Hire a great meeting facilitator to ease your mind
You have a hot new business idea and it is ready to launch – however, before all systems are go, you need to assemble your company’s best and brightest minds to figure out the plan of attack.
It must be a productive meeting and you need to achieve three critical objectives: define the new brand; devise a launch plan; and map out an action strategy to get the job done.
It has to go off without a hitch, but you are worried. Your top executives are busy and easily distracted! With the range of personality types and diverse viewpoints you find yourself wondering how you’ll be able to keep them on track.
Well, you can relax, because I have the answer for you: hire a really great meeting facilitator!
This is a trained meeting management professional – a neutral party who is not affected by office politics or the seniority chain.
Meeting facilitator check-list
1. The Discovery Stage: A great meeting facilitator will schedule a preliminary talk with you to learn about your meeting objectives and to collect information about participants. They also ensure the goals and deliverables of the meeting are clear and defined.
2. Mapping a Strategy: The facilitator takes the given information and creates a series of “building blocks” for the meeting agenda. Basically, this is one exercise followed by another, and another that delivers the desired outcome from participants.
3. Quality Check: A great facilitator will ask you to quality check their plan, and make any necessary refinements. They may even assign the participants some “homework” to do in advance of the meeting.
4. Show Time: On the day of the meeting, your facilitator will engage participants, even disciplining them if necessary using techniques such as technology bans and time outs to channel the group’s focus. How do they get away with timing out the company president, when you could not imagine doing it? Simple. They do not work for him!
5. Energy and Excitement: A really great meeting facilitator brings both these to the table to generate another critical “e” – engagement. They read the room as the meeting progresses and can change their agenda on the fly, if needed.
6. That’s a Wrap: Post-meeting, your facilitator will provide a final report that outlines action items, commitments and most importantly, the meeting deliverables.
Quite often in business, you only have one shot to do something right!
A great meeting facilitator can mean the difference between success and just another unproductive meeting.
So, if you want to really “rock” that important meeting and amaze participants with how productive they were – hire a great meeting facilitator to get the job done.
To learn more about meetings, check out my pocket book, Good Meetings = Great Results!
