Chairing meetings requires many of the skills to facilitate effectively

Success begins with vision and meeting vision comes alive by articulating the purpose, scope, and objectives in advance.  Other considerations that support successful facilitating or chairing rely heavily on people skills such as:

Leadership when Chairing Meetings

• Ability to trust in the good nature of the human spirit, even in high-risk situations
• Accepting participants for what they are and not what you wish they were
• Capacity to approach people for their present value rather than past performance
• Embracing human nature that does not require approval or recognition
• Willingness to treat everyone, even casual acquaintances, with common courtesies and kindness

Flexibility when Chairing Meetings

Effective leaders when chairing meetings also remain flexible.  Ironically, the best-prepared and fully structured plans afford the most freedom and flexibility because they provide a backup plan if ad hoc or spontaneous discussions prove fruitless.  As emphasized in other posts, communicating clearly is important to any leader, facilitator, or chair.  Beware of participant biases and tendencies including:

• Missing the context through which a claim may be valid
• Overgeneralization that causes lost or misinterpreted meaning
• Presumptions that everyone is thinking what the subject matter expert is thinking
• Primacy and recency effects—whereby the first and final arguments carry more weight
• Use of terms that are unclear or ambiguous

16 Tips When Chairing Meetings

Additionally, and specifically when chairing meetings, as opposed to workshop facilitators, here are seventeen additional and valuable tips:

1. Always know your deliverable is the same as the meeting objective and logically identical to starting with the end in mind.  In the world of Lean Sigma, this is called “right to left” thinking.
2. Always strive to separate facts and evidence from beliefs and opinions.
3. Arrive first and prepare your physical space for optimal seating arrangements.
4. Clarify frequently so that everyone is offered an opportunity to question and challenge. They will find it easier to challenge you as chair, than the original speaker who may own the content.
5. Consider posting the deliverable visually on a large sheet of paper, and restate periodically to reinforce the purpose of the meeting.
6. Explain your role and aspiration to embrace the people and communication skills mentioned above.
7. Help manage conflict and do not simply ignore it. Some of the best ideas and strongest solutions result from getting conflict out in the open where everyone can understand.
8. Limit the size of the meeting by keeping representation between five and nine participants, known to be the “sweet spot” for optimal decision-making. The Agile mindset calls this seven, plus or minus two.
   

   Additionally . . .

   Manage housekeeping (administrivia) such as bathroom locations and safety procedures during your introduction.

9. Manage transitions carefully by reviewing a closed agenda step and clearly moving on to the next open agenda step.
10. Prepare, presell, and at the start of the meeting review the meeting purpose, scope, objectives, agenda, and estimated duration. Because participants should own the meeting output, they have a right to influence how the output is built.
11. Protect your participants but realize that it is not your job to reach down their throat and pull it out of them.  As employees or associates, they have a fiduciary responsibility to speak up when they can offer value.
12. Remain impartial during arguments, or at least demonstrate the appearance of impartiality so that participants can arrive at their own conclusions.
13. Restrict discussion to agenda items or you will subject yourself to scope creep within the meeting, and risk not getting done on time.
14. Seek contributions from everyone but do not embarrass anyone by forcing them to speak.
15. Start on time and police and breaks carefully as well. Do not penalize participants who are on time by starting late.
16. Take breaks when necessary, likely more than traditional.  A five-minute break every 40 minutes may be better than a fifteen-minute break every two hours.

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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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Facilitation Expert

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.