Take a minute to thank people who prepared things for the meeting, set up the room, brought refreshments, or did any work towards making the meeting happen. Thank all of the participants for their input and energy and for making the meeting a success. Sometimes, people dominate a discussion because they are really passionate about an issue and have lots of things to say. One way to channel their interest is to suggest that they consider serving on a committee or task force on that issue.

So is having catering arranged in order to ensure food and drinks are available during breaks, and having the right workshop equipment at hand. This can be easy to overlook, but ensuring you get this right is part of facilitation best practices. Missing a vital piece of equipment can be frustrating or stressful and make group facilitation more difficult. To learn more about workshop design, here is an article that goes through the process step-by-step. Having a skilled, effective facilitator guide a meeting or a workshop can make a world of difference to the meeting’s outcomes and team’s efficiency!

What is Ideation – and How to Prepare for Ideation Sessions

Using online tools for preparing meetings can make this process of engaging with larger groups of shareholders and group members more effective. Whatever method you choose, ensure that you can clearly communicate with your stakeholders and participants and that you can easily access and record those communications when improving your sessions. As a facilitator, it’s your job to guide a group through a process, making it easier for them to accomplish the goal at hand. Having a structure and general idea of what direction you’re going in will help you do just that. You need a plan, a back-up plan, and possibly a few more plans, just in case your other plans don’t work or something breaks. Having options will provide you with flexibility and allow you to change things up based on the group’s needs.

The next section of this facilitator guide for training will introduce you to the main duties you’ll need to fulfill and skills you’ll need to have to enhance your facilitation skills and excel in this challenging activity. Create a session with structures and activities that appeal to different personality types and people of all skill levels. The goal should be to articulate a shared vision while maximizing the commitment and engagement of everyone in the group. Everyone needs to feel that they are making a meaningful contribution to the end goal. Communication is the core of facilitation, as you need to be able to convey information, ideas, and feedback in a clear, engaging, and respectful way.

What to keep in mind when hiring a facilitator

Though agendas set the structure, a facilitator is only there to guide the process—which means it is possible for participants to go off track. It’s easy to head on a stimulating and interesting tangent (particularly in a close-knit group) that is not related to the matter at hand. Guidance involves ending irrelevant discussions, preventing detours and nudging people towards thinking in greater detail. A professional facilitator, as an example, will park discussions for later dates if they’re not immediately pertinent and keep track of timing to respect everyone’s schedules. They’re not an instructor or lecturer, who are content or subject matter experts.

You’ll see a quote from Martin followed by some takeaways and thoughts from us. Hannah has a Masters of Art in Leisure Studies form the University of Waterloo and a Bachelors Degree in Recreation Management from Acadia University. In her research, she focused on studying optimal learning environments, program evaluation, transfer of training, positive youth development and productive organizations.

The Ability To Create An Environment That Supports Learning

You need to have your own bag of tricks to help a group get to their end goal. Sometimes a group session will get off track or the plans you originally set up aren’t working out like you expected. Consider keeping a grab-bag (it doesn’t have to actually be bottomless; Mary Poppins is an aspirational goal) of activities to pull out just in case Plan A isn’t doing the trick. I can’t tell you how often I facilitate groups who work together but don’t actually know each other. Spending some time for a team to get to know one another adds great value to the dynamic. I’ll frequently have a group share their motivations for why they care about the work at hand, allowing them to build commonalities and connections.

The totality of the message being conveyed should not get lost and so effective listening is extremely important. There might be some natural barriers to listening like noises and other barriers could be talking more and listening less, boredom, being engrossed in personal issues, preconceived ideas and assumptions. They should maintain a body language that makes the group feel assured about his physical presence by facing them squarely, making eye contact, nodding , keeping an open posture and so on. He also should be able to attend to the speaker at a psychological level by understanding what is not being conveyed explicitly and he should be able to pick up from nonverbal cues. Paraphrasing and repeating back what was said and asking questions reflects that he is actively listening.

In short? High-performing facilitators are business’ best kept secret

Discover a flexible and comprehensive way of understanding mental health as a Certified Mental Health Professional (MHP)… Facilitation, collaboration, collective intelligence, communication, workshop, meeting… This course is intended to serve as an introduction to population health from both the vantage point of both public health and healthcare. We will examine the key components of community health needs assessments, how they are used, and how to compare population health assessments across subpopulations and time. We will also explore the epidemiological sources and criteria by which to select high quality data sources to estimate population health indicators and to select evidence-based…

• This requires you to read the room, understand the meeting attendees, understand the objectives of the group, and adapt when necessary.
• It can be as simple as factoring time to get to know one another to add value to the group dynamic.
• This also offers a chance to get further insights about the goals and the group, helping you to come up with the right session design.
• Additionally, try to observe experienced facilitators in action and take note of their techniques.

Sometimes issues will arise in the meeting that are so important, they will take much more time than you thought. If necessary, ask for a five-minute break to confer with key leaders or participants on how to handle the issue and how to restructure the agenda. Be prepared to recommend an alternate agenda, dropping some items if necessary.

Process design

It also involves being aware of any underlying emotions or needs that may be driving what is being said. To go into a session without sufficient planning is a recipe for disaster. Whenever you facilitate, you should have a complete agenda plan that has been designed with your participants in mind and a clear working plan in place. Go into a meeting with the best plan of action you possibly can, but be open to change if that’s what the group needs.

A good facilitator isn’t someone who actively avoids such differences but embraces them, and uses a combination of critical thinking, active listening and other skills to help a group navigate such differences. Like most things worth doing, becoming an effective facilitator takes practice. The good thing is that all of these skills are totally learnable—you just have to get out there and try them out! Each group agile team facilitator roles and responsibilities is different, and as you work on these skills, you’ll figure out what works best for your team and your organization. With your expert-level facilitation, all those different learning styles and personalities can come together to produce awesome outcomes. Learning skills are the abilities and attitudes that you have to learn and grow as a facilitator, and how they affect your performance and development.

You’re Able to Create an Inclusive Environment

Having an extra person as a sounding board allows you to check in with one another, see if you have noticed similar patterns and needs, and ideate changes together. A facilitator’s responsibility is to make a process easier or facilitate a process through adequate planning. A facilitator acts like a guide to help people move through a process. Facilitators know how to quantify the impact one has on the other in a way that learners may not be. And to that end, they can monitor the training process in such a way to maximise the investments of both learners (expectations and time) and organisations (money and resources). As part of their agenda setting, a skilled facilitator will know to talk to key personnel and ascertain the skillsets that are to be developed.