Are Your Group Get-Togethers Frustrating Because They Don’t Achieve What They Could, Or Should, Achieve?

I work with business groups to ensure their meetings and conferences are productive and inclusive—and that they deliver tangible outcomes.

• I’m frequently called in when a team needs to work through a particular issue. The issue is important. It could be complex and multi-faceted. The stakes are high. The participants’ are time poor—and their time is valuable. There’s pressure to achieve progress or resolution. It can’t be left to chance to get a good result from the meeting. Professional facilitation is needed.

• Other times I’m called in when there’s a need to extract the most from a meeting with a group of internal or external customers or other significant stakeholders, and impress them too. There’s a need to quickly get a group of people, sometimes strangers, to open up and participate fully, and leave feeling the exercise was valuable and worthwhile. Expert facilitation really helps achieve the desired outcomes.

Are you confronted by these sorts of challenges in any of your group get-togethers?

• It becomes a “talk fest” with insufficient solutions or outcomes achieved. There’s a lot of discussion and many words are put on the table—but the conversation doesn’t seem to go anywhere very quickly. And it struggles to stay on track. Time seems to disappear with little to show for it. Participants feel somewhat frustrated because their time hasn’t been spent efficiently or very constructively.

• Dominant personalities control the discussion. The 80/20 rule applies—20% of the people do 80% of the talking. As a result some of the others simply go through the motions. Some of them feel disregarded—maybe even slightly hostile as a consequence. You loose the benefit of their contribution, and morale and productivity suffers.

• There’s a lack of direction. You meet—but to what end? You know there are things to discuss but what should be the priority? You’re not achieving what you need to achieve from your time together. Somehow you’re not getting from point A to point B. with a consensus and agreement on issues, and therefore there’s insufficient forward movement.

• There’s a reticence to table sensitive issues. It’s a bit like an auction—no one wants to make the first bid. There are issues that need to be talked about openly but people are reluctant to put their cards on the table. Perhaps they’re afraid of where the conversation will go, and they lack the skills and confidence to make it a positive rather than negative experience. As a result you’re simply not addressing and resolving sensitive issues.

• There’s no real commitment to implementing action plans. You agree on priorities and discuss most of the important issues—but somehow allocating the action items to owners slips through the cracks. Or the ownership is not real and things don’t get done as you thought was agreed.

Now that you know the kind of group facilitation issues I help resolve, click on this link to learn more about The Types of Situations I Typically Work With.