Facilitation

Making Meetings Matter: Facilitation Services

We’ve all sat through those painful meetings that drag on without accomplishing much. I’ll work with you to ensure the best possible use of your group’s time. Using a variety of meeting tools and techniques, along with strategies for engaging people with different styles and backgrounds, I design sessions that meet your objectives. Then as your facilitator, I’ll make sure your group stays focused, engaged, and productive during the meeting itself.

Contact me to discuss how I can help your group with any of the following:

‣Strategic planning – Where are we going? What should we be doing? How will we do it? I’ll work with your group to help them answer these questions and produce a written action plan to guide you into the future.
‣Teambuilding retreats – Facilitated conversations, fun simulations, team assessments, learning, and planning are combined to help your group find ways to work better together.
‣Process improvement – Increase the effectiveness and efficiency of any multi-step process in your organization. I’ll help your group quickly create a map of the existing process and a plan for making improvements with high return on investment.
‣Appreciative Inquiry – Based on the idea that we move in the direction of the questions we ask, this is a great method for inspiring, designing, and realizing positive change in your organization.
‣Open Space and World Cafe sessions – These innovative, participant-driven processes are two great ways to get large groups engaged in dialogue about questions that really matter. Consider these approaches for conferences, networking events, and community brainstorming sessions.
‣Focus groups – Often the best way to really understand the nuances of a target group’s perspective, focus groups allow us the opportunity to bring group representatives together to discuss their answers to your key questions. I’ll help you craft the right questions, facilitate the group for you, and produce a report highlighting key themes.
‣Teleconferences – Virtual meetings can pose special challenges. I’ll help your call go more smoothly by using techniques especially adapted for phone- or web-based meetings.
‣Other meetings – Does your group need to develop new ideas? make a decision? design a process? resolve a conflict? I’ll work with you to ensure an effective conversation.

“Thank you so much for the retreat that you did for our committee. It was exactly(!) what I had envisioned, even though I couldn't articulate it very well... On behalf of the whole committee, thank you for getting us off to an energized start.”

Sample Projects

‣New Leader “Learning Communities” for a local hospital. For the first six months in their new roles, these leaders met every other week for 90 minutes. The sessions were an opportunity for the participants to learn and/or strengthen leadership skills and to get support in dealing with specific challenges that arose in their new roles. In leading the sessions, I conducted brief experiential learning activities, facilitated discussions around challenging issues, and provided group (and occasionally individual) coaching.
‣Planning Retreat for the board of a nonprofit health advocacy and education organization. At a transition point in its history, this highly action-oriented group had ambitious goals for what it wanted to accomplish during its weekend planning retreat. I designed and facilitated a 1.5-day session that helped them examine their purpose and identity, strengths and resources, key external influences on their organization, and the roles and responsibilities of their staff and various volunteers, as well as developing written short- and long-term goals with identified next steps. At the end of the weekend, one participant told me it was the best facilitated retreat he’d participated in on all his many years of sitting on nonprofit boards!
‣Teambuilding Session for the mostly-new staff of a cross-functional department in a major university. Through a structured work styles assessment and a fun training game (that simulated some of the dynamics the group was likely to encounter on-the-job), I helped this group get to know one another by identifying and discussing their strengths both as individuals and as a team. The activities also helped them identify the challenges they were likely to encounter in working together, and steps they could take to ensure they worked effectively together. The participants also noted that the session helped underscore for them how important it is for them to work collaboratively with one another.