Blog

Discover a very simple three-part formula for ‘packaging’ your message so it makes a signifcant, and lasting, impact on your audience. This formula can be used in almost every situation – from a formal presentation to an informal Q&A session to a regular meeting with your team.

As professional facilitators, we understand how these differ from face to face meetings and have accumulated a great deal of experience in facilitating successful virtual meetings. Here are 5 rules we use to ensure productive and engaging virtual meetings.

These are indeed worrying times and many of us are feeling anxious and stressed – either we have a lot to do, or suddenly we find we have nothing to do. We have some tried and tested strategies to help you get through the coming days, weeks and months.

Setting aside time to prepare properly for their meetings will help your team be more effective. We have a handy checklist for meeting organisers to ensure they are ready and meetings run smoothly and arrive at good conclusions!

Asking your team for feedback is not easy, but it is always worthwhile. We give you tips on how to ensure you get a well-considered response from all members of your team with clear examples of what you do well and areas for improvement. It will be good for you and for them, so don’t hesitate.

A couple of weeks ago, when facilitating a session at one of our clients, we ran into a typical situation: Managers expressed frustration because decisions were too often implemented without them being consulted. Sometimes, the CEO just want people to voice their opinion!

Who doesn’t want to feel like, and be seen as, a reliable leader with a great sense of accountability? They’re loved by everyone! They’re successful. Right? Yes. But only to a point. Taken too far, feeling responsible for everything and everyone is damaging for you personally and professionally, and is indicative of real structural issues within your organization that need addressing.

As most people, each day we have way more on our to-do list than we could ever accomplish. Even during the weekend and the holidays! There are just too many requests coming our way – and too many things we want to get done ourselves … Therefore, we had to find a system to get the best out of our day – making tremendous progress – feeling lots of satisfaction – without regrets or overwhelm. Here’s the 5 criteria we developed to get the best out of our day. We hope they will prove useful for you too.

Does your company have difficulties too sticking to the foreseen agenda of its meetings? Meeting participants enter long discussions and before they realize it – they’ve spent far too much time on one topic and don’t have sufficient time for a next (far more important) one…. In this insight we’ll dig deeper into a core underlying reason of this problem – and make some suggestions so your meetings won’t get off track.

When we talk about facilitation, we like to use the analogy of the thermometer and the thermostat. A thermometer measures the temperature; whereas a thermostat not only measures the temperature but also adapts it to reach the desired level.