Speaker 1: Do you want to be the go-to meeting facilitator in your company? By the end of this video, I'm going to share with you how you can be a good meeting facilitator by showing you all the techniques that I have used with my clients over thousands of meetings that I have facilitated. And if you stay tuned to the end of this video, I'm going to share with you something really cool that I use in all my meetings. Hi, if you're new here, welcome. For the best advice on career and project management, subscribe to my channel, hit that bell button, and I'll be sending you a new video every Wednesday. Over the past 20 plus years, I have facilitated many different kinds of meetings, like strategic meetings, project management meetings, process meetings, and I'm telling you there is a pattern and a way to do this successfully. And I'm going to share with you how you can take what I've learned and become a really good meeting facilitator. So if you're excited about mastering facilitation skills, give this video a like and let's get to it. Be prepared. If you're going to master your facilitation skills, it is critical that you understand everything before the meeting. It is all in the preparation. So what is it that you want to talk about? What kind of meeting is it? Who needs to be in the meeting? How much time do you have allocated? Is there any brainstorming that you have to do? Not only that, based on what type of meeting you have and what you're going to be doing, what do you need to bring to the meeting? Do you need any post-it notes, black sharpies? What things are going to help you be prepared to execute that perfect meeting? Agenda and objectives. All right, not only is it about preparation, but it's having a real good detail agenda and the overall objective of the meeting. Too often this is missed. So this is really important as a meeting facilitator that you have these things. Now when you do have objectives and meetings, you need to send them out at least two days prior before. The absolute minimal, minimal amount of time is 24 hours. You got to give people notice as to what you're going to be talking about. Now here's a little technique that I do that I'm going to share with you is sometimes I may not know what my agenda is. I have a concept, an idea, but I cannot lay it out, but I do know my objective. So even though I may have given the invite out like months in advance or even weeks in advance, the objective is there and I say meeting agenda to follow. So at least people understand what it is that we're doing. That is a huge deal because that's going to ensure you have the right people in the room. Set the ground rules. Okay. So now you're at the meeting. You've gone through the agenda. Now you have to set the ground rules. I want you to check out a video that I have on details regarding these ground rules, but to give you something really high level. These are the rules that you give to people to say, this is how we're going to behave in the meeting. And some really specific things are like phones and computers off. Tell me if you've ever had this happen before below in the comments that people are actually doing other work in a meeting on their computer and phone. I mean, how rude is that, right? So you want to do that. You want to make sure that you want to have permission to time people out. That's another technique too that's really cool to ensure that you keep people on track. So meeting rules and setting up exactly how people are supposed to behave is critical and it's going to help you master your facilitation skills. Involve everyone. All right. First and foremost, if you're not involving everyone in your meeting, then they shouldn't be there. Okay. I don't know how many times I've been in meetings where people are just hanging out. That's not a good use of their time, let alone your time. So involve everyone. Be very specific with who you're inviting and ensure that you have activities that's going to utilize the subject matter expert of every person in that room. Time is precious. Do not waste it. If you're having a meeting, call it with purpose and ensure that you have the right people in the room. Stay on time. Okay. Not only are you a meeting facilitator, you are a timekeeper. And if I had my watch, I'd be pointing to it right now like, hello. Keep on time. That is your job. It is really important that you let people know in your agenda. You even want to make sure that you put some time designated for it. And if people are going over it, you're going to have to do a little timeout. Ask them, what are you going to give up on the agenda to ensure that you can still stay on track if people really need to continue with the conversation. So that is your job as a meeting facilitator is also a timekeeper. Next steps, or as I like to say, action steps. So from now on, at the end of every single meeting, you are going to set aside 10 minutes to review all the action items. Have you ever been to a meeting where you had action items that were kind of thrown out in the room and then everyone walked out and you're not too sure if the right people got it or let alone when were they due? So this is going to close everything off. And that's what distinguishes really good and great meeting facilitators and is going to hone your facilitation skills. So ensure you set aside that time. Go through every single action item and ensure that it has a responsibility and a due date associated with it. You came to a meeting for a reason. And that reason wasn't just to hang out. It was to actually get things done. So of course there's going to be actions coming out of it and ensure that you assign them accordingly. Okay. Now that you're on your way to becoming a really great facilitator, remember how I talked about ground rules? Well, guess what? From the link below, you can grab my ground rules that I use all the time with my clients. These are my tried and true ones, and I'm telling you they work. So make your life easy, grab them so you can use them at your next meeting. Please subscribe to my channel, like this video and share it with all the professionals that you know. If there's a specific facilitation skill that you're now going to try, let me know in the comments below. I'd love to hear from you. Until the next video, see you later.