Meeting Facilitation - dealing with the uncomfortable

You’ve mastered the basics of how to make a meeting valuable. All the practical stuff like agendas, participants, picking a format and desired outcome as well as following up and getting feedback. But you still feel you need more to be a great facilitator. You feel there are things you don’t know how to do, when to do them and perhaps you worry about making enemies doing them. These things are less tangible, you can’t check them off a checklist and, let’s just face it, they can be very uncomfortable. Let’s lean into this discomfort together, in a safe environment.

In this tutorial/training we will learn more about communication theory, facilitation skills and group dynamics. But mostly we will spend our time discussing and practicing dealing with uncomfortable situations that can occur during a meeting: Bad actors talking over others, taking the meeting hostage, or even shouting or using inappropriate language. While the group will decide the level of depth, participants should come prepared to actively partake in exercises around interrupting and calling out bad behavior, reining in derailing conversations and pushing through friction.

Since this will be a very hands on experience and will deal with tough scenarios, we will limit the group to a maximum of ten participants and will have, and enforce, a code of conduct to make sure this becomes as safe a space as possible.

NOTE: There are no prerequisites to this workshop but FYI this is part three in a three-fold set of workshops. They are independent, self-reliant and focus on different parts of adding meeting value - the basics in why and how, facilitation during the meeting and dealing with discomfort.