Mastering Meetings^™

Basic

Meetings consume a large portion of the time and resources of people in organizations and communities. Good meeting skills are essential for any collaborative effort and enable people to make decisions and take effective action. Mastering Meetings™ will show you how to encourage participation, facilitate productive conversations, and build clear agreements. During this 2–day workshop, you will gain skills and strategies to run more focused, productive meetings that yield tangible outcomes.

Benefits for Participants

You will learn to plan, conduct, and follow through on meetings in a way that maximizes the expertise, energy, and commitment of everyone who attends.

You will learn how to:

• Encourage participation and creativity
• Keep meetings focused and on track
• Get more work done in less time
• Establish honest and open communication
• Produce better, more informed decisions
• Create effective action plans
• Maintain a supportive meeting environment.

More than one-half of the class time is devoted to practice. You will receive coaching and feedback from workshop leaders who have years of experience in leading and facilitating meetings. Whether you lead, facilitate or participate in meetings, your new skills will immediately increase the productivity of any meeting you attend.

Benefits for Your Organization

Improving the quality of meetings produces a ripple effect throughout an organization or community. You’ll experience higher levels of effectiveness, alignment, involvement, and satisfaction. You’ll create a common language and shared expectations about how people meet and make decisions. At the core of Mastering Meetings is the Interaction Method, a facilitated approach for building understanding and agreement that has helped organizations, associations, and coalitions to:

• Share one another’s ideas as a basis for agreement building
• Agree on priorities for action
• Break complex issues and decisions into manageable parts
• Improve ongoing communications and decision making within an organization or among partners in a coalition.

Workshop Topics

The Interaction Method: An Effective Solution to Problems with Meetings

• Setting up for Success
• Facilitative Behaviors for Conducting Effective Meetings
• Following Through on Meetings
• Managing Difficult Situations
• Collaborative Problem Solving
• Detailed Agenda Planning
• Meeting Practice Sessions