ASPE SDLC Division

COURSE 6000 | 2-DAY SESSION
Effective Meeting Design and Facilitation

Master proven skills and techniques to maximize the value of any meeting

How to:

Improve your techniques for planning and scheduling meetings
Learn the four basic types of meetings and how to facilitate each
Increase team performance through team-building meetings
Learn how to efficiently manage a meeting, using less time to accomplish more
Identify your key stakeholders and learn to communicate with them effectively
Learn how to effectively deal with problem team members in meetings
Learn how to train your team to be active listeners
Identify and solve real-world challenges to effective communications
Use self-assessment tools to enhance your communications competency
Develop action plans for improving your interpersonal communications
Bonus when you attend: Receive and use in class the following texts: The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings by Barbara J. Streibel and Doyle’s How to Make Meetings Work

Key Benefits of Attending this Course

Design the meeting that satisfies your requirements.
Understand the characteristics of a well-written agenda.
Ensure everyone comes to your meetings with all necessary information.
Know when to schedule a meeting, and when not to.
Learn your strengths and weaknesses as a meeting facilitator, and how to capitalize on the former and counter the latter.
Learn how to effectively draw out information from reluctant meeting members.
Handle emergency meetings, keeping every ones "eye on the ball."
Know when, and when not, to allow meeting members to make team decisions.
Teach your team members how to properly respond to informational meetings
Don't say "no" - negotiate it.
Start and finish meetings on-time.
Teach team members to actively listen both in and out of meetings.
Prevent the "Know-it-All" or "Steamroller" from taking over your meeting.
Stop destructive team behaviors stemming from "Snipers."
Effectively communicate with project stakeholders at all levels.
Build team cohesion through negotiating buy-in.
Coordinate your meetings with your communications management plan.
Maximize your meeting's productivity with effective follow-up.
Give and receive effective criticism.
Ensure meeting action items are accomplished on-time, on-budget, and right THE FIRST TIME!

Design Effective Meetings for Every Situation.

Our failure to properly design and facilitate effective meetings leads to one of the business world's most common frustrations - the time-wasting meeting. If given the choice, most people would rather come in early, stay late, or even work through lunch rather than attend one more inefficiently run meeting. Late starts, even later finishes, private agendas, loss of control by the meeting facilitator: these common problems result in major management frustrations, lost productivity, missed deadlines, and ineffective and missed communications. Effective Meeting Design and Facilitation attacks the problem of meeting failures by addressing the root causes: poor planning and faulty execution.

Ineffective meetings are costly…preventing them isn't!
The lost value to a project of a ten-person poorly-run one-hour meeting can be in the thousands of dollars. And this figure does not even start to include the detrimental effects of poorly understood or missed communications. By investing in just a few key skills and using them consistently, you can save significant time and money on your projects, and ultimately deliver higher-quality communications to your team members and key stakeholders.

Discover the real-world techniques that will help you immediately.
This two-day course will give you hands-on experience with the latest proven techniques for designing and facilitating effective, focused meetings. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises will provide you with the competence and confidence to improve your meeting management skills. You'll gain a thorough understanding of meeting types, the challenges faced in meeting facilitation, and practical approaches for handling meeting (and team) pathologies. Make your project meetings into opportunities to build team cohesion, create buy-in from team members and key stakeholders, and most importantly get things done. Regardless of your organization's environment, you can't afford to miss this course!

In Class Group Exercises:
In-class exercises help you identify and examine firsthand problems that you may be experiencing. Through group effort, you and your peers will discuss ways your project or company should be handling meetings during the critical design phase and how you can improve the implementation of these meetings. Specifically, you will:

Learn to align meeting designs with project or business requirements
Set the parameters of team and stakeholder expectations prior to meetings
Establish effective team behaviors in different types of meetings
Identify common meeting execution problems and deal with them in real-time
Learn to classify team member behaviors and respond to them in the most appropriate fashion
Make mundane meetings into effective team-building sessions
Turn any meeting into an efficient problem-solving session