managing resources
• Continuously improving quality