Getting participants to focus on the same thing at the same time represents one of the hardest thing to accomplish with a group of people. Therefore, learning to remove distractions reflects a core skill and primary responsibility of the meeting leader.
Your Rosetta Stone: Remove Distractions
Remember that all questions you have about what you can or should do may be answered by the question, “Is it a distraction or not?” If it is not a distraction, then it should be acceptable. If it is a distraction, then it is your responsibility to remove distractions so that your group can remain focused on the topic.
For example, if you put your hands in your pocket to rest for a few minutes, it is probably OK. However, if you start juggling your keys or coins, the distraction is unacceptable. If a participant closes their eyes, let them rest. If they start snoring, then intervene to remove the distraction.
Core Skills Where You Need to Remove Distractions
Remove the Electronic Leashes
As a facilitator, you need to manage four core skills including presentation, active listening, questioning, and observation/ neutrality. For these to be effective, you must reduce or eliminate distractions so that the group can stay focused.
These four core skills are critical to effective facilitation.
- Presentation skills are necessary for effective communication
- Active listening is a tool for effective understanding
- Questioning is a tool for effective information-gathering
- Neutrality is a tool for balance and integrity
Removing distractions is an essential discipline for core skills and may guide all of your behavior.
Note for example the challenges that correspond with the four skills:
- Verbal disfluencies and fillers such as saying “Uhm” too often
- Observing something else when the meeting participant is talking
- Providing answers rather than method
- Making judgments or using the word “I” too often
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
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Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
