Making good meetings: Facilitation tips
Par Family Councils Ontario
In this week's entry in our series on making good meetings, we're going to focus on an essential aspect: facilitation.
In a nutshell, facilitation is a form of leadership that involves effective communication to gather a group and productively achieve a desired goal. Effective facilitation navigates the group processes in communication, teamwork, and conflict resolution to help everyone achieve the best possible results. Read more on facilitation in our Understanding Facilitation blog post.
An important aspect of facilitating a Family Council meeting is balancing the group’s need for peer support with getting the work done. One common strategy is to include a set amount of time at each meeting for open sharing. Set aside at the beginning or end of your meeting, for example 30 minutes, for open sharing. Include this section in your agenda for each and every meeting to ensure that members know when to expect time for sharing. For more, read our blog post Balancing the need for support vs. getting work done at a Council meeting.
As meeting facilitator, you’ll also need to ensure that your meetings don’t devolve into just complaint sessions. While discussing members’ concerns is important, if your meetings are purely about complaints and concerns, you’ll likely find that the atmosphere becomes negative or toxic and your membership wanes. To help avoid that, use these tips:
- Consider a project or event!
- Open and/or close meetings with a round of positivity
- Ensure that you have a clear timeframe within meetings for processing concerns
- Keep in mind the 4 main Family Council goals:
- Support
- Communication
- Education
- Advocacy
Facilitation can make or break a Council meeting. The lack of effective facilitation can make for negative, unproductive meetings that leave attendees feeling unvalued, unsupported, and unheard. On the other hand, a strong meeting facilitator can ensure that everyone is involved in discussion and decision making, conflicts are handled in a way that spurs improvements in group dynamics, and the group achieves its goals. The importance of strong, effective Family Council meeting facilitation cannot be overstated.
For more on how to facilitate meetings to make the best of them, join us for our Making good meetings webinar on Tuesday January 30th at 2pm.
Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash.