5 Coaching Tips for Facilitating Meetings
Meetings are places meant for making decisions and resolving conflicts, and, yet, they can often be the obstacle. Few people really listen, everyone has their own agenda and they can go on forever.
So, how do you change this? We recommend applying principles of coaching.
Here are five coaching tips to help make meetings more effective:
1. Create an agreement
Begin your meeting with an agreement focused on your communication and outcomes. It is critical that the agreement is mutual. Things you can include in this agreement include meeting outcomes, how the meeting will be conducted and (especially important) how you intend to ‘be’ and treat each other during the meeting. While this might take 10-15 minutes at the start of your meeting, having a clear agreement to move forward with will help save time, keeping everyone on track.
2. Explore and discover
Once you’ve clarified the agreement, open the discussion and allow people to explore ways they can meet the outcomes. Use Effective Questions that start with ‘what’ and ‘how’ (and never ‘why’) to provide the opportunity for people to express their thinking. This will create a stronger sense of community and may also contribute to finding a route to the outcomes that may not have been considered.
3. Apply listening skills
As the meeting facilitator, ensuring that you are actually listening is important. There are three types of listening that we can choose to engage with at any given moment:
Me-Listening – focusing on your inner thoughts
Micro-Listening – focusing on the words others are expressing
Macro-Listening – focusing on what is not being said, others' body language, cadence, tone and more
Each listening type informs your focus and, therefore, what you hear and don’t hear. All types are relevant depending on the moment. If you are being asked a question, Me-Listening will help guide you towards an answer. If you are listening to another person, then oscillating between listening to the words (Micro-Listening) and listening to the bigger picture (Macro-Listening) will be most valuable.
4. Checking-In
At various points in the meeting, ask the meeting attendees to check-in and reflect. What are they noticing about the topic(s) being discussed? How is the meeting going so far? What needs to be agreed on right now before moving forward?
5. Accountability
To conclude the meeting, take time to review the outcomes set forward at the beginning of the meeting. Have they been met? Celebrate successes, acknowledge breakthroughs and begin to lead the group towards accountability. When will you all meet next? Who is going to do what and by when? How will they let everyone else know? This is also a good time to ask how this project will lead to further growth for each of them in the organisation.
