Quicker - Better Meetings Course

Quicker Better Meetings Course Programme

Managing Meetings Effectively

We tailor all our courses to reflect the needs of the delegates on the day. The course content may include many of the exercises listed below, and any additional material that the trainers feel is relevant.

Introduction

What would you like out of the day? Here participants will get the chance to add any live issues to the day's agenda. Our programmes are adaptable and our trainers flexible to best fit the needs of the people on the day.

How groups work

Groups work because everyone is part of a whole but is a whole person in their own right. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (people), but it cannot function well if all its parts aren't in some form of accord. They don't have to agree on everything, but groups work best when their purpose is clear and there are agreed working practices.

People come together in groups for all sorts of reasons and so there is no right way to be part of a group, and every single group, no matter what its purpose, will have a personality all of its own.

For groups to work each person has to be treated as valuable in their own right.

Here we will ask for participants experience and history of working in groups.

• What do you know that you do well in meetings?
• What do you bring to a group?
• What is your contribution to the Whole?

Meeting Dynamics

A quick review of the way communication happens face-to-face which will give people an overview of how they are affected by words, tone, cadence, non-verbal communication (including body language, environment, feelings, history, distractions, etc).

Impact of Body Language in Meetings

This is a simple exercise that demonstrates how body language affects facilitation and running meetings, and also the power that the listener has over the speaker.

Meetings Communication Cycle

This is a look at how to complete an effective communication by taking responsibility for the whole cycle - Thought - Spoken - Heard - Understood - Agreed - Implemented.

People will be asked to identify specific people situations and meetings where they can predict that things will go wrong (in other words, where they fall off the cycle).

Managing Meetings Tools

I've Noticed that -This technique can be used to effectively head off difficulties and delays that you can see coming.

Raising or Lowering your Meetings Profile

Here we do some work on changing the way you hold yourself in relation to others, and how that can quickly change the direction or outcome of a meeting.

Building on Meetings Ideas

In this set of exercises, participants learn to effectively facilitate ideas that are put up for discussion. In particular, they will work on the skill of passing the responsibility for action to the most appropriate person at the meeting, even if that person is resistant to taking it on.

Lowering the Heat of a Meeting

This is a core facilitation skill to take argument and turn it into discussion. We look at de-fusing difficult conversations or potential arguments. This facilitation tool can be used to calm down difficult confrontations. It is very useful for moving meetings forward and has the added advantage of giving the person using it a sense of control over what can feel like very difficult meetings.

You, I, We

How to deal with blame and conflict. This is a facilitation skill that uses the different effects of using You, I or We statements in order to get away from blame and making someone wrong. This helps people get to a place where they can mutually find solutions.

It also looks at the consequences when people store up resentments instead of dealing with difficulties in the moment (or near enough to the moment so it doesn't end up in the festering storehouse!).

Emotion vs Objectivity

A facilitation exercise to demonstrate the difference between an emotive response and an objective one, even to a topic which may be contentious or challenging.

The technique used here helps to ground an over-emotional or uncentred person and to separate out from the other person's emotion what's really going on.

Giving bad news

How do you give bad news, which could create an emotional response?

Bad news can often be given as 'good news' by taking out the emotions, defensiveness and negative judgements. Facts are presented without an emotional spin.

Managing Meetings - The View from over there

A quick exercise that looks at seeing things from 'the other side'

This capability can make running effective meetings much easier, when people are able to understand where other people are coming from, rather than trying to convert them to their own ideas first.

Meeting Dynamics

Meetings can have a life of their own! In most environments, people will come in with their own agendas. These agendas are neither right nor wrong, but they will impact on how the meetings go.

In this section, we explain the dynamics that are at work in meetings.

We will cover things that are often said and how to deal with them, roles that people take or are given and how they can work for or against 'good meeting', and a set of 'Fight Fair Rules' to enable productive and fair meetings

Meeting Games People Play

Either consciously or sometimes deliberately people will play games at meetings. Once these games are identified they can be defused and dis-empowered by the simple technique of letting everyone know that they are being played.

Here we work with a technique called levelling, which is more or less guaranteed to move things on.

Working to a Meeting's Agenda

Even if you don't keep meetings to the exact timings, it does help to set a specific amount of time for each agenda item. When you see yourself running over time, the timekeeper (another good role!) can mention it and set another amount of time for continued discussion. It is far better to spend more time on an issue than try to get through everything just for the sake of getting through everything on the meeting's agenda.

Project Meetings

This exercise that looks at commitment vs. lip service and exactly how you create "buy-in", and also how you can break through or get around stuck thinking. This is a valuable facilitation tool to be used for any kind of situation where there is a blockage or simply where things aren't getting done as effectively as they could be.

30 Second Influencer

A tool to help people get a powerful message across in 30 seconds. It can also be used to help people cut out some of the fluff and padding when giving what they think is an uncomfortable message.

Mucking about with Managing Meetings Issues

In the final section of the Facilitation and Better Meetings Training Course, we ask participants to work on a current meetings issue. We set up each issue to be replayed, we recreate the exact difficulty the participant had, and then work to get a more satisfactory outcome for each situation.

Within the constraints of a one-day workshop, there may not be time for all participants to play out their individual issues; we, therefore, look for the most useful issues to play out first.

Quicker Better Meetings Action Plan

Participants will be asked to make a declaration of some short-term goals and long-term issues including two or three things from the Quicker Better Meetings Training Course that they can put into practice immediately.

Delegates have the opportunity to take home hand-outs used during the course.

They also have access to a course web page containing

• Handouts used during the course
• New supportive material
• Impact Factory PDF documents
• Recommended reading
• Links to our favourite videos
• Photos of the day

to help further their progress.

Quicker Better Meetings Course