The Skilled Facilitator Approach Webinar

Please join us on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 from 11:00am - 12:00pm EasternStandard Time

Are you responsible for helping groups get great results - while fostering stronger, more satisfying working relationships?
Our clients are. We are. If you are, we've designed this free Webinar for you.

It's designed to give you practical strategies, tools, and ways of thinking that have helped our clients get results like these:

• Saving a key customer relationship that's in serious trouble
• Generating solutions that team members genuinely and actively support
• Developing trust between people who seemed to "hate" each other
• Making decisions that save significant resources and time - or that create new, valuable opportunities
• Dramatically reducing workplace stress - and increasing satisfaction

If you implement what you learn in this call, you can expect similar results with the groups you're accountable to.

My colleagues and I use the same approach I'll be teaching you. We have worked for 25 years to develop and apply this approach, and have learned what works and what doesn't. This approach is the basis for our two books: The Skilled Facilitator and The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook.

The Skilled Facilitator approach focuses on how you think AND how you act. Many approaches teach you tools and techniques to be more effective. But our work and significant research show that's just not enough. You have to change the way you think - the assumptions you make, how you interpret behavior, and your responses to stressful situations. We'll cover important tools and techniques in this call - but the main focus is on how you can shift your thinking to get better results.

I'll offer you practical, straightforward ways of changing the way you think. These are the same ways our clients have repeatedly used to achieve results they didn't imagine possible.

We'll do all this in a fast-paced, focused way. We'll integrate some of your questions into the session - and if I don't answer a question that's important to you, you can email them to me after the session, and we'll send out answers to everyone.

• A Model for Group Effectiveness. To help a group be more effective, we think it's important to have a model for what an effective group looks like. I'll describe ours.

• Defining Your Role with Groups. Sometimes groups need a facilitator; sometimes they need a consultant, a coach, or a trainer. You cause problems when you don't agree with a group about the roles you will play and how you will shift between them. I'll explain how to choose the right role, and how to shift roles.

• Using Explicit Core Values and Principles. All of us use core values to guide our behavior. We usually don't tell people what they are, and our values are sometimes counterproductive. I'll share the explicit core values and principles we use to help us decide what to do in any situation.

• Exploring and Changing How We Think. Compelling research shows that 98% of us act in the same counterproductive ways in stressful situations. We'll explore what you can do about this to get powerful results with groups.

• Using Ground Rules to Develop Effective Groups. If you're going to help a group act more effectively, you have to have a set of effective behaviors in your head. I'll share the ones that I have developed over the last 25 years.

• Suspending Judgment. Groups and practitioners often get into trouble when they assume they know what others are thinking. To be effective, we need to make assumptions in a way that:

  • Increases the chance that they'll be accurate
  • Enables us to share them with others to see if they disagree
  • Does not create defensive reactions when we share them
  I'll describe the approach we take to this here.

• Deciding What to Say, and When. When you work with groups, you need to know when to say something what to say, how to say it, when to say it, and to whom. To help you do this, I have devised a six-step process called the diagnosis-intervention cycle - I'll explore that here.

• Agreeing How to Work Together. Many facilitators unknowingly sabotage their work before it gets started. They make agreements that:

  • Put them between the team leader and its members
  • Leads team members to feel set up or betrayed
  • Destroys their credibility
  I'll describe the four-stage process we use to avoid these pitfalls and build trusting relationships from the start.

• Thinking Systemically About Groups. Professionals often tell me that despite their best efforts, things got worse in the groups they were trying to help. Usually, this is because they were focusing on the short-term, and undermined the group's capacity in the long run. I'll describe how we help our clients address this issue.

• Using Emotions Productively with Groups. When it comes to dealing with emotions in groups, many facilitators try to avoid them. This drives problems underground, and they resurface later anyway. I will describe how we deal openly and productively with emotions so that difficult issues get resolved and stay resolved.

If you want to have more impact with groups and take your effectiveness to the next level, this webinar is probably for you. I invite you to participate.