Facilitating a large group meeting can be a daunting task. You have to deal with different personalities, opinions, agendas, and expectations. How can you ensure that your meeting is productive, engaging, and respectful? Here are some tips to help you avoid a facilitation disaster.
Before you plan your meeting, you need to have a clear and specific purpose. What are you trying to achieve? What are the desired outcomes? How will you measure success? Having a clear purpose will help you design your agenda, select your methods, and communicate your expectations to the participants. It will also help you stay focused and on track during the meeting.
Depending on the size and complexity of your meeting, you may need to prepare various materials, such as slides, handouts, flipcharts, polls, surveys, or breakout rooms. Make sure you have enough copies, equipment, and technical support for your materials. Test them before the meeting and have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. Also, make sure you share your materials with the participants in advance, if possible, so they can review them and prepare their questions or comments.
Before prepare materials, you have to make a very good agenda, with specific times for each presentation and depend of each speaker you can organize what type of material support you are going to use during each session.
One of the most important roles of a facilitator is to create a safe and respectful space for dialogue and collaboration. To do this, you need to establish some ground rules for the meeting. These are the norms and expectations that everyone agrees to follow during the meeting. For example, you may ask the participants to turn on their cameras, mute their microphones, listen actively, speak respectfully, contribute constructively, and stay on topic. You can either propose your own ground rules or invite the participants to co-create them with you. Either way, make sure you review them at the beginning of the meeting and remind the participants of them throughout the meeting.
Practice asking - what would you suggest we do? Who would like tohelp with this? Who can see a problem and how to overcome it? What would success look like as feel like to you? What would you see or hear, where, when, that made you feel we have been affective today? Have we got to the real issue yet? What’s the question we wish somebody has answered today? Practice identifying the natural leaders and the cynics in the room. Tap the natural leaders in the room on the shoulder and bring them together. Tap the cynics on the shoulders too and ask then to help the natural leaders to make sure they keep it real and actually cut the crap and deliver
A large group meeting can easily become boring, passive, or chaotic if you don't engage your audience effectively. You need to use a variety of methods and techniques to keep the participants interested, involved, and motivated. For example, you can use icebreakers, energizers, stories, questions, polls, quizzes, games, or simulations to make your meeting more fun and interactive. You can also use breakout rooms, round robins, fishbowls, or world cafes to encourage small group discussions and networking. The key is to match your methods to your purpose, audience, and time frame.
Another challenge of facilitating a large group meeting is managing the group dynamics. You may encounter different types of behaviors, such as dominance, resistance, conflict, or silence. You need to be aware of these behaviors and address them appropriately. For example, you can use techniques such as paraphrasing, summarizing, redirecting, or reframing to balance the participation, clarify the issues, resolve the disagreements, or generate new perspectives. You also need to be flexible and adaptable to the changing needs and moods of the group. You may need to adjust your agenda, pace, tone, or style depending on the situation.
The best way to manage group dynamics is to reveal it to the themselves. It’s always easier for the observer to see any dysfunctions. Involve the group by asking: What are you noticing about this group dynamic?! What’s obvious?! Utilize live polling tools and anonymous contributions board to source ideas and solutions from group members.
The last tip to avoid a facilitation disaster is to follow up and evaluate your meeting. You need to close your meeting with a clear and concise summary of the main points, actions, and next steps. You also need to thank the participants for their time, input, and feedback. After the meeting, you need to send a follow-up email with the meeting notes, slides, resources, or recordings. You also need to solicit feedback from the participants, either through a survey, a phone call, or a chat. You need to analyze the feedback and identify the strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement of your meeting. You also need to celebrate your achievements and acknowledge your learnings.