Transcripts
1. Introduction: Are you frustrated
and exhausted from meeting after meeting
being out-of-control? Not on time and just
frankly not effective. Don't worry, you're not
alone in feeling this way. My name is Matt Robinson. I'm a professional project
manager and I spent the last 15 years working
on technical projects. This personally has been one of the more difficult
skills I've had to work on in my career and I continue to build
on this today. Meeting facilitation is a skill that can be built over time. It's attainable by everyone
with a little bit of determination and can
actually be fun and fruitful, believe it or not, once you get the hang of it and
it's working well. By the end of this course, you will have the
tools needed to plan and lead
effective meetings. Several templates will
be created together. And we'll build
out a checklist to support your own
meetings going forward. Here are the topics
at a high level that we will cover together. Stakeholder analysis and determination,
planning the meeting, mental preparation,
tips and tricks, logistics and scheduling
considerations. Establishing ground rules
and time management, leveraging visual aids,
follow-up activities, and ensuring a feedback
loop is in place. Be sure to stick to the n rho, share some templates that have
been helpful in my career. I appreciate any
feedback you can provide as this is how we can
all improve together. Look forward to jumping
into the first lesson, which is stakeholder analysis.
2. Stakeholder analysis & determination: Stakeholder analysis is a
fancy way of saying identify, understand, and engage
the right folks needed to support the goal. Stakeholders can
take many forms. For example, internal or
external to your organization. Government agencies. We are working under the context of the meeting in this case, but the principles apply at the project planning
level as well. Just this would likely
represent a much larger group. There are a lot of techniques
that can be leveraged for identification of
these stakeholders. Here a few examples
of such techniques. Interviewing potential
stakeholders, meeting with people in
person or virtually. This is a conversation
where you can get to know the person
and their stance on your topic and build some rapport documentation such as lesson learned artifacts, project charter, business cases, which are documents that often
call it the stakeholders, specifically by rolling name. Another technique is power grid, which is a framework
where you can bucket the different
stakeholders. These buckets described
their interests level and the influence they have
over your project or topic. Keep informed,
monitor, engaging, consult, and keep satisfied. This will help you
in understanding who and how to engage
for your meetings. We're going to assume
that this point, you know who your stakeholders
are for your meeting. The next step is to try
to understand them and their perspectives in particular towards your topic at hand. Are they really excited about your initiative or
would they rather pour a cup of coffee over their
head then join your meeting? So you may be asking yourself, well, how will this help
me in planning my meeting? Well, this will help you
target who to invite and potentially how to engage
them during your meeting, during the stakeholder
analysis is a good time to get to know the
personnel is you're dealing with if you
don't already know them, of course, personally, my
preference is to build a one-on-one relationship with my stakeholders before having
them in a larger group. This will help give
a lot of insight into how they may conduct
themselves during the meeting. There's a huge
amount of books on the topic of personality traits. But the way I see it, you have
a few things to consider. The quiet and shy types,
over talkers, negative, over positive to the point, you're almost worried about
them being too agreeable. Within these groups of people. You may have experts
on your topic, or even some that have no clue about what you're
going to be talking about. This will also give
you an insight into the different learning styles as an input into the planning. So why is this so important? You ask, I'm just planning
the meeting, right? The reason is you will want
to be prepared to have strategies for
handling situations that will inevitably arise in your meetings between
conflicting personality types. We will touch on these
in more detail shortly, but I wanted to highlight
an example or two to get you thinking about how gaming this insight
will be helpful. I'm an accountant,
keeps bringing up the financial results of one. However, your meeting is about
the upcoming team Potluck. So how do you handle
this situation? You tell Bob to shove it and go back to his cave on
the third floor? No, of course not. You could say something like
that is a great point, Bob, I will make a note of
this so we can talk about it in our upcoming
financial results meeting. Moving on to the next
important agenda topic, what are we going to be
bringing to the potluck? By understanding the types of personalities or inches
level and give us a lot of insight into the
techniques we may want to have in our back pocket
going into your meetings. Depending on the goal
of your meeting, you need to make a
determination of these stakeholders who should be included to join the meeting. In the event you are required to have people who
frankly should not be in the meeting
to achieve this goal. The handling techniques
will be that much more important
to make sure that those contributors have
the opportunity to bring the value towards
achieving the goal. Now I will assume that you've
identified the right folks, understand them a
bit and a thought of at least a couple
of strategies for handling some
potential scenarios. We are now ready to start
planning the meeting. Are you excited? I know I am.
3. Planning the meeting: In order to start
planning the meeting, you'll want to
make sure you have a clear goal and
outcome in mind. The basic understanding
of the goal performing stakeholder analysis
will be an input. However, you are now in a
position to refine this further and put the pen to paper for those
that still do this. Let's assume you were unclear what the goal of
the meeting should be, then you, my friend, are
not ready for the meeting. In fact, having the meeting
is more likely to cause some frustration and cause others to not trust the process. A lot of times this
step is either neglected entirely
or skipped because it can be time-consuming and we're often
on a time crunch. Depending on the nature
of your meeting. This can be everything from
PowerPoint presentations, system demos, visual aids, and even sending e-mails with pre-work
for your audience. This will allow
them to be better informed prior to the meeting. These things will
greatly help in establishing a clear
alignment between participants and ultimately
supporting achieving cool. It's very important
that you break down and understand your goal
before your meeting. So one way of doing that is
using the smart framework, which is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant,
and time-based. And here's a diagram that kind of goes into those a little bit.
4. Mental preparation (tips & tricks): One of the take a
moment before jumping into the scheduling
of the meetings to talk about a skill that
is important in meeting facilitation and one that will continue to grow over
time in your career. That is the ability
to be mentally prepared for the meeting itself. Personally, I used to get
nervous speaking in front of people and often would not
even be able to speak at all. A lot of this had to
do with a lack of preparedness for
the meeting itself, which when done well, will help build
confidence over time. Here are some tips to help
being mentally prepared, general health, being
well-rested, healthy anhydride. Research into the
topic to ensure you have a reasonable
understanding and had an opportunity to ask
some questions while engaging with stakeholders
in the one-on-one capacity. Role-playing
scenarios ran through a bunch of made-up scenarios, mental role-playing
to strategize how you will handle difficult
or unique situations. You will never be
able to think of everything in this activity. But a top ten will go a long way to help it on
the meeting day. These scenarios can be
everything from what folks may ask him a call
to the phone call dropping halfway and you
having to figure out alternatives for the meeting
room and things like that. You can have a lot of
fun with this activity. I encourage you to do so.
5. Logistics & scheduling: Since the global pandemic, we've seen a rise in remote working
arrangements as well as hybrid models unable to adapt and understand our
surroundings is very helpful. There is no difference in our preparation for and
during our meeting. Depending on the nature of
the meeting or project, you'll have several
things to consider. Here are some of
the items that will often need to be addressed. Size of the room based on
the number of participants. Remote versus hybrid, how will the teams
interact and behave? The technology such as
Microsoft Teams Zoom phones, everyone trained and have
access to this technology. Sticky notes versus
virtual whiteboards. Meals and break times, depending on if you're in
person for longer meetings, the availability of
rooms and participants, often this can be a challenge, allowing lead times in case
of difficult scheduling. Once you have had a
chance to assess all of the logistical and
scheduling considerations, you are now able to send
out the meeting invite, being sure to include the necessary details such
as Teams or Zoom link, phone number, location, agenda, clear subject line,
and participants.
6. Establishing ground rules: Establishing ground rules is an effective way to help
keep things on track. Ground rules are a
set of actions or behaviors the participants
agreed to upfront. This helps avoid any confusion and makes it easier when you as the facilitator needs to call out a deviation
from these rules. For example, Mark starts to interrupt and other participants
as the facilitator, you can make a call to mention the ground rule of
raising a hand. For example, this will
be a judgment call based on your part to help
keep things moving along. Here are some common
examples of ground rules. I'll provide a
template I've used in the past to help your
meetings as a reference. So no phones during
the meeting in-person. Using the raise hand
feature in teams or comfort system instead
of interrupting others. Be respectful and kind during
all team interactions. Most if not all of these
should go without saying, however, it helps to have the team on the
same page on these. So depending on the nature of
your meeting, for example, if it's a reoccurring meeting, you may want to have a more
detailed set of ground rules. If the meaning is
more of a one-off, you may want to establish a key set of ground rules
such as the raise hand. These are not meant to make the group feel afraid to speak. This is a fine line to be
walked to ensure everyone has an opportunity to feel and ultimately be
heard in the meeting.
7. People & time management: Time and people management
is without a doubt, the most difficult
part of most meetings. We all have our own
personality traits as we discussed in our stakeholder
analysis overview, the knowledge gained about
the various personalities is a key input to supporting the success of the
meeting goals. The relationships
you have built over time are going to serve you well while you're
in the meeting. The key thing to
realize is that having different personalities
is not a bad thing. As much as it can certainly
feel like it at times is actually a very positive
thing and should be embraced. Of course, if someone is just a very rude and disrespectful, in my opinion, this
should be dealt with separately and outside
of the meeting. The reason this is a good thing is that the greatest ideas come from the mashup of various
opinions and perspectives. Strong time and people
management skills can take some practice. But some of the
key things to set the tone or ensuring you
have a timestamped agenda. Ensure you are
starting the meeting on time and ending on time. This shows a respect
for everyone's time, which is our most valuable asset after the key challenge in time and people
management is often finding a polite way of interrupting the
conversation or trying to speed up certain parts to
keep the unnecessary flow. Keeping the goal in
mind while doing this, a skill that will come
over time with practice. Sometimes you may have a
great conversation going, but that agenda item only had a five-minute time slot
is assigned to it. There are ways of handling this and my personal opinion
is that it's up to you as the facilitator to make this call with
feedback from the team. I've had meetings,
were able to set it to adjust the agenda on
the flight because the group had a realization that it was much more
supportive of the goal, more so than the
next agenda item. For example, say planning a lunch versus meeting
the Q1 results, one supersedes the other. Other times topics are better positioned to be put
into the parking lot, which essentially is
a backlog of items that are to be dealt with
separately from the meeting. More often than not, you
will want to stick to your agenda you had
planned because after all, you put some thought
into this already. The risk of adjusting
the meeting on the fly too often can
lead to a bit of a harder to manage group
because they may become a bit complacent with things appearing to not be organized
and structured. The way that I've handled
this is to state I understand that we have
this other agenda item, but for this time,
if the group agrees, we can make an exception
to make this change. Also re-establishing
that this is not a regular occurrence
to be expected, and that it is important
to value the agenda.
8. Leveraging visual aids: Leveraging visual aids is an extremely effective
way to tackle a meeting. Research has shown that over 65% of people are
actually visual learners. That means that the odds
are a good portion of your participants are also
going to be visual learners. Visual aids or
anything that helps aid or supplement the spoken
language of the meeting. So things such as the
old-fashioned sticky notes for in-person meetings, PowerPoint presentations,
charts and graphs, workflow diagrams, videos, and so much
more can be leveraged. I'll look to provide
a few examples here.
9. Follow up feedback & conclusion: Congratulations, you've
successfully led the meeting. Not that the meeting is over. We still have a couple of
steps we need to take. We need to first send out
the meeting minutes and notes highlighting
any action items, associated timelines, Assignments
are relevant documents. Then we also need to follow
up with the stakeholders, either individually
or as a group. You may also want to
consider creating a survey to send out
to the audience. This will allow you
to obtain feedback to help improve upon
future meetings. This is a perfect segue into wrapping up
this short-course. I hope you got some value
from our time together. I appreciate if you
could also provide some feedback in the
community section as well as your
templates that you created as a result of
some of the course. I appreciate if
you could provide some feedback in the
community section. And then I'll be looking to make more course if that's something
you're interested in. I'm also considering making more project management
to things in Agile project
management as well as some personal interests such as graphic design and
other things as well. You're interested, please let me know if you want to dive into any specifics or if you have any questions about any
of the topics covered, feel free to add them
into the comments and I'll look to reply.
Thanks a lot.
Matt Robinson, Tech, AI, 3D Printing, & Laser Engraving
