Conflict Training 101: It’s Not What You Said…
Oftentimes, when working in conflict training I hear similar comments from people. For instance: “It’s not WHAT you said; it’s HOW you said it!” How many times have you heard that refrain? Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you said it, the person just doesn’t want to hear you. However, sometimes it is how you said [...]
Tip 1 for Virtual Meeting Facilitation
Many organizations find it cost efficient to have meetings by phone, which is a challenging way to faciliate a meeting. Though it can be efficient to have participants call in, it can be difficult to manage a virtual meeting. People often report feeling they did not participate enough or had a hard time joining in [...]
Meeting Facilitation: To Meet or Not To Meet
A complaint I hear often, as I am sure you do, is that there are too many meetings. People feel overwhelmed by number of meetings they attend to say nothing of attending meetings that have no real outcomes. It almost feels like a constant refrain. Here’s an example of how to handle some of these [...]
Facilitation and Deep Listening: Opening Hearts and Minds
Staying present and being open to others can create unexpected changes. I was honored this week to watch the magic of that approach. I was traveling with a group of young people — a diverse group in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political ideologies and all passionate activists. We were in a remote [...]
Conversation Management Techniques
As a meeting manager one of your key jobs is to keep the group on track. If you have been tracking the conversation, including the topics and where the group is in the PowerfulWork conversation model (see my earlier blog post), you can use any of the following tools to reorient a group that appears [...]
Changing How We See Things Changes the World
A client of mine called me recently asking me about how to fire someone. I asked him to tell me why he felt this person was not doing her job. He went on at length about all the things she had done wrong. After a time, I asked, “What does she do well?’ His answer [...]
Meeting Facilitation: Making Meetings Work
I am often called into organizations to facilitate a conversation, but meeting managers can easily use many of the tools we facilitators use (because anyone running a meeting should be actively facilitating the meeting.) One of the most important and powerful facilitation tools is tracking conversations, which helps keep a group or even an individual [...]
Facilitation Skills: What to Do About Bad Meetings?
Many people think that their work meetings are either out of control or a waste of time. Worse, they feel that they can’t fix the problem because they are not in charge. But in fact, anyone can positively impact the meetings they attend. No matter where you sit (metaphorically) at the table, you have the [...]
Conflict Strategies: Transforming Conflict into Productivity
A recent study (PDF) conducted by CPP, Inc. in partnership with OPP, Ltd in Europe and Fellipelli in Brazil examined workers in nine countries to see how different cultures view conflict. The authors reported astounding findings! Here are some of the findings: 85% of employees at all levels experience conflict to some degree In the [...]