5 Ways an Expert Facilitator Will Elevate Your Next Crucial Meeting
You spend a lot of your time in meetings. You might even be really efficient at running them! But when the stakes are highest, outside facilitation is well worth your investment. Here's why.
You spend a lot of time in meetings. You might be really good at running them too! Maybe you’ve even learned a few ice breakers to get people in the room feeling particularly present and ready to roll.
But listen, when the stakes are highest you need someone that isn’t you to facilitate your meeting. As someone who has been thanked by many clients for helping make their strategy session impactful, or for my invaluable ability to help keep things flowing, I promise you that a facilitator from outside your organization is worth every bit of your investment. Here's why:
You’ll avoid energy suck
You'll help everyone's input be heard fairly and efficiently.
You’ll ensure that you get to the decision points that matter most.
You’ll be able to participate in crucial conversations.
The objectives, outcomes, and who-owns-what will be crystal clear walking in and out of the room.
Let’s break these benefits down!
You’ll avoid energy suck. I don’t have to tell you what this is. We’ve all been there: a strategy session with a lot of opinionated stake holders, a “short” ideation session that has just entered hour 2 or a board meeting that has tipped too far into boring (but important) data driven updates. It doesn’t matter how crucial a conversation is, human beings have energy peeks and dips, and fortunately or unfortunately these dips are imprecise in their predictability.
Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash If you fail to manage the ebb and flow of human attention and interest… well, you lose people’s focus altogether! This makes reaching consensus, figuring out next steps or solidifying critical decisions super difficult!
Facilitators don’t just facilitate content or manage time, we help modulate the energy in the room. When the energy is lackluster, we know how to bring it up. When the energy is heated, we know how to cool it down. It’s part of our job to know when to challenge you to press on, and to know when you really need a break.
Great facilitators are experts at sensing the energy needs of the room so that instead of getting sucked into the ether, the energy stays in the critical decisions you are making.
You'll help everyone's input be heard fairly and efficiently. When it comes to meetings… particularly the hard but important ones like digging into your corporate values, you can predict how people are going to behave before you even get there. You know that there’s going to be at least one [shrug] “whatever you decide guys,” player, a few silent participants and a handful of overly loud, super-duper opinionated voices who disagree with each other (seemingly because they think they’re supposed to!).
You know how important all of the perspectives in the room are to your conversation, or you wouldn’t have invited them, but trying to hear everyone and reach consensus can eat up precious time. On top of that it takes additional attention to notice who hasn’t offered up their voice yet, or to pick up the the overlap that could unite differing points of view.
A truly skilled facilitator will know how to bring out the voices of your quieter contributors, and patience in your out-loud thinkers. We also have multiple experiences for sharing and thinking about tough questions that go well beyond group discussion so that time spent exploring is maximized in output rather than expenditure.
Getting everyone’s ideas on the table at a recent session You’ll ensure that you get to the decision points that matter most. By the time you get people’s schedules aligned and have carved out the time to tackle your important but challenging decisions together, more often than not you end up with an agenda that is overly ambitious. The last thing you need is for the truly critical stuff to be pushed off as people go down the rabbit hole of a single topic that may not even be on the agenda in the first place!
Photo by Startaê Team on Unsplash Experts in facilitation understand that while it may be necessary to address issues that arise unexpectedly in the course of a strategy session or planning meeting, it’s important to make timing choices when unexpected topics or deep dives into agenda items arise. This time management can be challenging as the person who created the agenda and brought people into the room, but for those of us who facilitate, it’s simply part of our job!
You’ll be able to participate in crucial conversations. This might be the most important reason to ask for external support. As a leader you know important questions to ask and you understand the big picture in a way other players at the table simply will not. Naturally you’ve gathered everyone because their input matters, but yours does too!
Taking on the role of meeting facilitator comes at a high energy cost. Managing the room's focus, the agenda, and ensuring balanced participation between vocal participants and quieter ones can lead to burnout and exhaustion by the day's end, preventing you from fully leveraging all of your insights at the table.
Your meeting attendees may contribute differently as well, yielding to you more while sacrificing their own valuable input. Why? Because they know that you are the key decision maker and the arbiter of when the meeting ends.
The objectives, outcomes, and who-owns-what will be crystal clear walking out of the room. A meeting is only as successful as its outcomes, and a strategy session only becomes effective with implementation.
Have you ever been in a meeting, and felt clear on the decisions and responsibilities, only to discover later that you’re foggier on the details than you should be? So you go to check your notes, and that’s when you realize why you feel so fuzzy… it’s because your notes are incomplete.
While the problem of clear notes can be solved by having a designated note taker in the room, an experienced facilitator will go even further by making sure that the outcomes are brought into sharp focus, primary tasks are made clear with dates attached, having heard a clear yes from the person responsible for carrying those tasks out.
Here’s the bottom line
Yes. You are capable of having many good meetings without expert facilitation. But when it comes to the truly high stakes conversations, smart leaders call on outside facilitation support for the reasons listed above and more!
…Now, how can you tell you’re actually working with an expert facilitator? I think that is where our discussion should start!
For discussion:
Have you ever hired an outside facilitator that sucked? What were the early indicators you wish you had paid attention to that might have clued you in?
Have you ever hired an outside facilitator who was an amazing game changer? What were the early indicators that told you that you were in expert hands?