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Facilitating with Ease!

A Step-by-Step Guidebook

Ingrid Bens

Jossey-Bass, 2000

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Companies that embrace work-teams quickly discover a basic truth: More teams mean more meetings. Management experts laud the benefits of enlightened teamwork, but they spend much less time dwelling on the often long, sometimes pointless and nearly always inefficient meetings that teams breed. With teams fast becoming a fixture in the corporate world, meeting management, or facilitation, is becoming a critical skill for anyone with executive ambitions. Author Ingrid Bens’ definition of a facilitator is quite specific – someone who guides a meeting without actually participating in discussion or decision making – but her book is filled with practical advice that any professional can apply when running a meeting. A host of charts, examples and worksheets (not to mention the accompanying CD) help illustrate her process for steering meetings without controlling or directing the outcome. getAbstract recommends this hands-on how-to guide to anyone motivated to minimize meeting-creep.

Summary

Facilitation: Not Just for HR Anymore

In the past decade, skillful facilitation has become recognized for making meetings effective. As a result, facilitation is a skill everyone is expected to have, not just human resource professionals. Facilitation is a core competency for anyone in management or on a team. With this skill, you can get the most from people when you need their buy-in and active participation. You also need facilitation skills to help support people, so they take charge.

As a facilitator, you aren’t participating in a meeting or trying to influence its outcome. Rather, your role is to help provide the participants with structure and tools. You help participants identify goals and develop action plans, and you help everyone participate.

Facilitation is being a leader without taking the reins, since your goal is to get others to take the lead and the responsibility for action. You are like a referee rather than a player in a game, in that you observe and guide what happens. This approach is different from the traditional approach to leading meetings, where the leader takes a strong, dominant role. Instead, responsibility shifts to the group participants...

About the Author

Ingrid Bens is a consultant and trainer focused upon conflict management, team building, facilitation, leadership and organizational change. She has more than 20 years of experience in facilitating team implementation and process improvement efforts. She has given presentations at conferences for numerous groups, including the Association for Quality and Participation, the Banff Center for Management, and the University of North Texas’ Center for the Study of Work Teams. She has an M.A. in adult education.

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D. B. 1 decade ago

All of Ingrid's books are great, and if you get a chance to take a seminar or class from her do so!!