How to Lead Meetings That Increase Your “Executive Presence”

How to Lead Meetings That Increase Your “Executive Presence”

by | Jul 8, 2021 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Structure

You may not think there’s a difference between being proficient at organizing meetings versus being able to lead meetings. There is!

Some people can do both. And if well trained, can do both well. However, many organizations discover too late—which is once the meeting has begun—that the person who has so efficiently organized their meeting does not know how to be an effective leader. A leader who knows how to guide the group to a clear deliverable; a concise plan of action (not just another meeting) for all to follow. A meeting that gets results!

With that said, increase your meeting success by increasing your “Executive Presence” — being someone who knows how to lead meetings.

How to Lead Meetings That Increase Your "Executive Presence"

Strengthen your credibility, Increase your ease, Curtail your ego

According to research by Northwestern’s Dr. Amy Cuddy, three factors will increase your “Executive Presence” (think respect).

  1. Strengthen your credibility
  2. Increase your ease
  3. Curtail your ego

By improving your ability to lead meetings, you and your organization nourish vibrant meetings that produce effective results everyone can own.

So, let’s take a closer look at each of these factors.

The formula to strengthen a speaker’s credibility extends back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and before. Aristotle presents three leadership factors of persuasive success: ethos, logos, and pathos. Aristotle’s leadership factors are closely related to Dr. Cuddy’s three actions. So, if you want to increase your “Executive Presence” when you lead meetings, you might want to pay close attention.

1. Lead Meetings by Strengthening Your Credibility (ethos)

In Greek, ethos means ‘character.’ Ethos captures the credibility and refers to the trustworthiness of the speaker (or, meeting leader). Ethos expresses itself through the tone and style of the message, transforming the speaker into an authority on the subject.

Ethos lends itself to the creation of reputation and exists independently from the message. The impact of ethos refers to ‘ethical appeal’ or the ‘appeal from credibility.’

Dr. Cuddy on Credibility

Foundational Factors

Three foundational factors sustain all the other factors that strengthen credibility. They include integrity, expertise, and preparedness.

  • Integrity represents honesty, forthrightness, and ethical business practices and behavior. Many executives have demonstrated stellar “Executive Presence,” but ethics became their undoing as they lost their credibility and, in many cases, they’re still working to regain that over time.
  • Expertise requires getting good before you worry about looking good to other people. Early in your career, intellectual, horsepower is essential, but it does not replace “Executive Presence”. “Executive Presence” doesn’t measure your merit, intellect, or horsepower. “Executive Presence” measures your capacity to translate your creativity, your good ideas, and your deep expertise for the benefit of other people.
  • Preparedness simply means showing up prepared. Foundations are built upon showing up prepared for something that’s important to you. Perhaps you’ve done a talk-through, a walk-through, or a run-through. If so, the non-foundational components to be covered next won’t harm you. For example, filler words decrease just by the nature of being prepared. When someone challenges you if you show up prepared, you are less likely to get caught off guard.
Vocal Factors

Vocal factors also strengthen credibility and include inflection, cadence, resonance, fillers, and props. Inflection and cadence capture the two most important factors.

  • Inflection refers to the amount that your voice changes in pitch and amplitude, over time. We all know how it feels to experience complete monotone or absence of inflection. For example, with customer service call centers, two variables were strongly associated with successful calls.
    • The ratio of listening to speaking. People who listened more were seen as being more attuned more helpful, and more interested.
    • The second was the variable of inflection. People with higher rates of inflection demonstrated stronger interest, and stronger responsiveness, and even their levels of expertise were rated as higher.
  • Cadence or speed may convey urgency. So, sometimes speed needs to be dialed down, especially if you’ve been told consistently, you speak too quickly. Your fast rate of speech may mean that your audience cannot track and keep up with you. Your levels of expertise are so high that your cognition can’t catch up and process what you’re saying at the rate at which you’re speaking. Some listeners suggest that fast speaking indicates nervousness or a lack of confidence. Slow down a bit by inserting pauses, especially when you’re making a particular point. Pauses signal that you are comfortable with silence. They can signal that you’re making an important point. Pauses can also signal your willingness to be challenged at a specific point in time.
Three Other Factors to Consider
  • Resonance or vocal power, knowing that when a voice is low to average in range (of the assumed gender), people will most frequently describe that voice as being successful, sociable, and smart. Those are the adjectives that do not describe when someone’s voice is really high with the assumed gender. They will say it’s grating, annoying, or too young. As we age, our voices get deeper, and increased age is associated with higher credibility. Thus, research suggests lowering your pitch. Additionally, control your vocal power (volume) and breath control.
  • Filler words become a distraction when used more frequently than normal speech. We all use filler words, including American Sign Language. Filler words represent a part of normal speech. However, beware when they start to become excessively measured by the fact, that they have become a distraction.
  • Props or fidgets such as your phone may detract from your credibility. It could be clicking a pen or a marker. Remember, anything that causes a distraction removes traction from getting DONE. And nobody wants longer meetings.

Aristotle on Ethos (Credibility)

Aristotle tells us that appeals from ethos should not come from appearance but from a person’s use of language. Advertising relies much on ethos and takes the form of credible spokespeople, such as Michael Jordan selling underwear. The historical view holds that three characteristics fortify ethos. Effective meeting leaders embrace all three, namely:

  1. Good moral character,
  2. Good sense, and
  3. Goodwill

2. Lead Meetings by Increasing Your Ease (logos)

Dr. Cuddy’s Foundational Factors on Ease

Four foundational factors sustain the other factors that increase your appearance of ease and strengthen credibility. For instance, diet, sleep, exercise, and social support increase ease and credibility.

  • Diet – “Is there any food in your food?”
  • Sleep – “Is there any rest in your sleep?”
  • Exercise – “Do you move routinely and develop stress resilience?”
  • Social support and friendships make us stronger, more stress resilient, and more capable when we’re under fire from any number of things that we cannot control.
Other Easing Factors

Additionally, easing factors also strengthen credibility including stability, congruence, connection, and authenticity.

  • Stability (emotional) refers to how we navigate our inner world of thoughts, emotions, and feelings. You tame and develop emotional regulation by recognizing, even naming the emotion, to create space between you and the challenge. Called “labeling,” a descriptive mode brings us into the present moment and can regulate the brain’s amygdala from overtaking our response. You could say internally, my heart is racing, my face is getting flushed, my hands are getting sweaty, etc., and your central nervous system will calm down. Therefore, expressing the emotion prevents it from taking over.
  • Congruence implies alignment of your words with your body language.
  • Connection includes strong eye contact, although it varies by culture. Do you know how to listen to people, do you maintain a connection with them over time? Above all, they want to know that you are at ease connecting with them.
  • Authenticity signals the ease of self-assurance. What are your strengths, what are your values, what are your needs? What is your vision and what are you striving for in the world? In other words, authenticity creates self-assurance and a clear purpose that anchors you over and over.

Aristotle on Logos (Internal Consistency)

Aristotle tells us that appeals from logos refer to internal consistency and reasoning of the message—clarity of your claims, logic of your rationale, and effectiveness of your supporting evidence. Aristotle’s favorite approach above all, logos captures the logic used to support claims (induction and deduction) with facts and statistics.

  • The impact of logos may be called an argument’s logical appeal.
  • A meeting leader supports inductive logic by requiring facts, evidence, and support. They allow participants to develop a general conclusion. Or they lead deductive logic by challenging participants with a general proposition and then eliciting specific facts, evidence, and support.

3. Lead Meetings by Curtailing Your Ego (pathos)

Dr. Cuddy’s Foundational Factors on Ego

Learn how to Lead Meetings that get results!

Dr. Cuddy’s equation on “Executive Presence”

Ego as a denominator in Dr. Cuddy’s equation on “Executive Presence” means we are dividing our credibility and ease to get a final quotient (where more is better). So, when you divide a number for credibility plus ease with an exceedingly high number, you erode your quotient. What participants want is true confidence and true humility. Therefore, an effective leader may hold back their point of view until they hear from others to be sure that they’re getting the information that they need from other people. For example, from CS Lewis we have the following:

“True humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s thinking about yourself less often.” — CS Lewis

Aristotle on Pathos (Audience Focus)

Pathos (Greek for “suffering” or “experience”) refers to an “appeal to the audience’s sympathies and imagination.” The persuasive appeal of pathos focuses on your participants’ sense of identity, their self-interests, and emotions. Therefore, many consider pathos the strongest of the appeals.

Be cautious as appeals to participants’ sense of identity and self-interest exploit common biases. They naturally bend in the direction of what is advantageous to them, what serves their interests, or the interests of the groups to which they belong.

Finally, to improve one’s “Executive Presence,” continue to minimize or avoid using the first person singular “I” or “me.” Substitute the integrative “we” or “us” or refer to the collective and pluralistic “you.” The fewer times you say “I,” the more respect you will gain as you get viewed as the one who leads meetings that create clear and actionable results.

~~~~~~~~

NOTE: These three appeals are used to describe rhetoric, which we define as “the art of adjusting ideas to people, and people to ideas.” Fortify yourself with a deeper understanding of rhetoric and argumentation if you want to lead challenging meetings more effectively by becoming a better facilitator.

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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 daily 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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.

Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN

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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference

The Servant Leader Solution Benefits Everyone

The Servant Leader Solution Benefits Everyone

by | May 6, 2021 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Structure

FEAR: F#©% Everything And Run

If the thought of change instills the FUD factor in you (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) you’re not alone. Fear of change keeps people in relationships they’ve outgrown, jobs they don’t like, and even hairstyles that no longer suit them. Likewise, organizations suffer fear, uncertainty, and doubt over change, even when they understand that change is necessary if they are to add value and remain competitive. Fear that they may fail. Uncertainty about how to change, or rather, what actions will lead to successful change. And, finally, doubt about whether all the time, money, and effort it takes to implement the change will be worth it.

Meetings That Get Results, by Terrence Metz. Become a Servant Leader

Available September 15 through Penguin Random House. Published by Berrett-Koehler. Pre-order your copy today!

That’s where you come in. The truth is people don’t change their minds, they make new decisions based on new or added information—and sometimes frequently. This new and added information accelerates change by influencing decision-making in both individuals and groups.[i]

The Servant Leader

With that in mind, a servant leader (like you) does not change people’s minds, but rather, makes it easier for people to choose appropriate change supported through more informed decisions. By speaking with people rather than at them, servant leaders create environments that foster breakthrough solutions. The problem is, in most organizations this change begins during meetings. Yet, meetings often fail for one of three reasons:

  1. The wrong people are attending (rare)
  2. The right people attend but are apathetic and don’t care (rarest)
  3. The right people care but they don’t know how to conduct an effective meeting (bingo!)

We know that groups can make higher quality decisions than the smartest person in the group, so why don’t we invest in learning how to run better meetings? Part of the problem can be found in our muscle memory.

When part of a group or team, we are more attuned to taking orders than creating collaborative solutions.

The Servant Leader Solution

As the workplace transforms, leadership techniques change. Today, instead of dealing mostly with individuals (one-on-one conversations), servant leaders work frequently with people in groups (ceremonies, events, meetings, and workshops). Instead of supervising hours of workload, they help their teams become self-managing. Instead of directing tasks, they motivate people to achieve results. Facing consecutive days of back-to-back meetings, meeting participants value the importance of well-run meetings that stay focused on aligning team activities with organizational goals. Professionally trained facilitators solve communication problems in meetings or workshops by ensuring the group stays focused on the meeting objectives while applying meeting designs that lead to more informed decisions. Yet, while modern leaders exhibit many of these positive traits compared to traditional or historic leaders, a further shift is required to be truly facilitative, so that teams and groups realize the full potential of their commitment, consensus, and ownership.

Characteristics of the Servant Leader Difference

Modern Leaders Servant Leaders
Communicate and receive feedback Structure activities so that stakeholders and team members evaluate them and each other
Content experts, based on position and power Context experts, based on credibility, genuineness, and inspiration
Effective interpersonal skills People savvy, but also group-focused
Have some meeting management skills Skills that use groups to build complex outputs by structuring conversations based on a collaborative tone
Involved in directing tasks Facilitate plans and agreements based on group input
Remain accountable for results Transfer ownership so that members are highly skilled and accountable for outcomes
Value teamwork and collaboration Focus on removing impediments while providing procedures that fortify self-organizing teams

 

Have you ever led a meeting? I’m going to assume you have. So, ask yourself, when the meeting was over, what changed from the moment your participants walked into the meeting? As a servant leader and meeting facilitator, you become the change agent, someone who takes a group from where they are at the beginning to where they need to be at the conclusion. All leaders must know where they are going. They must know what the group is intending to build, decide, or leave with when the meeting is done. Effective servant leaders also start with the end in mind.

A Servant Leader Takes Command of the Questions

The servant leader does not have answers, but rather, takes command of the questions. These optimal questions are scripted and properly sequenced. If you were designing a new home, for example, you would consider the foundation and structure long before you decide on the color of the grout. By responding to appropriate questions, meeting participants’ focus, and generating their collective preferences and requirements. A neutral, meeting leader values rigorous preparation, anticipates group dynamics, and designs the meeting accordingly. The meeting leader becomes responsible for managing the entire approach—the agenda, the ground rules, the flow of conversations, etc., —but not the content developed during the meeting. Therefore, effective meetings result from building a safe and trustworthy environment, one that provides “permission to speak freely” without fear of reprisal or economic loss. Ironically, the more structured the meeting, the more flexible you (the meeting facilitator) can be. Without structure, meeting design, or a road map, you can never tell exactly where you are, or more important, how much remains undone. With structure, you can take the scenic route because you have a plan that references your original design.

Whereas groups without structure who take the scenic route get lost, or worse, cannot agree on where to go next.

Benefits of Embracing a Facilitative Leadership Technique

The Servant Leader Solution Benefits EveryoneWhen organizations support skilled and facilitative leadership for product development, project management, and others, they are allocating human capital to ensure the success of their single most expensive investment—meetings. They do this by ensuring that when . . .

  • Context is carefully managed, and teams are free to focus on higher quality and value—quality being defined as satisfying customer expectations and value being defined as exceeding customer expectations.
  • Staff are treated like partners and collaborators, and commitment and motivation increase.
  • Stakeholders’ ideas are sought, and meetings become collaborative, innovative, and vibrant.

The value of embracing the servant leader, facilitative leadership technique extends beyond meetings to benefit a widening circle of people:

You Benefit By . . .

  • Earning respect and recognition for being one who leads better meetings.
  • Increasing your leadership consciousness, facilitation competence, and meeting design confidence.
  • Learning how to modify and adapt proven agendas, procedures, and various information-gathering, analyzing, and deciding tools.

Your Organization Benefits By . . .

  • Expediting the output of highly sought deliverables.
  • Improving the culture and team spirit while enabling outstanding individual performances.
  • Reducing the cost of omissions, issues subject to normal oversight.
  • Reducing the cost of wasted meetings and wasted time in meetings.

Your Community Benefits By . . .

  • Encouraging shared planning efforts to improve the distribution of resources.
  • Improving volunteerism.
  • Increasing decision transparency.
  • Solidifying shared ownership.

All Society Benefits By . . .

  • Increasing eco-effectiveness when reducing wasted time and resources.
  • Improving the likelihood of win-win scenarios.
  • Motivating hitherto unused or underused intellectual capacity.

“Meetings That Get Results” aims to shift your thinking from facilitation (as a noun or a static way of being) to facilitating (as a verb or a dynamic way of doing)—truly making it easier for your meeting participants to make more informed decisions. Leading is about stimulating and inspiring people, and facilitating skills epitomize the DNA of servant leaders.

Facilitation Liberates Leaders

In the past, leaders needed to be content experts. Today, organizations already employ and engage a wealth of subject matter experts. What they need are leaders who know how to be facilitative while managing context. In the past, leadership was about giving answers. Today, leadership is about leading with precise and properly sequenced questions while always providing a safe environment for everybody’s response. Imagine the following scenario. Your team needs to develop a plan that will solve employee burnout in the cybersecurity department. To assess the value of proposed solutions, they’ll need to know the purpose of the cybersecurity department, and why it exists.

Which of the following makes better sense . . .?

A ‘presenter’ might access the cybersecurity department charter from HR (Human Resources). In most organizations, this would take from fifteen minutes to five hours or longer. Then spend another fifteen minutes building their PowerPoint slides. Then take five minutes to present the slides and another ten to twenty minutes managing Q & A (questions and answers) about the content on the slides. Call it one hour total (minimum). At the conclusion, the presenter still owns the content they showed on the slides.

Alternatively…

You, as the meeting leader, can use a procedure, such as our Purpose Tool. The Purpose Tool distills a consensual expression about the purpose of the cybersecurity department directly from the subject matter experts who understand both the purpose and the problems within the department today. In fifteen minutes or less, you can lead the team to build an expression of shared purpose using the Purpose Tool.

Most importantly, at the end of the fifteen minutes the meeting participants, not you, own the results.

A structured technique bestows your participants with ownership right from the beginning. But here is the real joy—once you understand how to use a tool (i.e., how to manage the context), you can use it repeatedly. Additionally, you don’t need to have detailed expertise on specific content. You only need to have a conversational understanding of the terms being used. “Meetings That Get Results” will raise your consciousness around the roles of meeting designer, meeting facilitator, and meeting leader by helping you understand how to . . .

  • Apply facilitator skills such as precise questioning, keen observing, and active listening to improve meetings
  • remain content-neutral, passionate about results, yet unbiased about the path
  • think separately about facilitation and meeting design, and 
  • understand that the roles of meeting coordinator, meeting documentor, meeting facilitator, and meeting designer are not persons, but rather, positions, that are frequently performed by the same person

~~~~~~~~ [i] For the past thirty years, most ‘changes’ have been both digital and dynamic, constantly shifting—based on stuff that is ‘in-formation‘. With ‘in-formation,’ change is both inherent and inevitable—only growth is optional.

______

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 daily 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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.

Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN

______

With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference

Best One-Page Meeting Agenda Template Plus Three Workshop Agendas

Best One-Page Meeting Agenda Template Plus Three Workshop Agendas

by | Apr 1, 2021 | Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure

Regardless of their personal style, experts and professionals who lead effective meetings rely on a simple, one-page meeting agenda.
(Templates for which we’ve included .docx and .rtf links for you to download below.)

Meeting Agenda Template

Taking a few minutes before every meeting to prepare your simple meeting agenda can prevent wasting another hour in yet another meeting.

This meeting agenda template focuses on what DONE looks like for all meeting agenda steps. It’s all about getting DONE because nobody wants more meetings or, especially, more time in meetings.

If completing this meeting agenda template only gets you to think clearer about your meeting purpose, scope, and deliverables, your preparation will have been rewarded. Once you revise the style of your meeting agenda template, you can modify or repurpose your future meeting agendas in a few minutes. Always stay focused on ‘“right to left” thinking, which means keeping the end in mind by knowing what DONE looks like.

Add Content to Your Meeting Agenda Template

Develop your meeting agenda template by adding your own content. Modify the picture below of the meeting agenda template or download a DOCX or RTF document. 

Start with a clear statement of your meeting purpose. Then articulate your meeting scope, both what is included and what is excluded (IS NOT). Carefully spell out your meeting objectives, frequently called “deliverables.”  For standard business practices, Steven Covey refers to the objectives as “the end in mind.” In Agile communities, you are expressing what DONE looks like. The Lean and Six Sigma communities may refer to it as using “right-to-left thinking,” where you go to the end of the written line and work backward (in the English language), from “right” (ending) to “left” (beginning).

While the first and last two agenda steps (Introduction and Wrap) repeat themselves from meeting to meeting, modify steps two through XX with content, questions, and activities that complete your meeting objectives. Two secrets for building a compelling, one-page agenda template include:

  1. The best meetings generate some type of action or follow-up, so make sure that all activities are assigned to someone in the meeting, and
  2. ‘If it wasn’t documented, it didn’t happen,” so be sure to distribute thorough meeting notes soon after the meeting concludes.

NOTE: We are very careful of rhetoric here. We do NOT ask “Who is going to do this?” Rather, we ask, “Who will take responsibility for reporting back to this group on the status of this?” As we all know, many volunteers re-assign the tasks to somebody that works for them.

Make it a 50-minute Meeting, Not 60

Learn to keep your meetings to fifty minutes by starting five minutes after and ending five minutes before the hour or half-hour. Stop treating your one-hour meetings too lightly with little or no preparation. Statistically, we waste more time and money in briefer meetings than full-day or multiple-day workshops.

All in, you cost your organization at least USD$150 per hour. With eight of you in a one-hour meeting, your “burn rate” will be around $20 per minute. Therefore, some organizations encourage meeting participants to NOT attend if there is no agenda because meeting time represents a high probability of wasted time. For optimal productivity, here is the framework for a field-tested meeting agenda template, which you can quickly modify for your fifty-minute meetings.

 

Meeting Agenda Template

Meeting Agenda Template

Download .docx file Agenda Template

Download .rtf file Agenda Template

Meeting Experts Note:

  • All agendas, even a one-page agenda, should include a beginning, middle, and end. Do not skip the beginning or end. See other MGRUSH  Best Practices for how to manage robust introductions and wraps.
  • Capture participants in advance to anticipate modifications or additions. Since we expect our participants to own the meeting output, they should provide some voice as to HOW the output is derived.
  • Crafting a simple, one-page agenda around the deliverable makes it easier to create the agenda steps required. For example, a “Wedding Plan” might include decisions about food, music, and ceremony. A project plan might include objectives and key results, situation analysis, alignment, and assignments.
  • Distribute your completed and written meeting agenda before the meeting. Earlier is better, preferably as part of a “read-ahead”.
  • Keep in mind that simple agenda steps ought to reflect WHAT, the objective (i.e., noun) of the step. Do not detail HOW (i.e., verb) you are going to facilitate the activity. Save the details, method, and tools for your private, annotated agenda or notes (see supporting rationale and more thorough explanation in the next section).
  • Observe in the picture above that each agenda step should stress a discrete outcome (i.e., a condition) or output (i.e., something that can be documented).
  • Time box strategic discussions unless you are hosting a strategic planning session. Strategic issues bog down many tactical and operational meetings. Defer strategic issues to a separate meeting time and place. In other words, most meetings waste time discussing stuff not related to the deliverable of the meeting or the agenda; i.e., scope creep within a meeting. And scope creep begins in meetings.

Nobody Wants More Meetings or Longer Meetings

Yet many of us find ourselves in meetings a few dozen hours per week (or more). Why do we meet so frequently since seldom do meetings remove stuff from our “To-Do” list? On the contrary, most meetings normally lead to more work. How do we fix this? Start with your agenda steps.

Your meeting participants do not want any more work, and verbs are work. We perform verbs so that our actions yield results, frequently called objects (hence the term objective). Objects are also known as nouns: persons, places, things, or events about which we need more information to make more informed decisions. Label your agenda steps as nouns because verbs add no value for participants.

Agenda Steps Too Frequently Stress Work (i.e., Verbs), Not Results (Objects)

Verbs like “identify” and “define” add no value to a simple agenda. Verbs shown on meeting agendas only help meeting leaders and facilitators who need to know what method they plan to use for delivering results at the end of agenda steps. Therefore, keep the verbs to yourself. Put them on your annotated agenda (i.e., play script for you only) or private notes, but spare your participants the burden of doing your work. Most participants seek less work, not more, so use an object or noun for describing agenda steps.

Note, for example, that an agenda step may deliver a “definition” but it cannot deliver a “define.” An agenda step may deliver a “decision,” but it cannot deliver “deciding.” Be precise with your rhetoric.

Our business units, departments, and activities are organized around nouns, not verbs. Everyone performs the same verbs, such as Plan > Acquire > Operate > Control (MGRUSH) or Plan > Do > Check > Act (Deming). Look at organizational design. People get organized around things (nouns), such as treasury (Finance), regulatory (Legal), human capital (Human Resources), products (Marketing and Engineering), customers (Sales and Service), etc. Everyone performs the same verbs that describes WHAT they do. However, they are performing or adding value to different resources or objects, thus HOW they do it varies.

Meeting Deliverables are Also Nouns

Therefore, view your meeting deliverable as an object and exclude verbs. Always keep your participants focused on “what DONE looks like.” Begin with the meeting deliverable and describe the object you have in your hands when your meeting is complete. Do the same for each agenda step, so that everyone stays focused on the end in mind. Observe the two agendas in the table for modifying a simple agenda.

Use Nouns (Objects) to Describe Your Meeting Agenda Steps - NOT Verbs

Agenda Steps Should Describe What DONE Looks Like

Verbs Belong on Your Annotated Agenda

Place the verbs in your annotated agenda where you should include detailed instructions for your procedure. For example, if using break-out sessions:

  • What are the team names?
  • Who are the team CEOs (i.e., Chief Easel Officer)?
  • What question(s) do you want teams to answer?
  • Which method(s) for analysis will yield consensual understanding and agreement?
  • What media support do you need to explain a tool (e.g., PowerBalls)?

Most people include verbs in their basic agendas to remind them what to do as the facilitator. However, the instructions they provide themselves are devoid of the painstaking detail required to keep groups clear and engaged. If, as a participant, you have an elevated level of confidence that your facilitator knows what they are doing, most assuredly you would rather participate with the agenda on the right (e.g.,”Prioritizing“) because it’s clear and simple. Its agenda steps denote chunks of progress—objects that have been created, not work that is forthcoming.

Three Basic Agendas and Agenda Steps for Frequent Deliverables

Here are three basic agendas you can use for the most common deliverables from meetings: plans, decisions, and solutions. Of the hundreds of Best Practices articles you can access, many explain the specific tools and procedures for facilitating each of the agenda steps below. Use the magnifying glass on the web site to search for the term you want to learn about more.

Basic Planning Agenda Steps[*]

  • Launch (see seven-activity procedure)
  • Mission (WHY are we here?)
  • Values (WHO are we?)
  • Vision (WHERE are we going? How do we know if we got there or not?)
  • Success Measures (WHAT are our measurements of progress?)
  • Current Situation (WHERE are we now?)
  • Actions (WHAT should we do?—from strategy through tasks)
  • Alignment (Is this the right stuff to do?)
  • Roles and Responsibilities (WHO does WHAT, by WHEN?)
  • Guardian of Change (WHAT should we tell our stakeholders?)
  • Review and Wrap (see four-activity procedure)

 

Basic Decision-making Agenda Steps[**]

  • Launch (see seven-activity procedure)
  • Purpose of the Object (e.g., any object such as the acquisition of another product line)
  • Options (for the Objects)
  • Criteria (about the Objects)
  • Deselection and Decision (prioritization)
  • Testing (for decision quality)
  • Review and Wrap (see four-activity procedure)

 

Basic Problem-solving Agenda Steps[**]

  • Launch (see seven-activity procedure)
  • Purpose of the Solution (Description of Ideal)
  • ‘Problem’ (Problem Definition)
  • Symptoms (Externally Observable Factors)
  • Causes
  • Actions
    • Preventions [x-axis, Timeline 1]
    • Cures [x-axis, Timeline 2]
    • IT Service Department Personnel (y-axis, Persona A)
    • Management (y-axis, Persona B)
  • Testing
  • Review and Wrap (see four-activity procedure)

[*] I have ‘greyed out’ the less important terms because they signify or trigger meaning about the more important questions in black that should be the focus of the Agenda Step. 

[**] Terms that are ‘greyed out’ are for your eyes only and not to be shown on the plain agenda you share.

______

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 daily 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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.

Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN

______

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Why Meeting Participants Have An Obligation To Contribute

Why Meeting Participants Have An Obligation To Contribute

by | Mar 9, 2021 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Managing Conflict, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support, Problem Solving

Many articles talk about getting meeting participants involved. Seriously? If the meeting output impacts participants’ quality of life, how much money they make, who works for them, etc., rest assured, they will add their point of view, if asked.

However, if the meeting output, frequently called a deliverable, does not affect them, they should not be attending.

Meeting participants should be engaged before they show up. If not, why are they attending? If their attendance is based on your mandate or a boss’s edict, then stop it. Your meeting has lost before it begins.

The point is when meeting participants are professionals, meaning paid employees who add value to an organization. Meetings are NOT simply an opportunity to speak up, meetings are an obligation to contribute as part of the implied contract of being a professional.

In-person or online, meeting participants have an obligation to participate.

In-person or online, meeting participants have an obligation to participate.

We are not talking about unstructured community discussions and volunteer settings we refer to them respectfully as Kum-bah-yah. Rather, we are talking about the vast majority of business meetings where the meeting output becomes input to help advance initiatives such as products, projects, departments, business units, and organizations.

Meeting Participants Called Subject Matter Experts [SMEs]

Professional meeting participants are made up of members from the business and technical communities who contribute their subject matter expertise, also known as content. Once they feel ‘safe’ to speak up and are engaged with clear and pertinent questions, they develop ideas and thoughts that are shared as content.

Do not let their ideas evaporate in the ether. Remind participants that the facilitator has an obligation to protect them from harm, and they have an obligation to share their thoughts and input. Also, frequently remind your meeting participants that their…

Professional meeting participant responsibilities include:

  • Preparing and actively taking part.
  • Representing the voice of their business needs and goals.
  • Owning the results of meetings in which they participate, if they imply or suggest consensual agreement.
  • Communicating meeting results to others, as appropriate.

Notice the underlying demand that you expect meeting participants to invest time before and after their meeting. This may be a big surprise for people accustomed to only showing up, going to the next meeting(s), and eventually going home until their next round of meetings ‘tomorrow.’

Why We Need Meeting Participants (Power of Plurality)

Plain and simple—decision quality. Nobody is smarter than everybody because groups of people can develop more ideas (options) than individuals on their own. Any person or group with more options at their disposal will statistically make higher-quality decisions. By leveraging one another, we are capable of breakthroughs and innovations not realized when working alone.

Professional meeting participant characteristics include:

  • Arriving with a clear understanding of the meeting’s purpose, scope, and deliverables.
  • Coming prepared, having read the pre-read BEFORE the meeting, not AT the meeting.
  • Striving to be present and focused, and to not be a cause of distractions (e.g., texting).
  • Preparing input and responses for the dialogue that concerns them most.
  • Willing to listen during the meeting.
  • Understanding that there is more than one right answer.

How You Can Help Your Meeting Participants Become Better Listeners

As the facilitator, help your meeting participants become better listeners. Dr. Ralph Nichols, “Father of the Field of Listening”, notes three behaviors that perfectly align with the role of facilitator. Begin to exhibit these behaviors yourself, and meeting participants will follow you, making them better listeners during meetings.

1. Anticipate

First, strive to anticipate the speaker’s next point. As they tend toward additional content, clarifying existing content, trying to understand the context, etc. As the facilitator, your anticipation helps shape your direction and participants will follow you. For example, should you be walking closer to the speaker to understand them or closer to the easel to write down their contributions? Meeting participants will take your cue and focus on the information being shared or the uncertainty that needs to be cleared up. If they anticipate correctly, their understanding has been reinforced. If they anticipate incorrectly, they wonder why, and the cognitive dissonance will further increase their attention and focus to understand why.

2. Identify

Another method to improve participants’ listening is to identify the supporting elements a speaker uses in building points. Here is the primary role of the facilitator, to help extract the most significant contributions. Next, ensure that you capture and record the supporting elements so that all the meeting participants can view the same information. Build understanding among all participants by challenging their thoughts, or as we say in the MGRUSH curriculum “Make Your Thinking Visible.” Participants, as speakers, rely on three actions to build their points:

  • Characteristics of speakers

    • They explain their point,
    • May get emotional and harangue the point, or
    • They illustrate the point with a factual example or illustration.

  • Sophisticated listeners know that . . .

Attitudes are frequently subjective and specific to the speaker or contributor who “feels” a certain way. While other factors that motivate behavior include values and beliefs, sophisticated listeners hope to better understand what evidence, facts, examples, situations, or other objective information may have shaped the attitude or caused the feelings.

For example, we know that the preferred spice levels in foods we eat vary from person to person. When a certain threshold or pain level is exceeded, we might label that bowl of chili we’re eating as too spicy. However, someone sitting next to us, eating the same chili, might choose to add additional spice because they have a different threshold of pain or sensitivity to capsicum. Therefore, the level of capsicum measured by Scoville Units provides an objective basis for understanding the claim, “This chili is too spicy.” Consequently, participants increase their listening efficiency when they accept the ‘subjective’ point of view and seek an objective reason for it that everyone understands.

3. Reflect

A third way to improve the listening skills of your participants is to consistently reflect the points that have been recorded. Good listeners take advantage of short pauses to summarize and absorb what has been said. Periodic summaries reinforce absorption and understanding.

Listening is Hard Work

Most of us are poor listeners for a variety of reasons. We have had little training and few training opportunities exist (although the MGRUSH Professional Facilitation class is a significant exception). We think faster than others speak. Plus, listening is hard work and requires complete concentration. It is a challenge to be a good listener, but good listeners get big rewards.

Guard Against Selective Perception

Participants interpret and filter everything they hear in meetings and workshops. They hear or see differently based on their individual biases, or colored lenses. To illustrate how lenses operate, note the vastly different pictures below are all from the same area in space using different lenses including radio, infrared, visible light, x-ray, gamma ray, and others.

blank

Varied Perspectives, One Reality

NASA Public Domain

Or consider the following where we discover the horizontal lines below are truly parallel and not askew. Some will claim that “no way” are the lines parallel, when in fact they are perfectly parallel.

Parallel Lines, or Not?

Parallel Lines, or Not?

Look at the people in the picture below and understand that they are the same height, although appearances deceive.

Same Height, or Not?

Same Height, or Not?

Finally, A Meeting Participants’ Credo as an Obligation, Not an Opportunity

The closest thing to a silver bullet for making facilitators more effective is to get your meeting participants to show up prepared. To that extent, we offer you the following meeting participants’ credo. This credo, or a statement of the beliefs, aims to guide participants’ actions, has been modified from “The Ethics of the Management Profession” Harvard Business Review and is often reprinted as the “Hippocratic Oath for Meetings” by many business organizations around the world.

Meeting Credo:

As a participant, I serve . . .

. . . as society’s fiduciary for_______,  an organization that brings people and resources together to create valued products and services. My purpose is to serve the public’s interest by enhancing the value my organization creates for society. Sustainable value arises when my organization produces economic, social, and environmental output. Output is measurably greater than the opportunity cost of all it consumes.

Ethically Responsible

In fulfilling my role.  .

I Recognize . . .

. . . that any enterprise is at the nexus of different constituencies, whose interests can diverge. While balancing and reconciling various interests, I seek a course that enhances the value my organization can create for society over the long term. This may not always mean growing or preserving current ways and may include such painful actions as restructuring, discontinuation, or sale if these actions preserve or increase value.

I Pledge. . .

that considerations of personal benefit will never supersede the interests of the organization I am supporting. The pursuit of self-interest is the vital engine of a capitalist economy, but unbridled greed can be just as harmful. Therefore, I will guard against decisions and behavior that advance my narrow ambitions but harm the organization I represent and the societies it serves.

I Promise . . .

to understand and uphold, both in letter and spirit, the laws and contracts governing my conduct, that of my organization, and that of the societies in which it operates. My behavior will be an example of integrity, consistent with the values I publicly espouse. I will be equally vigilant in ensuring the integrity of others around me and bring to attention the actions of others that represent violations of this shared professional code.

I Vow . . .

to represent my organization’s performance accurately and transparently to relevant parties, ensuring that investors, consumers, and the public at large can make well-informed decisions. I aim to help people understand how decisions that affect them are made so that choices do not appear arbitrary or biased.

I Will Not Permit . . .

considerations of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, party politics, or social status to influence my choices. I will protect the interests of those who may not have power, but whose well-being depends on my decisions.

I Will Participate . . .

diligently, mindfully, and conscientiously by applying judgment based on the best knowledge available. I will consult colleagues and others who can help inform my judgment and will continually invest in staying abreast of the evolving knowledge in the field, always remaining open to innovation. I’ll do my utmost to develop myself and the next generation of participants so that our organization continues to grow and contribute to the well-being of society.

I Recognize . . .

that my stature and privileges as a professional stem from the honor and trust that the profession as a whole enjoys, and I accept my responsibility for embodying, protecting, and developing the standards of our profession, to enhance that respect and honor.

______

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 daily 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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.

Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN

______

With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference

How Scenario Planning Helps Prevent Missing Requirements

How Scenario Planning Helps Prevent Missing Requirements

by | Jan 5, 2021 | Analysis Methods, Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Planning Approach, Problem Solving

Poor requirements don’t impede projects, missing requirements do.

Experience has taught us that one approach stands above all others when you want to scour for missing requirements—consider ‘dry runs’ by using various scenarios found in scenario planning. Strive to build a range of understanding from the sunny and optimistic “sunny skies” (best case—rare) through the calamitous “stormy skies” (worst case—rare). For robust analysis, include partly sunny and/or partly cloudy conditions (most likely or frequent cases).

For example, recently a vendor offered us a twenty percent discount for making a second purchase. However, without cookies and screen history, their site defaulted to their ‘new customer’ discount of ten percent. Thus, we were unable to use their ‘special offer.’ They had gathered the initial requirements properly (i.e., ten percent discount for new customers) but had not considered the occasional exception (special twenty percent discounts). Scenario planning built around functional requirements helps you anticipate and identify ‘exceptions’ while building more rigorous acceptance criteria.

User Story Procedure

A familiar format for compiling User Stories completes the following procedure but does not anticipate exceptions or conditions. For example, what alternative story develops when a customer’s electricity is interrupted? What might customers do differently if they suddenly realize a financial windfall such as a tax return? Standard approaches create a baseline but do not leverage structure to understand or extract requirements under ALL conditions.

As a _____________________ (persona)

I want ____________________ (functionality)

So that ___________________ (I get business value or benefit)

Gherkin Syntax

Scenario Planning Helps Prevent Missing Requirements

Gherkin Syntax

For others’ User Stories, some people prefer using the Gherkin Syntax. Complete the Gherkin Syntax from each persona’s perspective. However, it also lacks the rigor to explore or prompt for specific exceptions rather than baseline standards.

  • GIVEN    [and]    <precondition>
  • WHEN     [and]    <user action>
  • THEN      [and]    <user action>

The INVEST Test

INVEST represents a mnemonic for testing the thoroughness of each User Story by discretely testing against each of its six components. While INVEST helps validate (or not) a User Story, it also fails to provide a clear and stimulating means to test for what may be missing.

  • I = Independent (self-contained)
  • N = Negotiable (not overly specific)
  • V = Valuable (accompanied by acceptance criteria)
  • E = Estimable (relative sizing)
  • S = Small (optimally completed within two days, maximum)
  • T = Testable (from a user perspective)

The Epic Exception

Commonly you will see flows from a product development perspective that look something like this (except for the red line). While this displays a myopic, developers’ point of view, the customers’ perspective also includes special activities at various times during the year, such as the requirements of creating a budget versus requirements when reviewing or modifying a budget: 

Scenario Planning Helps Prevent Missing Requirements

Scenario Planning: From Vision Through Acceptance Criteria

While the baseline flows above mostly capture the developer’s perspective, the customer also has acceptance criteria (associated with tasks) that occur irregularly, illustrated above as something that may occur every month or so. 

Continue to establish your baseline, as you would today, but take it a step further. To avoid missing occasional features/stories/tasks, test your baseline using the principles of scenario planning. Whether you use structured and sequenced interviewing or build collective understanding through facilitated meetings and workshops, applying the logic and questions appropriate to scenarios improves the likelihood that you won’t miss substantive or critical requirements that rarely occur.

What is Scenario Planning?

Forward-looking deliverables such as five-year plans and shaping curves rely exclusively on the concept of probabilities since no future state is certain. Probabilities consist of shared assumptions, beliefs, and outlooks about some future state or condition.

You help isolate potentially missing requirements by exploring probabilities, particularly when evidence supports multiple outcomes. Scenario planning implies creating ranges and not relying on fixed numbers.

Use Scenario Planning to Create Ranges

Probabilities consist of commonly held assumptions, beliefs, and outlooks about some future state or condition. Forward-looking deliverables such as five-year plans and shaping curves rely exclusively on the concept of probabilities since no future state is certain. How can a facilitator help resolve arguments around conflicting probabilities, particularly when evidence supports multiple outcomes? Create ranges and not fixed numbers.

Strive to avoid building one set of ‘answers.’ Rather, build multiple answers—such as five answers based on perspectives suggested below. Facilitate mutual understanding around potentially different requirements that support five discrete scenario types.

Sunny Skies:

Dare your participants to think positively. Ask them to relieve themselves from concerns about risks and other exogenous factors. Strive to build and agree on a ‘best likely’ scenario, akin to Sunny Skies and Clear Sailing. Don’t allow impediments or other negative throttles. While probabilistically unlikely, the Sunny Skies scenario provides a bookend, number, or set of numbers that would unlikely ever be exceeded.

Stormy Skies:

Take your participants in the opposite direction. Allow for every conceivable catastrophe or injurious situation. Try to fall short of ‘bankruptcy’ or ‘going out of business’ (but relent if your participants make an urgent claim that complete “death” is one potential outcome).

Partly Sunny Skies:

Having built the two prior scenarios, take a closer look at the Sunny Skies scenario and toggle some of the less likely occurrences. Strive to make this view and set of numbers positive, but not extreme. If necessary, use the PowerBall tool to rank the importance of assumptions and only toggle the most important assumptions, leaving others untouched.

Partly Cloudy Skies:

With our Bookend rhetoric, move again in the opposite direction by taking a closer look at the Stormy Skies scenario and toggle some of its less likely occurrences. Here you want to lead to a set of negative numbers, but not in the extreme. Have them study past performance and downturns for reliable percentages. Again, if necessary, use the PowerBall tool to rank the impact of assumptions and only toggle the most impactful, leaving the others untouched.

Probable Skies:

Take the four scenarios and potential sets of numbers to derive discussion and consensus around the most likely. Force participants to defend their arguments with an appeal to the prioritized lists of assumptions and revisit the prioritization if necessary. Along the way, Scenario Planninglisten and note the most extreme numbers being suggested as ‘most likely’ because they can help establish the final range.

Further analysis can take the final range and establish targets and thresholds for on target performance (e.g., green lights), cautionary performance (eg, yellow lights), and intervention performance (e.g., red lights). The value of a facilitator is rarely greater than when serving as a referee for future conditions.

Most critically to your success, avoid unstructured discussions. Carefully and extensively document and define all assumptions. Remember to use your Definition tool, since frequently you will discover participants in violent agreement with each other!

NOTE: The value of a meeting facilitator is rarely greater than when serving as a referee for future conditions that cannot be proven, even when using evidence-based support.

Scenario planning approaches and questions unveil missed requirements and help provide more detail around user acceptance criteria. The approaches also provide value in general business situations, such as establishing thresholds for scorecard inputs and dashboards. Perhaps most importantly, as a facilitator, you will find they are fun and engaging. Arguing about prior performance can get heated. Arguing about potential futures keeps your situation much more lighthearted.

National Intelligence Council Support for Facilitating Scenario Planning

The MGRUSH Professional Facilitative Leadership training explains the importance of meeting design and facilitating scenario planning. Therefore, if you find yourself in that role, consider purchasing the USD$2 Kindle version of “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” to support your meeting design and preparation.

Future Scenarios

For instance, Robert Moran’s excellent summary can be found in “The Futurist” March-April 2013 issue, sponsored by the World Future Society.

Peering into the Future

Peering into the Future

  1. Fusion: an interconnected East and West collaborate to address global challenges and innovation blossoms as nearly everyone prospers.
  2. Genie out of the Bottle: gaping extremes describe the global environment and within countries and communities as the best positioned to reap most of the benefits of the new world order.
  3. Non-State: cities, NGOs (ie, non-governmental organizations), global elites, terror groups, and multinationals derive global change and chaos.
  4. Stalled Engines: the Pacific Rim engages in nationalistic brinkmanship and amplified conflict ensues. Global growth slows and the United States turns inward as globalization unravels.

Additionally, the report covers a forward view towards individual empowerment, diffusion of power, aging populations, mass urbanization, and accelerating change such as:

  • 3-D printing and robotics revolutionize manufacturing
  • America’s domination begins waning
  • Economic power shifting East and South from the West and the North
  • The global middle class continues to expand
  • Hydraulic fracturing could make the USA energy-independent
  • The threat of a pandemic looms

In other words, the scenarios provide your planning session and decision-makers with valid considerations. Therefore, to borrow directly from Mr Moran:

“With technology empowering the individual, the battle for the twenty-first century could be the battle of the self-organizing swarm against the command and control pyramid.”

In conclusion, let us know how your session turns out.

______

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 daily 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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.

Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN

______

With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference