Among my many clients, occasionally I am asked to facilitate meetings. It’s something that I used to do professionally a lot more than I do these days. I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours, sitting in meetings. I’ve studied many facilitation methodologies from transactional facilitation and dynamic facilitation. I’m a certified trainer in a process called nonviolent communication.

I bring a lot of tools to meeting facilitation, and the number one leverage point in the communication process for effective meetings and teams is mature individuals.

However, if you were to ask me five tips for effective meeting facilitation, these are what they’d be.

Two Essential Questions for Effective Meetings

These are two questions that about 99.9% of the time I notice are not asked at the beginning of meetings.

If you simply ask these two questions, everything would become much clearer and the meeting itself would already have much more structure.

The first tip for effective meetings is the question, What are we trying to accomplish?

This “outcome-thinking” tunes everybody’s minds to what is our shared purpose together.

And at the end of the meeting, for us to look back at it and say, yes, that was worthwhile — it was worth the time and energy spent — we need to know what we’re trying to accomplish.

Now, the second tip for effective meetings, which is the second question is, How much time to we have in which to accomplish it?

That is often assumed or implied.

Sometimes it’s defined already because we have a set start and end time, but you might find it surprising how many meeting I attend where it is not clear how long the meeting is, and when the meeting ends.

So, I would ask those two questions at the beginning of every meeting:

What are we trying to accomplish? And, how much time do we have in which to accomplish it?

An Effective Meeting Concludes with Clarity about Next Actions

Now the third tip that I would share with you for effective meetings is, before the end of the meeting, getting very clear as a group, what is the next action?

Now there may be multiple next actions, for example if you’re talking about various projects. What is the next action for project A? What is the next action for project B? What is the next action for project C?

So we know that upon leaving this meeting there can be immediate forward movement on any of these projects, or whatever it is that you’re talking about at the meeting.

Before people get up and leave, you want to be clear what the next action is.

When a Question is Not a Question — and how to Apply Empathy Effectively in a Meeting

The fourth tip I’ll give you for effective meetings is you want to be able to sensitive yourself to when someone in a meeting is needing empathy.

Sometimes people come into a meeting and they’re in some kind of pain. Either emotional pain or there’s something that gets triggered or stimulated for them during the meeting.

Often when someone’s in pain, they’ll ask a question. They’ll say something like, “How does this make any sense?”

We need to recognize when that’s not a question and when it is a question.

When it’s not a question, it is usually a statement of some sort of frustration or disappointment.

If we can slow ourselves down and offer that person empathy, it can help to strengthen the connections and help people hear each other better. We may not always want to take time inside a meeting, but you can. And especially the higher your skill level, the more successful you’ll be at this.

Let me give you an example:

I was at a meeting with some pretty high level change makers in my community and people who have their hands on the levers of power of various government agencies and various organizations, presidents of some of the local chambers of commerce, directors of several departments of our local government.

At this meeting, one of the members, in the middle of the meeting, got up and pointed his finger at everybody and said, “You people…”

Now, as soon as he said, “You people,” I thought oh no, this is not going to go well. And then he proceeded to say, “You people… this circle is just a bunch of rich people who only care about other rich people. Who’s taking care of those low-income people up in the valley over there? We need to really start caring about them.”

And then he sat down.

Now, the facilitator of the meeting didn’t know what to do with this. So she looked at her agenda, looked at him, looked back at her agenda and then she said, “Okay. Next on the agenda…”

This is what happened.

Here’s a statement of somebody’s pain, when they care so deeply about something and the don’t know how to handle it.

Sometimes things just get overlooked. The facilitator just started to move on but I interrupted her and I said, “Um, excuse me madam chairperson, just a moment.” I turned to the man who had spoken and I asked, “Jerry, are you feeling some disappointment because you’d really like to see some more evidence from this group that there’s caring and consideration for people in the community who have fewer financial resources?”

Visibly relieved, he sighed, “Yeah.”

You could just hear the sigh of relief from him getting heard.

And then I followed up with another question, which is actually the next tip.

I said, “Jerry, is there anything that you were wanting from the group in relation to what you just stated, or was it enough to just get heard that you really value the care and consideration for other people in the community and you’re wanting to see more evidence of that in this group ? Was it enough just to get heard or were you wanting something back?” And he said, “No, I just wanted to get heard.”

Now this accomplished two things. The first was that he had the experience of feeling heard, which had not happened when he first spoke.

The second thing that happened was it allowed others to hear him for a second time and to hear what was important to him and what his values were, rather than just hearing, “You people are bad.”

And so instead of hearing a judgment, they were able to hear him a second time and to hear what was precious to him, in his heart.

That was really valuable because in the long run it did help to maintain the connections within the group, as opposed to what some times happens which is that people create a story about someone and we end up writing them off because we think, “Well I don’t want to have anything to do with that person because all they’re going to do is judge and criticize me.”

Again, when we’re in pain, we speak in ways that make it harder for other people to respond to us compassionately. That’s part of what I teach in the Blackbelt Communication Skills Program, is how to transform the way that we speak so that people can really hear us. So that we are met with compassionate understanding. You can help people do this right in the meeting, or if not in the meeting, outside of the meeting.

So, in that moment I interrupted, I said, “Excuse me madam chairperson,” I asked him, “Is this what’s going on for you?” He felt heard, I heard his sigh of relief, checked if there was a request, there wasn’t, and then I turned back to the chairperson and said, “Thank you, I feel complete.”

And then the meeting proceeded.

That took a total of two minutes or less. It benefited that group and made for a more effective meeting.

So, that’s the fourth tip for effective meetings: be sensitive to when somebody in the group is merely in pain and needing empathic attention, rather than asking a question or wanting to problem-solve or even judging other people.

Taking Responsibility for What We Want by Making Clear Requests

The fifth tip for running effective meetings is making clear requests or helping others clarify their request.

Now, we need to be very clear with what a request is and isn’t.

A desire is not a request. “Oh, I wish someone would just go talk to that woman.”

Like in a group where I facilitated in which  there was someone who had been a big challenge for the group and someone exclaimed, “I wish someone would just go talk to that woman!”

That’s a desire, but it’s not a request.

A request would sound like, “I’d like to see a show of hands of people in the room who might be willing to go talk to that person. Ok, I see the number of hands. Please come talk to me after the meeting. Thank you.”

Or, a proposal is not a request. I was in a meeting where somebody presented a proposal I thought was beautiful, but then they waited after presenting the proposal. They stopped and wanted to see what other people did rather than making a clear request of the group.

For example, “I’d like to see a show of hands of other people in the group who liked this proposal and feel like they could stand behind it.” Or, “I’d like to see a show of hands of people who have feedback for me and who would be willing to have me contact them so they can give me feedback on my proposal.”

So that’s an example of an actionable request: I can raise my hand to tell you yes or no about something. That’s an example of an actionable request.

Now, true requests have four criteria.

We need the request to be really specific because if you put out something vague, then you’ll get something vague back and that’s not going to contribute to your needs. So, we want to request to be specific.

We want it to be doable. One of the worst things that can happen is for somebody to say yes to a request that’s actually not doable. That will generate resentment. It will generate disappointment. We want to make sure it’s doable.

We want it to have positive action language. In other words we want to tell people what we do want them to do rather than what we don’t want them to do.

An example is a father with a teenage son who’s watching a lot of television and the father says, “Son, I wish you would just stop watching so much TV,” and the son says, “Sounds good dad. I’m going to go outside and join a street gang.” And the father says, “No, no, no, no, no, let’s go see what’s on the tube.” As opposed to, “Son, would you be willing to turn the TV off when that program ends and pick up a book and do some reading, would that work for you?”

See that’s actionable in the moment (the son can agree or not).

We want it to be in the moment. We want to give people an opportunity to respond to us right now.

Specific, doable, positive action language, and present moment, all of that adds up to an actionable request.

So those are the five tips for effective meetings.

Conclusion

In summary:

1) Ask the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?” 

2) Ask the question, “How much time to we have in which to accomplish it?”

3) At the end of the meeting, people know what the next action is, or what are the next actions on the various projects. 

4) Be tuned in to when somebody is needing empathic support so that it doesn’t disrupt the meeting, so that the meeting can keep moving, and so that we can attend to the members of our community when they have issues coming up.

5) Be able to make clear requests or be able to help other people clarify their requests, so that they’re actionable and so that people can contribute in a way that responds to their needs or at least furthers the dialogue.